In mission statements it's not uncommon to see the phrase "attract and retain talented employees". Waze is strong on the "attract" part but it mustn't neglect the "retain" part. While I understand the principle of encouraging junior editors, advancing editors will lose heart if they spend too much time fixing things constantly being broken by junior editors. An advancing editor who has begun to lose heart may also become less polite with the junior editors, which of course will discourage them too. Waze ends up losing both.

So, a game-like system for practicing skills that awards real points would support both attraction and retention of good editors. Seems like a big win for Waze to me.

@kentsmith9, agreed this is not easily possible as a purely volunteer effort. The concept would involve Waze development support for an automated practice system that resets automatically. A scenario in which routing from A to B starts out broken and must be fixed without breaking routing from C to D or introducing bad routing from E to F would test a lot of skills.

The scenario could be made increasingly difficult by asking the editor to:

• Prevent routing through a private neighborhood.
• Get routing working to an address on road divided in reality but not split in Waze.
• Disconnect a road that has been permanently blocked off.
• Fix an intersection mapped too literally to the satellite image and broken as a result.
• Fix busted turn restrictions on an at-grade connector.
• Fix a TTS problem like "Robert E Lee Blvd".
• Fix a roundabout so it routes properly.
• Create a park and place the stop point so it routes properly.
• Use a timed turn restriction.
• Deal with a 1-month closure of a road segment.
• Restrict a road to buses and shuttles only.
• Deal with locked segments (trick question: you can't, you have to get help, but this is a very real situation!).

What would be more difficult is practicing compliance with local conventions. I doubt Waze HQ wants to do that in an automated practice system because, honestly, Waze would work perfectly fine in a town in which every single private parking stall has its own "Parking Lot" area place, every lane of every parking lot is mapped, and every POI is an Area Place including every Taco Bell and ATM. I suppose the Waze app wouldn't even mind that much if every single corner of every single intersection had an at-grade connector, provided it was added correctly. But all these things violate convention/style guidelines and cause the editing community terrific grief.

For convention issues like these, a multiple-choice practice test with screenshots is most likely the way to go.

kentsmith9 wrote:I do believe having the locks too high will be a huge disruption to the editing community. I was previously of the mind that we should have locks very high, but now I am not defaulting above the following for No. CA now that the highways are very deep inside our major cities with the FC:

F/R = 5 for major areas, 4 for remote areas
MH = 3
mH = 2
Pr = 2
St = 1

I am open to setting ramps lower in all areas if we think that is a big problem. To be honest I think construction happens so infrequently that an unlock request on a Freeway/Ramp is good to have the RM or CM know what is happening.

Based on recent experience in the South Bay (of the SF Bay Area) I would like to propose that we default to Lock Level 3 for mH in urban areas of Northern California.

I'm curious what our brethren elsewhere in the Southwest region have found...but here we have had a couple of editors reach Rank 2 quickly by creating multiple spaghetti messes of parking-lot roads as well as railroads (existing, overlapping existing, and defunct) or by extensive changing of road types based on intuition, not FC. These editors have not learned about checking connectivity or turn restrictions, or about FC, but nevertheless have confidence in their work and are unafraid of reworking intersections and road types on significant highways.

Attempts to establish two-way communication with these editors have met with little success. One was finally persuaded in chat to check PMs, but there has been no response. The other was eventually found in Live Users, presented with a message scrawled in red roads, and upon visiting the chat to report it was asked to check PMs; but this editor simply responded with "lol" (a misunderstanding, not a retort, I believe) and the PMs remain unchecked.

It has not been good.

Locking mH to 3 may not be called for in more rural areas (?) but in the urban zones of Northern California it is starting to look necessary.

Opinions?

(EDIT: Clarified editor behavior.)

The editors in question have been reported to the SM and RC. My understanding -- I could easily be wrong here and would welcome correction! -- is that, since blocking is so heavy-handed, it needs to be reserved for editors who have clearly damaged routing and who are clearly continuing to damage routing after being sent a PM and given several days to respond.

In particular, my understanding is that inability to establish two-way communication is not, all by itself, sufficient cause for blocking.

In this situation, both editors appear to have damaged the map, with resulting URs, but damage specifically to routing has been less severe. Both editors have been PM'd and alerted via chat to the presence of a PM; one has read the PM, the other not. Neither has acknowledged the importance or content of the contact in any way. It is unclear if these editors are reforming, losing interest in Waze, or simply dormant until the next map bomb. As this behavior doesn't meet the bar necessary for a temporary block, we are taking a wait-and-see approach. They may or may not cause more damage; if they do, the damage may or may not be severe. Without two-way communication there's no way to be sure.

Given the work involved in finding and cleaning up the damage already done, and the high bar for blocking, my desire is simply to keep it from happening again. Thus the locking proposal.

If the bar for blocking should be lower, that would be a great conversation too. It's hard for me to know what's best here.

(EDIT: Another solution is better tools for AMs and above. I proposed one such tool here, granting AMs the ability to send a special "blocking PM" that blocks the recipient only until the PM is accessed. Not responded to, just accessed, and the block would clear automatically and immediately upon access. I believe this capability would go a long way towards helping in situations like this.)

