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On a Waymarking trip we so happened to take a break at a roadside pull out and noticed a sign. It was for a biosphere reserve by Unesco. The upshot is, at least in this case, there was a sign, we were able to take lots of pictures of the area and the information was very detailed. We would appreciate your input so this category at least has hope to pass review. Anyone interested in being an officer? Post your interest here and a group will be created. Thanks.

Every so often as we read the long descriptions on some categories, we come across a challenge; of sorts: If you do, this or that, you will earn extra points… We have on several occasions have earned those elusive "Extra Points" Wondering and Pondering: Where are they…? Looked on our profile page: Did not find any… Looked on our waymarks: Did not find any… Maybe I got a gold star: Did not find any… Looked on the forums: Did not find any… Looked in the How To Information: Did not find anything about where these extra points are stored…or anything else for that matter. After approval, looked for a reviewer comment about my extra points: Did not receive any… So where did they go?

Hi lumbricus, I am aware that some of these reserves are gigantic, this does seem to be one of the major obstacles of this new category. I have tried to come up with a solution that is workable. So far, not too successful. As well from some of the research I have done, some of the reserves, as best as I can tell; do not have signs, no distinguishable landmarks, and in some cases; difficult or impossible to reach a high enough elevation to provide an overview of the area. Just to name a few... Anyone have any suggestions?

And I got all puffed up when I hit 100. Eating humble pie today... Keith

That's GREAT NEWS, Bruce. We're delighted to hear it! Welcome back to the fray and Thank You for all you do for the Waymarking community. This is going to make you harder to catch, though You've given us one more incentive to keep going down the road. Keith

Hi Guys, This is the "K" half of BK-Hunters. Thank You Andreas for having noticed the 10K thing. It has, indeed, been an adventure. We have expended considerably more time researching and planning than we have snapping pix and posting combined. I'm beginning to contract carpal tunnel syndrome and I'm on the second computer and fourth mouse since we began those 1,000 and some days ago. It's been a helluva lot of fun though, as it has given us an excuse to get in the car and go to places we otherwise would never have even considered visiting. After 10,000 waymarks we have learned more about the country around us than we had in the entire pre-Waymarking segment of our lives. We are, as I write this, planning the biggest and longest Waymarking trip of our careers, to take place beginning in about 10 days. I won't let you in on our plans quite yet. You'll have to wait until we return and the waymarks begin to pour forth. A hint - there will be at least two new categories created as a result of this trip. MANY Thanks to all the reviewers who have contributed to our success!!! We certainly couldn't have gotten there without you!!! Keith

Firstly, this is not a duplicate of the category "World Heritage Sites" listed on the UNESCO website. "Tervas says, Hello, Sorry, but world heritage is world heritage, biosphere is another thing (Every now and then someone tries to waymark these nature locations to this cultural category). Suggestion: create a new UNESCO biosphere WM category, I think that would be popular." This is the response I received about the UNESCO Biosphere Reserves, when I wrote for a clarification. Clearly, they would not be accepted in the category. Just tossing the idea out for consideration. The following was copied from the UNESCO: Biosphere Reserves – Learning Sites for Sustainable Development. Source: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/environment/ecological-sciences/biosphere-reserves/ "Biosphere reserves are areas comprising terrestrial, marine and coastal ecosystems. Each reserve promotes solutions reconciling the conservation of biodiversity with its sustainable use. Biosphere reserves are ‘Science for Sustainability support sites’ – special places for testing interdisciplinary approaches to understanding and managing changes and interactions between social and ecological systems, including conflict prevention and management of biodiversity. Biosphere reserves are nominated by national governments and remain under the sovereign jurisdiction of the states where they are located. Their status is internationally recognized. There are 631 biosphere reserves in 119 countries, including 14 transboundary sites. They are distributed as follows: 64 in 28 countries in Africa 27 in 11 countries in the Arab States 130 in 23 countries in Asia and the Pacific 290 in 36 countries in Europe and North America 120 in 21 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Three zones, one biosphere reserve! Biosphere reserves have three interrelated zones that aim to fulfil three complementary and mutually reinforcing functions: The core area(s) comprises a strictly protected ecosystem that contributes to the conservation of landscapes, ecosystems, species and genetic variation. The buffer zone surrounds or adjoins the core areas, and is used for activities compatible with sound ecological practices that can reinforce scientific research, monitoring, training and education. The transition area is the part of the reserve where the greatest activity is allowed, fostering economic and human development that is socio-culturally and ecologically sustainable." Criteria: Must be listed on the UNESCO website Must include at least two images taken by the waymarker: NO photos taken from the internet. Coordinates taken by the waymarker. At least one paragraph about the location, developed by the waymarker. This is NOT a copy and paste category. If "some" of the information is taken from the UNESCO website or other source, it MUST be cited. This new category WILL NOT accept any waymark that can be posted in the World Heritage Sites category. NO cross postings. Location: Worldwide Any suggestions and ideas are all welcome. Anyone willing to be an officer, please contact us using our profile page. A group has not been created, awaiting your response. Regards: BK-Hunters

Well, the way I see it: More for us. Everyone has an opinion: warts and all... We started out as Geocachers: Got tired of finding the same cache over and over, just different locations. Will say we have found some great hides and deserving of a favorite. However, we stumbled on Waymarking looking for a place to post Benchmarks. The rest is history. We will continue to Waymark, plan our trips around it and still feel the rush of finding that new category.

