I'm an officer on several categories, and with the good weather of spring, there have been floods of new waymarks submitted lately. One thing that I've noticed is that sometimes people do the least amount of work possible to write up a mark. It seems that in the rush to list a weekend's worth of waymarks, they sacrifice the quality of individual marks to pump up their numbers. Really - how tough is it to check and see if a site has a website? To check and see what a business' hours are? As a waymarker you are known by the waymarks you post - do you really want the description "half-assed" be something people think of when they think of you?
It can get tedious when you have a bunch of waymarks to enter, but if you notice that you're starting to dread having to post the next mark then take a break. Try limiting it to 2-3 waymarks in a sitting. And if posting is that distasteful to you, then visit waymarks instead and let someone else do the spots justice when they post them to the Website.
It's one thing to have typos or to invert coordinates due to over-zealous typing. Lord knows I am regularly guilty of that. But to purposely skip adding information that will make a visit to the site easier and more fulfilling so you can move on to posting your next waymark, well that makes it to the top of my "lame list" for the day.
I don't want it to sound like there are a lot of people that do this. Most of the waymarks that come through my queue are well researched and written. Thankfully the lazy waymarker seems to be in the minority.
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I have to agree, it is very disappointing when you get a bunch of waymarks submitted with only a short description. I totally get it, though. The urge to shotgun upload all your waymarks, I mean. Instead of trying to change their behavior I think it would be better to create ways for other waymarkers to fill in the gaps. Some people might like to let their fingers do the walking and add website URLs and other info to existing waymarks.
So, a little wiki-style waymarking. I like the idea. I wouldn't want people being able to add content within the original description section that the original poster submitted, but if between the end of the description and the logs there was a section for additional information from the waymarking community, well, that would be a great feature. It's too easy for useful information to get lost in the visitor logs. I like. I like.
Thanks for this post HikeNutty!
A while ago I wanted to do a bit of research about a waymark in the World Heritage Site category and was quite excited when I saw someone had waymarked it. Clicking on the waymark revealed nothing more than a short description.
Some waymarkers seem to think that if a category asks for one photograph and accurate coordinates, then that is all that should be submitted. I was wondering the other day if a waymark could be declined for 'Lack of effort'.
I really like Nate's idea too (Is that Super_nate or Opinionate?)
Cheers
TeamTGF
A couple of months ago I saw a waymark come through for the Lincoln Memorial in the US Capitol Mall. Now, this is one of the most important US Memorials - so many famous things have happened on the steps of this memorial, for example, Martin Luther King's "I have a dream..." speech. Not to mention what Lincoln did for our country. Anyhow, the waymark's description went something like this "visited this on vacation. It's really big and cool. You should see it." I was so irritated and frustrated that a place of such importance to our history was basically described as "big and cool".
World Heritage Markers is a category that I feel people should have to spend some time writing up a description for their waymark. Only 800 or so places on the planet have been named a World Heritage location - I'm guessing that these places need more than a paragraph to describe them.
Nate's suggestion would allow some of these great spots to get the treatment they deserve.
Agreed. I have several times been frustrated by this very issue. Often I will encourage a waymarker by listing additional information and sources in my approval. Most times it goes ignored. One waymark I approved in a category that has almost no guidelines for listing I really regret because the approval reads like a geocache log rather than a waymark. I spent time searching for interesting information about the location and supplied it to the poster but nothing changed. This is a cat. I love because of its focus despite its shortcomings and it pains me to have this listed among the other gems that are out there and its my fault that it is listed. I asked the leader of the group for permission to edit it but haven't heard back from him on the issue. I may go edit it without permission soon because I doubt the guy who placed the waymark will even notice the change.
TheBeanTeam
If I were you, I would e-mail the waymarker and let him know that due to lack of information you will be editing his waymark. Let him know that if he has any questions about it he can contact you. That way your bases are covered. Likely he/she won't care, if they didn't care enough about the spot to do it justice in the first place.
Wanting more information on subjects is a lot of the reason for my backlog. There are things that I've marked and photographed, but I just don't know much about. I don't like to submit incomplete descriptions, because it's a rip-off for people viewing/visiting my Waymarks, and for me too. I enjoy learning about local history, and while I could post something and say "Here's my local (whatever), it's neat-o." and call it done. I want to know why I should be Waymarking something. I've not had many visits to my Waymarks, but I'll have a better sense of satisfaction and pride when people visit my Waymarks that I've done right. Admittedly, there are a few Waymarks I've submitted that I didn't get very descriptive about, but in those cases it wasn't possible for me to. I mean what can be said about the local McD's and Wal-Mart, really? Plus I've always been taught, "If you can't say something nice...." :)
Mr. O said, "I mean what can be said about the local McD's and Wal-Mart, really? Plus I've always been taught, "If you can't say something nice....""
LMAO! That's a good reminder for me.
I'm not very descriptive with my waymarks of TxHMs. I try to do a good "short description" but, since the marker is a bunch of text, and there's a text box to hold that text, I just paste in the THC's Atlas data in the Long Description.
Which reminds me, I need to go post a note to one of them. Someone straightened the bent post!
One more comment.
When writing about waymarks one has to be careful to observe fair use and cite sources. My NRHP entries have some info that I got from a locally published book. I tried to summarize the info, or paraphrase. I cited the book in the comments that only the poster and managers can see, and in the associated Forum...
I think that in some categories there's not much you need to write about. I mean, with a historic marker the marker text is going to tell much of the story, aside from parking and any changes at the site.
Others such as World Heritage sites or a National Park deserve to have time spent on their descriptions. They have big stories that can't fit into a couple quick sentences.
Hopefully someday there will be a feature like Nate was talking about - something "wikipedia-ish" (new word :) that allows visitors to add new information to a waymark in a section that follows the long description, but precedes the visitor logs.
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