'morning everybody,

After a recent editing incident on the map around the N40 in Cork (see this thread discussing it) it has been suggested that we do what quite a number of other countries have done and start a locking policy to protect high-value roads from accidental or malicious edits by inexperienced editors. (often these editors are well-meaning, but they may break roads and routing without realising the effect they have - and it's not unheard-of for people to deliberately damage roads. It doesn't help that sometimes the satellite imagery is out of date and some editors may change the road layout to match what they see on the satellite without realising that some junctions or roads may have changed a lot since the satellite image was taken).

In the past, I've tried to avoid locking roads as much as possible and have only locked roads that form part of a very complicated junction that took a lot of work to get working properly, or that have been repeatedly broken by other well-meaning editors. We don't want to discourage good editors but we do want to make sure routing works as well as possible and to stop the map from being broken.

This post is to start a discussion on what kind of locking policy we want; I encourage all editors to join the discussion. I would suggest giving the most-mature highest-value roads higher locks, but would also suggest avoiding locks (or just using low locks) in areas where a lot of mapping is still needed. We only have two active L5 editors, a decent handful of L3 area managers, and quite a few L2 editors - and obviously anybody can be an L1 editor as soon as they've started to use Waze.

Here's my opening suggestion for lock levels:

All motorways everywhere: L4

In near-complete areas (including but not limited to Dublin and Cork):

N-roads that are dual carriageways: L3
N-roads that are not dual carriageways: L2
Urban R-roads: L2

In areas that still need a lot of mapping:

N-roads that are dual carriageways: L2
Major R-roads that are the only main road in the area: L2 but only if complete and all side roads are attached

These numbers are relatively arbitrary, so feel free to propose alternatives. Obviously any road can be given a higher lock if there's a good reason for it.

Whatever locking policy we come up with, we should encourage all editors to post to the forum to request an unlock or update, and when we see new roads created by new editors that can't be junctioned with existing roads because of locks, we should welcome them and explain what they need to do to create the necessary junctions.

Now, over to the floor. Once we've got a consensus we can put it on the Ireland wiki page so we'll have something to refer to.

++David \ davidg666