Wow! How great it was for you to post this. Thank you, Andreas. I did not ever expect anyone to notice. It only took us, coincidentally, exactly 1,000 days.

Thank you Waywizard, Unbelievable! Your assistance is greatly appreciated in approving our waymarks in the Antique Hotel category. Best Regards, BK-Hunters

Greetings, I was reading this thread with much interest. Most intriguing is that Waywizard was of assistance with waymarks pending review. I would appreciate your assistance with the "Antique Hotel" category: I have written too many emails to all group members with no response, even offered to assist with reviewing and joined the group. No response. Some of the following were declined: paraphrased: Your waymark does not "fit" on the page. We have over 10,000 approved waymarks. About a year ago we started using HTML and so far not one of them were declined due to not fitting on the page except the ones in the Antique Hotel category. Leader: last logged in 3/11/15 2nd: last logged in 2/22/15 3rd: last logged in 2/3/09 There are other regular members that are very active and some are leaders of their own categories and some are great about clearing pending waymarks. Why not promote one of these? Need help with: WMN296 - Broadway Hotel: Pending since 12/12/14 WMNC4E - St. Eugene: Pending since 2/11/15 WMNJOT - Hume Hotel: Pending since 3/20/15 WMNJOW - Adventure Hotel: Pending since 3/20/15 WMNJ11 - Hotel Ymir: Pending since 3/20/15 WMNMB4 - Miner's Hotel: Pending since 4/3/15 There were waymarks last approved 3/11/15 I have cancelled the waymarks, made minor changes and resubmitted on several occasions. Last was a day or two ago. Your assistance is appreciated.

Counts us in. Cemeteries are one of our favorite categories and would add to our "hobby".

I would like to add "Bicycle Shops" to the list of inactive leaders. The leader of this group Last Visit: Friday, May 18, 2012. I have contacted the leader and the second officer on the list requesting our waymark be reviewed. Also offered to join the group and be an officer to help out. NO RESPONSE from either one of them. Even cancelled the submission, made minor changes and resubmitted three times, still did not get anyone's attention. So, What Now? I will add that the majority of reviewers do a great job and need to be complimented and acknowledged for their time devoted to Waymarking: a great place to be.

Thank you A-Team for pointing this out again. No OCR is always perfect and proofreading the results are necessary. I have even translated a plaque in Russian to Russian and the results were perfect. I was so excited with the results and could not wait to post it in the new waymark. However the results were less than perfect and what resulted were a series of ?????????.

