Does U.S. President Obama share office space with an outfit called “Edwards Snow Den”? No, he does not, which—among many similar instances of “vandalism”—is why Google Maps is mothballing its Map Maker feature.
Google’s Pavithra Kanakarajan writes:
As some of you know already, we have been experiencing escalated attacks to spam Google Maps over the past few months. The most recent incident was particularly troubling and unfortunate – a strong user in our community chose to go and create a large scale prank on the Map. As a consequence, we suspended auto-approval and user moderation across the globe, till we figured out ways to add more intelligent mechanisms to prevent such incidents.
“It’s going to take longer than a few days” to figure out something better than manual approval of edits, she added. [via]