Improvements to eliminate street duplicates

The recent launch of the Cityguides had drawn our attention to the number of street duplicates on Wikimapia. We have taken some measures aimed at eliminating those duplicates.

1) The street name input in the address field when creating and editing places was changed.
Based on collected statistics we found that most of the duplicated streets are being created when adding or editing place addresses. Accordingly we have changed the input widget to be the same as the one used in street creation. It has proven itself very effective helping to avoid duplicates while naming segments.

2) Relevant watchlist bug fixed
Until now the streets created through the address form on place edit pages did not appear on the watchlists. Now all the streets added using the place edit form are shown correctly on the watchlists, thus making detection of duplicates an easier task.

3) Street duplicates merged automatically
We have programmatically merged some nearest street duplicates. Altogether more than 40 000 duplicates were eliminated. Streets with additional photos or descriptions in more than one language were left intact to avoid data loss, so some of the duplicates still need to be merged manually.