Silverquill suggested that we post this on the forum. What is OCR: Optical character recognition (software) Transcribing text, especially if quite long, is time consuming and tedious. There are several categories that require you to include the text from signs, monuments, plaques, etc. These instructions may seem overwhelming at first; however, when weighed against the time it takes to manually transcribe the image a little prep work makes it worthwhile, for us at least. Be aware that not all images can be transcribed, usually stone, shiny background, photos with lots of glare to name a few. Take a clear photo of the item to be transcribed, if you cannot take a picture of the entire item, take it in sections. Plan ahead and remember that these images are going to be used for the transcription. Taking a high resolution pic can be to your advantage here - you can reduce the resolution somewhat after processing, but remember that your final B & W pic will be much smaller (in kilobytes) that was the original. The one we use is a free online program that does not require you to sign in or register. There are several free websites available online. We used "Google" to search by just using OCR in the search bar. We use this one with great success - Link: http://www.onlineocr.net/ We have compared the results of this OCR software against others and this one consistently did a better, more complete job. Sometimes we use a combination of three programs to accomplish the transcription: Photo shop or similar program: to removed back ground color and adjust color and/or contrast. Fast Stone Image Viewer (more about this later): to convert to a negative (when necessary) straighten the image, crop and adjust color and contrast. Actually, I use Fast Stone exclusively most of the time. OCR: to convert image to text. 1. Select the image that needs transcription (it must be in a format that the OCR will accept) We use jpg. Check your OCR before getting started for what type of image format to use. 2. Whether you use Fast Stone or another program make a duplicate copy of the image to modify. You want to keep the original if you plan to post it on your waymark. 3. Look carefully at your image, if the lettering is white or a light colored you will want to convert it to a negative. (Fast Stone) (DO NOT CONVERT to BLACK and WHITE Yet.) 4. We would suggest that you straighten your image, and crop fairly close to the text, eliminating as much non-text as possible. (Fast Stone) 5. Your image is ready to modify. Use a program like Photo Shop to remove as much of the background color as you can and convert the background color to white. (Your text should be dark, hopefully fully black, at this point). You may have to experiment on the tolerance level so as not to remove the text. Use the paintbrush feature or clone and heal to remove any images, noise, or anything that is not text. Or try using the histogram function to reduce background colors, this sometimes works well. 6. Convert your text image to black and white and increase the contrast. Increasing the contrast several times in a row works well in certain circumstances. Adjust the image size so that you have good sized letters in a full sized view. Your file should be somewhere between 200 and 1,000 k. in size by this time. Save. 7. Follow instructions with the OCR. Your text should be transcribed. 8. Sometimes the conversion is not perfect, depending on how noisy or dirty your original pic was before processing. If there is a large amount of text, we make a paper copy of the image text to proofread and make any corrections that are necessary. We copy the transcription into Word or other text processor. I like Word, it has a spell checker and this helps make some of the corrections, if necessary. 9. Be patient, this does takes a little practice. Well worth the effort as we have saved countless hours of transcription time using this method. 10. Good Luck. Questions: Just ask. Faststone Image Viewer: If you do much post processing of your pix you really should try this out. Faststone is MUCH MUCH MORE than an image viewer. I use it for all my post processing work except for warps. It's free - just search on "Faststone Image Viewer", download it and try it out.

Having looked it up just now, I see that we were misinformed vis-a-vis the photographing of children issue. Thank you for setting us straight. Need to verify my sources more carefully in the future. It seems that your "Water Parks" category was NOT the one we're trying to nail down. Do you remember another similar one, possibly named "Spray Parks"?

Found it!!! The group was called "Splish Splash Fun", it was created on 8/9/2009 by Saopaulo1 and the category was called "Water Parks", not Spray Parks, as I thought. "Category Status: The Water Parks category has been created (with variables)." Check it out here: http://www.Waymarking.com/groups/details.aspx?f=1&guid=8d0690b2-2439-4987-b2f2-ac72afbe936b

Maybe I need to start a new thread asking if anyone else remembers it. I know weren't the only ones to post there.

No, one bridge.

I wish I could answer that question, as all our waymarks in the category, and the category itself, are gone. I do remember that it didn't have a lot of posts, less than 100, I think. Can't really remember when we did the ones that we did do. Probably through a few months (or less) of 2013. Maybe some in the summer and a few in the fall. I doubt that we did many more than 6 or 8 before it disappeared. One day we went to post another and could no longer find the category...

Really, all you need is one.

I'll admit that I've run afoul of the legislation at "Citizen Memorials" in the past, but a literal interpretation of the guidelines leads us to believe that it DOES NOT allow such memorials: "Essentially any form of memorial that honours an individual or a group of individuals that are remembered for any reason. However, this category has exceptions are noted below. Not allowed waymarks ... ... • Occupational memorials. ... ..." The upshot being that the Citizen Memorials group assumes that these would ALL be acceptable in "Worker's Monuments", many of which are not. Hence we do, indeed, seem to have a gap here. Great idea for a new and needed category! A caveat is that either or both of the present categories could be modified. It's not as though doing so would set a precedent.

To quote lumbricus: "I like the idea!" Can't think of many that we've come across, though mountains certainly does come to mind. Yes, I'm sure we'd be able to find a bunch of these. Gives us one more thing to hunt for... EDIT: Further, it creates a venue for increasing the knowledge database of historical figures, some as yet little known, who deserve a wider exposure.

Whoa!! Hold on here!! Does no one here remember the "Spray Parks" category? It only lasted for a short while and was done away with. We had done several waymarks in the category, in 2013, I believe. Though we don't know, we suspect that there was a good reason for its demise. If I were a pedophile and I were to search online for places to reliably find young children, I would consider the "Spray Parks" category a gold mine, complete with directions and coordinates. We suspect that this may well be the reason that the category suddenly disappeared. Many may not be aware of this, but, in at least the US, and possibly other countries, as well, it is illegal to take pictures of children that are not your own without permission. Serious problems could arise here. This really needs a rethink. EDIT: This could actually apply to playgrounds, as well. We all know that there is no "Schools" category and that caches can't be placed within a certain distance of schools. The reasoning is the same as it is for spray parks. We wouldn't be all that surprised to see "Children's Playgrounds" disappear one day, as well.