Welcome to Waze Laos!
We would love to have your help. Read along and join the Waze Laos editing community.
What is Waze?
Waze is a free GPS navigation application for mobile telephone or tablet. Waze has speech support, free map updates and uses real time traffic information and actual reports from its users. Users like you! With Waze you can share your driver experience, connect with friends, send your ETA to show when you will be home, or just avoid traffic jams. Waze is crowd-sourced, meaning it is maintained by its users.
- Waze has the application, often called client or just app. You can read more about the app on the global wiki pages
- The Waze map (Waze Map Editor, or WME) is updated and maintained by volunteers like you. Information on editing can be found in the paragraph about Editing Guidelines.
- Its users form a community, who work together locally as well as internationally.
This page focuses on the community and Map Editing in Laos. For the general basics on editing, there is a Quick-Start Guide provided. With these two pages, everyone should be able to edit constructively in Laos! If you want to know more about a subject, there are many links provided to pages with detailed explanations. Our advice is to open them while you press Ctrl. This opens the linked pages in another tab and keep this basic page open.
Editing Guidelines
Global Wazeopedia (General guidelines)
Community
The community maintains the Waze map and makes sure it works as best as possible. We make guidelines that are specific of our location, as well as work together internationally. There are no local editors in Laos, and much of the map in Laos is not even drawn yet. If you live in Laos, or travel often in Laos, we really need your help! You can help by sharing your experiences, or even edit the map yourself. How to connect is described in Communication.
The current active community is completely made up of international editors. Please contact one of the editors in the chart below for further information.
| Editor User Name | Rank | Role | Edits in | Home Country |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| fermario73 (PM) | 5 | CM | Entire country | Argentina |
| leinerg (PM) | 5 | AM | Northern 2/3 of Laos | Costa Rica |
| kyhtak (PM) | 4 | AM | Northern 2/3 of Laos | United States |
Communication
How can I contact Waze? Where can I find more information? Where can I post my questions? Currently, the Country Managers (CM) are responsible for Waze in Laos. Please contact them for questions or assistance.
Forum
The Laos Forum is a good starting point for finding more information. You can read the latest information, learn from questions of other editors or ask a question yourself. Login to the Laos forum using your standard Waze login and password you use in the app and the editor. In the forum you can also make use of Private Messages (PM). This is a kind of inbox, like your e-mail. When you receive a PM, you will also receive a message to your regular e-mail to inform you of the new message. How you can handle your PM's is described here.
WME Chat
While you are editing, you can directly request help in WME chat. It shows you the level of the editor you are talking to. Please keep in mind that most editors are willing to help, but not all of them have the technical knowledge or editing experience to give you the best answer. Because the built-in chat does not always work as desired, we mostly use Waze Laos Discord Chat.
Waze Laos Discord Chat
We have chosen to use Discord as our communication platform. If you would like to join discussions and help develop the Waze map in Laos, Discord gives the best opportunities. There are different channels for specific subjects, and you can send private Direct Messages (DM) as well. It is easy to share pictures and screenshots, and to get help from multiple editors. It is also easy to set notification rules for your browser as well as for your phone.
Wazeopedia
A lot of information is available in the Wazeopedia. ("Wiki" for short) There are global pages with information applicable to all regions in the World. There are local pages as well.
We have just started this Wiki page for Laos. Because all of our current editors live outside of Laos, this page is only available in English right now. At the bottom of each Wiki page, the last update is shown.
If this is more than half a year ago, please take into consideration that the information might be outdated.
Editing
More coming soon
How to start
More coming soon
Roads
More coming soon
Base Map Editing
More coming soon
Road Naming
More coming soon
Abbreviations
More coming soon
Road Categories
More coming soon
Road Types
More coming soon
Drivable Segments
More coming soon
Highways
More coming soon
Other Streets
More coming soon
Roundabouts
More coming soon
Non-Drivable Segments
More coming soon
Locking Standard
More coming soon
Speed Limits
More coming soon
Update Requests (UR's)
More coming soon
Map Problems (MP's)
More coming soon
Projects
For starters, there are four basic projects (besides just getting the rest of the roads mapped) that would really help with the map in Laos.
Find Non-Copyrighted Sources for Resources (if such even exists)
We really need non-copyrighted reliable sources so we can correctly map and label at least major roads, and so we can name rivers, major landmarks and features, cities, towns, and villages.
City / Town / Village Names
This one is going to require some sort of non-copyrighted map and / or local users. Since there are few road names, about the best we will be able to do is get people to the correct village.
Create a UR Reply Spreadsheet
Pakistan has a really nice spreadsheet that uses both English and Pakistani responses. It would be nice to have something like that for Laos, since none of us speak the language.
Google Translate might be OK for a start, but the ideal would be to have native speakers of the Lao language, who are also fluent in English, to work with us on this.
Petrol / Gas Stations
Another thing to work on . . .