The issues surrounding editing rights is hard - but I was referring more to falling into the mindset of having elite users (for lack of a better term), who are rewarded (materially, further down the road) at the exclusion of everyone else in the community.

Anyway, moving on, editing rights are hard because there are contradictory requirements,

• you want new users to be able to improve the maps, but not to be able to obliterate months of work.
• you want to give AMs control of their area, but not at the exclusion of everyone else working their.

There are ways of mitigating these issues, but no panacea.

For example, there may be merit (and I'm not proposing this as a solution, just an example of a possible mechanism) for having a check-in, check-out mechanism for map-areas that gives AM-type rights on a temporary basis, with possible rollback.

All crowdsourced community has their own level of rights. And the wikipedia is not a good example. Either check out the Linux community, which is a better example. The main difference is that these products are highly sensitive to vandalism.
And don't forget, that the Waze want to make some money from these data and it must be relevant. (Like the linux kernel must be stable and well checked)

The "power users" in all crowdsourced projects are "autoselected" by community, this is true for the waze users too.
But if you want the Wikipedia example, there are "powerusers" too for checking after vandalism.