A one-size fits all locking standard ignores that our ranks really need to reflect that editors have two sorts of trust that we should be measured on.

1) A trust that the editor is not malicious and has the desire to do well for Waze and the community

2) A good technical knowledge of the inner-workings of how the maps works

I would hope that I have at this point passed the test on #1. For me, I am still striving for point #2. Hence I think I fall into a decent rank level at rank 3. Rank 3 in the new "no points" scheme wasn't all that easy for me. Carl (@cbenson) almost made me cry to get it! He denied my AM app at first (with helpful feedback of course). It took me a while to get it. He knew me pretty well and my work before he approved it. He, I hope by that point, knew that I was trustworthy. He wasn't going to approve a promotion to 3 for just anyone. I had to work for it.

With that said.... in vast parts of the country... a MH and mH are just going to be long segments of simple road with simple junctions and lots of PLRs streets, and PSes connecting to it that require not a lot of expertise to maintain. It just requires trustworthiness that someone is not going to do something malicious to it. If a 3 is a standard for that level, then that should work.

However, if two MHs/mHs cross each other in that area in some complex interchange that requires an "Otto" box, then for that interchange, it should be locked at 5 because that interchange requires demonstrated expertise to create and maintain.

And since in urban areas these complex interchanges tend to be chained one after the other, it's often easier just to make it all at that level.

And that is my logic for why there should be different standards for different areas.

The chat / hang out method of unlock request is wonderful. As stated it allows interaction and mentoring and little delay. The forum method is time consuming for both parties involved. I've had some of them languish for weeks.

Regardless I appreciate all the help I get from all of you so I don't want this to appear like I'm complaining. I understand fully the need for locks and standards. I was just looking to provide some alternate perspective.

As a rank 3 guy who has previously commented on this I have heard the issue of "the old ways" of quickly promoting questionable editors based on points only -- so my knee-jerk reaction is "Why not just demote them instead of making it more difficult for editors such as myself by 'fixing' the problem by raising locks on everything?"

... then I see stuff happen like what happened today in my area. A rank 3 editor whose last forum post was over two years ago suddenly pops up out of nowhere and starts mass closing URs without comment in an entire county.

So you can't fix this problem by demoting all editors who were promoted based on points only -- because not all of them are bad editors. But some are and it's going to be almost impossible to identify them all, especially if they are not active.

As for the SM issue, there seems to be an easy fix to that one to me. The flip side to it is -- if they are trusted to edit an entire state, why aren't they all just promoted to rank 5?

irowiki wrote: Heck, you could extend this to AM areas to a degree, and that would let a level 3 AM edit level 4-5 things if needed, in his AM area....I know that would be a far bigger can of worms then trying to nail down SM's though.

As an AM of some podunk town in Virginia as well as Bronx, NYC, that would be fantastic for the former since there's just one little MH that bisects the town, but for the latter it'd be totally inappropriate and would limit AMs for that city to only be a skill level needed to be a rank 6 because it's just some insane stuff there.

PesachZ, we're about to go live with it in Australia & New Zealand, but we have been testing this on the beta WME to see how it worked. Keep in mind, it only calculates the minimum Auto-lock level based on past traffic history flow on that segment. The UL (if its higher) will override the Auto-lock. Unfortunately this means that a 'high-flow' street (where a lot of wazers use a "street" every day) may end up getting minim Auto locked to a higher level than to what you specify it as.

The Waze dev team should hopefully have the fix soon, where a higher AM,CM will be able to 'force' the UL to a level lower than the minimum Auto-Lock. They are working on it now as there was a lot of discussion regarding it in the forums.

In my opinion, Auto-locks are great for large areas for AM's & CM's alike to cover and to a certain extent, prevent malicious attacks on the roading network.

Fair comment PesachZ, however if an existing high volume road is auto-locked at Lvl 6, why would a lower level editor want to edit it anyway? It should be an existing and long established road and the area would have been completed a long while ago.
The exception to this suggestion is if they change the turns junctions or contour of the road, other than this, the segment shouldn't have to be changed.

IMO I thought that Waze was only going to lock to a max of Lvl-5.

+1 agree with what they are wanting and would promote this also as such.

Just out of curiosity, why are the NYC roads locked at lvl 6 for? Seems a bit extreme.
or are you referring to the proposed auto-locking?

I'm not certain that a national standard is appropriate.

1) There are still areas with no editors. For such areas, Freeways need to be at a lower level. The unlock mechanism is too cumbersome for extensive, ongoing editing. There needs to be someone local who can easily reach a rank that can maintain the roads.

2) There is a very uneven density of the lower road. In some areas, one third or more of the local streets are minor highway or more.

3) Rank 2 is near useless as a lock

4) We've just recently moved toward Functional Classification forcing roads that do not look at all like a highway to become mH and even MH. Whether you agree to that approach or not, the designations serve to give the routing engine more choices or more consistency in choices of longer distance routes. It shouldn't necessarily follow that this is needed for their lock levels as well. If a local 2-lane shopping strip is MH because that's what the FC says, do we really want to force it up to the AM lock rank? Or do we want to allow most editors to edit it?

5) As the traffic volume locks are coming into play soon, do we really need to worry about manual road locks at all anymore?

DwarfLord - you left out option 3. Don't inflate or deflate. Build up. Mentoring is in beta right now. If we get enough mentors and the program works well, you can easily get a cadre of full fledged R4s quickly and even R5s after a few months.

Fredo-p wrote:The issue with locks being to high for junior editors, isn't that what unlock request is for?

Sent from my DROID4 using Tapatalk

If an area has a very immature map, low level editor would need an enormous number of unlocks, which will discourage them. Unlock requests forum works best for solving isolated problems.