Talk:Snap Map

Great job on your wiki article. It is a good length at about 3000 words long, nice job! Your article is a great length without any of the sections feeling too long or too short. Your article includes the 3 major components of a good article, the opening summary paragraphs, the body of the article and your statements are backed up by reliable sources. Your introductory paragraph is a good length. It explains the background of snap maps. It also does a nice job explaining the features at a high level, before you dive deeper into the specifics of the features later in the article. It was also nice that you had a lead in paragraph to the ethical concerns of snap maps. Going into the body of the article, I think you made a decisive choice here. You do not dive too much into the history of snapchat itself, which is good to not overwhelm the reader with irrelevant information and to focus mostly on Snap Map history itself. I really like the detail you went into for the location settings section. I appreciate the thorough definitions for “my friends, except…” and “only these friends” because they seem like essentially the same thing so it was good to have the explanations there. In your features section, you did a good job explaining all of the features. Even as a snapchat user myself, I didn’t know much about the map layers explore and memories features. I also wasn’t aware of the My Places feature. This is a nice inclusion on the map that users can use. Including the section about the web was interesting because I typically think of this as a mobile app. Your ethical concerns section is a good length and describes things well. Your use of sources throughout your wiki article are very reliable. You have a nice distribution of sources, where you use plenty, so I know your article is well supported, but not too many where I get overwhelmed. I think overall, your wiki page has a nice flow. The only suggestion I have for potential improvements is to bulk up your ethical concerns section a little bit. Whether this means decreasing the intro or history or features sections a little bit, I think the ethical section could benefit from expanding on a few of the topics. That being said, the issues at stake are very clear. I understand the ethical issues that are exposed in the article and why they are important. The location tracking and user privacy issues does seem to be the largest concern with snap maps, so it is good that you went into such detail. I really appreciated that you added several examples of criminal incidents that have occurred relating to snap maps. These support the ethical concern behind location tracking. I think the heatmaps/soft targets section is a good inclusion, however it could benefit from just another sentence or two explaining the ‘soft target’ theory. For the user mental health section, I think it was necessary that you had that source included, because the section made it feel like a slightly biased point of view, but having the source there made it feel more neutral. The article overall does a great job reporting on the ethical issues (and snap maps as a whole) from a neutral point of view. You did not state any personal opinions and it felt very objective. It was good to include statements from snapchat itself about the use of snap maps and also of outside sources, to help the balance feel more neutral. You did a good job simply describing the controversies that have occur/could occur (without feeling speculative). Overall, you did a very nice job with this article and just a few tweaks before the final submission and you will be in great shape! - Sarah Whitman