Google Map Maker Opens Its Editing Tools To Everyone By Jon Mitchell.
From the post:
Google announced a major redesign of Google Map Maker today. This is the tool that allows anyone to propose edits to the live Google map, so that locals can offer more detail than Google’s own teams can provide. The new tools offer simple ways to add and edit places, roads and paths, as well as reviewing the edits of others.
That peer review element is key to Google Maps’ new direction. In September, Google rearranged the Map Maker review process, deputizing regional expert reviewers to expand its capacity to handle crowd-sourced edits. Today’s new tools take that a step further, allowing anyone to review proposed edits before they’re incorporated into the live map.
Is there a lesson for crowd-topic map here?
Or do we have to go through the painful cycles of peer review + editors, only to eventually find that the impact on quality is nearly nil? At least for public maps. Speciality maps, where you have to at least know the domain, may, emphasis on may, be a different issue.
If you are a professional in a field, consider how many “peer-reviewed” articles from twenty (20) years ago are still cited today? They were supposed to be the best papers to be read at a conference or published in your flagship journal. Yes?
Some still are cited. Now that’s peer review. But it took twenty years to kick in.
I suspect the real issue for most topic maps is going to be too few contributors and not too many of the unwashed.
Mapping, like vocabularies, is a question of who gets to decide.