Hi Brian,

KonaEV wrote:I was looking forward to helping update and correct the maps but I was mistaken on the points system to become a level 2 editor.
It seems you need 3000 Map Edit points to become a level 2 editor which I cannot see happening any time soon.
There is a limited amount of work I can do in my area at level one and I see many (small) changes that I cannot make as I need level 2 access.
It will be a great deal more work and time to create posts here to get someone to do the work than simply editing the map.
I appreciate that people need to be vetted and proven to be good and reliable enough to edit the maps, but 3000 edits is off putting, and I will most likely return to being a consumer rather than a contributor which is a great shame.
I shall continue to post about any big issues I see but the minor changes that require level 2 will just not get updated.

Sorry for waiting so long to write a reply to this!

Yeah, I see you've got 112 edits in about two weeks, so I feel your frustration at needing to get another 2888 edits...

However, even though being limited in some places is tedious, especially if you have to request an unlock for a lot of things, I think you can make a lot of progress by choosing what kind of edits you do.

Generally, we try to avoid locking in most places if at all possible. Yes, most R- roads are locked at L2, but most other roads aren't. There are also vast areas of countryside (and many towns) that still need a lot of work. In many areas, only the main roads are mapped but most of the minor roads aren't.

I got my early editing points first by editing the roads around where I live by fixing up obvious routing problems and after that by picking an area where the roads were missing. Then I started to pick towns that hadn't been mapped yet and adding all the missing roads, including housing estates. In fact, housing estates in particular are great for making lots of edits, because there are easily at least 20 segments to be mapped, turn restrictions to set, names to set and speed limits to set.

Usually, after each town, I went through the surrounding countryside adding the missing back roads and naming them. Naming back roads is a little slow because it takes a while to work out the townland names.

A couple of years ago, I mapped every single road (except for a few I missed) in county Clare, although I never got the naming finished. You could pick a county where you have editing rights and map all the missing roads. If the R- roads they attach to are L2-locked, yes, you'd have to make unlock requests for those, although you could select lots of R-road segments at once and make a single permalink to request them all to be unlocked them all in one go.

I think you'll be surprised that it's actually quite possible to make a lot of edits in a fairly short time. Some editors manage to get thousands of edits in a single week. (although do please take care to make quality edits and don't make random changes just to get points — that won't make you many friends )

All decent edits that improve the map are well worthwhile and improve the map for everybody. I got great joy when I first started to see my changes show up on my phone and I still get joy when I see improvements to the map make it possible for me to use Waze to navigate to somewhere where it just wasn't possible before.

Once you do manage to get your edit rank up, you can (if you want) apply to become an area manager for an area you're familiar with. We don't have anywhere near enough area managers to cover the country, so some places (like Dublin) have several area managers, plenty of other places have no area managers at all. Even some big cities - Galway and Limerick, for example - need area managers. Limerick, in particular, could do with a lot of work on its map.

Anyway, I'm rambling, so I'll stop typing now ... If you enjoy editing, then please do keep editing. It's quite possible to get enough edits to move up the editing rank fairly quickly and even at L1 you can make really useful contributions to the map — and see the results first-hand.

++David \ davidg666