Waze forum

xteejx wrote:Talk about a comeback, but very well put

Thanks, xteejx. And I did not even put in my most important observation: an area of the map is NEVER finished until many people have edited it. You need an editor to clean up, another to watch over the routing, a freak who does nothing but roadnumbers, one who enters streetnames, definately a local to drive around and find errors and someone extremely patient to debug the lot. In the end someone must maintain the area and make changes as roadworks change the grid. And when the wiki changes, everybody has to come back and start over. It is all about the collective! No village can exist without a butchery, a bakery, a grocery. Some people can take two, maybe three roles, but never someone can do it all.

Maybe that should be reflected in the scoring? Editors can join together in groups - call them troops, no, call them "troupes" (to signify the artistry involved!) and get points as a collective, where the "troupe" wins that brings an area from wasteland to blossom in the shortest time (divided by surface)?

xteejx wrote: I mean, most of us with high points already know we don't have lives outside Waze (or little), why *make* yourself look like OCD suffering map editing freak like us lot? LOL

In this "age of the geek" we are considered the avant-garde, it seems. Sexy even? Be prepared to find groupies on your doorstep next year!

Enhket, I am sorry I lashed out to you at the end of my post. It shows that it is dangerous to base an opinion on a very small number of posts in the forum, but that is no excuse. I know now that you are an active member on the forum in your country and that you did way more than using ET. Again, I am sorry. I know I can have a pointy pen when I feel driven and this time it pointed at you.

However... my aversion against ET still stands.

enhket wrote: Now, it is true, i did promote ET, but in a good way. Excuse me, but if it will take me 2 hours to click every segment just to change the name, when i could do the same on ET in 20-30 mins at the same quality, then yes, i am going to use ET. If it comes to promoting ET in order to make points with no quality, then i dont promote it.

I can't remember that I ever did 2 hours of clicking on every segment just to change the name. It just isn't worth to spend two hours on. It does nothing for the map. Yes, technically, you touch the segments and fill in one of many attributes - the cityname. But to show the name on the map it is enough if a handful of streets have the cityname. If the 2 hours are a waste - so is the 2 minutes with ET. The only reason it may look attractive is that it brings 60 times the number of points per minute.

Last time I used ET for selecting segments was another case. In borderregions two or three basemaps can overlap, and that results in streets that are exactly on top of each other but are from different countries. It can take 10-15 steps to tear such streets apart and delete the wrong one.I spend weeks doing just that with cartouche. Now, with ET, I can select the segments from one country and delete them. There is a big improvement in the map when doing that, and that justifies the use of ET. (By the way: I did not get lucky with the current available versions of ET - it simply did not work, had to use the Highlighter again).

It was even worse: select a junction, click "turn into roundabout", select size (randomly in meters or yards), press enter. Wait for roundabout to appear. See that it has the wrong size. Click cancel. Repeat sequence with different size. If it fits - click save. Wait for 30 seconds. Find your roundabout - oval.

That is fast - considering he has to drive first and wait for an editable area. Or did he open a backup-account in advance? (And asked for AM-rights even).

The bottom line is, not all edits are done equally well, and do not contribute equal value to the map. Some edits, such as alternately locking and unlocking the same road day after day, contribute nothing to the map. Should those edits be rewarded at the same rate as, say, fixing a turn restriction, adding new construction, or (correctly) resolving a UR? No. Is it easy to distinguish the former from the latter, without human intervention? No.

The closest we can get, without full-time human review of edits, is to use the heuristic that more experienced editors are likely to make better quality edits, and that new editors are likely to make lower-quality edits.

One way to compensate for this is to reward the two groups differently. But that only discourages new editors from doing quality, detailed work, and gives them even more incentive to find ways to rack up points as quickly as possible.

Another way is to weed out the editors who are more interested in points than in quality, by self-selection: Limit the rate at which new editors can edit the map. Allowing new editors to make no more than (say) ten object-changes per save, or even fewer*, makes novice editors focus on map detail; limits their ability to make worthless (and potentially damaging) mass-edits for points; and prompts those who are only interested in "gaming the map" to look elsewhere for entertainment.

• * In the days of Cartouche, when it was one edit per save, high-point editors were guaranteed to be motivated by quality more than by points.

The number of permitted object-changes per save should increase with editor rank--which should be based not only on number of edits, but also calendar time, forum involvement and peer review.

xteejx wrote:One save was one lot of points in cartouche? Didn't know that!

No: edits had to be saved one at a time. Adjust the geometry of one segment, save. Change a street name*, save. Add a new segment, save. Add a junction to connect the new segment to an existing segment, save.

• * Cities & street names were one of the few things you could change for more than one segment at a time. But it was unreliable. Speaking of unreliable, alt names would be discarded upon changing a segment's geometry.

Each save took a couple seconds at least; ~15 seconds when it got busy, and would take the editor offline for a minute or more when the database was down. It forced you to take time and think about what you were doing, and make every edit count. Nobody who was only interested in the points stuck around long enough to do much damage.

I don't care about the points, I just like the GPS, I think it is awesome, I do enough traveling

We had a similar incident in the U.S. where a user got a lot of points in a very short period of time. We later found paves like this. A user could rack up a lot of points in mileage and pave points doing this.

In our case, the user claimed ignorance, and that he had not flown, and it was turned over to admin to find out if it was some kind of glitch. Never did hear anything else about it.

This should definitely be turned over to Admin with links to the paved lines.

It's a pave. That's why it interrupts when it crosses a real road. What is that? A railroad?


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