I feel that Road Types/USA and Road Names/USA need significant rewrites in order to be truly global, though I'm happy for this to be done after the transfer to Wazeopedia as long as it's done "soon".

Perhaps we should only transfer the parent Road types and names page, and work on filling it with generic information?

For example, we should have documentation about the different road types, and how they are used for routing, without any of the guidelines about how to apply them to the real work. E.g. Freeways and Highways are for long-distance routing, Private and Parking roads are not for through routes.

Had we'd had that from the very beginning, it would have saved a lot of confusion

Note: as road types can be translated by language, the Wazeopedia page about them should also be translated accordingly (without localisations).

Other US-centric pages that had been nominated include Roundabouts/USA and Rest areas, both of which contain information that is mostly generic and globally applicable.

Roundabouts/USA has since been removed from the list - can the majority of it be moved to Roundabouts instead? Then it can be transferred.

Rest areas won't take much effort to generalise. However, other countries may have already written their own local version...

Cameras could do with having some local information removed from it, otherwise it's fine.

Moderators have voted on this list, and approve it.

Personally, I'd like to see a plan to address the outstanding points above.

I lightly object because the UK Guidelines (United_Kingdom/Places) for Car Parks was written based on what was considered to be "Global Guidelines", and this provided considerable weight to the argument that only certain car parks should be mapped. Without global guidelines, it's much harder to justify some local decisions.

Can we at least keep some global recommendations for mapping, with caveats for Local Guidelines? Perhaps as a hidden page that would only be used by local Wiki authors, and not generally searchable?

[Off-Topic]
I feel that we should have some globally applicable "recommended practice" that all countries should use as the basis for writing their localised guidelines. If we let countries to come up with unique conventions, then we lose out on consistent behaviour across the globe, and some localisations may be incorrect or out-dated.

For example, we know the importance of having a well connected network of freeways and highways, and counties that categorise their roads differently may then struggle with long-distance routing.

Regarding parking lots, I think all countries should adopt the "three principles", as it gives a good experience to the user. If the principles aren't applicable or relevant, then fine. They're recommendations, rather than mandatory.


I'd like to see a set of global "template" guidelines that countries can use to localise for themselves. This would have a list of items that should be written about, for each topic, plus some recommendations. These wouldn't appear in the results when a user searches for them, but local Wiki masters will be able to reference them.

For examples, Road Naming would have sections for highways, streets and abbreviations. No content, just a skeleton structure, though it would recommend that roundabouts be unnamed.

Savvy?

[/Off-Topic]

I agree to the content being removed to a USA specific page, but I'd like to see something put in its place. The way voludu2 wrote it above would be good. It's factual, with hints as to the optimal way to map them.

kentsmith9 wrote:Do we have a list of pages that started as more US-centric that need to be "cleansed" to be more global?

The first page of this thread has a few pages that have been identified as needing to be generalised.

Here are the pages that I feel are too US-centric and need to be generalised:
(Please read my posts near beginning of this thread for commentary)

- Abbreviations and acronyms

- Landmarks by Type (US)

- Road Types/USA

- Road Names/USA

- Roundabouts/USA

- Rest areas

- Cameras

- Places/Car Parks

Obviously, some of these are already "owned" by USA, but are lacking an equivalent generic page for the whole world.

There a many reasons for putting things in the global wiki. They are all there so the local experts have an easy reference for constructing their local guidance, and so that emerging experts can learn more about how waze works.
* things which the waze team has told us
* things which have been discovered to be true through controlled, peer-reviewed testing
* corollaries to the above, to make it easier for the local experts understand how various facts about waze interact
* a useful compendium of how typical mapping problems have been handled in different parts of the world, as a ready reference for local experts and emerging experts.
* any guidance for which there is global consensus.

In the case of parking lot places, we can say for sure that the parking "balloon" will float above it when the driver nears a destination, leading the driver to perhaps assume this is a place available for parking. We can also say that parking lot area places of significant size will show up on the map, which can be useful in some situations and simply clutter in others. That it may not be necessary to mark the parking lot at a shopping mall, office building, or business that has parking for employees and/or customers on site.

Also that Parking area or point place is not appropriate for on-street parking spaces, or for private parking only available for employees or residents-- this is a coralarybofnthe fact that parking bubbles float above parking lot places, and that it is not nice to drivers to believe they can park some place which is for residents only, or for restaurant patrons only (violators will be towed).