An apology was not enough, in light of recent ‘Google Map’ dishonest activities, ‘Google’ has decided to suspend ‘Map Maker’ services temporarily until the company finds a better alternative. When the mapping mischief was first discovered, most of us had a good chuckle and wondered who was responsible. Inevitably, Google took it down and later confirmed that it was a user-created edit, which raised questions about Map Maker’s review policies.
Lately edits in ‘Map Maker’ has quite escalated in recent months, to the point that the ‘Map Maker’ team is having trouble contending with both the abuse and legitimate edits. From 12th May edits will be likely frozen until the company finds a suitable way to handle this situation.
Google’s Product Manager Pavithra Kanakarajan said, “We believe that it is more fair to only say that if we do not have the capacity to review edits at roughly the rate they come in, we have to take a pause.”
‘Google’ has already suspended auto-approval and user moderation, instead relying on manual checks from its in-house team. The company says it’s quickly accrued a huge backlog of user-contributed edits, so while it develops a new moderation system, its suspending public submissions entirely.
Google official statement, “We have hence decided to temporarily disable editing across all countries starting Tuesday, May 12, 2015, till we have our moderation system back in action. This will be a temporary situation and one that we hope to come out of as soon as possible. While this is a very difficult, short term decision, we think this will help us get to a better state faster. More importantly, we believe it is simply the right thing to do to all of you, our valued users who continue to edit with the hope that your changes might go live as fast as you’ve been used to.”
It is unknown how long the maker will be unavailable, it’s also admitted that it’ll take more than a few days to fix.
