While such an editor might be one you educate, it would certainly not be one you punish. That’s my point.
And restricting access to tools is punishment. Especially when they weren’t using them incorrectly anyway.
The problem is that because all we have to go on is the most recent editor, anyone unfamiliar with the way the map has been in the past might be tempted to believe that the last editor was the one that ADDED these issues to the map, rather than simply failed to correct issues that were already there.
This is where benefit of the doubt comes into play and/or having a good sense of what the map was like before the editor came along. And why I seriously think a ‘history’ function would be excellent to have.
But in lieu of a history function, all we have is map awareness and benefit of the doubt and education. The only ‘history’ we get other than last editor is first editor. And if that’s not enough to confirm that the editor in question is the one responsible for the bad mapping in the area, then why punish someone for doing good, just not enough good? That’s counter-productive.
For instance, I know a certain US highway near where I live has been labeled Major Highway for months. One day I logged on and saw a section of it that had turned yellow, to minor highway. I contacted the editor to let him know to follow the standard, changed it back, and locked it to one level higher than his rank (this is before the lock standard took place in my state.)
However, as I go through and correct FC in other areas I’m less familiar with, do I take the time to contact the editors of those segments and let them know they set the road type incorrectly, or failed to fix it? No. Chances are their name is on the segment because they fixed something else and they didn’t touch the road type at all; it was like that before they got there.
I disagree, these are educated editors who are purposely using the tool incorrectly only to gain points and not help the map. There is no intent at all in making the map better, it is a quick way to gain rank, end of story.
I don’t know the circumstances of your ban, but I’m certain there is way more to the story.
It seems like this could all be avoided with the staff running this as a back end update on the server. If there were no segments left to simplify, then the tool would be effectively nerfed enough so that anyone could have it. Granted, we would have to weigh the potential (from what people have said, minimal) harm that running this on every segment would cause.
Before I put the cart before the horse, is simplifying segments something that the staff have indicated as helpful or that they want us to do it?
Anyway, back on subject, I’m not entirely sure how this tool can be used ‘incorrectly’ in the first place. This may simply be something I need education on.
At what point, ever, am I looking at my screen and should NOT push that button? Why?
I’d be more than happy with this solution as well. I’m happy to see the map improved, but I can see how this is a ‘cheap’ way of getting a higher edit count, for a relatively minimal improvement.
To answer your question, I believe yes, based on a foggy memory from the discussion from when the tool was first added. Not sure.
We’re considering the impact of the suppress tool. Just to be clear though, whatever icon lets you simplify all qualifying segments on screen with one click
What I’m getting from this is that an unknown-direction road that’s ‘untouched’ is route-able but an unknown-direction road that’s been ‘touched’ is non-route-able (or at least gets a penalty to routing, since I’ve heard elsewhere that changing a road to unknown is not ‘enough’ to make it non-route-able). Since this tool ‘touches’ those roads they make them unable to be used in routing. An experienced editor can and should set the direction of those roads, then there’s no problem. But it is the edit-count-hungry editor sweeping through at zoom level 4 (zoom level 3 will only get primary street or higher, as far as I know, which has an extremely tiny amount of unknown-direction roads as far as I know), ‘touching’ these unknown roads, that is the issue.
So, assuming this is the only issue with why you shouldn’t just spam this everywhere, why not just make the tool not work on roads with unknown direction?
Heck, when I’m working in untouched areas, it’d be nice to have a mass edit tool that changes unknowns to two-way as a default. Obviously any one-ways I’d go in and manually change, but that would sure be a handy mass-edit tool. And then the remove unnecessary junctions could work, and then the simplify tool after that.
(Actually in most cases I’d then have to clear ALL geometry on the segment and re-position it since the base import was in the wrong spot. But it’d still be a helpful tool.)
The suppress unneeded geometry tool might cause problems on a segment with ‘soft’ directionality. ‘Soft’ directionality is the same as a soft turn except (1) it refers to the directionality of a segment and (2) it cannot be seen in the editor. The latter point is the biggest problem therewith.
