Increasing Waze awareness

[Editot]

There are an increasing number of Wazers in Hong Kong. But probably not enough to make the many features of Waze as useful as they must be in other territories. What plans does Waze have to raise publicity in Hong Kong? I could imagine, for example, radio channels taking traffic feeds from Waze (traffic news, certainly on the English channels, is currently quite limited).

[tomchiukc]

It has been much better than two years before, while most people were using Open Street Map. I see you guys keep on improving the maps. However, if there are more authority put down to us, it would be better.

Things we can do / help:
1. Putting back name of streets and areas in both English and Chinese.
2. Looking for better ways to update map. Buildings are too high and flyovers always block away GPS signals.

[dantw]

Things we can do / help:
1. Putting back name of streets and areas in both English and Chinese.
2. Looking for better ways to update map. Buildings are too high and flyovers always block away GPS signals.

Nice to see the HK forum, here is at least some activity, hope that will change in the China forum as well, working on it

Presently I am doing some basic work on the Shanghai map, and I had the same thoughts as tomchiuckc to increase waze awareness by putting road names in Chinese and Pinyin. Chinese won't use waze if no Chinese road names are available!

Anyhow, a first try and I can see in the WME nothing as rectangular shapes on place of the Chinese characters. Same problem seems to be with Korean characters (I had a short look to the Seoul map).

Basically I got two questions:

1.
Does anyone has an idea how and if Chinese charaters will be displayed in the actual application for the user later?
2.
Would it be better to use Chinese and Pyinin in the raod name itself or using roadname and alternate road name?

Thanks for your replies and suggestions!

[leocylau]

I remember Waze did mention to develop Chinese version to allow us to input and display Chinese...but as usual it will take ages
We can't unfortunately change it except Waze implements it.
IMO, it's better to use Chinese for road name and English for alternative name.

[dantw]

I did a bit try and error and just named two roads in Chinese and Pinyin (did not used alternative names though), and got some reasonable results.

I still can't see anything but rectangles in the WME, but on the phone (I am using an iPhone 4) looks good.

[leocylau]

Hi dantw,
It looks good indeed. WME is an open source. If you are a programmer, you can try to do an add-on to display Chinese. Sure it's better to let Waze implememt this...again...it'll take ages
Leo

[Editot]

Waze appears to be working well in Chinese on the Client - I noticed even in the Editor for a while but seems to have fallen away.

I am editing roads / cities heavily in Hong Kong but don't speak Chinese. I provide bilingual wherever I have the opportunity to do so (Tuen Mun, for example).

Need help from Chinese speakers (readers / writers!) to complete the map.

[tomchiukc]

In fact, there is a problem for street names in Tuen Mun: They are named in several way, some are using the name and alternate name, but some with both Chinese and English on the same box. As a result, I never was able to find a path from all other places to the district around Leung King Estate. We have to fix it, but seems people seldom drive to that area. It has to be fixed bit by bit, by walking through all small streets and put back names and house numbers.

[tomchiukc]

Not sure if it is going to affect us, but Wikipedia said Waze is going to be propriety instead of Open Source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waze#Licensing

However, the quoted news is possibly in Russian -- I do not understand.