The Global Wayfarer Challenge helped make a big dent in Boston’s queue, but it was fascinating to see that Los Angeles, a city that is 1,200km2 with 4M people was cleared prior to Boston (125km2, 700k population) being cleared.
Regrettably, the Global Challenge failed to completely clear Boston’s queue, and several bad-faith reviewers created situations where re-submissions were required. The good news is that we organized a local Wayfarer Challenge with rewards distributed out-of-pocket (almost $200 in prizes!) and recruited 30 reviewers to participate!
Over a period from May 24th - June 2nd our community completed over 10323 reviews! Of our 30 participants, 26% had nominations still in queue from the Global Challenge, and 50% submitted nominations in the week of our challenge.
Unfortunately, this has made it abundantly clear that the queue in Boston is still broken beyond reason. During this time period we had reported only 10 nominations within the City of Boston from our efforts resolved via Community Review. Outside of the city there were 25 nominations approved by the Community. This data should be subject to scrutiny because while we know of over 90 nominations submitted by our group, many others who were not participating in our challenge could have been submitting stops and getting them approved.
What we discovered doing reviews was that a majority of our reviews were coming from places like Mississippi, Texas, Arizona, and New York and were not local nominations. In fact, an overwhelming majority of our users (79%) said that fewer than 20% of their reviews came from the “Home,” “Bonus,” or “Play Area” review areas. This was while local nominations languished in voting, or reviews without adjacent nominations were stuck in queue.
In post-event polling, 43% of users self-reported that they did not feel like the Wayfarer experience allowed them to have a direct impact on their local community. This is particularly concerning to me, because it truly isn’t fun seeing one local review every 116 nominations reviewed and having to sift through dozens of low-quality nominations in Mississippi or give attention to other major cities on the other side of the continent. There had been some speculation that some of these were from the Upgrade Queue, but the chance of people with Wayfarer Upgrades submitting and Upgrading street name signs and light posts had better be slim.
The good news is that 82% of participants said that they would be somewhat likely or very likely to continue reviewing nominations in the future. 20 of our participants were reviewers with fewer than 500 lifetime reviews, and 11 were first-time reviewers.
