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

By submitting suggestions for edits, you build up a reputation in terms of certain types of edits and/or certain regions or countries. This is very important for the way the algorithms evaluating the suggested edits are taking your reputation into account: if your ‘trust level’ is high for specific factors, your suggestions will more easily be approved.

Let me illustrate this with some specific examples. When I came across a chain of discount supermarkets that is operational is several countries, and noticed that quite a few of them had an incorrect category (either ‘grocery store’ or ‘supermarket’ in general) I obviously had the unstoppable urge to correct this (look around a bit on this forum to find out how addictive being a local guide can be). The category edits I suggested in my own country, where I had already made loads of edits, were approved within seconds. But similar edits in a neighboring country, where I had already some, but not really a lot of approved edits, got status ‘Pending’. After a while most of those ‘Pendings’ were approved, and since then much more of the edits I make in that country are also approved instantly.

Post office in my home town still named ‘De Post’ (Street View picture 2009)

Post office in my home town renamed to ‘bpost’ (Steet View picture 2017)

Another example is linked to the post offices in Belgium. A number of years ago they were renamed from ‘De Post’ (in the Dutch speaking part of the country) or ‘La Poste’ (in the French speaking part) to ‘bpost’ – all lower case. On Google Maps a lot of them had their name incorrectly spelled: some had ‘Bpost’, other ‘BPost’ and a few still the old name. While correcting those, the ones where I suggested to change ‘Bpost’ into ‘bpost’ were approved without a problem, but the ones with ‘BPost’ or the old name (so: where the suggested edit was more then simply changing the initial character from upper to lower case) went ‘pending’. After a while those ‘Pendings’ became ‘Approved’ (as it happens: while I was typing these last few lines, one of them popped up as ‘Approved’), and when I suggested some new ‘bpost’ name edits earlier this week, all of them were approved instantly, no matter what it was.

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.