Yesterday, I found out the update from Thai users that someone or some people outside Thailand who have bad or malicious intention to edit many historic sites in Thailand e.g. temples or Wat “วัด” in the northern and north-eastern parts of Thailand including Bangkok. They accessed to many sites and added some words in Khmer e.g. ฤสี ลึงพรหม พรหมลึง in between Thai words of such sites i.e. they preferably aimed to change Thai names but English names are still correct.
Normally, Thai people including tourists and commuters love to use Google Maps for navigation and search places in Thai language. From this situation, they have severely affected and got confused from this incorrectness while navigating.
Another more sensitive case is one historic site called “Tamoen Castle ปราสาทตาเมือน” was incorrectly changed in terms of both its Thai & English names including geographic location i.e. it has been intentionally moved to just inside Cambordia border (normally inside Thailand border). Since the site situated at the edge of both countries, had been in controversy long time ago but it was later confirmed that the site was already registered as Thai historic site.
Initially, I and other Local Guides in Thailand tried to change the names of such places but were not able to do so in some places. The message “Your edit couldn’t be verified, so it won’t be published” generally showed on the Maps when completed changing the names.
Please help advise if we could do further to solve this public issue ASAP. Your support would be very much appreciated.
Thank you in advance for your quick and kind support.
Some screenshots for more information and examples below.
It is always annoying when this happen. Maybe the spammers were not aware that the names can be in many languages without interfering with each other. Or maybe the intent was malicious.
Hi @MortenCopenhagen
Thank you very much for your kind support - very good advice for me.
I would like to quote some sentences from your post here:
If you get the infamous Not Applied response then it has already been decided that your suggestion is not going to appear on Google Maps. It doesn’t mean that your suggestion was wrong, but possible reasons for rejection include:
User-generated content is not allowed for security or political reasons in your area
User-generated content is blocked as a measure to prevent spam in the area or category
Your documentation was insufficient
The place is claimed or has lots of reviews or photos
It’s a chain store maintained centrally
You submitted more than one edit at a time
Your trust score is too low
Many of them seem to be valid reasons for this case since many Thai users submitted more than one edit at a time, UGC is blocked to prevent spam or not allowed for political reasons. At the moment, I stillwonder why the first user who made the incorrect changes could do that.
Dear @DeniGu
Kindly help me on this situation please. Do you have any comment?
As Connect moderators and also my friends, kindly help me look at the case as you might have experience about this - edits not verified/approved. This has become a public / national issue and I would like to reach to Google Maps team to help. Please advise if there is anything I can do to encounter this issue quickly.
@SunPanupong It’s sad when things like these happen. It’s not the first time and happens in other places too. And since we cannot see edit history of places, sometimes it is hard to detect some of these unless users flag out. It’s hard to say if some of these edits are done intentionally with ill intend or unknowingly. In some extreme cases, locations were also claimed in GMB and name changed.
Specifically for these, it’s hard for Google to know unless being flagged out by users, and changes in Thai characters makes it a little much harder to detect.
I would suggest, as since you have tagged a Google Moderator @DeniGu , that you can compile a list for at least the information below for each location.
Very helpful guideline. As of now, it’s better to be proactive (rather than waiting for Google Team to help) to complie a list of information to be changed for each location as you suggested so that the issue can be escalated to be resolved quickly. Thank you buddy.
Thank you for tagging me and thank you for bringing this to our attention. I’d really appreciate it if you could compile in one place the information that @StephenAbraham listed for each of the affected locations. That will help to escalate the issue to our responsible teams.
