Reporting ridiculous pins

[Translucence]

Hi ... it's been a while ... I was talking to another local history group who have never heard of HistoryPin and I noticed that many (all?) pictures that I've reported through the years are still appearing on the HistoryPin map at exactly the same locations.

It makes the site look quite amateur and makes me think the staff aren't interested in quality of the content.

This includes pictures carelessly pinned on the wrong side of the planet

eg

## Masada is in the Middle East, not in suburban Melbourne, Australia - no desert here

https://www.historypin.org/map/#!/geo:-37.815573,145.026852/zoom:15/dialog:240731/tab:details/

## The school group who runs this account didn't check what city this town hall was from - it's in America, not Australia

https://www.historypin.org/map/#!/geo:-37.819145,145.000555/zoom:17/dialog:112534/tab:details/

(The same school group have many other incorrectly placed pictures, clearly the kids didn't care what they did)

I also reported this profile who were uploading pictures to HistoryPin to use in advertising caravan and camping parks ...

Jon agreed they were violating the site's Terms and Conditions and he'd do something about it ... but that was half a year ago and their 167 advertising pictures are still there ...

https://www.historypin.org/channels/view/49326/#!photos/list/

[Jon Voss]

Hi Christopher,

Thanks for your persistence and always honest observations.  

There's no doubt we've got to come up with a better way of dealing with mis-tagged places. The way it works currently is someone flags it, we have to reach out to the person who pinned it, then move it, then get back to the person who flagged it.  Currently we have a backlog of those in the hundreds, because it's a major pain.  It may be something we could try to get some interns to help out with (volunteering?  we could possibly give you the ability to take on some of this remotely if you're interested).  Another thing that you could do is comment on some of these mis-pinned photos, which will alert the account owner.  Ideally, we've got to come up with some way of letting people make changes or suggestions automatically, but it just hasn't been high up on the list I'm sad to say.

I totally agree about the grammar school kids.  Total slackers. There's another opportunity to get involved with your local community, and see if the teacher wants to team up on a project!  Happy to try to help make that connection.

On the case of the Aussie Travelers Free Choice Camping profile,  this has been a very interesting one.  We did engage with the people working on this profile and after some discussions asked them to take out their commercial links, as we don't allow commercial advertising on our site.  They agreed to that and changed their profile accordingly.  Because they've made those changes, we've let it stand.  But I'd be interested to hear what others have to say about it as well. 

Thanks again for your work and contributions to Historypin!

Jon

Jon Voss
Strategic Partnerships Director
---------------------------------------------
Historypin
2665 Mission St
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-935-4701

Skype: jonevoss

Twitter: @jonvoss

historypin.org

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[Translucence]

Hi Jon,

with that commercial profile that is using your site to host their advertising pictures, I see nothing of historical value in those pictures, and I'd debate if any have the slightest value outside advertising.

Even if you don't click to see more of their photos, the first page of 8 photos on their profile is entirely promo shots of campsites - mostly montages of patches of grass, and campsite signage / toilet blocks. If you look further, many other pictures are just shots of fruit, advertising nearby fruit stalls, pictures of available caravans, etc.

They're not even pretending to use it for history purposes.

I'm sure there would be some way they could shift to using Google Maps instead of mucking up HistoryPin.

Christopher

[Jon Voss]

Hi Christopher,

I appreciate your thoughts on this and it's a good thing to explore.  I don't think it's actually as straight-forward as it may at first seem.  If they are commercial, what are they selling?  Are they advertising campgrounds, sponsored by campgrounds?  Are they making money off of these posts?  They claim not to be.

It turns out that they are a pretty active group on Facebook (with nearly 8k members) that shares camping tips and photos with one another.  In terms of community building, it's quite interesting to us as to how that does or does not translate to Historypin and whether or not you could have groups of people discussing particular locations, sites, historical spots, etc. on Historypin, and whether that would be of social value.  

