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Quality of waymarks falling down...


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Last months, during  the WMs approval process, I notice the sharply decreasing quality of the sent waymarks. Sad is that many of them are from experienced long-time colleagues. Quality means: horrible unsharp and underexposed phone-taken photos, poor listings without pinch of effort inform us about the topic etc. Guys, please, try to work better :) - or we will follow fate of geocaches: millions of WMs without real value (really we are doing it only for numbers ? :)).

 

Edited by Dorcadion Team
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Kudos for your comments.

I, too, come across waaaaaay too many Waymarks while reviewing which are essentially useless in terms of their educational or historical value. As well, I find the inclusion of only 1 or 2 photos of a magnificent historic cathedral or courthouse to be a disservice to the object itself. While I will continue to approve substandard Waymarks, I will also continue to grit my teeth and mumble under my breath while doing so. In fact, the lower the standard of a Waymark, the more time I will invest in looking for valid reasons to reject it.

Keith

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I have two comments:

1. Lately I browsed through several categories and examined the oldest waymarks in those categories and I came across several waymarks that had little to no text in the long description and few photos of poor quality. So, I think that there were always good and not so good waymarks. But today we have some waymarkers who put extra effort in creating great waymarks with formatted text, photos in the long description and so on. Maybe we just raised our expectations?

2. Sometimes I find a photo in my holiday photos that is not the very best quality, but the location is still interesting. In a perfect world, I could still create the waymark and hope that many visitors will add great photos to the gallery. For example: In the Universities and Colleges category there is no waymark in Denmark. I found a photo of the University of Copenhagen that I took out of the sightseeing bus. It's just one photo of medium quality. The category demands at least two photos, so I will not create that waymark, but wouldn't a waymark with one photo be better than none?

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3 hours ago, PISA-caching said:

In the Universities and Colleges category there is no waymark in Denmark. I found a photo of the University of Copenhagen that I took out of the sightseeing bus. It's just one photo of medium quality. The category demands at least two photos, so I will not create that waymark, but wouldn't a waymark with one photo be better than none?

I lived in an exotic land for two years.  I thought it would be nice to represent that country with a waymark.  With two years of photographs, only one site met category criteria.  Before digital cameras, we were very frugal with images.

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In my humble opinion it's not a matter of quantity. Four photos aren't automatically better than two photos. For example: I'm not a religious person and therefore I hardly ever enter churches, but lately I started to go inside to take a photo of the interior. Two photos (one from the outside and one from the interior) can be far better and interesting than 4 photos of the facade. Unfortunately, I don't always have the time to enter all the buildings that I want to waymark.

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1 hour ago, PISA-caching said:

In my humble opinion it's not a matter of quantity. Four photos aren't automatically better than two photos. For example: I'm not a religious person and therefore I hardly ever enter churches, but lately I started to go inside to take a photo of the interior. Two photos (one from the outside and one from the interior) can be far better and interesting than 4 photos of the facade. Unfortunately, I don't always have the time to enter all the buildings that I want to waymark.

The amount I take allows me to sort the multiple angles I took, but it is true that it is necessary to take an inner photo (when possible, of course), we can not always take a full photo of the facade when the building is in a narrow street

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We all can only see a small part of the new waymarks, so the perception might be different when you are active in another area or are officer in other categories, but what I see is generally the opposite. There has been a steady increase of high quality waymarks over the last two years and the average level has never been as high as now.

We still have a lot of poor submissions, some are from total beginners who have to learn first and some of them are from waymarkers who have been active for many years, but I did not notice any change. There is the same bitter fight for the reputation of the worst waymarker on the whole planet, this fight has been going on for years now and it is still between the same few people as always. I do not get it. The effort to always find the lowest acceptable level must be much higher than the one to create average quality waymarks.

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25 minutes ago, fi67 said:

There is the same bitter fight for the reputation of the worst waymarker on the whole planet, this fight has been going on for years now and it is still between the same few people as always. I do not get it. The effort to always find the lowest acceptable level must be much higher than the one to create average quality waymarks.

 

I was totally unaware of this, but it is equally as silly as those here that pleasure themselves as being the world's best waymarkers. It's just a silly side game to geocaching. B)

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8 hours ago, PISA-caching said:

In my humble opinion it's not a matter of quantity. Four photos aren't automatically better than two photos. For example: I'm not a religious person and therefore I hardly ever enter churches, but lately I started to go inside to take a photo of the interior. Two photos (one from the outside and one from the interior) can be far better and interesting than 4 photos of the facade. Unfortunately, I don't always have the time to enter all the buildings that I want to waymark.

I guess the point I was trying to make was that in certain circumstances the minimum number of photos simply can't capture the essence of the subject. I'm about as nonreligious as anyone you will come across but I've come to love old churches for their architecture as well as their historic value.

It seems that, throughout history, civilized societies have expressed their creativity most ably in the construction of their religious edifices. The sheer quantity of the architectural and artistic content of many churches and cathedrals simply cannot be captured with "a shot of the outside and a shot of the inside".

