When will the Historic/Cultural Significance and Visually Unique categories be removed?
HaramDingo-ING
Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭
Now that we have new evaluation criteria since the sweeping changes of Wayfarer 3.1 three months ago, it is about time to retire these antiquated categories.
There are many posts and discussions that emphasise these issues, so I have collated a whole bunch of them below:
Historic or Cultural Significance
Visually Unique
Understanding and referring back to previous AMAs and roadmaps/updates, there seems to be an intended shift to change the star rating system to a rather simplistic yes/no system. There is a lot of conjecture, theories and general attitudes throughout the Wayfarer community about these two infamous categories. That all playgrounds/sports fields should be rated 1-star for historically or culturally significant. That visually unique should really mean visually distinct. That if a category has an average of say 4.5/4.9/1.6/4.1/4.7 rating, that because of the low 1.6 average for historic/culturally significant it would end up rejecting the nomination as a whole instead.
Coming off a recent flurry of nominations being rejected for both these reasons, these really now need to be retired, and Wayfarer needs to move forward and advocate for its new evaluation criteria. For the meantime, while Niantic is waiting to figure out how to implement a yes/no/unsure rating scale, let's substitute some category cards in our existing Wayfarer.
Changes
Historic or Cultural Significance -> Exploration
This change switches out the category for the first eligibility criterion. All you need to answer is whether it's a great place to explore as per the criteria.
Visually Unique -> Exercise
Similarly for this category, change the second one to the second eligibility criterion.
Safe Access -> Social
In my opinion, the Safe Access category is the most useless card at present. I have rarely deviated from giving a nomination 5 stars in this category because most nominations do have adequate access anyway. There was no sort of "maybe this has some access, but you could step on the grass instead..." sort of business. Anything that was obviously lacking in safe access would use the 1-star overall rating and select the Pedestrian Access reject reason. It's either yes, or reject immediately with a 1-star. So it should change to the third eligibility criterion.
Impact
These changes would:
- eliminate unnecessary rejections regarding the culturally or historically significant/visually unique questions,
- integrate the new eligibility criteria into the spotlight for better education and reviewing workflow,
- simplify the process.
If you did not want to include all three cards (because for example of a trail marker: voting 5/yes for the exploration and exercise categories, and voting 1/no for the social category), you could just have one card that just asks all three questions at once, whether the nomination meets any of the eligibility criteria. If a nomination did not meet any of the three eligibility criteria, the nomination would guaranteed be rejected with 1-star in Should this be a Wayspot? before it even got to the three cards. There would be no reason to vote average or highly in the first question and then low ratings for all three eligibiltiy criteria actually. Now that it comes to that realisation, maybe these additional questions should just not be there at all either...
I write these because I really would like to see Wayfarer's capacity and capability grow. Given that we are on the edge of Winter 2020/2021 as per The Path to 2021, I really would like to see the review interface overhauled very soon.
Comments
You may be getting the does not appear to be visually unique if some but not enough reviewers have marked it as duplicate to something near by. I responded that I marked it duplicate to someone reddit complaining about his sledding hill being rejected for not being visual unique. It could very well be there is a percentage of people that need to select duplicate for it to be marked as duplicate but a lower amount of duplicate with overall low stars might give you not visual unique.
What you're suggesting isn't really removing, but reforming the categories. I think having multiple ways to rate the criteria of a submission is good, and the current system would very much benefit from reforming them.
When Wayfarer was released to PoGO players, there was an influx of Poketubers making review videos rejecting very valid submissions due to not understanding the rating criteria. I've had to educate local reviewers myself about this to avoid wrongful rejections. These common confusions are still around a lot with reviewers.
I've proposed before changing some of the phrasing. Like changing "Visually Unique" to "Visually Distinct" or "Stands out from Surroundings". And "Historically/Culturally Significant" to something like "Community Importance". I've asked in some of the AMAs a few years back about this, and never got more than a vague thanks for the feedback and that they may look into it. Which mostly means bupkis. Maybe during the next AMA it may be worth bringing up again, with AMA 3.0+ changing a lot. If you're around for it, it might be worth bringing up this post, it's a good compilation.
