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DougK
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Everything posted by DougK
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Try: Western Exterminator, 4246 E Wood St Suite 350, Phoenix, AZ 85040 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Western+Exterminator/@33.4096626,-111.9892251,3a,107y/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipP6cGn4VeqJi7dXYUpRvrG_lgi6Bsd-JnN29Ny4!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipP6cGn4VeqJi7dXYUpRvrG_lgi6Bsd-JnN29Ny4%3Dw168-h120-k-no!7i539!8i384!4m8!1m2!2m1!1sWestern+Exterminator,+Phoenix,+AZ!3m4!1s0x872b0f04e70960b1:0xdf4a408c28f1c6c9!8m2!3d33.409662!4d-111.989557
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Find your nearest waymark with a smartphone
DougK replied to fi67's topic in General Waymarking Topics
I've been able to create a simple iOS Shortcut that acquires the current location, and creates a URL for Safari that brings up the nearest waymarks. -
Wild Road was also the leader of Knights of Pythias, which now only has two officers left and one hasn't logged in since 2014. That category needs help.
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…"provide distance and direction to PM caches on a waymark page." I'm lost. What's a PM cache? Where are distance and direction provided on the waymark page? When I became part of this group, I asked category founder SilverQuill, "Why only traditional caches?" He said it was just a quick way for possible waymark visitors to note that there might be some quick and easy geocaches to locate while they were there. It wasn't likely that puzzle caches would be of interest, because these often require extra preparation and solution time, not easily done in the field. Even then, the resultant cache location might not even be in the park. Similar thinking with multi-caches and earthcaches. I find many Municipal Parks submissions don't bother looking at the "Nearest geocaches" link in their own submission. I never reject a submission because this field is empty, when there are caches that could be listed. I may take the time to post-edit in some geocaches if I see some in the park, but you're probably right. Why bother? Geocaches often don't have a long life. Sixty percent of the caches I've ever found at some time have been archived. The only accurate (current state) is to click the "Nearest Geocaches" link to see what exists today. Again, I don't understand. Who objects to an officer approving too quickly? Are you talking about the Municipal Parks category or Waymarking in general? Since SilverQuill's "retirement", takeabrake and I are servicing this category daily, while maintaining a standard of quality that I believe was the intent of SilverQuill. I'd have to fault SilverQuill for the original acceptance of WM1Z36, without noting from the inset map, that the coordinates weren't within the park. There could be other submissions lurking in the category with inaccurate coordinates, but I'm not actively searching for them. If they come to my attention, as WM1Z36 did, I will make an effort to correct them. About me: I come from a Quality Assurance background and have an eye for both accuracy or errors. This applies to everything I do in life. My interest in Waymarking has softened as I see so many focused on running up their stats, at the expense of quality (invalid coordinates, blurry photos, pictures taken at night, no long description, spelling and grammar errors, etc). Waymarkers have to know that their waymarks are coming up near the top of Google searches. When someone outside of Waymarking clicks on one of these search finds, my hope would be that they find quality, useful information, that doesn't leave Waymarking with questionable information.
