DwarfLord wrote:That's my impression of why opening this up is so hard. It relies heavily on taste and as a volunteer organization that operates largely by consensus we don't have a good way of dealing with differing tastes except to embrace minimalism.

Can someone offer an objective framework for adjudicating taste in a volunteer/consensus organization?

Whoever yells loudest wins?

There is no way to enforce a standard if a general consensus is ever reached on this or another issue. Appealing to the standard is the best that you can do. Editors edit with or without community guidance and best practices in mind, and guidance can be selectively ignored based on personal taste anyway.

If this discussion embraces the route of starting to map most Places as areas, it may be easier to handle this in the app instead of the editor. Long term, themes could be created that could range from minimal to displaying any type of area. That way, the subjective taste relies on what the driver wants display, but in reality, everything is objectively edited to be included.

I'm personally very excited about the idea of users being able to add Places from the app since it will finally add value to Waze search results. Right now, even with Places available for months, the quantity of Places are sparse.

I don't have access to the beta editor to test the moderation process full circle, but with regard to your concern about modifying something in which you're emotionally invested or have spent time researching:

Users will be able to edit places which are locked above their rank. Their save won’t go through as usual - it will become a place update request that a user with an appropriate rank can moderate. After saving they’ll get a message that their edit is pending moderation.

This country club is below my rank. No moderation needed, and the edit I just made from the beta app is immediately displayed in standard WME and ready for the next tile update. From a workflow standpoint, should this mean that any approved/moderated Place gets locked at 2+ so that future edits for that Place by app-only users will still have edits submitted for moderation instead of just taking effect once they are a "trusted" user? Or, do we just leave most locked at 1 and say that quality control is in the user domain and not so much the domain of map editors?

I'm also curious to see if a Place added in the app counts as a "map edit". If so, you could have rank 2+ "map editors" who have never even opened WME. When they do, they would have all of the privileges of legitimate map editors of that higher rank, and I could foresee some major problems and training issues. Has anyone checked on edit count from app-only edits to prove or disprove this concern?

CBenson wrote:How will duplicate entries be merged?

Manually of course This won't be fun, and hopefully it won't be too common.

PesachZ wrote:This may be all too common unfortunately, especially with place points, unless there is also a change which makes existing points visible in the client. Otherwise what is stopping a (trusted) user from submitting data for a place which he cannot see on the map (even though the point already exists).

Nothing unfortunately--even with a visual. It's up to the user. But *if* (cough) when you add a new Place, the app were to present a list of nearby Places whether they be Point or Area, that would hopefully cut down on duplicates.

EDIT: I see CBenson posted three minutes before I did. I guess in the future, I shouldn't take too much time fretting over whether or not to present minor details about the beta.

If we define "Residence/Home" outside of a typical house, I'm fine with altering the wiki. If we opted to make every home on every block a Place, that's too monumental of an effort for me, and I'll choose to spend my time on other things. I think that the interpretation of "residence/home" as a typical single-family house may have been what made the Champs recommend not mapping when they initially voted earlier in the year.

Residences that serve as potential destinations for more than one user such as co-ops, college dorms, nursing homes, or the like certainly have value being added as Places. For apartment complexes, I would personally lean toward not mapping the office as a "residence/home" since no one lives at the office, and instead use the "offices" category. I haven't mapped one in reality though.

Is Union Station (which serves Metrorail, Amtrak, VRE, MARC, and several bus lines) to be tagged as train/subway/bus/taxi station and shopping center?

Classifying a station by how far above or below the surface the train runs is probably the most obvious.
Can we state this as guidance?

Mark a station as Subway Station only where the boarding platform is subterranean.
For all others use Train Station including for monorail, trolley, inclined plane, cable car, or gondola.

But then we circle around to the discussion about "should large office buildings be considered Areas in their own right, or set to points?

I think the "Farmland" should adopt something similar to the "Forest/Grove" wording. As noted, there are occasions where it makes sense (a farm in the middle of a city), but most of the time, it doesn't.

Also, I'm concerned about the tunnels and bridges lacking the note "only major, named bridges" -- perhaps general guidance needs to be afforded that unless there is a name for it, there should not be a place marked?

I'm not sure that traffic jam suppression really occurs with the parking lot or gas station areas. They don't seem to suppress the automated map problems unless there is a parking lot road drawn through them.

The reason to look at them as places is that they're destinations -- they need to be searchable, but having a "splotch" on the map for them is unnecessary.

I'm concerned about two things:
1. "Never" to landmark parking lots that are "associated with campuses" -- the use of parking lots has helped here where you would navigate to a specific parking lot on a university campus. They're usually named, and big enough to warrant an area

2. "NONE" for landmarking of farmland -- as mentioned previously, farmland in the middle of the city is worth landmarking, both for its value in navigation and the interest of why this farm hasn't been developed.

Perhaps we should just add a section about how any time we establish rules, there will be exceptions -- if there is a desired exception, then it should be discussed in the local forums and some decision can be made with the assistance of a higher-level editor, who can then also lock it to prevent well-meaning editors from removing it later.

petervdveen wrote:Because they know you are not in that shopping center?
So if I want to shop in different shopping centers I have to move my car every time? No, in Europe we don't work like that

My brother-in-law in Kentucky got towed for just this -- parked at McDonald's and went to the strip mall next to it for a sandwich. By the time he got back to his car (about 5 minutes), it was on the back of a tow truck, waiting with a $200+ bill.

The companies that have these parking problems actually allow "spotters" to sit and watch the people park and walk away, then the tow truck is waiting around the corner to swoop in for the kill.