We’ve finally found a solution. You see, there are only a handful (literally) of totally vegetarian restaurants in all of Finland, so making a category only for them seemed a bit of overkill. There are, however, many restaurants with a variety of good options for vegetarians, but there’s a lot of grey area between having a few leaves of iceberg lettuce in the salad bar and offering a range of vegetarian main courses that really satisfy.
No one person can really list all the places that fulfil this requirement. So we are leaving it up to everyone at once. Every restaurant page now has a voting box in the bottom right hand corner:
As long as more than 50% of the people voting are of the opinion that the restaurant is child friendly or vegetarian friendly, it remains in those categories on the main map page. As soon as the “Yes” votes drop below 50%, the restaurant is removed from the category. This takes into account the fact that restaurant menus, etc can and do change.
In the example to the left, three people believe the restaurant is child friendly, and three believe it is not vegetarian friendly.
We also added the child-friendly category because families with children, like vegetarians, often have a hard time going out to eat, and it is largely the staff ’s willingness and ability to accomodate the family’s needs (the pram, the screaming children, and so on) that makes all the difference. Again, this category is another grey area of opinion, so it is our hope that the combination of for and against votes will result in the greatest accuracy.
We may add other categories later, if demand is high enough. At the moment, we want to be very careful about which categories we add, because each one adds more clutter and makes the site more complicated. As a result we have also set up a category-voting forum, where you can add your wishes for the future.