I agree that it's not necessarily historical, but that's another question altogether, and one worth asking for sure.  Should we take things down that aren't clearly about history?  Even though the site is called "Historypin," we think not, as it gets pretty quickly into some subjective judgements.  Is art history?  What about a picture of graffiti on a building? Is a picture that a guy took of he and his girlfriend out to dinner last week history?  It may be to him.  And it may be relevant to others if he tells a story about it, or if the restaurant gets smashed by a truck next week. 

Or what about if it is historical AND commercial?  Like this town that has pictures of all their stores? Is that ok because it's 1995?  Or a picture of friends in a restaurant with the coca cola machine featured prominently?  Does that pass because it's 1952? Or because it's the first day the store served to African Americans?  When do we pull the historical, or the historic lever?  As far as we're concerned, history starts now.  Then? No, now.

Indeed, we don't consider ourselves curators, though we may create curated tours of content, and provide tools for that.  And an historian may question whether some of the content on Historypin is worthy of historical discourse, and that's ok.  But perhaps you can see why we take great care in deciding whether or not to take content down from the site. 

Jon

[Mike Strange]

I have followed this discussion closely; heartily welcome the removal of the commercial advertising but still do not believe the pins by ATFCC have anything to do with the original stated purpose of History Pin to engage between generations and offer an historical record of events.  If there was a site called Travel Pin then fine but from my perspective this dilutes the historical flavour so not here thank you Jon.

Mike

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[Andrew Taylor]

On Wednesday, February 4, 2015 at 7:23:45 AM UTC+11, jon.voss wrote:

Currently we have a backlog of those in the hundreds, because it's a major pain.  It may be something we could try to get some interns to help out with (volunteering?  we could possibly give you the ability to take on some of this remotely if you're interested).  Another thing that you could do is comment on some of these mis-pinned photos, which will alert the account owner.  Ideally, we've got to come up with some way of letting people make changes or suggestions automatically, but it just hasn't been high up on the list I'm sad to say.

Hi Jon,

I see that your title is "Strategic Partnerships Director" - does that mean you are too high up the food chain to do simple edits?

Why would people volunteer their time to do something that your own team won't take some time to work on?

I'd say you need to take a page from Nike's "Just Do It." philosophy.

Internships are a lazy solution, and volunteers?  Most people have their own work to do, rather than cleaning up work that someone else will get the credit for.

No one should be too big to do grunt work.

I worked with a librarian once who said "I'm not sure the Director wants to waste my pay grade on Excel edits."

I wanted to ask him: "what is he wasting your pay grade on now?"

Sincerely,
Andrew Taylor

 

[robin aka georgiawebgurl]

All
I am a IT & Metadata librarian who mostly lurks here and volunteers (after hours) for the Facebook Place Name project. How it works is that when I go into the project site @ Facebook, I receive a list of tagged places. I can confirm it is correct, make needed changes including merging duplicates, correcting typos, and adding missing content. My edits go into a queue for review. My understanding is that each entry is reviewed multiple times and if a consensus is reached, the edit is accepted. I am not sure of that part of the process, since I don't work for Facebook. :-) After a few days/weeks, I will receive a message stating ___ edits have been accepted. 

I don't know if it would be possible to set up this sort of queue for historypin, but this is a PERFECT internship opportunity for library & information science majors, librarians looking for professional development experience or those seeking to increase their metadata skills (perhaps, to change career directions),

If you want help promoting this sort of thing to that community, I have the connections!  

BTW, I would never say "not in pay grade" even though I was at the highest rank in my previous position. ;-) I know libraries are increasingly short staffed, underfunded, and beset with the fallacy of popular thought that everything is available for free online with all of the work done by computers. Absolutely not true -  the only constant in my career has been an increase in the amount of work and its complexity (computers can often do easy and menial work, but it still has to be reviewed, as we can see from this situation).  

Just my thoughts,

Robin  

http://contentdivergent.blogspot.com

[Jon Voss]

Yes, that's true.  Maybe we can shepherd them over to our friends at Findery.