Is the location of the bus station really spam/promotional content?

Question

In the following question and answer, I've explained how one could go to a certain bus station in Tbilisi to catch a minibus to Yerevan. I added two things, the address of the station along with the geocoordinates, as "X bus station" can sometimes be hard to find in developing countries like Georgia:

I've also landed at Avlabari on my way back, so there might be departures there also. (What I've done on leaving is simply ask a taxi driver for it and they drove me to the Ortachala station.[^1])

[^1]: 1 Dimitri Gulia St, Tbilisi (41.6752119, 44.8332579)

One commenter said:

[...] Having said that I suggest removing the promotional content of your answer.

I was kind of puzzled, and asked to make sure that's what they were referring to.

Another contributor, @Willeke, at 13k rep, outright edited my answer to remove the location, address and coords:

I have edited out the details for the taxi, not that useful in the long run and close to spam, if not outright spam, which might have resulted in deleting this answer.

I'm pretty baffled here. Was that an appropriate reaction, is that the policy of the Travel.se?

If they thought it was a taxi company, why didn't they at least ask or even check what it was? I get that my footnote could have gone on the first reference to the Ortachala station, but wasn't the reaction a little... overreactionary?

Answer 1

Judging from the comments there, it's quite clear that these users believed you had given the name and phone numbers of a driver called Dimitri. lol :)

The users who mistook this for spam spend considerable time reviewing and answering questions here, and there is a fair amount of spam here, so I suppose such errors do happen occasionally. (They're only human, after all.) As you have now seen, when such errors do occur, it's quite easy to get them reverted. (Like you did, replied to the comments and posted on Meta.) I would probably also have pinged the users in chat.

Interestingly, even if this was (I know that it wasn't) the contact information of a taxi driver called Dimitri, I'm not absolutely sure that it should have been removed. You are not using a throwaway account, you have a decent reputation on Stackoverflow, and I consider it disappearingly unlikely that you would have had some sort of deal with this guy Dimitri, lol :) But maybe it's not allowed anyway? Regardless, that's a separate question.

Answer 2

As other answers have pointed out, this was likely a misunderstanding. I would like to point out an additional way to prevent such a misunderstanding.

Do not omit the N-S and E-W designators and degree sign. And truncate the length a bit.

41.6752119° N 44.8332579° E is far less likely to be misinterpreted as anything else then coordinates. Even less so if you reduce it to 41.67° N 44.83° E. Arc seconds are 30m (at the equator), omitting some decimal places should be precise enough for anyone still to find the place (and your map likely doesn*t have the coordinates that precise anyways, google maps puts the location marker outside the bus station with the coordinates you gave).

Furthermore, if you use the DMS system it gets even less likely to be misinterpreted: 41° 40' 30'' N 44° 49' 59'' E. No chance someone thinks that is a phone number or anything else other then coordinates.