Google is going to let you hooligans edit its Maps again, even though you couldn’t resist using the tool to draw pissing Androids.
The company has announced the second phase of the Google Map Maker reopening. This will open the map-editing tool to another 45 countries, including the US. This means that map maker is now back online in over 50 countries.
After a series of questionable (but kind of funny) edits, Google shut down its map editing tool in May while it “made the moderation system more robust.”
In July, Google announced it would begin to reopen it, but with added safeguards.
“Map Maker will be reopened for editing in early August, and we’re looking for users to now have more influence over the outcome of edits in their specific countries. This means that edits on Map Maker will be increasingly made open for moderation by the community. While some edits will still require moderation by Google operators, our loyal users will recognize that this is a departure from how we have operated in the past where majority of your edits were reviewed by Google operators,” said Map Maker head Pavithra Kanakarajan.
Areas are now assigned “Regional Leads” who will approve edits, in conjunction with Google’s auto-moderation. This means less tomfoolery, but more wait time for edits to be approved.
Google has also disabled polygon editing, which was what the map pranksters used to make the edits.
“We are working on identifying Regional Leads in the remaining countries and will open them for editing as and when we select enough Regional Leads,” says Kanakarajan.
Behave yourselves.