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I'm sorry you feel that way. I think this is one of the easiest categories in which to get a waymark approved. Municipal/County parks are everywhere and we get plenty of submissions every day. I especially appreciate the help takeabrake has given to this category. He was promoted because he had submitted 100+ Municipal Parks that were model submissions. Now, when I get up on the west coast, my east coast compadre, has generally cleared out the waiting queue of approvals for Municipal Parks. Waymarks get addressed daily in this category. Generally, the first two things I/we look for during approval is 1.) there's photo showing a sign with the park name and 2.) hopefully a web link to the park at the city's web site. Those two things verify the park is correctly identified. There are some parks so small or cities so small that there is no park sign. The category states if there is no park sign, to state that in the private message. I may look in Google Street View to verify that there is no sign and if I see a park sign that could have been photographed, the waymark will be declined, because I can't fix your missing photo. Regarding the URL to the park website: The field can be a URL to the city web site or, even better, a link to a web page for the park itself. Including it will definitely expedite the approval. Not including it will cause me to go find an appropriate webpage and insert it for you, at least on your first submission. Just because the field is not marked as required, doesn't mean you should not attempt to find one to improve your submission. My preference would be to make this a required field to aid in approval, but I can't edit the category requirements. It's also hard to make the field required, because we do receive submission from rural cities that don't even have a city website, let alone a list of the parks in their city. As I've mentioned before, when I'm approving waymarks, I will generally edit/fix spelling errors or minor problems, if I can, rather than reject them and send them for another round trip to approval. Things I can't fix are improper coordinates or missing photos. Those problems I do return to the submitter for them to fix. The back story of WM1Z36; Clearly, this came into my concern from a recently submitted Municipal Park, WM11J6C. WM1Z36 was shown as a possible duplicate. So I looked to make sure the new waymark wasn't a different part of the same park or whatever. The posted coordinates (sorry, now gone) were in a parking lot west of a building marked as a self service station, but certainly not in Scidmore Park. I suppose I could have doctored up some new coordinates and just updated it myself, but I felt it would be clear to the submitter that these coordinates were inaccurate and that was their responsibility. The returned waymark had coordinates in another parking lot on an island. I could see that this was an overflow parking lot that was connected to to main park by some pedestrian bridges. I just thought the coordinates for this park should be near the petting zoo, playgrounds and main facilities of this beautiful park, so I returned it again asking for coordinates at the entrance to the park. The next submission comes with a long private message, no change to the coordinates, an earthcache, GCZY62, listed in the Traditional Geocaches field, and the coordinates being somehow justified by this earthcache, because it had a map from some unknown source, showing that the island is part of the park. My point was that the middle of a parking lot is not the entrance to the park. I looked at Open Street Maps, MapQuest, Bing Maps, etc. so I'm not disputing that the island is part of the park. I spent a lot of time driving around the park virtually using Google Street View. This obviously is a very nice park if you "drive" around it. I found what appeared to be two possible entrances to the park. The park "entrance" on the island, has no sign leading you to believe there might be a park there, as it looks like a beat-up, alley-like road for the neighboring business UNIgrow Hydro. It does not show off the beautiful nature of this park. The mainland park entrance looks much more attractive, looks like a park, and shows off some of the actual park facilities. The URL submitted with the waymark was the main home page for the city of Three RIvers. It took me a little searching and clicks to two more pages to find the actual park website. At this point I decided another decline would be more time consuming and unfruitful. I had researched all the information that I was seeking to make this a better quality waymark, so I approved it and post-edited the desired changes. 1.) Set coordinates at the main park entrance. 2.) Changed the URL from the city home page to a direct link to the park web page. 3.) Removed the earthcache reference and inserted a traditional geocache that I found in the park, with a little clickable link. After all this, I think this is a much better and more accurate waymark. I'm sincerely sorry for any consternation it caused.
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It looks like a door, not a gate. Try recategorizing to "Doorways of the World".
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Which categories require you to use HTML?
DougK replied to Max and 99's topic in General Waymarking Topics
This problem was caused by Groundspeak redefining the characteristics of a text box, sometime in the past couple of years. I first noticed it in the Municipal Parks category, where there's a text box to list recreational facilities. Previously, one could list all items in a return separated list and the items would each appear as a separate line item. After the change to the characteristics of the field, enabling it to use HTML, all previously filed waymarks render the return separated list as a run-on, sentence style list. The return character in HTML rendering is ignored and treated as a space. The only way to get the original look as separate list items, is to use the line-break tag, <br>, to have the items rendered on separate lines. Another more complicated way might be using the ul tag. <ul> <li>ITEM one</li> <li>ITEM two</li> </ul> I'm not aware of any categories that require HTML formatting, but I have been "fixing" some submissions to make lists in a text box appear as the submitter thought they would appear. In short, this a Groundspeak-induced problem, that affects text boxes across every category that uses them in their variables. -
You would grant a pass to 5/6 of all the waymarks in the category? These waymarks should have been questioned two years ago. At this point there are now less than 500 Medal of Honor sites remaining to waymark in the world.
