Invited reviews from active travellers/contributors#156

Invite people who have been very active in contributing sites or who are active travellers to provide “expert” feedback on locations, especially locations near where they tend to travel.

Can we not do that by editing articles? Like if we notice something isn’t quite accurate or has changed since publication, such as a museum moving address.

I should have described my idea in slightly more detail. I want the “expert” feedback to include recommendations on locations that do not seem to belong in Atlas Obscura (either because they are too mundane or because they are not “obscure”), to potentially flag closed locations to the editors, and to potentially highlight ongoing editorial issues with existing articles. (The editorial staff have approved some of my edits and other people’s edits quickly and seem to sit on others. In particular, not marking places as “closed” in a reasonable amount of time will dissapoint a lot of Atlas Obscura readers.)

Ah, that makes more sense!
I guess part of the problem with the closed locations is someone would have to notify them to mark it as permanently closed and I honestly have never done that personally so I wonder if it skips others minds too.
I guess the difficulty with removing mundane articles is different strokes for differently folks. What you or I might consider mundane might be someone elses biggest thrill!
I totally agree with the quicker marking of closed sites if there was someway to do it. Or a way to reopen articles that have been closed but actually a place has just relocated.

At first, I wanted to suggest some sort of review panel. In my real life job, I have been on review panels for scientific proposals, and while the reviews are subjective, everyone often agrees on at least one proposal being, to use the scientific term, “awesome”, and at least one proposal being, to use the scientific term, “yucky”. However, “local” review panels meeting together, even by Zoom, seems like it would take a lot of extra work and planning, which is why I suggest the invited reviewer approach (which is more like what scientific journals use). I do imagine that a lot of people may have a lot of divided opinions about many Atlas Obscura sites, but I would imagine that a few of them would be viewed by a very large majority of people as either so prominent and so mainstream that they aren’t obscure or so commonplace that they don’t really belong on Atlas Obscura. (I would say, based on my own opinion of places that I have visited, 2% of locations fit either of these categories.)

@Dark Nebula Deluxe Thank you so much for this feedback. We have discussed a few options that pertain to your idea as well that I want to share:

1. https://atlas-obscura-digital-product.nolt.io/5 - setting roles based on your contributions. This would allow us to determine and display who is a top contributor in a certain category or region for example.
2. https://atlas-obscura-digital-product.nolt.io/35 - ability to flag places on the web. We have a reporting feature that allows you to alert the editors if a place is closed or does not belong in the atlas, but currently it only is implemented in our iOS app. We’d like to bring this functionality to the web too. Another idea we’ve floated is to make that data more visible (ie. “47 people have marked this places as closed”, so someone browsing a place might be able to gauge for themselves how useful the information is).

I’d maybe also point to the ‘let users pre-review submitted places to lighten the load for the editors’ suggestion.

Rather than drawing on a pool of “experts”, AO would be better served if those submitting and/or editing place entries included citations and a bibliography. Editors could then critically evaluate the sources. This is not so important when submissions are based on an individual’s firsthand expereince, but rather when s/he accompanies the entry with historic, scientific, or archaeological background information. Where does the contributer obtain his/her information? Without citations how does one compare the original write-up from any number of edits? The problem with determining the validity of data by concensus is that what might be a readily available internet source (such as Wikipedia) may not be the most accurate one. To this end, your “top contributor” may not be your most knowledgable one. AO does an excellent job of introducing its readers to wonderfully funky places–however, there is a lot of erroneous information (cringe-worthy) in areas such as archaeology and history. I have been tempted to edit some of these posts, but hesitate to do so not understanding the processes at play or how information is weighed.

@artandarchaeology I agree, but overall users can help a lot with structure and initial reviews. I’ve seen a lot of places that are super badly written, etc, and I think thag having users go through that and pointing to the better places would help a lot already.

I think including citations and bibliographic information is a separate topic (although I strongly support doing this). Having said this, I think it would be possible for an article to be submitted to Atlas Obscura that is well-referenced with citations and a bibliographic record but that does not belong for other reasons (such as, for example, being less interesting than the author thinks or for being so famous that it isn’t “obscure”). The editorial staff cannot be expected to be familiar with every location on the planet. Additionally, based on the articles that I have seen in Atlas Obscura for some of the places where I have lived or that I am very familiar with, I have the sense that both the authors and the editorial staff may have misjudged the signficance of a site or how it fits into Atlas Obscura. Adding reference information to articles will solve some problems but not this. This is why I suggest that they seek out additional reviews from reliable contributors or experts who may know the locations better.

Your points on all counts are well taken. Thank you for your very thoughtful and prompt response.

My main issue with this is that some places take well over 6 months to get looked at, and without throwing shade at the editors, that is incredibly inefficient.

A first check by users to sort out the spam, trash and incomplete submissions would hopefully already help out a lot. Then if we could maybe even rank some of the well written places or flag ones that we think need extra attention it would make life much easier for the editors’.

The actual research should be for them yes, and I also strongly believe that the sources need to come back, but that is indeed a different discussion.