Reviewer test needs variety!
Right now my local/regional community is getting a whole lot of new portals, no doubt bolstered by the fact that PoGo players can review as well now. However, the vetting process for authorizing new reviewers has a serious flaw - it seems to pose the same questions for everyone doing the test. As I saw some friends who plays exclusively PoGo answer the questions they very much looked the same as the ones I undertook.
In my opinion, this will only allow huge amounts of truly unqualified reviewers access to Wayfarer as it'll be easy to make a cheat-sheet with the answers to all the questions. Needless to say the ramifications of this is a lot of potentially invalid portals getting through causing Niantic all sorts of hassle. I've already seen candidates like a boat mast get voted through.
A suggestion to remedy this is that there should be more variations in the test - perhaps including title and location edits as well. After all approving new candidates is only one aspect of Wayfarer.
Niantic likely considers their catalogue of POIs a valuable asset, so please take more steps to ensure what's going into your games at least meet the very criteria you've set yourselves.
Comments
In my opinion, this will only allow huge amounts of truly unqualified reviewers access to Wayfarer as it'll be easy to make a cheat-sheet with the answers to all the questions.
I'm pretty sure that already happens, and unfortunately, there really isn't a way to combat it. Even if you add more questions or types of questions into the pool, a resourceful enough group will eventually get all of the questions and their likely answers.