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My WMxxxx waymark code was lower than Morfe's WMYAKZ, showing my intent. Yes, it has incorrect coordinates and has a blue flagged draped in front of the headstone. That flag is not present on any of the 35+ MOH gravesite in San Francisco National Cemetery. Have you ever seen one of these flag when visiting an MOH gravesite? Look through the complete MOH Waymarking category and notice that the ONLY photos with a blue flag in them are from Don Morfe. It's not hard to come to the conclusion that he carries the flag with him and places it there. But just to be 'absolutely positive', I asked him where he got his blue flag. Don replied that a friend in the American Legion got the blue flags from their store. Well I found the Medal of Honor Society website where Don's getting all of his coordinates. Then after reading his profile, he says he posted all is coordinates to that website. What a nice circular reference. Since he says he started in 1999, before digital cameras with GPS and GPS receivers were available, I asked him where he got all of his coordinates. He replied "in 2008 and thereafter I then went to Google Earth and put the cursor on the grave location and it then showed the GPS Coordinates. Keep in mind using 4 digit decimal GPS the object can be off as much as 25 feet depending on the weather." That would pretty much invalidate all of his submissions by strict Waymarking standards. So yesterday, I made another trip up to San Francisco to verify coordinates. Heres my simple setup. After three minutes of waypoint averaging, I came out with the same coordinates as before. (They are blurred because it's my Waymarking work product.) At that location, I put in the coordinates from Morfe's WMYAKZ, and my GPSr said I was 106 feet away! This is pretty inaccurate when you're standing among thousands of similar headstones. Every Waymarker knows a posting and a visit are different. A posting takes a lot more work. I'm not posting a visit log to a waymark with inaccurate coordinates. Our esteemed colleague, BruceS, once said an waymark with incorrect coordinates is an invalid waymark. I've once reposted a place with accurate coordinates and had the original rejected, so there is precedence. What bothers me most is that the current collection of MOH recipients at San Francisco National Cemetery, that I worked on and tried to do so nicely, now has waymarks with inaccurate coordinates and blue flags sprinkled in. Now that I sort the waymarks into alphabetical order, I see that there are two waymarks for Charles Varnum, one I posted in 2014 WMJYB2, and a Morfe waymark from 2018, WMYHZZ. Agreed, that when you're verifying these submission, you probably get hit with 30+ nearby MOH waymarks and you might not spot the duplicate so far down the list, because these coordinates are inaccurate as well. I also stopped by this grave site again yesterday. Same setup: Coordinates are not blurred here, because clearly they match my original submission. Check Morfe's coordinates. So there's the inaccurate coordinates again and the same blue flag again. WMYHZZ should be re-valuated and declined. I agree that those are Don's photos, but scrolling through the category, I'd estimate that 10-20% have that blue flag draped, or mounted somewhere in the photos. Surely BruceS had this in mind when the MOH Waymarking category was developed. "Do not place anything on the grave when taking the photo." When Morfe took his photos, he wasn't taking them to meet MOH Waymarking requirements, though many of his photos are acceptable. Knowing how he's acquiring coordinates at this point makes me doubt their accuracy and validity. I certainly doubt the accuracy his Google Earth acquired coordinates that he's proliferated at the MOH Historical Society. I've proved two of them wrong that I have first hand knowledge and multiple verifications. I don't have the will and time to go through the 35+ coordinates he put in for the other MOHs in San Francisco National Cemetery at that website. I just don't believe you can accurately pick out a particular gravesite in Google Earth and come up with correct coordinates, accurate to within 10 feet. Honestly I think it's great and commendable that Don has devoted so much of his life to visiting Medal of Honor grave sites. His recent Belgium and overseas MOH waymarks are outstanding. But technically, some of his older work is not compatible with the MOH Waymarking category. I think the officers are overlooking category requirements to accept his work. Interestingly, he seems to have dropped his flag from photos too.