Using the suppress unneeded geometry tool on segments with ‘soft’ directionality likely makes that directionality ‘hard’.
It’s not really possible to tell which segments might have ‘soft’ directionality. It’s safe to assume that any segment created by admin(staff) and never edited has ‘soft’ directionality. But there are other segments with soft directionality too. For instance, segments “created” by other users back in the day when the created-by name changed to the first user to drive a segment. But plenty of segments actually created by other users in the editor will not have a ‘soft’ direction.
Further, back in the DAY (like 2009 or 2010), it was not possible to harden directionality except by locking a road. So, in my own neighborhood, probably the most meticulously edited area in town at that point, two-way roads were being automatically set to one-way by the merger process (because I leave my neighborhood a different way from the way I come back), because I was probably the only one using Waze every day back then, and almost certainly the only one in my neighborhood. At some point, this was changed. So I’m not sure what the status is of segments that were last edited in 2010.
“Unknown direction” is by default a ‘soft’ direction. However, countless one- and even two-way roads in unedited areas still have ‘soft’ directions—the directions are set by drivers. Anyone who’s seen one of these untouched areas will know what they look like, lots of one-way segments in residential areas where there are few to no one-way streets in the real world. Some of these one-way segments are on two-way streets but have only been driven in one direction. Some two-way segments could actually be on one-way streets but have been driven down the wrong way, or walked down perhaps with Waze running.
Using the “suppress unneeded geometry” tool on these could harden that directionality, meaning drivers can no longer improve the map on their own. Yes, it could be fixed in the editor, but actually fixing it is another question, and takes work.
There is no way I know of of properly defining a ‘soft’ directionality segment. So I do not believe this tool could be properly limited to segments where it would not cause trouble.
Instead, we limit it by education — “don’t use this the wrong way” — and limitation to users who we feel we can trust with them. It seems that there have been enough instances of troublesome use by AMs that it might be time to limit the tool further. The AM review process is not comprehensive enough to guarantee this, and we Champs don’t really want to spend all our time disciplining those AMs+ who overstep their bounds.
BTW, not all troublesome use is necessarily damaging — users who are explicitly using this tool to “get lots of points quick” are not using it in the intended way.
Ok, I’d first like to say that this tool isn’t going away. That’s a ludicrous knee-jerk reaction to a few editors using it for rapid-edit-count increasing. Note: I intentionally did not use the words “abuse,” “point farming,” or “cheating” as we have yet to establish that this is any of those.
We are considering restricting access to the “apply to all segments on screen” portion to R5&CM.
Apply to selected segment(s) will still be available to R3&AM.
With the topic of “unknown” becoming unroutable… I’d argue that if a road is still in “unknown” directionality with Waze’s basemaps having been around for a few years, the road is of such low importance that we probably don’t want to be routing anyone on it anyhow! It may not exist, it may not junction how it supposedly does on the map, etc.
That said, if the only thing we’re worried about is these unknown direction roads, we can update the function to not apply to a road unless it is at least one-way.
If we’re worried about all “soft directionality” roads, then we should really be worried about that with other innocuous changes, as well. And the only response I have is: 1. we need confirmation that this situation still exists and 2. we need a way to indicate it.
For #2, that means we need to have some sort of data point provided in the Waze Model so that TB or WMECH can make it obvious.
I think education is one thing that can be improved with every tool that we create that makes changes to the map rather than merely highlight. Validator does an excellent job explaining why things can be problematic; as far as I’ve seen, toolbox releases things and says “here’s a new feature, have fun!” From what I know with the release of the suppress unneeded geometry, it wasn’t explained what the pitfalls could be, just that it helps improve load on the server; to be honest, I had no idea roads, other than those set to unknown directionality, could have their direction changed, or that they needed to be edited to “harden” them. To me, it seems like a big flaw with the editor if it doesn’t have a way for us to identify these soft roads, especially if they look correct and don’t need any editing.
Back to my main topic, would anyone else find it beneficial to have a document/wiki page that explains the full purpose of each tool, including pitfalls and when (not) to use them (if it doesn’t exist already)? I know I would like that; I was recently promoted to rank 5, yet shy away from using most of those tools because I don’t know of any time I would want to fix all soft turns or wasn’t too cause problems I’m not aware of.
