I'm late to this party, so am catching up...

I understand why Hospitals that provide immediate care need to be mapped exclusively, but why should only emergency response fire stations be mapped as such? What's the use case for members of the public? They don't need to navigate to their nearest fire station when their house is on fire...

I notice that when a point place is converted to an area, it is exactly 40x40m. This could be a useful guide for 'size dependent' criteria. Another useful rule of thumb (for places and segments) is it has to be visible at 500ft zoom level (=5).

We have ignored the Great Table for our local United_Kingdom/Places version, preferring instead to give generic guidelines to our editors and let them use their discretion. Simply: large buildings can be area places, individual businesses as points, with a few exceptions.

I feel that the applicability of these guidelines is US-centric, and do not translate well to the UK.
A fire department or ambulance station simply isn't a place one would drive to, even in an emergency.
Also, some emergency stations are unmanned, and don't have a public accessible entrance.

Anyway, thank you for the clarification. We'll write our local guidelines accordingly.

SuperDave1426 wrote:Question: Do gas station area places suppress traffic reports in some countries but not in others?

No, this is a global "feature" that staff assure us does not exist (and maybe never did).

voludu2 wrote:This is meant to be a global page. If it contains guidance that is not globally applicable, this should be brought up for discussion. Any local-only guidance should be removed to a local-only page.

...and something else that should possibly be removed from Places page is this:

[[Places/Gas Station|Gas Stations]] and Parking Lots should be mapped to the edges of the property

In some countries this is not the case at all, and is therefore a local wiki guideline.

Gas stations may be treated as [[Best_map_editing_practice#Parking_Lots|Parking Lots]].

This sentence doesn't sit well with me. Gas stations are their own type of place, not parking lots.

Sticking close to the original text, how about "A modest parking lot road drawn through the area, leading through the gas pump area, will improve routing and prevent jams appearing on the main road."

The purpose of this paragraph is to explain that "Gas Stations and Parking Lots should be mapped to the edges of the property (or at least to the drivable area);" as an exception to the preceding guidelines about Area Place size. As the polygon doesn't have any other special properties, there's no need to mention PLRs here. That detail will be on the appropriate sub-page.

Less is more. No need to say anything else. Readers will have to follow the links if they need to know more, which consolidates all the information into one place (for maintainability and simplicity).

The links in this paragraph could be consolidated into the first mentions of Gas Station and Parking Lots. No need to say "see X for more".

My 2c.

Orbitc, vectorspace, driving79, and myself all discussed this amongst ourselves, but haven't put it out to everyone yet. We're all under the impression to reject photos on military bases for various reasons. One being, if Google isn't allowed to take photos on base with their map cars, then Waze shouldn't have the photos. There is a huge amount of sensitive information on various military bases and there are those who may not know what's sensitive or not. IF there are photos of the approved areas, go ahead and allow those, but any other part of the base and any other photos, you can reject.

Something else you can approve are the planes or tanks at various base entrances, which sit in public view of everyone.

vehicle identification number

I think a vehicle VIN number is as bad as a license plate #, and photos that show the VIN in the dashboard or on the inspection sticker on the windshield ought to be rejected.

I just rejected a photo for this reason.

The selfie-with-Starbucks-in-the-background is also taken with the photographer's approval. I'll reject that, too.

Yes that is an excellent help, and should also be linked from
https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Main_Page

which(sigh) needs to be reworked.
AND ALSO -- from https://www.waze.com/support/question

And have you seen https://www.waze.com/en-GB/support/answer?q=42016336
https://www.waze.com/en-GB/support/answer?q=42016336



Some day, when we have a way to communicat with users, I can add that to my canned responses.

I did some rewording of the section on area place sizes. The point was to simplify the wording a little. If I have changed the meaning, please undo my recent changes and I'll have another go at it when I get the facts straight.


https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Places#Area_Place_size