We’re living in the Golden Age of crowdsourcing our information, it’s really true. With the recent announcement that the age-old cornerstone of academic fact-finding, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, will soon be out of print, it seems that, at least temporarily, the people have spoken, stating clearly that they want to have a say in their knowledge base.Building reference material by committee seems especially relevant in map making, and these days it seems that seeing a .kml map file floating around the web is almost as common as a .doc or a .jpeg. But in this age of Wikipedia and the Google Map, there’s one major problem: Who is in charge of filtering and verifying the information that flows into these public data sources?Enter the Google Map Reviewer. Like a digital rent-a-cop, these volunteer checkers monitor the information you put into their systems. This way, supposedly, nobody is going out and plotting such malarkey such as a movie theater in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle, or an offshoot of the BQE running through your apartment building. After all, this isn’t the Sims, folks.I had my first encounter with these digital vigilantes, who work to keep the Internet free of blatant falsehoods, a couple days ago when I logged into Google Maps Mapmaker. I was trying to upload a spreadsheet of data onto a map to save, and instead accidentally drew a line on my street. When it showed up as a comment on a public map, I deleted it. And then I forgot about it. No big.That is, until the next morning, when this guy showed up in my inbox:Turns out trusted Google Reviewer Phani had seen my egregious error, and was emailing me to inform me that yes, actually, my street does exist, as can be confirmed by a number of satellite images (if I had any doubts), and asked me to please reverse my decision to delete a strip of road from the Google interface.Snark aside, in an age where anybody with access to the web can have a say in aggregating one of the biggest databases in the world, it’s comforting (for myself, anyways) to know that there’s still an expected level of accountability for our actions. And it’s not an iron fist coming down from Google, either. It comes in the form of a fellow global citizen and user of the Internet (a person with a name) that cares enough to come out and say, “Hey man, that’s not right. I disagree. Please correct your mistake.”I asked around to see if anybody had a similar experience, and it turns out a kind slap on the digital hand is not that uncommon from the volunteers patrolling the Google Maps. “I’ve proposed a river in Manhattan, but it was rejected as well,” a friend of mine wrote back. He said he added it in the West Village back when Google Maps first came out, but deleted it once he realized there were actually people approving additions.Maybe this is the thin thread that keeps our globally aggregated mapping system from looking like some sort of messed up Candyland maze, or in a permanent state of 8-bit pixelated glory. Granted, it makes for an interesting social experiment, but it’s far less useful for trying to find directions. Either way, my friend said it well when he wrote, “Whoever moderates this thing must have endless patience for idiots like us.”
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