Local Guide Best practice: Reporting duplicates

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Image by Bru-nO on Pixabay

[This is one of a series of articles originally published on Local Guides Connect

When you come across two (or sometimes even more, but for the sake of simplicity I will refer to 2 in the rest of this post) mentions of the same point of interest (POI), you should report one of them as duplicate. You do this by going to ‘Suggest an edit’ and then indicate ‘Place is permanently closed’, whereby you select as reason ‘Duplicate of another place’. So far, so good. But this can still be a tricky thing to do, because you need to decide which of the two is the one you want to report as duplicate.

In some cases this is quite easy to decide: one of them has no reviews, no photos, and the pin is located 50 meter away from the actual location, while the other has 12 reviews, 6 photos and is located correctly. But in other cases, Continue reading →

Local Guide Best practice: Find the right zoom level

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[This is one of a series of articles originally published on Local Guides Connect]

This is one I struggled with myself quite a bit when I started out as local guide. When you’re walking around in a neighborhood, or explore one on the desktop version of Google Maps, the number of existing points of interest (POI) you get to see heavily depends on the zoom level you are at. Especially in urban areas, where there are obviously much more POIs than in rural areas, it can be quite important to zoom in an out at the appropriate locations.

I have no idea exactly how many different zoom levels there are, but I Continue reading →

Song of the day: Joe Jackson – Steppin’ Out

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In the 1980s and 90s this song would always be ranked in the top spot whenever I submitted a top 3/5/10 of all time favorites. Nowadays it’s down to number 2 – ever since Eels started releasing albums.

Part of the enchanting magic of Steppin’ Out is the fade in from the previous song on the album Night & Day, which you can unfortunately not experience in this clip. So, if you ever have the opportunity: do listen to the entire album.

Local Guide Best practice: Submit changes one by one

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[This is one of a series of articles originally published on Local Guides Connect]

Sometimes you come across a point of interest where several pieces of information are missing or wrong. Then you click ‘Suggest an edit’, make all the changes and click ‘Submit’, right? Well, my advice is not to do this, but instead submit the changes one by one. Admittedly, it’s a few extra clicks, but I have experienced that if you submit several changes at the same time and for some or other reason one of the suggested changes is not applied, none of the changes get applied.

And for those who are eager to score as much local guide points as possible there is another reason as well: the counter that shows you how many points you have earned always only counts to 5 when clicking submit, no matter how many suggested changes you submitted – just one single or 2, 3 or 4. Compare this to what happens when you post a review for a point of interest: the counter then does produce a different result if you submit a review that is over 200 characters long, as it takes into account the 10 extra points for a long review. So, my interpretation is that ‘Suggest an edit’ brings 5 point per time you run the module, not always 5 points per changed piece of information – unless you submit them one by one.

The original article can be found here

 

Disclaimer: the practices described here as best practice are my personal interpretation, and I don’t claim any level of official endorsement.