Smudged city View history

A "city smudge" or "smudged city" is when the name of a city appears on the client map where is doesn't belong.

Waze attempts to connect all roads with the same country, state, city, and road name together. So if you label a road in California as belonging in Virginia, that city's name will now appear along a band across the US.

Following is an example of how to resolve the situation, using the city "Fayetteville" appearing in the Charlotte, NC area.

Step 1: Identify the problem

• Make note of the name of the city you are seeing.

Step 2: Check the editor for obvious, close errors

• Open up the map editor in the area that you saw the problem. Zoom in and out a few times and make note of the names of cities you see displayed over the map. If you can find the misplaced city name, bingo! Go to step 5.

Step 3: Check for non-local errors in the editor

• In the editor, type the name of the smudged city into the search bar with NO state. Hit enter and a list of options should appear.
• Now one by one, pick each returned result. Similar to Step 2, you want to zoom and scroll around a little.
• You are looking for the smudged city name showing up multiple times like what I found in the Fayetteville, AR area:

(NOTE: this is also a good way to find typos of city names)