Automatic downgrade of inactive editors - Jan 2017

Map Editors Community United Kingdom
1

On Monday morning (23rd), Waze HQ will run a process to automatically downgrade inactive editors to level 2. Every editor so downgraded will receive an explanation email from Waze. This is a one-time process and there are no current plans for it to happen regularly. It was proposed by Waze HQ and the details have been discussed and agreed with the Global Champs.

The intention behind it is to deal with the large number of higher-level but inactive editors on the Waze “roster”. Most of them have long since left Waze behind and the vast majority of them will not have been following the forums and will be seriously outdated on current editing practices. There will also be a lot of “legacy” AMs - editors who needed nothing more than a certain score to request an AM area in the days before the UK was self-managed. Since we became self-managed, upgrades and AM areas only go to editors with a proven ability to edit well and involvement in the editing community.

If you have been downgraded, this downgrade is not an expression of anyone’s opinion about your editing skill, forum personality or anything else. The only criteria is not having edited for at least 6 months. Editing the maps is an entirely voluntary process: we do not require anyone to make edits and do not hold it against anyone if they feel they don’t have time to edit.

If you were previously an Area Manager promoted under UK Self Management, re-promotion is likely to be nearly as automatic as the downgrade. Brush up on the current best practices and get in touch with the UK Admins.

If you were not previously an AM promoted under SM, please review the process on applying to be an AM. We will not require you to take on an area, nor will we require you to become heavily involved in the forums. We understand that some editors are happy to just edit. However, we will want to assess your editing history before restoring a previous editor level.

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No real problem with being downgraded as I happily admit I was away for a while, but I was a little surprised to receive the downgrade notice today when I applied a couple of map updates last week. I’m still here.
Happy wazing!
Jules

3

Did this achieve what was wanted / expected? I only ask as several of the AM’s that were not active are still on the AM map, but now as L2 instead of L4. :smiley: I assume there were more who were not AM’s and therefore their reduction in level was not visible.
Maybe it was a bigger issue in other countries.

4

The worldwide list of editors to be downgraded was over 4000 names; from the UK there were nearly 200 names.

There’s no way to judge this process by the results. Since this was an exercise to downgrade editors who are completely inactive, there should effectively be almost no results - they are still inactive. It was more intended to protect the map against an editor with a previously high rank simply returning to editing without being up-to-date.

There was one positive lack of result. :lol: We did not have a flood of angry posts from editors who felt unfairly treated. That’s why I started this topic - to stress that it was an automatic process; it was in no way a punitive measure; the downgrade was not necessarily permanent.

I also spend a lot of time monitoring the forums as a whole and this process seems to have gone very smoothly across the world. :slight_smile:

The automatic process that removes AM areas after 90 days of inactivity seems to be stalled at the moment - it’s not just the UK. We’ll either nudge Waze or just remove them manually.