I have just recently become active in editing maps in my area (Yeovil, Somerset, UK), and I've noticed that the "Yeovil (Somerset)" convention has not been followed here (not by me, either up to now ).

I assume it is not as important if the city/town name is unique? But is it still the intention that this convention be followed, and I should start correcting any that I find that are not Yeovil (Somerset)?

A couple of other, slightly related points:

- Are we meant to populate the "city English name" field when we are in an English speaking country? Is it intended that we duplicate the city name, or leave the "city English name" field blank?

- Now that there is a newer version of Cartouche, for road names and their aliases, is there any common direction about how a road should be labeled? Eg. A local road is the A37, aka Ilchester Road. Do I give a primary name of A37, then an alias (e.g. Ilchester Road) when one exists, or vice versa, so within towns we label with the local name first, A37 second?

I like the idea of the comma separation.

As you say its a bit more complicated for London where postal addresses differ from the actual county. I don't think we should label anything Middlesex as it doesn't exist. However Kent and Essex are a different matter. I'd favour leaving it as the postal town as I think that is more likely what people will search for. If I was going to Hornchurch, I would probably try Essex first, the same with Bromley and Kent

What about Middlesex which isn't an existing county? Should we label towns as such or label them as "London"

Yes it's a good idea, we are working on adding this to the cartouche and it will be ready soon.

Shai

Hi Dave, welcome to the forum!

We usually name suburbs after the city they are part of, for example West End (Southampton).

It's not ideal, but we're waiting for Waze to properly support counties in the editor. (We're not optimistic that it'll be any time soon). Meanwhile, we really should update the Wiki to include this...

Hi people

Can anyone give me any steer on how we treat smaller cities from a naming perspective. For example to city of southampton obviously has many suburbs. Should they all be listed as Southampton (Hants) or should they each be listed separately, for example for the West End suburb should it be called:
West End (Hants) or West End (Southampton).

Intuitively I would think it would be West End (Hants) but there might be other towns in Hampshire that have a suburb called West End.

Very confused!!
Thanks,
Dave

Hi.

I've just become a new AM for my area and have been naming the streets and cities according to the wiki conventions ( ie: town (county) ). However, most of the towns and villages that have previously been mapped have not been and are just labelled as the town name. With me doing it correctly ( I hope ), I now have double names for some of places.

My question is, if I go around my area changing all the wrongly labelled places to the correct naming convention will the older names disappear from the map to be replaced by my town (county)? Also, when will the Waze developers get around to giving us a County field in the database? The map will look incredibly crowded if every place name on the map has a county attached to it.

Cheers.

I wish they would give us the county/region field because I am not a fan of the current method.

I'm also not a fan of the current method. Appending every place with a county name seems counter productive and it makes the map look cluttered and unprofessional. I will now do what you do and waste my time renaming the places if and when the county field gets added to the database.

Cheers

This is a really tricky one, with several possible solutions - all with pros and cons.

I originally thought to show the borough as the "city name" - and initially started using "Kingston" for all street names, and not using the neighbourhood names like "New Malden" or "Tolworth". However, I started to think that most locals are going to think they live in "Tolworth" and use that when looking up street names rather than the borough name, which most of us don't really use that much.

However in some neighbourhoods, you can be even more granular. For example, you could say you lived in Islington - or you could break it up even further and say you lived at the Angel, or in "Stoke Newington" - both of which are in Islington. Again, when I used to live in Stoke Newington - I rarely said I lived in Islington.

Ideally I think we should try to follow the principle of letting locals define their city as they themselves call it, but people will have different ideas of what their neighbourhood should be called. This is especially true of the neighbourhoods where people identify their address more in terms of the closest tube station than the actual district name.

Taking the argument all the way to the extreme - if -any - part of London should be called "London" - you'd think it's the inner-core - and I doubt anyone's going to quibble about using "London" for roads in The City. But should we use "Soho" instead of "London"? "Mayfair"? "Westminster"?

As it's important to have some agreement/consensus I'll suggest the following possibilities, but I think we should wait to hear from more Londoners before setting one in concrete...

1.) We could use postcodes as the delineator - all N, NW, SW, SE and E postcodes are London. Downside: lots of neighbourhoods that you'd think would have their own identiers won't.

2.) We could use some sort of geographic delinerator - everything inside the inner ring is "London", or going even bigger, "ALL London boroughs are "London")

This still leaves open the question: how do we decide what to call the areas that AREN'T "London" that I alluded to at the start of this post...

You'll notice that I generally have been leaving the city field blank in hopes that a solution would become apparently later on, and I'd go back later and change it. A clear solution hasn't yet occurred to me though.

zzyzxuk
Area Manager
Greater London

OK - I think I have a solution, but it will need both your input, and a little technical help from Waze.

If you all like it, I can ask the Waze guys if they'll help us with it - I think they're able to, and as it's a pretty big problem for us in the UK, it'll be worth their time to do it...

Here's what I propose:

Currently, we have three fields in the database that we use to identify a street, in this format:

Country: United Kingdom
City: London, United Kingdom
Street: Whitehall

Or, to use a more relevant example:

Country: United Kingdom
City: Washington, United Kingdom
Street: High Street

Now, the problem is that we all want to have an additional layer of place name. For example, there are TWO cities called Washington in the UK, one in W Sussex, the other in Tyne & Wear.

I propose that we convert to a system where we put more information in the 'City' field like so:

Country: United Kingdom
City: Washington, W Sussex
Street: High Street

or

Country: United Kingdom
City: Washington, Tyne and Wear
Street: High Street

This is very similar to how Waze has addressed this problem in the USA where (famously) there are a large number of cities called Springfield, for example. They include the "State" in their city name field. So, we will include "County" in our name field.

For this to work, we'll need to use a standardised list of counties (no historical counties pleaes!), and I also propose we use abbreviations such as CAMBS, etc.

This will solve the problem of how to do London too - we can use borough names, or other neighbourhood names, and still show that it's London by using London as the county name:

Country: United Kingdom
City: Stratford, London
Street: High Street

So, before we move on this, how many of you support this idea?

If there's some general agreement, we'd then need to agree a standard for entering county names.

Then finally, we'd need to ask Waze to do a "global search and replace", by providing them with a list of cities names that need globally changing, e.g., Surbiton, would need to become Surbiton, Surrey. I think if we did the grunt work for them of compliling a list of what needs to be replaced, they might be more willing to do this,... but I do think that this is practically essential to do.

It's how Garmin and Tomtom have done -their- address databases, IIRC, and in the UK is almost essential.

Tell me what you think.

zzyzx-uk
Area Manager - Greater London