There shouldn't be an issue with this.

orbitc wrote:I second this. Also, if cosmetic is what you are after; you can always create straight segment to snap the landmark.

For named traffic circles which can be helpful visually for navigation, I also use temporary roundabouts for creating "perfectly" smooth circular/elliptical landmarks. (I also use temporary roundabouts to create smooth non-roundabout segments. But the Toolbox functionality makes that unnecessary now. Of course, it's always good to know how to do things using only the built-in functionality in case the scripts ever are forbidden from loading.)

I don't think the majority of landmarks added for individual stores simply make a blob on the map and provide zero navigational reference because no text will appear. Don't see the point. Certainly don't see the point see the point now that in the coming months and years, google will probably become increasingly integrated.

doctorkb wrote:

Waze gets money for advertising businesses, so landmarking a business means there is no incentive for the business to pay Waze to display them.

Until Waze themselves say "no" to this, I really don't care. We need to be building the best map there is, not worrying about the business model. Furthermore, there's a big difference between the pin advertising they sell and small landmark print.

The Champs had this discussion with Waze - as recently as March. The bottom line is DO NOT MAP INDIVIDUAL BUSINESSES.

doctorkb wrote:

Frankly, as an IT professional, I think it's just plain wrong to hijack the polygon (landmark) system for POI's, which it is clearly not intended to be used for.

POI = Landmark = POI in Waze, right now... it's not hijacking unless some other system is put in place.

Landmarks DO NOT EQUAL POIs. Period.

We are in the process of writing the US Landmark Guidelines. In fact there are only a few things that have to be tweaked from the discussion thread (http://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=129&t=38934). The delay here is due to a few things 1) Work getting very busy for me & then me changing jobs and 2) Trying to write and entire page that explains what landmarks are & how to map them.

doctorkb wrote:Andy: this is a discussion. No need to yell to try to make your point.

I'm not yelling to make my point - I'm telling you policy.

To play Devil's Advocate: so it's ok to map a dinky strip mall with two stores (because it's not an individual business) but it's not ok to map Home Depot which occupies twenty times the square footage and has signage that actually identifies it?

Clearly you haven't read the guidelines, which clearly state "Please note that strip malls & grocery store plazas typically do NOT meet this definition" and there is a minimum store count before a mall would be considered big enough to be a landmark.

Long term, we need a separate POI system, we talked to Waze about this back in March.

ctpoole wrote:

jasonh300 wrote:

WeeeZer14 wrote:Ditto for tons of little family cemeteries I find. Created by Admin and never updated by a human.

There are cemeteries like that in rural Louisiana, and they're never even in the right place. If you zoom in really close on the aerials, you can see the cemetery and it looks like it hasn't been maintained in 100+ years. Anyone who ever cared is probably long dead and buried in a modern cemetery somewhere else.

And Riamus is correct. The landmark listing we have in the editor, like road-types is what was imported from the TIGER maps.

Old Unmaintained cemeteries are actually very important to genealogist. They are often hard to find so having them mapped can be important.

They would have come from the US TIGER Basemap imports, so these are mapped somewhere - the question we are asking is it important for them to be on the Waze Map? Probably not.

doctorkb: This! That's pretty much the reply I wanted to write as I was reading through this thread.

Riamus wrote:15 years ago, you'd say that you hadn't seen a K-Mart closed, but they are closing.... Big chains do close....

Thank goodness we have an active group of editors who can (and do) change the map daily! That's what makes Waze such a powerful tool - the fact that it reflects much more current information than other maps.

Riamus wrote:And considering many of them are far off the road, it can be difficult to know exactly which turn you're talking about if you use those.

This is where common sense comes into play. Granted, there are some people who give directions similar to "Go down the road a piece, then turn left where the Crowder's old barn used to be....". Hopefully those people are not editing Waze maps.

And, sure, there might be disagreement about a specific example here or there, but, as doctorkb said, "Navigational reference is paramount". If the store is set way back from the road, then it isn't a good landmark. Easy.

Riamus wrote:It's far easier to tell someone to turn at a gas station as they are usually on a corner

It's only easier at intersections with a gas station.

Riamus wrote:or ... some major office building that isn't likely to change its name regardless of who moves in or out of the office spaces.

I've probably seen names on major office buildings change more often than big box stores closing. (Did you know that the Sears Tower is now the Willis Tower?) But it doesn't really matter since, as I said, we have editors to fix things.

Riamus wrote:And if the news is to be believed and Google is buying Waze, then Waze is very likely to get the Google basemap that includes the POIs displayed on it. If that were to happen, we would see double names on every landmark that people used for a POI. It would be far better to try to get Waze to expose the POI as a layer rather than trying to build a duplicate of it.

As we all now know, Google *is* buying Waze. But, man, you have a ton of assumptions in there. There are countless things that could happen that would change the way we edit. Trying to account for every one is a fool's errand.

If - strike that - When things change, the editors will do what we do fix the map accordingly.

This all kind of reminds me of the overly-complicated roads and mapping-of-every-lane-of-a-parking-lot that we often see from new editors. The thing to keep in mind is that our goal is not to create a perfectly accurate representation of every tiny wiggle in every single road. Our goal is to make the best guidance/reference tool for getting from one place to another. All other considerations should be secondary.

No one is suggesting that we should map every big box store. Or every Home Depot (For the record, I vastly prefer Lowe's Home Improvement over Home Depot ). But *IF* - in a particular situation - there is a huge orange Home Depot sign at the intersection of two important roads, then that might be worth mapping.

Riamus wrote:Waze gets money for advertising businesses, so landmarking a business means there is no incentive for the business to pay Waze to display them.

First, as has been pointed out, the ads are (unfortunately) much more than just a landmark.

But more importaintly, Waze isn't as popular as it is because they sell ads. (They've only been doing that for a few months, anyway.) The reasons I started using it over Android's built in Google Maps are:

• Ability to report/receive road reports (hazards, police, etc)
• more up-to-date maps
• (slightly) more accurate ETAs

The fact that an ad pops up every time I'm near Taco Bell only makes me consider going back to Google Maps, it certainly isn't a "draw".

So, again, if a landmark makes the map more user-friendly and more easily navigable, I say include it.

AndyPoms wrote:Landmarks DO NOT EQUAL POIs. Period.

Personally, I find this statement silly. Waze will now route you to at least some landmarks that are mapped in WME. Whatever we want to call them is largely irrelevant as most wazers and many editors are not forum dwellers and do not study the wiki. No matter how many editors may want a landmark to display for orientation on the map as a separate function from a point for a routing destination, that's not the current reality.

Given the number of landmarked ex-golf courses that were on the map when I started, I have to believe they were imported from somewhere.

jasonh300 wrote:

WeeeZer14 wrote:Ditto for tons of little family cemeteries I find. Created by Admin and never updated by a human.

There are cemeteries like that in rural Louisiana, and they're never even in the right place. If you zoom in really close on the aerials, you can see the cemetery and it looks like it hasn't been maintained in 100+ years. Anyone who ever cared is probably long dead and buried in a modern cemetery somewhere else.

And Riamus is correct. The landmark listing we have in the editor, like road-types is what was imported from the TIGER maps.

Old Unmaintained cemeteries are actually very important to genealogist. They are often hard to find so having them mapped can be important.