Suggestion
Niantic should hire people who actually inspect PokeStop and Gym nominations to inspect the sorroundings of the area and don't rely on two photographs submitted only, and not updated google maps, reviewed by others who seemingly forced to review just to get that upgraded feature.
Comments
Again, you didn't provide any context. Niantic already have staffs who review nominations and appeals, and they may also reject nominations if they think the nominations don't meet their criteria.
Can you just share your rejected nominations here? If you're afraid of your address showed then you can hide that info manually.
That would be awesome, but the local knowledge of submitters and reviewers is extremely valuable to make proper judgements on the cultural relevance of potential wayspots. And in most cases the two photos are sufficient to judge if it exists and if it meets criteria. If this is not the case you can reject the submission's location.
Tell me what's the difference between historical value or cultural relevance of a rejected Chapel and an accepted Chapel nomiation? They are both Chapels. And Niantic and reviewers reject it because the picture is blurred or the pin isn't pinned in the center.
Well a wayspot gets judged on various criteria and you are just naming two that aren't great, then my advice is to improve the submission and try again if you feel this is valid.
I did it couple of times already. Niantic had all the rules to reject my nominations. Maybe Niantic can teach us about this "S2 cells" strategy, and not from bloggers and other players.
Important to note that you are not nominating PokéStops/Gyms, but Wayspots which may become one of those types of POI in one game.
The Wayspots can also become Portals, Nests, Big Flowers/Mushrooms (one day), Portals (ARealm ones, not Ingress) and who knows what else.
They won't because we aren't supposed to know that *quotation marks*
+ the use of wayspots depend on the game team using it, it's supposed to be outside the Wayfarer process.
Seems like you got the "not culturally/historically relevant" rejection bug, can you confirm?
Then why mix games in different wayspots? Why should I care about other games than Pokemon Go. They force all of us to be reviewers because we don't have other choice to speed up the process and get that upgrade feature. Do you think people really care about the review? What's happening in review community now is becoming a field of retaliation. "You rated me low stars and rejected, I will rate you lower stars in return to be rejected as well." So other nominations now are affected and rejected.
The amount of internal staff that would required for Niantic to review every nomination in a timely manner would be astronomical, which is why they enlist the general public to help grow and curate the wayspot database.
The central wayspot database is an asset for Niantic that they can market and is a spearate product to any particular game. Wayfarer does not make the decision on if a wayspot appears in a game, that decision is for each individual game themselves.
Wayfarer is a mechanism for Niantic to add points of interest to their database, Lightship. All accepted wayspots go here, all supposedly according to the criteria we use. The games will pull stuff from this database; each game will have different spacing rules outside of WF.
It is economical for them to do so, even if their cash cow is PoGO. GO doesn't even have forums.
I have frustrations with the wording of the emails but if you want your game objects, research the game themselves. WF team is a handful of people, they cannot handle global submissions. If you have a problem with us reviewing, why have us submit stuff too?
What's happening in review community now is becoming a field of retaliationThis is actually a great point. It is why there is no discussion in my local groups about the criteria. I see no concrete way of reporting people who go against criteria as retaliation. Still the above stands.
They should have not implemented that Poke Stop nomination in the first place if they could not accommodate the bunches nominations coming in. Or they should have limited the nominations of each player. Imagine an unlimited nominations per player multiply it maybe a thousand players or million players. As you said astronomical. When they couldn't accommodate, they pass the burden to the public. And now the general public is becoming toxic because we are given now the power to reject nominations even the nominations are eligible because our nominations were rejected as well.
I joined the community because I sympathized with Niantic's philosophy of "facilitating exploration and connecting with others through virtual space."
I believe that Wayspot, which I nominated, has had a positive impact on people who play other games as well, such as encouraging them to explore unknown places and change their behavior.
We must respect others and communities, including those who play other games.
How can they expand more the exploration and connecting with others through virtual space if Niantic and now the community kept rejecting eligible nominations with unreasonable reasons. They should limit the nomination per player because obviously they have a ratio to how many wayspots they are going to approve and how many are they going to reject. And they have obviously as well a system to where they place best wayspot. And if all these criteria doesn't meet with their ratio and system they trash our nominations.
The history here is incorrect. Niantic added the ability to propose new points of interest because of fan requests. Ingress players wanted to make new portals, so they proposed a system that involved player review in order to minimize the cost to Niantic. Niantic, at the top levels, has never taken Wayfarer seriously, only as fanservice, which is why the system is so glaringly flawed and everyone knows it, yet change/corrections are so slow in coming.
As for the rest of this thread, I strongly suggest stopping these rants and instead go into the Nomination Improvement forum and post the FULL rejection (all images, all text, pin location, rejection reasons) that has wronged you so egregiously that you have to dump this on the rest of us. Experience with this forum tells me that most rejections have things we can learn from, despite that Niantic is a terrible teacher.
@X0bai-PGO is generally correct but not entirely correct about the history.
Niantic launched Ingress with a small set of portals that they seeded from a variety of databases including historical markers and fire stations(!). Because they needed to fill out the portal network anyone could submit a new portal simply by taking a photo and emailing it to Niantic with some additional information. (This part was before my time so I am relying on what other people said.) Niantic would review it and turn it into a portal if they approved of it.
Later they built this functionality into the Ingress app itself. In late 2013 when I started playing the turnaround time for new portals was a few days. It quickly grew to a few weeks, and then a few months, and then years... Niantic could not afford the staff required to keep up with the submissions. They shut down submissions for a long time, during which time they built out the player-review system OPR (Operation Portal Recon). The OPR Beta launched for L16 Ingress players in November of 2016 and we started reviewing and clearing out the backlog. When that system was working well they opened up submissions again for Ingress players.
Pokemon Go launched and PoGo players wanted the ability to add things as well. There are massively more of them than Ingress players, Niantic didn't do a very good job of teaching people how and what to submit, and the system has become flooded with submissions... many of them are so low-quality that they're a massive waste of reviewers' time.
I will second what X0bai said and suggest that you post your full submissions for review.
Wayspot seeding included hmdb (historical marker database) and the 2013ish USPS locations (a free download).
People were encouraged to submit single nominations, and other whole databases / lists at a time - like your local walking tour, city art list, county historic places, local parks.
The original nomination system was halted mid-2015 - swamped.
OPR (crowd-sourced reviewing) was opened in the U.S. mid 2017 to work thru the backlog - sooner in a few countries (Japan and South Korea, as I remember). Nominations were reopened September 2017, with each agent getting 7 nominations every 14 days.