Placemaker Best Practices

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How does editing work?

Thanks for joining our Placemaker community! We're excited to have you. Keeping all the places in the world accurate and up to date is no easy feat, and we couldn't do it without you. Below, we have provided some guidelines about editing places so that we can keep things tidy and standardized.

When someone sees wrong or missing information about a place in FSQ Open Source Places, they can suggest an edit. Once suggested, it must get enough confirmations from our Placemakers to actually be applied to the place. We call this "voting". You can vote that a suggested edit is correct, incorrect, not applicable, or suggest a different value for the field.

General Guidelines

• Always use correct spelling and capitalization. If you aren't sure of something, look it up!
• Try to follow our Best Practices to the best of your ability.
• Format addresses according to the city/region/country’s local postal guidelines. Do not edit in other countries if you are not familiar with their local postal rules and guidelines.
• Be flexible and open-minded: remember there will be exceptions to these rules. Focus on providing thorough and correct information for as many places as possible. The rest of the Foursquare community will thank you!
• When completing any of the task types, please make sure to validate the place by using the Search the Web feature and make any additional updates using the View/Edit this Place.

Flagged Tasks

These tasks ask you about the status of a place. They could ask you if a place is closed, if two places are duplicates, a place should be private, or if it should be removed from our dataset for other reasons. You should try to choose the most accurate flag for a POI.

Closed

• A place should be closed if it was once operational, but no longer is. If it has never existed, instead flag it with "Doesn't Exist".
• Do not mark a place as closed if it is only temporarily closed.
• When a business moves to a different address, close the original place and create a new place at the new address. Never change the address and move the pin location of the original place in this case.

Duplicates

• Duplicates should be merged if the two places represent the same POI.
• Sometimes, things are marked as duplicates that are actually related, but are different places. An example of this is a suggested merge between a Walmart and a Walmart Garden Center. These two places should not be merged. In this scenario, the best option is to edit the child place to have the other place as its parent and click Don’t Merge.
• When marking a place as a sub-place, it must always be physically located inside the parent place. Sub-places are just normal places, the only difference being that they are physically inside other places. So, all formatting rules for normal places are applicable to sub-places as well.

Private

Places should be marked private if:

• It’s not open to the public, like a conference room in an office.
• It’s only relevant to a small group of people, like “the bench where we met” or “building laundry room”.

Inappropriate

Use these flags to indicate the place is offensive, fake, or spammy, so that we know to remove it from our dataset.

Doesn't Exist

Use this flag if the place is not real.

Detail Tasks

These suggestions are about the basic place information like name, address, and related URLs.

Name

• Try to avoid extra, unnecessary, or redundant information: prefer Starbucks over Starbucks - Times Square.
• Use proper capitalization.
• The name should generally be what you see on the building.
• Do not include translations in the place name. This can be done by adding a separate translated name.
• Emojis are not allowed in public place names.
• Generally avoid using abbreviations in place names. Ex: Abbey Road, not Abbey Rd.
• For very well known place name abbreviations, you can include the abbreviation after the name in parenthesis. Ex: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Address

• Format the address information based on the local postal guidelines.
• Prefer shorthand notation for addresses: Ave over Avenue, St over Street.
• If the address includes a suite, make sure to include it using Ste 123; do not include #123.
• When a business moves to a different address, close the original place and create a new place at the new address. Never change the address and move the pin location of the original place in this case.

URL

• Only official links for the POI should be used.
• Test the URLs to ensure correctness.
• Avoid including extra UTM or tracking parameters.
• For chains, prefer a URL for a specific location, rather than the generic chain URL: prefer https://starbucks.com/link-to-specific-location over https://starbucks.com. Use the generic URL if the specific location does not have a specific URL.
• If a chain has a country specific URL for the POI's country, use that one rather than the global one.
• Avoid using shortened URLs.
• https:// vs. http:// – if both work, prefer https://, otherwise include the one that works.
• Sometimes a website gets changed and the previous one redirects to the new one. The “correct” URL is the final URL in the redirect chain.
• If entering a URL in your browser such as https://www.domain.com and it redirects to https://domain.com , the "correct" URL is https://domain.com.

Menu

• The menu field is a URL to link directly to the place's menu, if applicable.
• Avoid linking to menus on delivery platforms unless that is how the place links to their menu from their own website.
• Like URL fields, if both https:// and http:// work, prefer https://, otherwise include the one that works.
• Like URL fields, sometimes a website gets changed and the previous one redirects to the new one. The “correct” URL is the final URL in the redirect chain.

Social Media

• Accounts must be the official account of the place or brand.
• Do not include @ for social media handles.

Chain Tasks

• If a place is part of a global or local chain, that chain should be found and selected.
• For chains, prefer a URL for a specific location, rather than the generic chain URL: prefer https://starbucks.com/specific-location over https://starbucks.com Use the generic URL if the specific location does not have a specific URL.
• If a chain has a country specific URL for the POI's country, use that one rather than the global one.

Category Tasks

• For hierarchical categories, use the most precise specification if possible (e.g. Food -> French restaurant instead of Food -> Restaurant).
• If there is no detailed designation: stick to the top category.
• If several categories seem useful (e.g. discount store, supermarket or grocery store), simply choose one.
• For related categories (e.g. discount stores, supermarkets or grocery stores), there is generally no need for corrective action.