Bulk/joined edit requests would be a great feature, even if they were reviewed by Niantic.

AisforAndis-ING

About a year ago, me and another wayfarer worked together to submit a Storywalk that is located along a trail of one of my local parks. For those unfamiliar, a Storywalk is essentially a set of trail markers where each marker contains a page of a children's book, and the book can be read by walking the length of the trail (Its a great way to encourage kids to read and exercise). The Storywalk at my park consists of 18 permanent signposts, and every few months the book pages that are featured within the signposts are swapped out for a new book, to continue to encourage people to revisit the trail of the Storywalk. You can see an example of one of the signposts here. While it took a few months to do it, we eventually managed to get all 18 markers along the trail accepted. Awesome!

Fast forward to a week ago, when I most recently revisited the park: It seems they have once again swapped out the book within the Storywalk, however, with this most recent swap, they made a small change to how the Storywalk works. The Storywalk still uses the same signposts in the same locations on the same trail, however, the numbers on the signposts were changed, with intent to change the order in which the signposts are visited. The Storywalk trail used to start at the playground area, going in a circular loop past the parking lot, and ending back at the playground where it began. However, it has now been changed to start at the parking lot, passing the playground, and then ending back at the parking lot. As a result, sign #16 became sign #1, sign #17 became sign #2, sign #18 became the explanatory starting sign, etc. Essentially, all of the signs are now offset by three.

In the real word, this is not a big deal, however, all of the wayspots for the Storywalk were numbered according to their original numbers, and now all of the wayspot titles/descriptions are technically no longer correct. The problem is that editing these wayspots will now be a massive pain in the **** for a number of reasons:

• Editing all of these would require using 38 title/description edits, which is obnoxious bloat to the system.
• The likelihood that these edits even get accepted is low, because the wayspot pictures show the old sign numbers.
• I could submit new pictures as well (causing even more bloat), but the likelihood that the new pictures get accepted is also low given that the numbers on the new pictures would not match the current wayspot titles/existing pictures.
• I cannot avoid these issues by doing location edits instead of title/description edits because the old signposts are too far apart from their renumbered locations (pretty sure I technically shouldn't do this anyways).
• Even if I could do location edits, the likelihood these got approved is low because the signs were photosphered at their original locations when we submitted them.

But more importantly than all of the above reasons, even if it was more simple to submit a bunch of edits to make these changes, there would undoubtedly be a period of time when some of the wayspots edits were accepted, and some were not, making the entire set of Storywalk wayspots even more chaotic until all of the required edits were completed. Considering that some of these edits will likely get denied, it could take a long time for these corrections to all go through naturally.

Having some way to edit/review all of these at once would be extremely beneficial. It could help explain to the reviewer why these changes are being made, and if they were reviewed/accepted as a group it would save the park from any wayspot chaos that would result from differences in edit acceptance times.

There are plenty of other reasons that a process to bulk edit wayspots would be of great value also. For example, imagine a park that has multiple pavilions, and all of them are wayspots, but all of them just have a generic name like "Pavilion". A bulk edit that allowed you to rename them to Pavilion 1, Pavilion 2, Pavilion 3, etc, respectively would likely result in a better reviewing experience and later on a better in-game experience.

I understand that there is definite potential for abuse if this was an option, so it would probably be best if any such system was reviewed by Niantic. Despite this I think it could do a lot of good to help both reduce the number of edits in the queue that won't get accepted due to systematic problems, as well as to help preserve and improve the quality of the Wayspot network.

Hosette-ING

Yes this. I know of one place where the same things exist but they have traded locations. Trying to get the edits through would be a nightmare.

MargariteDVille-ING

I think anyone reading the book would figure out that it's now offset by 3 - and think themselves very clever for figuring it out. It is not a big deal, not worth this much angst. It's a game, meant to be an adventure.