In my observations this can be the result of a scenario in which a new wayspot first synced in as a PowerSpot, and then was also eligible for a Pokéstop/Gym type of object, due to some timing cutoffs I believe.
There can definitely also be situations where one is an import and the other is a regular wayspot.
Imo the first scenario doesn’t warrant a report as there is technically no duplicate and nothing to remove, whereas the second does.
As others have discussed, there are several important clarifications that Wayfarer needs to make regarding “duplicate” Powerspots. I will reiterate them here:
If a POI that is eligible to be a Wayspot already exists as a Powerspot, will it be rejected as a duplicate if later submitted as a Wayspot nomination? As others have mentioned, this type of competition would be inadvisable. It could lead to the Lightship Wayspot database being throttled and reduce the number of Wayspots that would otherwise be added to the map.
If a hidden Wayspot that appears as a Powerspot later becomes unhidden due to valid map changes (e.g., location change), will the Powerspot disappear? Or will there be a Powerspot and Wayspot for the same POI?
There are many Powerspots on the map that correspond to the same POI as pre-existing Wayspots (e.g., both correspond to “McDonald Park”) but are pinned in slightly different locations on the map. Should these Powerspots be removed on the basis of being duplicates? If so, is there a mechanism to report these Powerspots as duplicates? Right now, the Powerspot reporting feature does not include a “duplicate” option.
Totally impractical solutions as there is no way to get the exact coordinates of the power spots (does not show on Ingress Map) and those things come and go every 2 days and may not come back before several weeks. Some Power Spot also have very long or inintelligible names, making retyping those in the chat impractical.
Adding a 6th or 7th option to report on the fly “Invalid location” or “Does not exist here” in the in-game Power Spot menu(*) would actually be a much more efficient solution.
(*)The Power Spot menu is currently accessible ingame by very inconveniently (works only half the times) tapping twice on the (?) button when inspecting a Power Spot.
So, there’s this recent post, and they nominated new Wayspots, both rejected as duplicates. They have had Power Spots in the past. I can’t find the locations based on the screenshots to check Lightship, but they also noted that the S2 cells are empty, and aren’t seeing any Ingress portals either.
I did let them know we’ve been asking for clarification on whether or not we can nominate existing Power Spots that meet Wayspot critera to be Wayspots here.
I think these datapoints (for example Courts of the World) were purchased only for PokemonGO. I think Niantic would have to pay the data owners (for example FourSquare) more to include them in other games. If so, it is not a decision by the Ingress team (or MHN, Pikmin Bloom, etc). It’s a Niantic budgeting decision.
The Courts of the World import was pain enough. These Power Spots are a MUCH bigger database, that Ingress agents can’t see in game, and now not even in an outside app. That’s huge!
I found a courts import in Myrtle Beach that was also in Pikmin bloom, super confusing why it wasn’t in ingress until I realized the import had actually applied to other games. I guess just the ingress team wasn’t interested
Could be. Or maybe it was inexpensive to add to Pikmin Bloom. Or maybe the Pikmin developers added it in a misunderstanding.
I start to despair about wasting my time, being blocked, not being able to see things, unable to create or contribute… and then I remember that Niantic often comes up with something great, if we can just wait for it. In this thread, NianticThibs said “You can expect additional improvements in the coming months.” So I’ll take this to mean I’ll see something awesome by the end of 2024. In Ingress. At least by April Fool’s Day 2025.
In the past, Niantic’s “months” has been 3-5 years (fixing emails, rewriting the review process with 
, reviewing edits). Sometimes it’s actually months.
I highly doubt that it works like this. Imported locations have appeared in pikmin bloom as well. If there even is a cost to niantic to bring in these imports, I doubt it’s on a per game basis. Ingress more than likely excluded them because a lot of ingress players are pickier about waypoint quality, and those imports are generally not high quality.
For some more context, via Wayback Machine, you can see NianticThia’s post about the imports first being added to the map and players comments here which are not great.