The (County) Suffix
Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2012 3:02 pm
I know this is opening a fairly large can of worms, but I'd like to see the advice in the Wiki changed so that the "(County)" suffix is only added when absolutely necessary. My supporting arguments are as follows:-
Smudges: The map editor does not allow a new town to be created that is too far away from an existing town with the same name. This was the primary reason for the suffix, and so we no longer need to be adding it 'just in case' there's another town with the same name.
Searches: The suffix doesn't appear when searching for a town in the Waze app, so it's no use there. I also expect most users to be searching for a specific address anyway.
The Map: Towns with suffixes look simply horrid on the map, and is unnecessary clutter.
Cities: There are 53 cities in the UK [1], all unique and well known. Many of which are large enough to need split up into smaller sub-regions. No room or need for the suffix here.
Towns: There are 929 towns in England [2], and all bar 14 of them have unique names. Let's keep the town names clean, and only add the suffix to those 14.
State field: The suffix is just a hack until we get a proper state (county) field in the editor (which may never happen). If it does magically appear, then we can ask Waze to set the field using geographic data, rather than parsing them out of city names.
Now, I'm not suggesting that we have to go and rename all the towns manually before the next map update, but we should at least consider changing the rule for new towns that get added, and gradually work on the existing ones over time. We can ask Waze to help too, if there are specific towns that need tidying up.
My tuppence.
Smudges: The map editor does not allow a new town to be created that is too far away from an existing town with the same name. This was the primary reason for the suffix, and so we no longer need to be adding it 'just in case' there's another town with the same name.
Searches: The suffix doesn't appear when searching for a town in the Waze app, so it's no use there. I also expect most users to be searching for a specific address anyway.
The Map: Towns with suffixes look simply horrid on the map, and is unnecessary clutter.
Cities: There are 53 cities in the UK [1], all unique and well known. Many of which are large enough to need split up into smaller sub-regions. No room or need for the suffix here.
Towns: There are 929 towns in England [2], and all bar 14 of them have unique names. Let's keep the town names clean, and only add the suffix to those 14.
State field: The suffix is just a hack until we get a proper state (county) field in the editor (which may never happen). If it does magically appear, then we can ask Waze to set the field using geographic data, rather than parsing them out of city names.
Now, I'm not suggesting that we have to go and rename all the towns manually before the next map update, but we should at least consider changing the rule for new towns that get added, and gradually work on the existing ones over time. We can ask Waze to help too, if there are specific towns that need tidying up.
My tuppence.