I must have seen a dozen now, all suggesting the same edits.
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This was a previous topic in the old forums.
I don’t fully know if there was a determined issue, but we do know that the church has a preferred way of having their name listed. It is possible that members of said churches are submitting edits to match with the style guide that the church has set forth. Here’s the link to the church’s style guide for reference:
I only have one of these churches in my area, and did recently go by it, and did see that it was listed with language that is no approved by their style guide. Since I’m not a member and isn’t an issue to me, I didn’t feel the need to submit edits to the title and description.
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Thanks. I’ve been picking correctly (I guess lol).
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It’s obnoxious when these edits remove location information from the title that might allow you to tell two different churches apart.
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Once again, please document future reviews if possible.
Also unclear if the official styling refers to the name of the church as the church (organization of people) or as a church (the building). This article suggests to add the specific identifiers to building names:
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Like they want to be generic.
A lot of those churches are named incorrectly:
The Grammarly correct way is “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”.
Incorrect capitalized letter: “The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints”, “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints”
Preposition (in, at, of) are not capitalized in titles unless they are the first word. Words with hyphen in-between does not capitalize the second word.
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I’m all for grammatically correct titles, but I’ll prioritize including a location identifier over grammar fixes that remove one.
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Often I’ve been picking neither option because of this. The one with the location has the typo. And the one with the typo corrected removes the location disambiguation.
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I’ve been going with neither as well. I figure the titles with geographic location in them is better suited to a POI.
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beyond sick of seeing these pop up while reviewing.
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I think this is the first example that I’ve seen for this issue. Ok, I get the title change, it matches the style guides from the church, but it would be nice if the fact it’s located in Naperville was included somewhere, title or description. Being that “the Church” is acceptable, couldn’t they note in the description that “Visitors are always welcome at the Church in Naperville,” or something like that? I also see that meetinghouse is used for some locations (is for this one), so is that acceptable to the church?
I mean, who knows what is going on here, but it’s interesting. Look at the titles for these on Google Maps, and they are all The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Google Maps even has a The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints category.
I live in Utah, which means these churches are everywhere. These edits haven’t always been this way, but all of a sudden they are EVERYWHERE. From north Utah to South Utah. I have no idea how someone would nominate all of these changes at once unless A) they are cheating or B) the church itself somehow did this, but I doubt they’d care about pogo.
It definitely seems suspicious. Anytime I review it’s probably 30-40% just church title edits. It must be seriously slowing down progress with all other Utah nominations.
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My carefully considered opinion is that the editing of a bunch of Wayspots to remove localizing info (individual church’s name, street, community or town) seems like sabotage of the Lightship database.
As for the description edits: It seems unlikely that one individual has been visiting so many disparate locations in such a short time. The identical descriptions constitute third-party text (copied from a website), and should be rejected as such.
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Let’s all keep in mind that Niantic players are diverse, and they don’t ask what your religious/spiritual beliefs are.
With that said, I do not believe that the church has asked Niantic to change the titles and descriptions, as they would most likely not be reviewed by the community. I’m leaning more towards players that are devout members submitting the edits.
Many devout members of this church do a good amount of traveling, especially young members who are required to do some mission work, and may also have to go to different church areas from time to time to solicit their religion. I grew up with some kids in this religion, and instead of going to college or getting a job after graduating high school, they had to do some kind of work for their church, and this work sometimes would be quite long in time, several months or more.
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Maybe there’s a Discord somewhere of avid LDS Pogo/Ingress players who decided to work together to make them all consistent? Lol. I’m an editor in my day job, so a big fan of consistency, and I still find that a bit over the top.
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It is something I wonder could be the case. They’re using a secure server or forum that only they have access to.
I also don’t think that they would be restricted from playing any online games, with a few exceptions, but none of the Niantic games seem to be off-limits.
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In case anyone wanted to reference the thread on this exact topic from the old forum, here it is.
I still find this level of coordination (or whatever it is) happening across such a vast geographic area to be very strange. As I noted in the old thread, finding the exact same edit made to an LDS church in the middle of nowhere Alaska is suspicious to me. Having grown up in Alaska, I can almost guarantee no one took a 5 hour drive to Healy, Alaska (population under 900) just to edit a PokeStop and have it independently end up being identical to every other LDS church edit in the US.
Finding a list of every LDS church isn’t difficult to do. I was very easily able to find a list of every LDS building in Alaska in just a minute or two and I suspect it’s similar in other states/regions. I suspect someone(s) just took that available information and is using whatever tools to make these mass edits. It seems obvious that no singular person is doing this in person. So what’s the alternatives?
Also it was requested in the old thread before to share examples of these edits when you encounter them to keep tabs on the situation.
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Hi @aliccolo
Thanks for the linked old discussion!
I remember that I assume it could be third party and could be rejected for this.
But now I ask me if it is more like abusing the system and if niantic is aware and forces that.
It is very strange that no comment from official side comes, or I missed it.
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