Let me start by saying I'm a local guide because I like doing it. To me, giving accurate information about my neighbourhood is important, so I take the "local" quite serious. Earning points for entering / editing data is nice, but to me not as important as getting the facts right. However, to mane people the rewards actually are important, sometimes even more so than the joy of improving Google Maps. Quite often I'm confronted with the point system corrupting the actual purpose of Google Maps. "Guides" rejecting edits without actually checking the facts just to get a silly point or posting the same picture for several locations to get lots of points with a minimum of effort. These things make it hard on real guides who take pride in their work, because we have to report spammers and re-enter edits that were rejected for no reason what so ever. So I have two suggestions:
1) checking data should only be available to guides level 4 (or 5) and above. So to reach that level, a new guide needs to actually make contributions (pictures and reviews) and once he / she reached the required level, he / she has proven to be an actual guide and not a point hunter.
2) Google has algorithms to check quite some data automatically, so why not adding a simple algorithm to check if a guide entered a picture more than once (even if that was done by mistake). Can't be too hard I guess and it would end that specific way of spamming immediately.
Just thinking out loud 😉
2022
