Well @HeatherandAnna have you posted these in the nomination improvement section. Share your rejected nominations and let the community provide advice
I have found the community very good at identifying where I had (many) flaws and they provided fantastic advice. Sure sometimes I disagreed but that is the nature of these things - and hindsight tells me more often than not they were right.
So do share and lets see what we can do to help you
When onboarding new reviewers and nominators - better training. better training. better training. If you have no passed the training no nominating.
Do regular 6 monthly refreshers. Sure be annoying for the many but every organisation I work in and every volunteer organisation I am in - we do yearly, six monthly and even monthly refreshers. Keeps us on our toes. Keeps up to date. Keeps us aware. It works.
Clean up the Featured Waypoints. Often they do not meet criteria. Often poor examples. Whoever is editing these needs to do the training. And if automated. Fix it.
Ideally these should be well presented. Good examples of what makes a great nomination. They should be leading quality - not promoting mediocrity let alone waypoints that are fails
Really really help people become better nominators AND reviewers
Well I will start with this
Happy New Year 2025! May this year bring you endless joy, abundant opportunities, and cherished moments with loved ones. Hereās to new beginnings and making every day count!
Though Christmas has passed, may its warmth and joy linger in your heart throughout the year. Wishing you peace, love, and happiness always.
Quote for the year: āThe future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.ā - Eleanor Roosevelt
Wishing you a fantastic year ahead!
What I want most from Naintic this year. Is to look into how to accommodate ruaral area better when nomination made. For POI to be accepted. Also, revisit the categories drop when nomination is done. There some of those categories which does not fit into the critica.
Like I submitted and very pretty graffiti wall painted on a premilanry school. So that was one of the options to choose from. And it got rejected for being an K-12 school. But I did show it is school but the graffiti is POI not the school. Or is these categories for Emily to speed up nomination requests.
Thanks for your feedback and wishes, and a happy year to you as well!
I have to say that the graffiti you describe got rejected correctly though. Something painted on a K-12 school is ineligible because it is on the grounds of a K-12 school, and this is a rejection criterion. It has nothing to do with category choice, had you not picked this category while nominating, it would have been rejected all the same.
The categories you choose in a Pokemon Go nomination have nothing to do with criteria to become a Wayspot. Ingress nominations do not contain these categories (at least at this time) so they definitely are not being used by the ML model to decide the nominations.
Hey there @HeatherandAnna! Welcome to the forum. Wayfarer can be a tough hill to climb when you first get started. I read your post a couple of times and I can understand your frustrations. I have a couple of tips to help you.
Make sure you understand the Wayfarer Criteria, aka what makes a good POI for inclusion on the map. Link to criteria - Criteria Clarification Collection
Understand the mission of Wayfarer, You said you were excited about the prospect of contributing āPokestopsā. As @cyndiepooh tells newer people. You are actually nominating Points of Interest to the Niantic Geospatial map. Commonly refered to as the āLightship Mapā. I know in Pokemon Go it says you are nominating a Pokestop, but youāre not. Itās a common sense of confusion for newer players.
You said youāve been discouraged by endless rejections - Well. We are here to help. Again, Iām going to my collegue @cyndiepooh - take their advise and post your rejection in this channel āNomination Support - Niantic Wayfarer Communityā Youāll be able to get feedback from countless people who would love nothing more than to give you tips on making your submission the best they can be.
Now, as a new explorer, youāll have to learn that something you may think are perfect nominations may in fact not be. By no fault of your own, but by the rules of the wayfarer system, or by the games it feeds into.
You said āThe players on here need to stop rejecting everything and trust that the people who live in the areas they are nominating Pokestops have good reason. Yes, there should be checks so people arenāt nominating their own house or a rock outside the door or something. But other than that, err on the side of believing that other players contributions are worthwhile.ā
I sometimes donāt disagree with you, but you have to remember this is a live service world-wide game. There has to be a set of standards that governs the game for everyone. We canāt just let small regions break off and make their own rules. Now, I many times want to go the other way on this one myself.
Because what is āeligibleā in Kansas may not be appealing to voters in Kazakhstan.
Finally, poke around the forum. Look for people you feel like you trust their opinions and reach out to them for advise. I will offer my services if youād like me to look over your nominations or help you find something in your local area that is eligible for inclusion.
So why not clean up the games by removing said POIs (not your DB as I am sure useful to have). But from games. That way people donāt keep nominating them because - I saw it in the game so I thought it was OK. Or I nominate them to be the mostest etc etc
Thatās a really interesting idea. Though Iām not sure if ML should be the final say. But maybe it could flag the bulk of the out dated or low standard wayspots that currently exist.
The web browser just feels a bit awkward, trying to scroll down the review page or zoom in on images or opening and navigating the street view map could be smoother for example; I sometimes find I end up having to refresh to page or tap onto my profile in top right corner and back again to reset the size and format / layout of the screenā¦ Itās a little hard to explain beyond that. But I imagine an app could have the screen size set and prevent and unintended zooming or layout changes
I would love for Niantic to actually give us some statistics on all of these things we submit.
How many times was this stop spun?
How many people actually looked at that description?
Did anyone care to look at additional pictures?
Does anyone outside of these forums care about stuff like that?
Or is it just the minuscule percentage of people on these forums that looks into that stuff?
I see the potential for abuse but when nominating a POI it would be nice to see the cells, even if only wayfarer. For instance, when nominating a pool, we have to pick a location outside of the actual water so I pick a portion on concrete just outside one of the corners of the pool. Knowing the cells would help me pick which corner to choose.
Idk how the ingress folks nominate (I just created an Ingress acct yesterday) but Iād move my location in the pokemon go app a to the most advantageous corner of the POI if I knew it meant it would be in its own cell.
Iām not talking about cheating or moving a few meters from the actual location, just choosing which side of a big POI like a pool or dog park to put the wayspot.
As a newbie to submitting and reviewing, one thing would be nice is to understand why on rejected reviews me and other person(s) didnāt match up to what I reviewed.
As I am always looking to try and make my reviews better. I can see that longer term might cause issues but at the start when trying to understand the criteria it is helpful.
I would like to have another mandatory requirement for the nominators to fill in and with options to fulfill why/how the mandatory requirement is fulfilled.
A new section for the nominator where they state which one or multiple of the three main criterias for the wayspot nomination is for, with tick boxes, and compliment to that a free text field besides those tick boxes where they can state how/why itās makes the criteria fulfilled.
Hopefully that will give the nominator a moment to really think through once again how well it fulfills it.
It will also give the AI (Emily) reviewer more data to make it more accurate since it now also will have more understanding what itās looking at and from what view the nominator thinks of it.
I would like to see the submission appeal system improved.
Currently we receive 2 submission appeals per 21 days. The bad thing of this system is that even if your appeal is accepted you have to wait another 21 days to appeal another time.
It happened to me several times that some nominations do not pass because the people reviewing in the area is not up to date with wayfarer criteria or does not spend enough tine to properly review it. This leads to this nominations being reject but accepted after appeal.
I suggest that if a submission appeal is accepted, we should receive another appeal back.
As for looking at description, I donāt know how youād tell that especially in Ingress as the description is right there when you tap the Portal. No extra taps needed.