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My MOH story: NOTE: I don't consider myself a numbers waymarker at all. My goal when I started Waymarking was to try and find one waymark to fit in every category. Of all my Waymarking category posts, 50% just have one waymark and probably 75% of my categories have two or three waymarks. In 2014 I started looking for a Medal of Honor recipient to waymark. I found the San Francisco national cemetery had 37 Medal of Honor recipients buried there. Since Saopaulo had only waymarked two of them, I thought this would be a nice collection of MOH grave sites to visit and produce a nice set of waymarks with my quality standards. I spent a lot of research, preparation and trips over time working on this set. For something as small as a headstone, the coordinates need to be as accurate as possible to lead you to a headstone among many like it. I use waypoint averaging, which samples coordinates over a period of time until readings settle on a value, that has a confidence level of 100% of being within 6-10 feet. This often takes 2-5 minutes to get to the 100% confidence level. So I walked the cemetery, searching for headstones. When I find one, I have a number of steps to perform at each site. Takes notes, wait for the GPSr to complete averaging, take photos without the GPSr on the headstone. Sometimes I took photos before starting the GPSr, sometimes I would take photos after the GPSr settled and was removed from the headstone. It seems I got distracted and forgot to get photos once, because I was waiting for the GPSr to settle. I completed some of the MOH recipients that year, but not all of them. in 2017 NW_History_Buff contacted me about photos that were coming in with Don.Morfe's MOH submissions. I guess I had a past reputation for unearthing pilfered/improper photos used in waymarks over the years and he wanted my opinion. After looking at several of his waymarks I could see from the EXIF information in Don's photos that they were scanned photos. My response to him at that time was that he'd probably taken his photos a long time ago with a non-digital camera and had scanned them into a digital format. After looking at his profile then, I told NW_History_Buff that this was probably the first of many that he would be receiving in the category. Well this also tipped me off that if I wanted to complete the MOH collection in San Francisco National Cemetery I had envisioned, that I needed to get this done immediately. So, I made another trip and walked the cemetery all day, taking notes, collecting coordinates and photos. After getting home and producing all the waymarks, I found I only had coordinates for Lawton, but no photos. I submitted the waymarks that were complete and started a waymark with all the information except the photos for Lawton, knowing I had to make another trip up to San Francisco. I lingered a few weeks hoping Morfe might look at all the San Francisco Nation Cemetery waymarks and think it was already complete. He did discover the holes that I'd left and filled them in with his own waymarks. By the time I finally got the photos and submitted mine (it didn't show as a duplicate, because I'd already created it), it was rejected as a duplicate. It has a lower Waymarking code than Morfe's, showing my intent. I would invite anyone to look at my collection of MOH recipients from San Francisco National Cemetery. There is a consistency and uniformity that I maintained to honor all these people. After examining Morfe's WMYAKZ, I realized his coordinates were over 100 feet away from mine! In addition it has his blue flag resting in front of the headstone. Those are two reasons to declare this waymark invalid. So my disappointment is that the San Francisco National Cemetery MOH waymarks have photos with blue flags, which are not there and have inaccurate coordinates.
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Abuse of Waymarking for own advertising purposes
DougK replied to kaschper69's topic in General Waymarking Topics
I recently declined WM11B1N - Just Like Home Country Store, submitted to Apple Stores. I guess they sell apples at their store! :-) -
I've watched these waymarks come in too. These are mostly (all?) scanned photos. His visits were done so long ago that I sincerely doubt that he has any coordinates acquired with a GPSr device. I was working on Waymarking the 30+ MOH winners at the San Francisco National Cemetery. Somehow I ended up with no photos for one of the MOHs. I went back and got the photos and submitted the waymark that I'd already started. It came back as a duplicate. I found that Morfe had snuck in and posted it - WMWTEM His coordinates were way off, like they were a guess in the area. He has also draped a blue flag on the grave in his photo, which I can tell you is not there or anywhere in the cemetery, at any other MOH winners. The category says "Do not place anything on the grave when taking the photo." You will find his blue flag in many of his waymarks - WM112YB, WM115J6, WM115KZ, WM1160T, WM114X6, WM112BV, WM114X2, WM111BE, WM10Y9G, WM10XQZ, WM10XQW, WM10XBA, WM10WVV, WM10WVN, ... the list goes on and on. Scroll through the MOH category and you'll see his blue flag added to many of his waymarks. In my opinion, these are all invalid waymarks, because he has placed his flag on the headstones. Invalid coordinates are another reason to reject a waymark. i think i'd be surprised if many of his coordinates lead you directly to the right MOH headstone. He wanted me to tell him the right coordinates for WMWTEM, so he could correct them.
