AndyPoms wrote:You're correct, there are certainly some changes that have to be made to the CT list to make it National Friendly and part of what I'm working on proposing to the champs first will include a lot of language similar to "Please see local Wiki Pages / local Area Managers for information on what is considered 'Major' and mapped for this category in your area". We will still need local guidelines/specifics.
Religious Sites: Did you see my post above that puts some info about the discussion we had in CT? The one where we decided to landmark "Major" sites & quickly decided that CT had none, so we moved on, but the "Major" discussion is still valid. That's something that would be included the National Guidelines. The basic idea was if the religious site was one which someone would make a pilgrimage to/visit as a tourist attraction, it should probably be mapped - but like I said, we quickly decided that CT doesn't have any (well, since the Holy Land park closed).
Water: I posted above that we were working on figuring out what was there & what wasn't in CT. We did the original work on the guidelines for CT when there were issues with the water layer & we didn't want to mess with it. I would certainly agree (as would the other CT users) that if it's not on the water layer, and is significant it should probably be mapped - HOWEVER, we need to talk to Waze about this as they may be adding other water bodies (they are mostly working on coastlines now) and un-submerging roads.
Cemeteries: Yes, a lot were basemapped, not all were. What value do the add? In CT, we're not going around deleting them, but we aren't adding them either.
Military Bases: There will be exceptions to every guideline as we can't write anything that is iron clad because we need flexibility. You mention Hill AFB, and it's landmarked so people don't go through the base, but 1) isn't there a fence around the entire base? 2) aren't all the roads on base a mix of "Private" and "Parking Lot" (preventing Waze from routing through the base already)? At Naval Submarine Base New London we have to keep renaming the on-base gas station to "NEX Fueling (NO PUBLIC ACCESS)" as we don't want to get complaints about unauthorized people trying to go there from off base. We've tried to reach out to a few of the on-base users (based on their editing) to work more on their map (including landmarks), but they haven't responded. Overlapping landmarks causes issues which is one of the bigger reasons we went with the city layer.
Fire Dept: In most places they are considered a "Safe Haven" and you can get emergency medical care there or if they are on a call there is a call box out front. Most maps mark these - It's worth it.
Police Dept: The City/Town name just adds unnecessary words to the map. In your example does the person being followed care if they are going to "Anytown Police Dept" or "Othertown Police Dept"? No, they just care they are going to a "Police Dept", any Police Dept. Anyway, if one were to search, they would use POI search, not landmarks. It's there to help people see it on the map.
Golf Courses: Private Courses will appear in POI Search or can buy advertising from Waze. This falls under the "Don't map individual businesses" guideline.
Stadiums: They just look cooler with the shape & the parking lot roads handle the jams & missing roads reports. It was something we played with before making this decision.
Interchanges: The issue is that larger, more complex interchanges would be very hard to build, label & control. The problem with "hacking" the city layer like that is that a report on the overpass will display as "Main St, <Exit #>" instead of the town where it is.
Other things of note, one does not have to attend a meetup to become a Champ. No one has said anything about locking the userbase out of the discussion, in fact I said the opposite several times.
Okay a couple points of First as to religious sites, you will soon have an LDS Temple in Hartford (you don't have to map it)
and members do make pilgrimage like trips to them if they don't live near one. In the US these trips are now mostly day trips because there are enough of our Temples, but many members still make an excursion of a trip. In other parts of the world members sacrifice and save greatly to be able to travel to a Temple just once in their lives. So while not on par by any means with Mecca or other similar sites, these are significant locations. Similarly in Utah we don't have a strong catholic presence but we do have one historical cathedral built about the same time as the Salt Lake City Temple and I made sure it was mapped as it is of importance historically as well as religiously. Stadiums, okay I can buy the cooler shape argument, but when you map them to their shape that tells newbies to map other buildings to their shapes. Let's be consistent. If it's a large complex (building and parking lots) make it one large landmark just like malls, universities, and so on.
Golf Courses, what tripped me up I now see is the word Private. Most of our Golf courses are publicly owned, and it's not worth the effort to determine which is which, so I've just told my editors to mark em all as parks.
Fire Depts, When there is an insta-care clinic with actual medical personnel usually closer than a fire dept, I'd map those clinics before fire depts. Yes they are also the safe haven for abandoning children, but how common is that actually and a POI search will do just as well. I guess my real objection to it though comes from dealing with editors who wanted to landmark everything and trying to limit them. I just don't see the value in marking them. Yes I know most maps do but still have never seen the need for that either, other than it dates from when the town fire-hall would often double as the town hall or town meeting hall. And half the men in town were members of the volunteer FD force.
As to the Interchange "hack" no it doesn't affect reporting negatively. A report on the overpass will report as being in (if you look at the linked example) Manderfield Exit, Utah, not Manderfield Ut. Any reports on the neighboring roads won't give a city name in the report. And if there is a problem that points me right to the exit rather than the city. As I said before, this will only work in rural areas well away from any actual city. Another location I tried this has Just the exit number as the name. [urlhttps://www.waze.com/editor/?zoom=5&lat=38.07154&lon=-112.6882&layers=BFTFFTTTTTTTTTTTFTTTTFT]Exit 95, Utah[/url] Again I'm not set on this, I think it's clever, I think it works. It always shows up on the client whereas the landmarks do not. As with this one at the south side of Nephi, UT. I just verified that the landmark I placed there months ago does not show in the client in day or night mode, and thus the exit number does not show, which is what I think we really want them to show.
And to Jason, thanks for the info, my biggest frustration here, even more than being or at least feeling excluded from the discussion is the fact that while you guys have been debating this in secret, I've been battling for months with no set resource to point editors to and say "This is how it is to be done." There was a good discussion going, then it suddenly died it seemed to me that lacking anyone taking the initiative and editing the Wiki or saying "Okay it sounds like most people seem to agree with XXX" most editors seemed to just be going along with what had been said that wasn't immediately shot down. Give me (well I just created a Utah guideline page so it's not so important now) something to point new editors at and I'll be happy. Taking the discussion behind closed doors, with no statement to that effect and leaving me with nothing to point new editors at has caused great frustration. I finally had to get one editor banned for a bit as he simply wasn't responding to any effort to get him to communicate, and he stated that lacking any set wiki instructions, he was just trying to mark all the landmarks the drop-down list let him mark.