Another, equally important, aspect of churches is their historical value. In comparatively recent times, when a new community came into being in the western world, the first public structures erected were generally a post office, a church (and a brewery). The most elaborate and the longest lived were often the churches. Their history becomes synonymous with that of the community.

fi67 added:

"We still have a lot of poor submissions, some are from total beginners who have to learn first and some of them are from waymarkers who have been active for many years, but I did not notice any change."

With this I must agree. When we began Waymarking our Waymarks were pretty minimal. We were essentially clueless and didn't know any better. We did, however, endeavour to learn and to invest the time and energy to research Waymarks in an effort to make them more interesting and more informative. We can only hope that new Waymarkers will follow a similar path.

Keith

Edited by BK-Hunters
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Another thought:

It falls upon category creators as much as it does Waymarkers to maintain, or improve, the quality of Waymarks submitted. If a category's requirements demand little or nothing, then, in a great many cases, that is exactly what will be submitted. This is part and parcel of "the same bitter fight for the reputation of the worst waymarker on the whole planet".

Demand more from your submitters and they will be forced to, however grudgingly, provide more. I don't have sufficient fingers and toes on which to count the number of categories extant which demand essentially nothing of the submitter. Admittedly, a great many of these are from the original batch of categories, created when dinosaurs walked the earth, but this is not to say that some enterprising category leader couldn't upgrade the requirements.

I'm beginning to get the feeling that I'm dreaming now. After all, there seem to be few category leaders with sufficient initiative to even go back and fix the typos and misspellings in their category descriptions. Such an attitude is unlikely to inspire greatness in a submitter.

Keith

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5 hours ago, lumbricus said:

Today I got a message that my way to review Waymarks is not the right way. I should spend more time to review Waymarks. I should do more denials if something is not 100 % right. Over the years my perspective changed.

Every single Waymark submitted to a category was created by a Waymarker. The Waymarker spend time to go out and discover new things out there which have not beend documented yet. If it comes up to write a listing the people have very different backgrounds or things they like. Not all are Dr.s or people which like doing researches for ours. Some Waymarkers like that, others like to discover things and give them a voice online.

If I review a new Waymark I try to be as positive and friendly as I can be. If a very active Waymarker choose a category I assume he did right. I still check it, but normally he/she did right. Even if the long description is poor we win with every Waymark. We have an edit function, all Waymarkers with high quality standards are welcome to edit Waymarks and add some informations. The quality of our Waymarks at the moment is high!

We should not forget that Waymarking has to be fun in some way for all players. I can assure you if we scare away average quality waymarkers with forcing them to 1,000 % standars we will kill Waymarking by ourselfs.

 

Bravo!

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On 11/30/2017 at 8:10 AM, lumbricus said:

Today I got a message that my way to review Waymarks is not the right way. I should spend more time to review Waymarks. I should do more denials if something is not 100 % right. Over the years my perspective changed.

Every single Waymark submitted to a category was created by a Waymarker. The Waymarker spend time to go out and discover new things out there which have not been documented yet. If it comes up to write a listing the people have very different backgrounds or things they like. Not all are Dr.s or people which like doing researches for hours. Some Waymarkers like that, others like to discover things and give them a voice online.

If I review a new Waymark I try to be as positive and friendly as I can be. If a very active Waymarker choose a category I assume he did right. I still check it, but normally he/she did right. Even if the long description is poor we win with every Waymark. We have an edit function, all Waymarkers with high quality standards are welcome to edit Waymarks and add some informations. The quality of our Waymarks at the moment is high!

We should not forget that Waymarking has to be fun in some way for all players. I can assure you if we scare away average quality waymarkers with forcing them to 1,000 % standars we will kill Waymarking by ourselfs.

I totally agree to this, and it does not contradict my previous post.

I do not reject submissions just because of poor quality (although sometimes it is hard) and I did never say anyone should. There are always people with different backgrounds, experience and possibilities, also language is often a problem. But when a category has defined requirements that are easy to follow, I see no reason why a waymarker should not correct the missing or wrong parts before the submission is approved. I always try to be as helpful and explicit as possible and I do sign all my denials in case of questions.

Too restrictive officers will damage Waymarking, but those guys I was refering to don't do Waymarking a favour neither.

 

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3 hours ago, fi67 said:

 

Too restrictive officers will damage Waymarking, but those guys I was refering to don't do Waymarking a favour neither.

 

 

So when it comes right down to the facts of this matter it is just internal bickering against a few, maybe three waymarkers that are playing Waymarking as a numbers game and not a grid game?

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This topic of the quality of waymarks was discussed back in June 2006 Dilemma with tacky waymarks

Apparently this issue was never resolved and many discussions later we are still talking about it. 

I am still of the belief that if you do not expect anything, in some cases, that is exactly what you get.  

...and of course I could go on about officers approving waymarks that do not meet the stated requirements. 

 How about naming a category "Pencil Sharpeners" and leave the requirement page blank? :)

 

Edited by BK-Hunters
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