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Absent Leaders and Unresponsive Officers
DougK replied to wayfrog's topic in General Waymarking Topics
Yeah, I wonder too????? These waymarks didn't just all happen at once. They accumulated over time. So another interesting piece of data is: how long was the oldest waymark in queue, waiting for approval on this wayfrog sweep. I think BK-Hunters is probably not far from collecting this tidbit of information as well. I found the above study very clever indeed. On the average, many waymarks were probably waiting for about half of that interval of longest time for approval. The good things is that 94% of all categories were able to address all of their submissions with a reasonable amount of activity. This still doesn't say that all those 94% are operating on a timely basis. The one statistic I've always wanted to calculate would be an average or median elapsed time from submission time to approval time for waymarks in every category! Seeing that ordered list every month might make it easier to see what categories need help. If a category's approval time exceeds three days, the feeling I get in our community is that new or more officers are needed in that group. How that happens has been an interesting series of discussions. If some set of these 71 categories continue to show up on the list of those needing broad-brushed approvals, then clearly some group renovation or revolution needs to happen. I think we would find them on the high end times of my imagined list too. <dream> I'm tired of scraping through HTML. if only there were some Waymarking APIs.</dream> -
FWIW, There's a new 2019 study of categories/groups and leaders/officers at Waymarking Group/Category Analysis. A link to this study is also available at the bottom of the Waymarking Stats homepage.
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WMKRN5
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If you have access to the Science channel, let me recommend a thought stimulating show called “How the Universe Works”. I just watched S6 E33 on neutron stars. A pulsar is a type of neutron star that is emitting a directed beam of radio energy that is received on earth as a very regular pulsing or “blinking” signal. Every pulsar has its own unique frequency of blinking. Scientists believe that these pulsars can be used to navigate through space, acting much like the GPS satellite system we use here in our local space. Since astrophysicists have been able to identify in space where the pulsars are located, one can figure out where in space one is by a sort of space “triangulation” with respect to several pulsars. This idea has been around for a several decades. An example of its use was included on the Pioneer space probes launched in 1972 &1973. To identify where Pioneer came from, an illustration of where our Sun is with respect to the intersection of 12 pulsar beams is etched on a plaque. See Wikipedia on the Pioneer Plaque. I’d seen the Pioneer plaque plaque before, but didn’t understand the concept. Now I find it a fascinating concept how complex it is and wondering whether there is an alien species smart enough to figure out the roadmap to find us here on earth if they encounter the Pioneer probe.
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Here's the correct Link for LCPS
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Coordinates not matching Google map
DougK replied to Max and 99's topic in General Waymarking Topics
Here's my opinion: If you'll notice the waymark inset map comes from OpenStreetMap, a free open source mapping system of sort. It's nice and works fairly well, but I don't think they have the research, manpower and money behind it that Google is applying to mapping technology. Google publishes a mapping API for web developers who want to show maps on their web pages. Waymarking was using an embedded Google map on waymark pages in the past. It's not completely known to me what happened, but Google changed the mapping API in some way that required changes for the mapping clients (Waymarking.com). We all know how much attention Waymarking.com changes command. Maybe Google was charging a fee, maybe the interface changes were too much work for Waymarking.com development to do, so they switched to the OpenStreetMap usage. I think this is when the "Search from here" button broke, because they didn't address that part of the change in the initial changeover. IMO, the quality of the Waymarking experience was immediately degraded after this changeover. I find myself using the Search for … Google Maps link on most waymarks, because the OpenStreetMap was inadequate. I check satellite views of waymark coordinates to see if the waymarked object is there, or I go to Google Street View to see if it's there. I don't think MapQuest has street view and I don't use Bing Maps as much, even though they have street view also. For me, I find Google Maps to be the most useful technology. I also find my GPS coordinates map pretty true on Google Maps. -
I found that when i go to the My Categories link for waymarks to approve, that the Edit Reviews are in that list as well and the link works correctly from there.