TBH, "historical/cultural significance" or "community importance" isn't a necessary criterion for wayspots. It's certainly a useful contributing factor but it isn't mandatory.
Exhibit A: trail markers. If the "Foobar Trail Mile Marker 3.5" got removed from the Foobar Trail it's unlikely that anyone in the community would notice or care. The mile markers for 3.0 and 4.0 would still be there and provide sufficient information for people on the trail. And yet all three of those trail markers are valid wayspots.
Niantic's guidance for this field is essentially "use your best judgement". If it really was a high-priority attribute I would expect better guidance.
I have no idea as to what the first comment is saying.
Definitely get that there should be a sort of reformation. I've also watched the Poketubers give 1-stars to certain nominations. Apart from Casey, I have never really seen anyone from Niantic review anything or give their opinion on how to review things in each category, so the difference between "use your best judgement" to witnessing a Niantic employee or some trusted Wayfarer or Niantic YouTuber with their head screwed on is the difference between "there is no really no cultural significance in a playground because it's not a church, 1*" and "this is how you should be voting in these categories".
The basic design of 1-starring historically or culturally significant is antiquated since OPR introduced the "Why is this a 1-star nomination?" I'm sure you all have been around since early pre-Wayfarer days but before the 1-star window was a workflow feature, if someone submitted a tree or worse yet, a body part, then you couldn't just do 1-star only for "Should this be a Portal" because it didn't prompt to select a reject reason. So for reviewing a regular tree then, you couldn't just 1/x/x/x/x and be done with it. It would be a weird 1/5/1/1/5 because the tree would have been correctly titled (funnily enough) and had pedestrian access.
Below is a list of dates where a nomination of mine was rejected for the not culturally or historically significant/visually unique reasons:
I get the trail markers from last year, but this year is a much more larger and frequent barrage of the not culturally significant reject reason which I could only ascertain from people not voting historic/culturally significance high enough. Either that, or people still have the belief in their head that they will intentionally lower their vote if there are many other wayspots nearby.
@HaramDingo-ING There is another possibility, which is that Niantic's algorithm for sending rejection reasons in email is imperfect. It's entirely possible, and seems increasingly likely to me, that Niantic is currently sending out rejection reasons that mean "well, it scored kinda low on this" rather than "this is precisely the reason for rejection." For example, if something failed for a low quality photo but people also thought it wasn't culturally significant and/or visually unique then you might get all three reasons in the email although the real reason for the failure was a strong negative on the photo. We don't know, so we can only guess at what is going on.
I'm also not sure what "voting historic/culturally significance high enough" means. In the absence of guidance from Niantic what defines high enough?
Here's a simulated example of what the reviewing cards could look like in a future Wayfarer. Note that I have not really added the yes/no thing yet, but for the most part they should be a yes/no.
It's interesting because this actually spells out SEE (if done from down to up) and Niantic games encourage people to explore and see the world.
@HaramDingo-ING
Your illustration above suggests it needs to meet all 3 criteria when it needs to meet at least one of those (so combine them together). Plus the following two of the required acceptance criteria are missing:
Must be a permanent physical, tangible, and identifiable place or object, or object that placemarks an area
Must be safe and publicly accessible by pedestrians (indoor or outdoor)
So combine the “SEE” group (love the acronym you found!) together and add the above two as the other categories and it matches the new criteria.
Then of it is a 1* rejection you select from the list of rejection criteria in that section, similar to before. Although as a nominator, I don’t like that reject is so much easier than accept, I mean the ‘avoid a cool down’ recommendation is to take 20 seconds to review a post so the quick 1* conflicts with avoiding a cool down.
Niantic seems to indicate that it will be rebuilt in such a way, in my opinion, so it is just a matter of time til they implement it, but yeah, needs an overhaul for sure, especially since they have conflicting definitions for visually unique/historically significant which is giving decent nominations the boot.
To me, this "mock up" is far too simplistic and would allow far too much "coal" through, You need to ask as well - "Does it meet any rejection criteria" as well, with the appropriate rejection criteria listed on a drop down.
