What is being done to combat the Edit Backlog now approaching 4 or more years in some areas?
Griffinfinity-ING
Posts: 52 ✭✭✭✭
In some areas, the backlog of edits is now approaching 4 or more years. What is being done to make sure these edits complete and not just languishing in the eternal Wayfarer purgatory? Some of my first edits were done in 2019 and I'm still waiting on simple Title, Description, and Location Edits. This isn't an issue of having not enough reviewers since a lot of these backlogs are located within major cities. More priority should be given to older edits or perhaps pushing these older edits to a much wider reviewer radius to complete.
Comments
I believe that expanding the editorial backlog to the equivalent upgrade area, not just to the region, would go a long way toward solving the problem.
Currently, the backlog builds up in areas that are not heavily populated as it seems limited to the current location.
This will also help prevent some abusers from arbitrarily editing locations as a byproduct.
I think edits need to be prioritised more. Part of the problem is that the longer there is an error in the game then more people submit edits, often slightly different, so then when reviewers come to chose there are a mass of slightly different options to chose from, and then the vote is split several ways and takes even longer again to resolve. If the edits were processed quickly then less people are likely to submit additional edits. As well as maintaining the game boards, this has the benefits of making reviewers jobs easier by having to chose from less options, and easing the queue with less edit suggestions. I think a lot of these text edits could be avoided completely if Niantic forced a spelling check on submissions, or gave us a seperate option just to report the text for spelling/gramar error.
For anyone who's used Google Maps' contribution function to suggest edits, I've done so quite a lot in the past. It's nice because you'll often see instant results and the email is not just a confirmation email, it's a published email, meaning a straight up AI approval. They don't always get it right (i.e. when decapitalising all-caps texts from titles) and resulting in some highly annoying "NOT APPLIED" AI responses to things that are clearly wrong.
Some places, even just over 200km away from me have edits that won't be actioned until someone actually opens up Wayfarer in those areas, and a member of our community recently got something approved that was submitted back in late 2020. Some places, like Esperance WA has never seen an edit come back.
So instead of saying "Nice work!" or "Great exploring!" and stopping people from reviewing why don't you extend the review range once (and only when) someone exhausts their review queue?
Name and description edits, and photos, are much easier to review than full new nominations. I'd like to opt into getting 100 of them in a row. Then people who don't want them won't need to. And I can get upgrades faster.
Title and description edits should need way less reviews than location edits or new nominations. There is no need to let 50-100 reviewers choose from no description to a new one, or from a title like "church" to "Christ Church Cathedral - Dublin" (for example).
At the moment edits are just a waste of time, in most cases. Why take time to make a good description if it will appear after 2-3 years? If I could upgrade an edit it would be different but I don't really know if an edit is worth of an upgrade.
This is very frustrating, for me too as I live in a residential area, which has a clearly marked line (I could draw it on the ground) between ''wayfarer activities taking a couple weeks'' to ''absolutely never unless upgraded''. Since edits cannot be upgraded...they aren't going to be voted on, ever.
In the past Niantic has said it wants to keep edits local so only people who are familiar with the place review them. This is great as an idea but does not work in practice. There simply are too many areas in need of edits with too few local reviewers. The only edits where it is really helpful to have physically been there are location edits. Since we can no longer suggest location changes over 10m in game, keeping this local is no longer an issue. The vast majority of edits are word edits. For these there is no reason why someone on the other side of the country will have any harder of a time choosing between "The Park" and "the prk" compared to a local. Edits should at least have the same review area size as regular nominations (instead of their current 1/4 size) and if they are over a year old should be boosted to the photo review size (3X larger than nominations).