Dear Wayfarer Team,
I got an Idea to make wayfarer work faster and be more fun to the people using ist.
How about we let Emily (the Machine Learning) handle (almost) ALL of the nominations?
She’s fast, shes pretty accurate by now and its very satisfying to see a wayspot you nominated in your favourite Game just a few days after.
In return, we could get one appeal per day(every two or three days?) up to a max of 3(5?10?) that can be stored wich get reviewed by the community.
I personally think it’s very satisfying to review appealed wayspots with well-written appeal Infos to get to the bottom of difficult to rate wayspots. Its certainly more satisfying than waving through good, easy to rate, wayspots. Its, in my opinion, way more fun to make difficult decisions with additional info provided where Emily struggles.
In return, reviewing should get you “Super Appeals” that go directly to Niantic reviewers for your own wayspot nominations, as Upgrades should be pretty useless if Emily handles everything in minutes.
What would be neccessary with such a change would be to be able to submit nominations on “hold” so you can make changes on another device after submitting, if need be.
Why am I writing this? Well, i recently moved to a new place, and there was a lack of wayspots in the Area, although there were good candidates around.
So I submitted my limit of 40 Wayspots in a few days. A good bunch of them (like 10) good through in a very short time, rated by Emily. Only one, wich was a weak candidate anyways, was rejected. I’m pretty happy with this, as I can now play in my new area with nice wayspots around.
Anyways, all other wayspots are either still in queue or “in voting” for 3 weeks now.
I know, by waysfarer standards, that’s not much, but I know the system and I also know many of the reviewers make bad decisions wich lead to re-nominations and appeals frequently.
For example i had to submit a trail marker with perfect description and trailmap (even a Homepage for the trail!), different photos and more 4 times and still didnt get it through.
A friend helped me at some point, and after a total of i think it was 10 submissions(each with trying to improve the last one, at some point i even took surrounding photos with a gps camera app…), the community finally let the thing through. It was frustrating, because I knew i was in the right and this was a good wayspot, and it would have sparked another Gym in my former place.
Emily would have let it through in minutes, and even if not i would have been able to appeal and make my case. (Appealing also should allow for more photos and maybe even a short video, although i know video content might be risky…).
Of course I know Emily needs data to work, but it would be nice if only so much gets handed to the community (and, to be honest, mostly trusted users please…) that things can go through the system in a few days, not weeks or months.
I think this woul improve wayfarer greatly and would make it more fun to use.
