Google will reopen Map Maker in August with new moderation rules

Google will be re-opening Map Makers after an incident of Google bot peeing on its rival Apple occurred a few months ago. This time, however, the search engine will follow a Wikipedia style of moderation to ensure that incidents like this don’t happen again. Map Maker, previously, gave users the freedom to edit maps in order to keep them updated but after the incident, the service was shut down in May 2015.

Google will now review the applications of new mappers before appointing them the role of ‘region lead’ of a particular area.

“Map Maker will be increasingly made open for moderation by the community,” said Product manager Pavithra Kanakarajan in a company blog post. He added that few edits will be moderated by Google Operators.

Kanakarajan continued: “The reason for this change is that every time we observed someone attempting to vandalise the map, many of you acted quickly to remove the offending feature and demonstrated real ownership of maps within your region. We have come to the conclusion that of all the defences available to keeping our maps clean, the interest of a community of well-intentioned users is among the most reliable and fast.”

Map Maker will return in August and Google will appoint mappers from select regions and offer them opportunities to be the lead of the particular area. Edits done by them will be further reviewed by an automated Google Moderation system, followed by the region lead. This time a Google employee is redundant since they “only occasionally moderate edits,”.
This method of operation works in the same way as Wikipedia.

Kanakarajan admitted that the new system will most likely slow moderation of edits but Google will grow the number of moderators in each country over time.