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Spring Cleaning

April 7, 2021 [news]   [regions]

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?

Location Types

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

As of April 5, 2021.

Location Type Count
Airport 9
Amusement Park 31
Arcade 464
Auto Shop 8
Bar 1327
Bar/Arcade 348
Bar/Restaurant 1001
Barber Shop 13
Bowling Alley 425
Brewery 273
Campground 30
Casino 22
College Campus 4
Comic Book Store 22
Condominium 3
Convention Center 2
Family Fun Center 172
Game Room 52
Gas Station/Convenience Store 17
Golf Course 10
Hospital 1
Hotel 123
Ice Cream Parlor 22
Laundromat 116
Mini Golf 27
Movie Theater 171
Museum 37
Music Venue 29
Night Club 23
Pizza Parlor 440
Pool Hall 70
Recreation Facility 44
Resort 37
Restaurant 389
Retail Store 124
Skating Rink 50
Ski Resort 5
Special Event 6
Strip Club 4
Tattoo Parlor 6
Taxi Depot 1
Truck Stop/Travel Center 26
(empty) 1522
Total Result 7506

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?

We haven’t added comments to this blog just added comments to this blog. So comments here or on reply to us on Twitter or send an email to map at pinballmap.com. Thanks!

Comments

Strip Club is a category no more. But, we started the map in Portland, and Portland has lots of strip clubs. So it made sense at the time! And the main logic is: it seems important to tag them as strip clubs just so people don’t accidentally walk into them with their kids. But obviously, there are lots of ways to figure out if a place is a strip club without us using that tag.

The current location type list is:

Airport

Amusement Park

Arcade

Bar

Bar/Arcade

Bar/Restaurant

Bowling Alley

Brewery

Campground

Casino

Family Fun Center

Game Room

Ice Cream Parlor

Laundromat

Lodging

Mini Golf

Movie Theater

Museum

Music Venue

Pizza Parlor

Pool Hall

Recreation Facility

Resort

Restaurant

Shop

Skating Rink

Special Event

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Spring Cleaning - April 7, 2021 - Pinball Map