When you are logged in to WME, you can make changes and save them within your Editable Area. Your editable area consists of:
- Driving Area - An area within a certain distance of roads you have driven recently How far this distance extends depends on your editing rank.
- Managed Area - Areas in which you are an Area Manager, whether or not you have recently driven in or nearby these areas.
You can highlight your editable area on the map by turning on the layer for Editable Area.
An object is editable if a large enough portion of it is inside one of your editable areas, subject to any further restrictions covered in the Editing restrictions page.
Driving Area
Waze records your drives when it is active (not in sleep mode), whether or not you are navigating to a destination, as long as your device has a constant GPS signal and wifi or cellular data (GSM/3G/4G/LTE) network connectivity. You can see a history of those drives in the left pane of the WME. Make sure you have no roads or landmarks selected, and click the Drives link in the side panel.
Short drives are usually added to the Drives list almost immediately. Longer drives may take a day or two to appear You can click on your most recent drives to see the details of where you drove. These details are not available for less-recent drives. Eventually, the oldest drives will be removed from your Drives list.
Managed Area
In the USA and other self managed countries, managed area assignments are given at the discretion of the community leadership of that country. Editors can apply for managed area. You don't need to drive in this managed area to keep it. You do have to remain an active editor to keep this area. You can also be assigned managed area if you are part of a mapraid. Generally, this assignment will withdrawn when the mapraid is over.
Editable Area Expiration
Driving area associated with a particular drive expires after 90 days. As of January 2018[update], this is checked at the end of each month. Driving the same roads again will renew the associated editable driving area or prevent it from expiring.
From time to time, Waze checks the editing servers to see which users with managed area have not been active on that server. The editing area of anyone who has not edited in the last 90 days will be removed.