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Wayspot Title: Mosque
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Location (lat/lon): Ingress Intel Map / 34.201657,-118.525797
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City: Los Angeles, CA
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Country: USA
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Screenshot of the Rejection Email (do not include your personal information):
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Additional Information (if any):
This place is not a mosque, or not just a mosque. This is MTO Shahmaghsoudi - School of Islamic Sufism, an international non-profit organization that also has Persian language courses for kids and adults. While they don’t list their address for some reason, you can see the location on their website:
I passed this place a few times in the past, but never had time to stop and explore. When I passed by it recently, I saw another wayspot - Maktab Tarighat Oveyssi Shahmaghsoudi. This wayspot actually has proper title and description about this POI instead of a generic “mosque”:
Even though one wayspot is for the sign of the organization and the other is for the building of the organization, it’s still for the same place - for example, a lot of churches in my area don’t have signs on them, but have signs for them close to church buildings. Considering these two wayspots are for the same POI, one of them has to go.
While Mosque wayspot was created first, the new MTO Shahmaghsoudi wayspot is much better. This is why I suggest removing the wayspot in question.
Another concern for both wayspots is this: Because they provide courses for both kids and adults, I wonder if they would fall under “School (up to K-12)” category, meaning both need to be removed. I will let you decide this part - I only reported Mosque wayspot as duplicate and did not report MTO Shahmaghsoudi.
Thanks for the appeal, Explorer. This Wayspot does not meet our criteria for removal.
1 Like
@NianticAaron Does it mean it’s OK to nominate a sign for a religious building and the religious building itself?
Can I rename this mosque (which is not a mosque) to Maktab Tarighat Oveyssi Shahmaghsoudi (which is what it is) without being threatened with bans and stuff?
Now we have a wayspot for this school and a wayspot for the sign of this school, and I can start nominating both buildings and signs for those same buildings 
Here is what Wayfarer help center has to say:
Should the sign for a Wayspot nomination be marked as a duplicate if there is already a Wayspot for the object the sign represents?
If the sign is a significant distance from the object then it should be considered on its own. If it is close, such as with a church sign and a nearby church building, then it should be marked as a duplicate.
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Thank you for this clarification. But what is considered a “significant distance”? In this case the distance is about 50m:
Is 50m a significant distance? What about 40m? 30m? 20m?
In this case the wayfarer team have clarified that it is significant.
They are not making any general ruling on precise distance as the guideline is simply a significant distance. That would mean a change in the guidelines, and that is something that does not happen this way.
The only thing that was clarified is that there is a concept of significant distance. What exactly makes a distance significant is unclear.
It has been clarified in this instance.
It may be considered in any future criteria clarification round, but that sort of clarification won’t happen here.
Everyone uses their judgement.
I know you will want a comment by Wayfarer team, which may or may not happen, so I guess this is more for others to consider.
No, the exact distance has not been clarified.
Distance is not an abstract concept that cannot be measured properly. It’s hard to measure artistic value or historical significance, but distance can be measured pretty accurately nowadays. It’s not very helpful to tell everyone to use their own judgment to figure out what significant distance means. I’d say 10m is significant - we can’t move wayspots over 10m now, so there is some significance of 10m. Who’s to say I am wrong? Someone else might consider 100m significant and everything less as not significant. Who’s to say they are wrong?
Asking for an exact value of “significant distance” is not something outrageous. And if it means that Niantic needs to sit down, figure it out, and change the guidelines, then Niantic should sit down, figure it out, and change the guidelines. Or at least provide a clarification in Clarifications section of the forum. It’s not rocket science.
I see you have added the request to effectively remove the word significant and give a distance to clarification criteria thread, and that seems an appropriate place. Thanks.
And this thread is not an appropriate place to ask for clarification, especially after another clarification was provided?
No. You are seeking something clarification beyond this wayspot in order to apply more widely. This thread is about this wayspot.
No, it’s related to this wayspot also. The clarification provided was only about the existence of “significant distance” metric. It was not shown how this metric applies here.
If they wanted to quantify significant distance, they would have done that already. My guess is that it depends on the situation, type of object etc. if the sign is really good/artistic, it might be approved even if it is closer to the object.
In this case, they have made it clear that this particular sign is over the ‘significant distance’ metric. Time to move on!
1 Like
It was more like “Here, I found this rule, it could apply here”.
The sign is not THAT artistic.
They can give examples of situations.
“Significant distance” doesn’t have to be an abstract concept for everyone to guess and to “use their best judgment”.
I have a couple of signs that were accepted as a significant distance away even though it was not that far in distance because the poi could not be seen from there. I think significant cannot be measured necessarily, and I definitely do not want to be trying to figure how how far away something is before I submit or accept it. A blind turn and a steep drop both made the distance significant - not the number of meters.
No, the rule always existed. It has been there on the help center ever since Wayfarer launched. And they responded to a specific question you asked.
Significant distance can still be defined even if:
- there is no straight road from one POI to another
- there is no line of sight of one POI from another
It’s just a matter of Niantic wanting to clarify this. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
I never questioned how long the rule existed.
It wasn’t a reply to a question, it was a reply to a statement, and the reply clarified nothing and only brought up another question - what is significant distance?