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Of the 300+ Smithsonian sculptures I've posted, I can only remember a few being in a cemetery. I believe most Smithsonian sculptures are outside cemeteries in public places. That could be a good thing for the proposed category, as the overlap may not be too large.
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"truly outstanding categories". A discussion
DougK replied to T0SHEA's topic in General Waymarking Topics
Rare things are definitely interesting, but if they're too rare I'm not in favor of it being a Waymarking category. Imagine a category for faces carved from rock that are at least 50 feet tall. After you waymark Mt Rushmore and maybe Stone mountain, how many are left? For the under-prevalence reason, this category should never get approved, even though they're rare and interesting. Over-prevalence is definitely the opposite problem, as objects/places become too mundane. An example might be Walk-Don't Walk pedestrian signaling devices. Even if you tried to narrow the definition to those with additional audible signals, I don't think a category like that should ever be approved. For those enjoying the Waymarking hobby by collecting an icon for posting (not visiting) to a category, rare objects make this difficult. I'm not a visitor, I'm a poster of new waymarks. When I see a new category proposed, I'm hoping for 300+ possibilities around the world, enough for everyone with this goal to find. I don't know how many other people are Waymarking like me, (icons for posting), but there need to be enough possibilities for all of us to get. For me, it's more interesting to add a new waymark to a category than visit an existing one. Posting new waymarks is where it's at for me. -
If you hadn't noticed, the Wikipedia Entries category has surpassed U.S. National Register of Historic Places to become the largest category. Largest Categories
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cannot categorize an uncategorized waymark
DougK replied to Bon Echo's topic in General Waymarking Topics
Confirmed. I once created an uncategorized waymark for a friend here intended for the "Your name Here" category. She was unable to categorize it and she realized that it was because she was a basic member. -
WAYFROG - Spammers which need to be dealt with
DougK replied to T0SHEA's topic in General Waymarking Topics
This is despicable and the worst waymark I've ever seen. I noticed that this person's Waymarking ID, cartoonedward, (and geocaching ID) now has a status that I've never seen before - Locked Member. It looks like they've been dealt with. -
WAYFROG - Spammers which need to be dealt with
DougK replied to T0SHEA's topic in General Waymarking Topics
Here's what stands out to me with these waymarks. Since the content in the long description is so uniformly the same, it's likely that they were all created by the same person. Interestingly, this person created a new Waymarking ID for each location, probably so mail would properly go to an appropriate person at each site. This person was on a one-a-day or every-other-day pace (2/22, 2/23, 2/25, 2/27, 2/28, 3/2, and a straggler on 3/20. If you notice, the Waymarker ID has not been logged in since they day they created each waymark! The person didn't pick the appropriate category for the first Pizzeria. It probably should have been Pizza Shops - Regional Chains, but Independent Diners may have sounded reasonable (they didn't find the appropriate category) and so, it got approved. A day later, they created another Waymarking ID and another waymark in the same category for another Pizzeria. It also got approved and the loop continued. When they started with the Bar & Grill, they stayed with the Independent Diners category, because it was working for them. I don't even consider these spam. Any business owner ought to be able to create a proper waymark for their establishment in one of the many Waymarking categories for businesses. It probably has very little commercial value other than appearing in a Google search. I'll bet it happens on Yelp, Foursquare, Google Reviews, Yahoo local listings or Angie's list all the time! The problem is with the reviewers. First a glance at the map inset should have said to the reviewer that something was wrong with the coordinates. Next, when I see a Waymarker ID that I've never seen before, I take a glance at their profile. I would have seen that this was the waymarker's first submission. For the Pizzerias, I would have declined them with a suggestion to resubmit to Pizza Shops - Regional Chains and correct the coordinates. If I were an active officer in the Independent Diners category, I might have accepted the first Bar & Grill (and corrected the E-W problem for the newbie), but when I saw that same name of an establishment submitted the next day, I might start to be thinking that this wasn't an Independent Diner, but a chain of diners and it was being submitted to the wrong category. I don't know what category to suggest, but I would go back and decline the first one accepted. I think these seven should all be reevaluated and declined with suggestions for a better category. I do think they are probably all acceptable waymarks, if an appropriate category can be selected and the E-W coordinate problem is fixed.