Hi everyone,
My friends and I are trying to focus our reviews on nominations from our own local areas, but we often get locations from completely different regions (and sometimes even other countries).
Is there any way to filter out or skip nominations from areas that aren’t connected to us?
Or is the only option just to keep pressing “Skip” until nominations from our own area eventually appear?
Thanks in advance for any tips or advice!
You can’t, entirely. Your reviews will contain nominations from 4 different “buckets”.
You get up to 4 types of reviews:
What you’re talking about are probably coming from that last category. When a review is upgraded, it’s blasted out to a lot of people from further away, in the attempt to get an agreement quicker. It may not be an area connected to you, but it’s close enough that you’re being offered the opportunity to review on it.
For example, in Chicago, IL, I occasionally see things from the southern US. I know I may not know everything about that region, but I review the best I can–I know if I upgrade my own noms, people down there will be given the chance to review my waypoints. It’s part of the social contract of participating in Wayfarer. You can skip them, if you feel it necessary. You get 100 skips a day. But there is no way to filter them out.
That makes sense, thank you for the explanation, I’m new at this.
The issue we’re having here in Sweden is that it can be very hard to review locations from other countries accurately. For example, our local parks are often rejected because they don’t have signs — many of them are simply named by the municipality, and they can look like private lawns to someone unfamiliar with how things work here.
In the same way, it’s difficult for us to fairly review nominations from places like Poland or the US, where local customs and design standards are quite different.
It would be great if there were some way to prioritize reviews from our own region, just to make sure we can review accurately and consistently.
All you can do is work with what you’re given, when it’s an area you don’t know. You may not have full cultural context, but like…anyone who upgrades a nom knows that their work will be seen by a broader audience, and hopefully has added all the relevant information for you to apply the criteria to what they’ve submitted.
It’s their job, at that point, to offer the explanation you need to make a decision.
That’s fair, and I agree.
It really helps to think of it as a shared system - if everyone adds enough context to their nominations, even people from far away can review them fairly.
Thanks for clarifying how the process works.
Great response and I want to expand on a few points:
Historically, this had been connected to the county of your current “most recent play area.” And it’s not always strictly upgrades - a number of folks have reported seeing my nominations show up in their review despite me not upgrading them. I think it’s some kind of rural prioritization but not necessarily strictly what we’d consider “rural.”
If you’re in Sweden, you shouldn’t be reviewing US country nominations unless one of your chosen locations (Bonus or Home) is set there.
A few other things to consider:
Your “play” area has historically generally set by a certain level of S2 cells (large grid) that can mean the system naturally considers part of a different country to be within your current play area. This happens a lot, especially in central European countries.
Also, because it’s a grid, country boarders don’t line up perfectly. Some cities along the boarders may end up being included in the neighboring country’s review pool.
I mention “historically” and left a few things a little vague. I used to be involved in a lot of this research and was one of the first people in my groups to note non-upgrade prioritization.
After ML and review challenges cleared out a lot of the global queue, some of those assumptions may no longer be how they are pooled.