What do we need to do for a consensus? I'm with daknife on this one even thought I'm just a lowly 3.

In Colorado, any road the state calls a "Major Road" of higher, I will change to the corresponding road class, minus one class. This upgrades anything that is a "Major Road" to a minimum of a "Street."
http://dtdapps.coloradodot.info/Otis/Flex/MapView (Turn on Base Layers --> Major Roads and Base Layers --> Highways - Functional Class)

Anything above "Street" I have been adding [DIRT] to the end of the street name so there isn't any confusion when someone gets to the street and expected a paved road with painted lines. I've even marked SH-XX with [DIRT]. I've been putting the road name without the suffix in the alternate name too.

The area I live in borders an incorporated city and an unincorporated township, each has many dirt roads as streets, dirt road shortcuts, dirt roads in better condition than paved and a mixture of all in some locations, to include farm roads used as streets. It is a challenge to address URs and edit for best routing options with the current dirt/4x4.
I would suggest expanding the options to "unpaved street", "dirt rd", and "4x4 trail" to help with the routing but considering the movement (or lack of) on splitting the dirt/4x4 the suggestion seems moot.
At this point it would seem to work best using a combination of dirt/4x4 and street using best routing thought process but it does not follow the guidelines in the wiki.
Not much in my post to resolve the issue, but open the discussion on the suggestion for the additional feature.
Consider the following:
Unpaved Street - maintained dirt roads with house numbers and for main routing.
Dirt Roads - maintained roads off the main routes and no house numbers.
4x4 Roads - recreational and 2 rut lanes that lead to a destination of interest.

Panther37 wrote:Anything above "Street" I have been adding [DIRT] to the end of the street name so there isn't any confusion when someone gets to the street and expected a paved road with painted lines. I've even marked SH-XX with [DIRT]. I've been putting the road name without the suffix in the alternate name too.

Don't do that.

Wow, I wish I was in on this debate a lot earlier! It seems that's what some people spend half their time doing here!

While some consensus will eventually be great on this topic, as someone mentioned, we cannot solve this by the map alone. We need more options from Waze. The reason this is probably hard is that it is a tradeoff of several factors. Where your opinion stands on the topic will be influenced from your experience and perspective. This is probably an blind-man elephant problem -- which part you feel will alter your perception of the answer. At the 2013 meet-up in CA, it was clear to me that a lot of people from the east coast / big cities didn't understand problems of the southwest very well. Same thing on this topic.

I believe it depends. I believe that some dirt roads can be primary streets and must be to accommodate some communities. Someone mentioned that people regularly go 60 mph down some of these roads. I believe that most dirt roads that are well maintained should be marked as streets. If the roads are not well maintained or are clearly for 4x4 vehicles, then mark them as such. The rationale for this has formed for me to be that any road that is navigable by a passenger vehicle meant for paved roads, should be at least a street.

My opinion has become more solid as I have done research on US Forest Service Roads. Not all dirt roads are the same. See the Wiki at https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Forest_Service_Roads for information that helps classify when a dirt road is and suggestions on how they should be mapped. There are pictures that show examples.

I believe that the travel history and speed from Waze will prevent routing through well-maintained dirt roads. If a person using Waze as a GPS comes across a road they don't want to turn down, then they should not turn down that road.