Waymarks That Fit Into Multiple Categories

[+Mary&Dave]

Hi all,

I decided to finally check out the Waymarking site today. At a first glance, it really isn't too shabby. Certainly a lot better than some of the threads on this forum would have you believe.

 

After browsing through a few of the categories, though, I noticed big potential for overlap on many of them. For example, what about an Independent Coffee House that is also a Wifi Hotspot and a Bookcrossing Zone. Should a single location really have three separate logs in different categories? That seems overly redundant.

 

Sure enough, I did a search for nearby waymarks and found one spot was logged in five different categories. Is this really the way it is intended to be done?

 

Mary

[+BruceS]

 

Sure enough, I did a search for nearby waymarks and found one spot was logged in five different categories. Is this really the way it is intended to be done?

 

Mary

 

Yes. This is very acceptable. You may list a location as a waymark in many categories because people often search by topic rather than location. In your example, I might search for a coffee house because I want a cup of coffee. I probably would not search for a bookcrossing site because at the time, I want a cup of coffee not get a book. Thus if you listed your waymark as only a bookcrossing site, I would miss my cup of coffee.

[+tozainamboku]

If you recogize that Waymarking is made of groups that have expressed an interest in different categories it makes sense that a single location may be listed in more that one category. One group is interested in Coffee house and another in WiFi hotspots. Each is keeping there own list. This use to happen with locationless caches. Sometimes a location would satisfy more than one locationless caches and it could be used multiple times (but only once for each locationless). Many times a virtual cache would also be listed as a find for a locationless as well. If you view way marking as a directory of places, it does seem a little inefficient to write up the location multiple times just to put it in multiple categories. Still, each category probably wants to see different information about the location which is specific to the category. While perhaps not the most efficient, the current setup is satisfactory. The proble occurs when a person is trying to use Waymarking as substiture for virtual caching. If you just say "show me all the nearby waymarks" you may see five waymarks all for the same location. You could log a visit to each of these waymarks - but that probably doesn't make sense. Instead you should be picking just a few categories that you are interested in and visiting those.

[+chstress53]

Some of us even play a game with ourselves and look for waymarks that fit several locations at once. My personal best is 5 waymarks for 1 location, the difference is that the descriptions our entirely different.