Of course soft directionality still exists. Otherwise users would not be able to set road directionality by driving on unedited roads. If soft directionality didn’t exist, every unedited place would have only one-way roads, because every first drive on every segment would necessarily be in one direction only. It would become one way and it would just stay that way forever because it isn’t just “unknown” anymore. Fortunately, that’s not how it works.
The difference between “other innocuous changes” and mass edit tools is that the other changes are not mass edits. If a user is actually selecting and editing a road intentionally, and notices the road is one way in the middle of a neighborhood, what does the user do? Hopefully they look at street view or aerials or something and fix the road. If you’re actually looking to do an edit to the road. Do you think an editor would look at this road, click on it, and move some geometry around? I hope not. Do you think that editor would do it to 75 segments all in a row? No.
Any mass edit makes the edit impersonal and makes it quite easy to do things without keeping consequences in mind. It hides the consequences under the blanket of a “panacea” button. You can run the simplifier at zoom levels where you’d hardly notice that a one-way segment is out of place.
That’s why it requires discretion. Requiring AM/3+ to select segments before using the simplifier means that the AM/3+ has to exercise discretion in choosing which segments to simplify. It is no longer “do all this magic on the screen”, it is “there are some extra geometry points on this segment that goes round a bend, let’s clean that up a bit shall we.”
1 - It used to be available to AM/CM/5+. So now the same tool is only available to 5+. - OK
2 - We did not use to include R3 only, meaning a non-AM R3 could NOT do this, but now we are thinking of allowing a non-AM R3 to select segments manually and do this? Which brings me to…
3 - I do not agree with the select segments, because they can just draw a huge area, select everything in it, click the suppress button…same thing as before, just a tiny step before.
At the point when you are doing this kind of purposeful mass-editing, it’s just as easy to do actual damage by, for example, changing the lock level or directionality of all those roads. So the simplify segments tool is not the problem in this case.
Nothing exists to stop users from selecting a bunch of segments and then doing a bunch of edits to them. Nothing but locks, anyway.
So it comes down to editors ‘hardening’ the direction of roads without double-checking them.
In all honesty, I agree with this statement:
Change ‘unknown’ to ‘soft’ and I still agree with the basic sentiment.
If users are ACTUALLY driving those roads, they’d already be soft-adjusted to the correct directions anyway. And there’s always UR’s that could come along later as well to draw attention to the area.
While I get that turning incorrect soft data into incorrect hard data does actually ‘hurt’ the map, I really don’t think it hurts it that much, in the long run. I would actually consider arguing the point that incorrect hard data is actually better, as it will generate UR’s and MP’s that soft data might not, bringing editor attention to the area for closer inspection.
And keep in mind we’re talking about the least driven areas of all, that maybe see one or two Wazers a year. Or less. The effects of any ‘hardening’ in these areas are going to be of extremely limited importance to the sheer majority of users anyway. Just like with the 44 to 46 issue, one could argue that this hardening ‘harms’ the map, but the harm is so extremely minor that the outrage over it seems disproportionate. In my opinion, at least.
I think the biggest case that can be made is people padding their edit count, which since it’s locked to AM, they have to go through at least a minor approval process to get the tool. That seems sufficient, in my opinion.
I still think it’s better to hunt down a case by case with people ‘abusing’ the tool and educate them then it is to apply the “this is why we can’t have nice things” rule and remove it for everyone below X requirements. Especially considering the ‘damage’ done is minimal.
I also strongly agree with a wiki outlining the features and functions of the toolbox and what they can do, when they should be used, etc.
In my opinion the problem is with the people abusing the tool and not with the tool itself. If editors want points they will get them in any possible way they can. They can use another tool to get the points doing low value changes.
Maybe these things (value of the tool and chance for abuse) should be discussed by separated.
High rank editors doing low value edits for points is a problem, since new editors learn this and they could think it is the only possible way to escalate ranks. It becomes worse when Waze awards this behavior.
