After being taken offline back in May due to some malicious edits to Google Maps, the company’s Map Maker program has reopened in six countries starting today. Map Maker editing is now available in Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, India, Philippines and Ukraine.
Two major changes that Google is noting are the addition of Regional Leads and the temporary unavailability of polygon editing.
Regional Leads in every country will be able to moderate: As announced earlier, we have selected mappers in each country as “Regional Leads” to moderate edits done by other mappers in their respective regions. These are users who have demonstrated a clear interest in mapping their areas and will be helpful in moderating edits made by you.
Polygon editing will be unavailable: We have temporarily disabled the ability to add or edit geometries of polygons. You will, however, be able to edit other attributes such as names on polygonal features.
The addition of Regional Leads adds another layer of moderating by Map Maker users in various regions. This should cut down on the number of spam and malicious edits, while at the same time giving regular Map Maker user edits more knowledgable reviews which should also cut down on the number of denials of legitimate edits and increase the number of denials on illegitimate edits. The Regional Leads will also be interacting more with users through the Map Maker comment system in order to improve the quality of edits that go live on Google Maps through the Map Maker program.
As for the temporary disabling of polygon editing which was mostly used for adding parks and other boundaries, this will eliminate edits such as the Android/Apple prank edit earlier this year. It is unknown at this time how Google plans to reintroduce this functionality as it is quite useful when used properly.
Map Maker is set to return in other countries, including the United States, over the next few weeks.
Are you glad to see Map Maker reopen? Let us know in the comments below, or on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook!
[button link=”https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/map-maker/JeAFzDcTFfQ” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Google Map Maker[/button]Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
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