If blocking is reserved only for editors who are both unresponsive to contacts and responsible for egregious and continuing damage specifically to routing; and

If Waze will not provide tools to require reception of community messages as a condition of continued editing; and

If it continues to be easy and automatic to reach Rank 2 regardless of the quality of one's edits and without any kind of communication or supervision;

Then we only have three choices.

1. Resign ourselves to a practice of locking the maps at higher ranks at the cost of further limiting good entry-level editors and increasing the unlock/update workload on advanced editors;

2. Resign ourselves to mopping up after uninformed editors, who may continue to make uninformed edits below the blocking threshold, at the cost of losing advanced-editors' time that would otherwise be spent mentoring, responding to URs and closure situations, or applying FC.

3. Allow the map to be damaged, say "oh well", and go fishing.

I don't like any of these choices, but since we are forced to choose, I choose #1. Although #3 has a certain charm.

vectorspace wrote: I also ask the question, "Why would we need a southwest locking guidance?" Irowiki, why do you think we need one? I can think of non-technical answers that focus more on the social aspects of Waze... for instance, that it would be harder to do this country-wide, so let's just work to advance our region.

vectorspace wrote:

ply8808 wrote:Not an attempt to answer for irowiki, ...

Nuts, I should have coordinated with my fellow Mentor about this. As his Mentor, I was trying to put irowiki on the spot (a little bit) to defend his position publicly!

ply8808 wrote:Bummer
But I do not feel we should let your mentee completely off the hook as he did start the topic, and I for one am very interested in his response

vectorspace wrote:

ply8808 wrote:Bummer
But I do not feel we should let your mentee completely off the hook as he did start the topic, and I for one am very interested in his response

No problem! Defense of editors against tyrannical champs is a virtue! I look forward to his response too!

Oops. This thread fell off my subscribe list for some reason.

I hope I'm not disappointing anyone, but it's actually not that complex, in reading the "nationwide lock standard" thread, I noticed a few people were doing locking standards by region (most notably New England) so I thought I'd jump start the discussion

I do not feel it is as big as an issue as figuring out FC stuff, for example.

I do believe having the locks too high will be a huge disruption to the editing community. I was previously of the mind that we should have locks very high, but now I am not defaulting above the following for No. CA now that the highways are very deep inside our major cities with the FC:

F/R = 5 for major areas, 4 for remote areas
MH = 3
mH = 2
Pr = 2
St = 1

I am open to setting ramps lower in all areas if we think that is a big problem. To be honest I think construction happens so infrequently that an unlock request on a Freeway/Ramp is good to have the RM or CM know what is happening.

Over the years we keep talking about setting up a fake town, but the problem is resetting it to get it back to the original condition to have someone retest. So what if we have a bunch of fake town screen shots with all items visible and we provide either answers A-D, or a question with an blank answer field.

If you are having trouble reaching users that are disrupting the map with their edits, we should be able to alert Waze HQ and get them to halt their edits until they respond appropriately. I know other states have used this pretty effectively.

I know how frustrating it is for "good" editors to be stuck behind segment locks that should not otherwise be so high, so I would hate to simply force mH to be level 3 since it is so common in many urban cities now with our FC updates.

I too am interested in the So. CA feedback on this topic.

kentsmith9 wrote:... but now I am not defaulting above the following for No. CA now that the highways are very deep inside our major cities with the FC:

F/R = 5 for major areas, 4 for remote areas
MH = 3
mH = 2
Pr = 2
St = 1
...

DwarfLord wrote:Based on recent experience in the South Bay (of the SF Bay Area) I would like to propose that we default to Lock Level 3 for mH in urban areas of Northern California.

I'm curious what our brethren elsewhere in the Southwest region have found...

We too (SoCal) have had huge problems with editors reaching L2 in a frighteningly short period of time, without any interaction in the community, and obviously no immersion in the wiki. I have no objection at all to a wide-scale raising of important mH roads to L3 in urban areas, or wherever they serve as vital connections.

I think that it's important for us to have a level of objectivity in setting locks, so the above defaults that we are using for minimums are a fine starting point. But one size does not fit all in this regard. There are mH and even PS roads which are very important to protect, and the current promotion system for editor rank is just not compatible with leaving these at L2 and expecting the map not to be damaged.

If we look at these defaults as minimum levels per road type, it's not that hard to develop a list of criteria for raising lock levels selectively. I submit some examples...
• Large roads of Street, PS, or mH types which are tempting targets for splitting or un-splitting may be raised by one lock level.
• AGCs and other segments which have carefully tuned junction angles should be locked between 3 and 5, depending upon complexity and road/intersection value.
• Wayfinders and other non-intuitive mechanisms for producing correct navigational prompts should be locked at 4 or 5.
• Roads classed as MH which are actual major highways, but not limited access enough to qualify as Freeway, should be locked at 4 or 5.
• Any of the above items which involve individual segments, rather than whole stretches of road, may be locked at 6 if of sufficient value and not easily comprehensible to a visiting CM or uninformed L5.

But locks only half way solve the problem. I think that we as a community need to collectively voice to Waze our desperate need for a more immediate and foolproof line of communication to editors of any rank who are engaged in something damaging to the map. PMs can go unnoticed, even by those who have been in the forums before. Something such as what DwarfLord has suggested, which would temporarily suspend editing rights, until messages had at least been read, would be a fantastic improvement.

Edit: Realized I had botched a pre-post edit job, and pasted a sentence into the wrong paragraph. Hate when I do that.