Get Started with the Placemaker Tools

Overview

Foursquare Placemakers are the guardians and curators of our Places dataset – playing a crucial role in shaping how people understand and interact with physical spaces in our digital world. Placemakers are the most dedicated and passionate members of our community. They care deeply about maintaining the accuracy and quality of our data, which includes everything from ensuring accurate place names, addresses, and other information to merging duplicate places and reporting inappropriate or closed places.

The Foursquare Places data set is ever-changing, with tens of thousands of suggested edits being created and resolved every day. You’ll help us by voting on whether you agree or disagree with pending data changes and by updating our data when you see issues.

Home

The Home tab is the central hub for all of the Placemaker Tools available to you. From this tab, you can easily view:

• Your Placemaker Status
• Proposed/Approved Review Tasks
• Quick Links
• Places Needing Your Review

Places Needing Your Review

In this section you will find all of the places needing your review. Each place needs review for different reasons based on the following filterable review types:

• Details - Location and contact information
• Attributes - Availability of services
• Chains - Chain membership of a place
• Categories - Category information of a place
• Flagged - Status of the place; public/private, open/closed, etc.

To review a place, click on the place name and open the relevant review type accordion to complete the review task. Please keep in mind that not every place you review will include all of the available review types. Each place will have tasks specific to our data review needs for freshness and accuracy.

Map View & Venue Pins

The map shown provides a visual way to explore venues that may need review:

By default, the map displays flagged venues, marked with orange pins.

A venue may be flagged for several reasons, including being mislocated, closed, or having incorrect information.

When you zoom in on the map and click "Search This Area", the map will display:

• Flagged venues (orange pins)
• Regular venues (not flagged), shown as black pins

This feature helps you discover and access venues in a specific geographic area, giving you the opportunity to review or update information as needed.

Search Dropdown

The layout includes two dropdowns that help you easily navigate and locate venues:

Search Venues by Text

Use this dropdown to search for venues by typing in keywords, such as the venue name, address, or other identifying information.

• By default, when you open the dropdown, it searches for venues within a 5km radius based on the location you have selected in the second dropdown (Search for Location).
• Search by venue name, or any text like Coffee, Bakery to show nearby venue within a 5km radius of the preferred location.
• You can also search directly by venue ID (e.g., 4b69f911f964a5201fbf2be3) or by venue chain ID (e.g., Starbucks 556f676fbd6a75a99038d8ec to search for all venues which are part of the chain in the radius of 50km of the selected preferred location).

A helpful feature: if you press Enter while searching, all venues from the dropdown results will be displayed on the map.

Search for Location

This dropdown lets you change your preferred location, which will be saved and automatically loaded the next time you open the app.

It re-centers the map to the selected location and automatically triggers a search to display venues in that area.

These dropdowns are designed to give you flexible ways to discover and interact with the venue data, whether you're zeroing in on a known location or exploring more broadly.

Quick Links

Add a New Place - Looking to add a new Place to the Foursquare data set? Click on this link to open the Add a New Place flow.

Leaderboard - View the Foursquare Placemaker leaderboard where the top spot is always up for grabs, and every vote/edit counts!

My Contributions - Want to know the current stats of your votes and edits? Click on this link to view the My Contributions page.

Contribute

Add a New Place

Use the Add a Place form to submit a new place. Please provide as many of the following data points as possible:

• Details
  • Place Name required
  • Category required
  • Address required
  • Locality (City) required
  • Region (State) required
  • Postal Code required
  • Country required
  • Map Location required
  • This is a chain
  • This is inside of another place
  • This a private place
• Contact
  • Phone
  • Website
  • Email Address
  • Facebook ID
  • Instagram
  • Twitter/X
  • Hours
  • Open Time
  • Closing Time
  • Open 24/7
• Attributes
  • ATM
  • Reservation
  • Offer Delivery
  • Parking
  • Outdoor Seating
  • Restroom
  • Credit Cards
  • Wifi

My Contributions

The My Contributions page shows you all of your suggested place edits and their current status. Use the Filter button to only show contributions based on Pending, Accepted or Denied.

Best Practices

Before you begin, be sure to familiarize yourself with our Placemaker Best Practices so we can maintain consistency in our data.

Search

If you want to provide feedback about a specific place not available in the Places Needing Your Review, you can use the Search bar to locate the place and then edit its info by clicking View/Edit this Place.

Updated 2 months ago