Imo cultural/historic is kinda irrelevant now and usually misunderstood anyways. Maybe replace it with a which criteria does this meet with options of selecting one or more of (exercise, social, or exploration). Visually unique most definitely should be changed to visually identifiable to avoid all the confusion with definitions. Safe access should always be there in my opinion because it is completely essential for nominations
If you are going to change some of the criteria used to evaluate submissions, then Niantic need to be much more definite about the meaning and useage of terms. I actually like "Visually Unique", it helps to keep too many identical looking submissions (think "park entrance signs" or "named trail markers") from cluttering up the map. However, if retained we need to know how it should be used and exactly what "object" we are evaluating. For something like a trail marker or park entrance sign, if this is the subject of the nomination then it should purely be the sign or marker being evaluated. However, I've seen too many arguments claiming that either "It's the trail itself being nominated so what the trail marker looks like makes no difference" or "it might be the same identical marker but the post and the bushes in the background of the picture are different so it must be a unique marker" despite the actual marker being identical to the 10 other nearby.
I think the entire nomination system would work a lot better if Niantic provided a bit more clarity and definition as to how some criteria work, and gave some more definite ruling s on some of the more contentions and regularly discussed "problem" nominations.
Visually unique isnt about identical submissions though, its about “can you locate this object if you were around it” not “how many of the same object are already poi’s in the spot they give you to look for duplicates
Thus pointing out the different interpretations of the same criteria.
It doesn't help the cause any that Niantic says different things in different places, and is rather ambiguous. This is what you see in Wayfarer:
Visually Unique
A visually unique nomination should not be something that is common in the area.
Common in the area? If I'm in a sculpture garden then sculptures are common in the area, but each one is still visually unique. If I'm on a trail then trail markers are common in the area, and the MM 4 marker looks exactly like the MM 4.5 marker until you get close enough to read the numbers, so I wouldn't consider most of them to be visually unique. In my neighborhood there are a lot of plaques describing the unique history of each building, but they all look very similar until you get up close and see the picture and read the history.
On the other hand, this is what's in the Reviewing a Wayspot Nomination help file:
Visual Uniqueness
Does the nomination stand out from its surroundings? Wayspots that are easy to locate and visually distinct from the buildings and objects nearby make high-quality Wayspots and should be rated highly. If you think the nomination looks bland and will be hard to locate, give it a lower rating.
Bland. That's a can of worms right there and probably a poorly-chosen word. Most trail markers look bland, and often they are deliberately designed to be visually unobtrusive but they're still high-quality submissions. To me most sports courts/fields look bland but they definitely qualify as wayspots. 'Bland and hard to locate" is an interesting choice of words.
For historical/cultural significance they're a little bit more consistent. This is what you see in Wayfarer:
Historic or Cultural Significance
Does this nomination have some historical or cultural significance?
And this is what the Reviewing a Wayspot Nomination help file says:
Historic or Cultural Significance
How much historical or cultural significance does the nomination hold within the community? A local library built 100 years ago is certainly more historically and culturally significant than exercise equipment in a park. Use your best judgement and rate the nomination accordingly.
Those are more or less equally vague and nonspecific.
So I guess kind of summarising the past couple of posts: the process reframes and essentially asks the following questions:
[ PHOTO ] [ TITLE ] [ DESCRIPTION ]
[ SUPPORTING PHOTO ] [ SUPPORTING INFORMATION ]
"Does this nomination meet any eligibility criteria?" YES/NO
"Does this nomination meet all acceptance criteria?" YES/NO - Select criterion not met
"Does this nomination meet any rejection criteria?" YES - Select a reject reason/NO
What is it? (Optional)
[ SUBMIT ]
While the rejection is the foremost of reviewing a nomination and personally should be the first question asked (it's either it meets criteria or it does not), the reject emails saying that "this nomination does not meet criteria" is exceptionally vague because the nomination met at least one rejection criterion. It's all semantics from here, really.
...
Tbh, I'm very confused trying to imagine what it could look like. I'm going to leave that to Niantic and watch closely how they implement this new rating system.