Are those new landmarks or all? Because, I cannot seem to search landmarks.

I totally agree that more information is better, and we should instead focus on how to regulate its presentation so that it is manageable.

That being said, I'm not sure the landmark layer on the WME is the best approach for this. To me, landmarks, by definition, are sparsely scattered, highly identifiable objects, from a distance, by which you would orient yourself. As such, the more things in a given area that we landmark, the less useful each of those landmarks becomes.

Central New Jersey is hyper-landmarked to the point of being out of control, and there is a total war going on about what should and shouldn't be landmarked. Excessive landmarks are deleted, only to be re-added by someone else who disagrees with that assessment. Retention ponds. Random unnamed copses of trees. Random farm fields. Not to mention parking lots with parking lot roads inside them (doesn't that cause some kind of interference with the routing system?).

I mean, it's great that we want to refine the presentation of things we see along the road despite having unmanageable amounts of information, but let's face it, that's not here and now, and it's making quite a mess out of the maps.

I think a large part of the problem is that many of us who have been around for at least long enough to bring our areas out of "the dark ages" - where many roads less than state highways were just classified as neighborhood streets by the TIGER import - lock those roads in our wake to prevent people from further changing them. I'm not saying this is bad, but it does force newer editors to look for increasingly obscure things to update, many of which we probably haven't even begun to consider a US standard for.

Don't landmark, just add simple parking lot road. Set proper turn restrictions and be done with it.

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ModandOp wrote:Okay. I've been reading through the forum and it seems Parking Lot Landmarks are not liked very much by more experienced editors.

If for example, there's a large office building complex, (where several people that use Waze drive to) should I encompass the whole complex + parking lot as an office building and draw in main parking lot roads? (Large I'm taking maybe 300 people, 100's of cars, maybe 12 people that use Waze) Or just the building and put parking lot roads around it?

Again...just follow the KISS principle. Draw in the main perimeter PL roads and don't landmark building (unless it's Waze)!

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jasonh300 wrote:
The more landmarks on the map, the less value they have.

While an individual landmark's value may go down with increasing number of landmarks, the value of the map as a whole goes up as more information is added to the map.

kentsmith9 wrote: While an individual landmark's value may go down with increasing number of landmarks, the value of the map as a whole goes up as more information is added to the map.

I would also add that more landmarks help find things in a search, but make a visual search more difficult (think Where's Waldo). The question is which is more important.

I have to disagree with you there. Where's Waldo is an incorrect analogy. A better analogy for a digital (as opposed to the paper Waldo) world would be Google Search. Modern technology allows us to make sense of an immense amount of information, something that was unthinkable in the essentially paper based Where's Waldo world.

We have to completely abandon our paper map based aversion to clutter and come in to the 21st century where digital technology allows us to have the best of both worlds: A lot of information and good presentation of that information.

The Waze client app will improve in its presentation so that the appearance of clutter is reduced and so it behooves us to prepare for that by adding more information to Waze. We have to skate to where the puck will be, not where it is now. (http://blog.ryanparman.com/2011/09/05/s ... will-be-2/)

There are several issues in play here:
1. People are confusing POIs with landmarks. Since Waze does not allow editors to add POIs but allows editors to add landmarks, editors add landmarks when they really want to add POIs. In theory, POIs are searchable whereas landmarks are viewable. They are very similar and related concepts.
2. Landmark is literally a "Mark" on "Land". It is an aid to navigation. It is also useful if someone while driving gets curious and want wants to know "what is that?" like what is the name of that body of water that I am driving over. Landmarks loose their utility in waze when there is a huge billboard advertising the existence of a business at that location (e.g. department store sign) but see below.
3. Landmarks and street names serve the same purpose. They help you know you are in the correct location. You can compare a street name on Waze with a physical street sign on a real street just as you can compare a 7-11 landmark with a real 7-11 store. They are equally useful especially when your relative or friend gives you instructions like "make a right one street after the 7-11 to get to my house" rather than giving you street names.
4. Newer editors see online maps like Google Maps and Bing Maps full of landmarks and see that they are not there in Waze and want to fix what they perceive as a serious shortcoming in Waze data.
5. The landmark adders are all newer editors and the landmark removers are all editors who have been on Waze for quite some time. The editors who have been on Waze for a long time do not like the editing habits of the newbies. The older editors have slogged through map building which early on was mainly roads and they want the newbies to concentrate on roads whereas the newbies want to do other things like add landmarks. However all the roads have been added and the newer editors do not see the point in concentrating on roads when there is so much more that can be done to improve the map. This is the "war" referred to in an earlier post.

So what do you all think?