@wowwzer - Unfortunately someone duplicated the area used to map Southeastern Louisiana University 4 years ago and tagged the second area as a school rather than a college or university.

This is an Overpass turbo query to show the duplicate area: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1kZe

I still remember this issue occurring and being mentioned on the Silph Road subreddit. I removed the duplicate 3 years ago, shortly after Niantic last pulled the map data they use to block spawns: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/627660194/history

Unfortunately, Niantic has not updated the map data they use to block spawns since 2019, but any update to any version of OSM after March 8, 2019 should resolve the spawn block.

That sentence “I’ve actually been able to shift my focus back to mapping things I want to map in my time here.” was supposed to be in the paragraph below where it ended up, but it snuck up somehow. Whoops!

I think Wayfarer has certainly had an impact, but so has the long gaps between updates and better tools for detecting bad actors before they get out of hand.

Over 2019, mostly between the March OSM-PGO update and the release of Wayfarer. I found or was involved with 357 individual cases of invalid Pokemon park edits (I kept a spreadsheet.) I found these cases using tools like OSMcha and custom overpass-turbo queries to actively hunt bad edits in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

While some days were definitely worse than others, that’s basically a bad edit for almost every day of the year. I’ve actually been able to shift my focus back to mapping things I want to map in my time here.

I haven’t yet gone through 2020-2021 to count everything up, but prior to the recent visual update in PGO, I was going weeks at a time without finding a single bad edit using the same techniques and tools. There has been a dramatic improvement since the time that Wayfarer was released.

This is purely my opinion, but, I’d say that while there are definitely people out there who add fake things for the game, Wayfarer has been a wonderful pressure-release valve that has shifted a lot of bad actors onto Niantic’s own platform.

Hi Andres, Pokemon GO map updates are very rare. It has been over a year and a half since Niantic updated the map data they use for hidden features like nests and EX eligible areas. It has been over 2 years since Niantic updated the data they use for the visual map you see in the game which includes roads, water, green areas and buildings. In August 2020, Niantic indicated that they had no plans to update things at that time: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/i1m1l1/at_this_time_theres_not_currently_an_update_to/

there are some areas that are kind of borderline where some sections of the sidewalk are directly on the road and some are separated by a yard or so of grass.

My local mapping area is quite similar. Footways here can join with the road as a sidewalk for a short distance, then veer away across a wide green space only to turn back and cross to the other side of the street before traveling up a gap between two buildings and popping out on an entirely different road.

The pedestrian “street” experience is quite different from the vehicle one in those kinds of cases. It can be difficult to determine when exactly you should swap from a “footway as a separate way” to “sidewalk as a property of the road” schemes of tagging, especially when the latter might only be used sparingly due to the complexity of the footway “network”.

As a side note though, the accurate mapping of pedestrian paths in larger parks is something that few would discourage. Quite often, features in parks can be obscured by trees or other features in satellite imagery, and Pokemon GO/Ingress/Harry Potter WU players are uniquely positioned to run GPS traces and survey these kinds of places while they play. If done right, games could benefit OSM, which could, in turn, could benefit the games in the future. There has been a number of cases where I’ve found parks drawn over houses quite close to unmapped (real) parkland… I wish there were more ways to encourage certain game inspired mappers to think a little less selfishly.