This is an example of one of the major problems of crowd-sourcing: trust.
There is no way to verify that the integrity of the submitter, who could be giving wrong information due to malice, incompetence, or as a prank. There's entirely too much trust in crowdsourcing.
It works very well for Wikipedia though, but that's because Wikipedia has much more people that care about the information and maintain it. Google Maps lacks that community feeling of providing correct information, probably because it's owned and operated by Google.
Maybe local business organizations can provide help in this, have a few people dedicate some of their time to making sure all listings are correct. Alternatively, counties / local governments could take this responsibility upon them; after all, local governments dislike seeing local businesses go out of business or get less customers because they can't be found on Google.
At the same time, Google could do better in verifying changes; cross-check them with official address books and business registries and the like.
Except Wikipedia doesn't work "very well". It works OK for most subjects, but there are some areas and points of view that are no-go areas because of the prevailing values of the major editors, and even turf wars. Mentioned not to long ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7700546
The only reason it works for Wikipedia is because everything must be externally-verifiable ("citation needed" and all that). On Wikipedia, trust in the crowd is not only unnecessary, it is actively discouraged. That doesn't work for all situations, and as we can see from this story, bad things can much more easily happen in cases where external verification is not available.
I think the real problem is this google has the half baked crowd-sourcing. Where you actually have a closed system and then let some people crowd source on top of it and have different ranks and people approving. It's the same reason Wikipedia is losing editors, because people don't want to wait for some admin to approve it.
In OpenStreetMap as a community project which is know as such people are much more likely to report things (on the German website there is even a big button for that). It takes longer for a edit to be approved in google map maker than people get easy stuff fixed in OpenStreetMap in my area. If I check my notes RSS feed after 1 week then most of the errors are already fixed.
Google does not come anywhere close to this. Not to mention that only a few of them can actually approve and fix things.
And because google is closed it does not have any kind of Quality Assurance tools. In OSM you could easily check if the last edit changed the opening hours and if the new one is strange (like not open Saturday evening)
Your prediction fails to account for the fact that Wikipedia can manage the problem, and they are probably the most important information source there is while still being by far the easiest to edit. What makes you think it is impossible for OSM to do it?
(Also, a bit dishonest to call OSM irrelevant when it is the canonical data source for a number of famous application, including Apple, even if it's not directly applicable to the situation here.)
I don't think it's a major problem. This is one old guy who didn't even understand that his restaurant was listed on Google. As soon as a tech-savvy person stepped in it was cleared up in a few minutes. The damage may have already been done, but that's another story (some are saying the restaurant was already in decline).
Sure, it's unfortunate, and these kind of "crowd-sourcing casualties" are going to happen here and there, but is it really that big of a problem, relative to the value that is gained?
I've heard so many horror stories of businesses trying to remove fake reviews from competitors. Even a tech savvy can't do much if your nemesis are bent upon destroying your online reputation. A company like Google doesn't offer an easy way to alleviate that. Your best bet is that you hope to stay lucky.
online scamsters are more focused on trying to pretend they got you to click an ad and buy something, but as soon as they turn their heads towards using 'crowdsourcing' for financial gain then the value of what crowdsourcing provides becomes extremely diminished. not only is its value diminished, but it becomes a weapon to use against people you do not like or competition.
imagine running bobs pizza just paying 100$ to some russian or chinese group to put negative yelp reviews for the near tom's pizza as well as change their opening and closing hours on places like google, etc costing them 10s of thousands of dollars.
There is no way to verify that the integrity of the submitter, who could be giving wrong information due to malice, incompetence, or as a prank. There's entirely too much trust in crowdsourcing.