Spring Cleaning

Part of what keeps Pinball Map useful is that we’re constantly massaging, scrubbing, kickflipping, waxing, and buffing the data. And by “we” we mean all of our thousands of users, our ~100 admins, and our Platinum Club über admins (e.g. the four developers). Some of the grubbier data management includes: fixing apostrophes, removing duplicate locations, correcting spelling, removing unnecessary white space, and ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZz.

Every once in a while we revisit things like “Do we still need all of these regional maps?” and “Are the location types useful to people?” This post is visiting (upon) the two aformentioned questions in the sentence you read prior to this one.

Side note: We added a few of our “regular cleaning” items to the brand spanking new Pinball Map on Github Wiki.

Regional Maps Without Admins

Sometimes our regional admins move on with their lives. When that happens, then the über admins take over the duties. The main duty is to approve new locations. Without any local knowledge, the process of adding new locations is no different than approving all of our “regionless” submissions (verifying the address and stuff).

Now that we have an app that doesn’t use “regions” and we also have a global webmap, do we need to keep these 21 (of 100) regions where we have no local admin at the helm?

• spokane
• jacksonville
• nyc
• toronto
• stlouis
• cleveland
• rochester
• southflorida
• kansascity
• newjersey
• redding
• centralpa
• asheville
• richmond
• charlotte
• new-hampshire
• rhode-island
• chico
• oklahoma
• michigan-west
• hawaii

Location Types

Here is our list of Location Types, and how many locations use each type:

As of April 5, 2021.

Just yesterday we cleaned up a couple of these (merged “Ski Resort” with “Resort” and stuff like that). We don’t keep analytics, so we don’t actually know how often people use these location types to filter their results. Like, is it necessary to have “Pizza Parlor” and “Ice Cream Parlor” when those could instead be lumped within “Restaurant”?

There is also the matter of consistent tagging by our users. For example, there may be lots of “Bar/Restaurants” that are instead tagged as “Bar” or as “Restaurant”. This would likely be improved if the Types were all consistently broad (rather than a mix of broad and randomly specific).

I think for starters, we will start with the Types that have very low numbers, and merge them with others.

It would be cool to reduce this list to like 15 or so.

Thoughts?

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