Are route log websites obsolete?

[english si]

If we're talking about something legislatively-created, then there should always be a source.

But we're not taking about something legislative-created.

Which is one problem with Wikipedia - because other places define road numbers in legislation, some of the Vogons want legislation or similar cited or it wasn't sufficient. "Assume good faith" just didn't exist, and those (like me) who were only there to do stuff related about my hobby, rather than have wikipedia as a hobby, didn't want to trapse through Wikipedia policy pages and find out the jargon to repeal these people who saw wikipedia bureaucracy as fun. They made wikipedia unfun, and they sure weren't going to make the hobby unfun, so walking away to preserve it was useful.

The DfT Road List is literally a spreadsheet that compiled an administrative card index in the Department of Transport building. We only know about it, because it got emailed to someone on SABRE who then attached it to a post in a hidden part of the forum, and, as I was getting rid of an Old PC and found the .xls file on there, I transposed it to a SABRE Wiki Sandbox page about 5 years later (which wouldn't have happened if Wikipedia didn't suck, because the SABRE Wiki wouldn't have existed, and the data contained isn't of much use to Wikipedia*). There's no publisher, no nothing.

*All the fun stuff in there wouldn't have been notable enough. Wikipedia wouldn't get excited about possible renumberings of short bits of motorway if a scheme from the 70s got built, or A roads we didn't know about previously that all we know from the DfT Roads List is the local authority who requested a number or town where it was - sometimes we've worked out where using original research and inference from secondary sources, but others we still have no clue as the original source isn't helpful beyond saying "this number was allocated to / reserved for a road here".

[Chris]

The French also have a very extensive off-Wikipedia wiki about roads: http://routes.wikia.com/wiki/Accueil

[formulanone]

"Assume good faith" just didn't exist, and those (like me) who were only there to do stuff related about my hobby, rather than have wikipedia as a hobby, didn't want to trapse through Wikipedia policy pages and find out the jargon to repeal these people who saw wikipedia bureaucracy as fun. They made wikipedia unfun, and they sure weren't going to make the hobby unfun, so walking away to preserve it was useful.

I can see why working with Wikipedia can be like that. There's a lot of overlapping policy, and the tendency to codify everything for "professional appearance" reasons makes it a helpful resource but a clumsy ideal to work with. But there's that haunting problem that we'd possibly have a similar problems if we created our own roads wiki. There would be a few users (or unregistered users) that would cross the line, and then there would be harder rules/guidelines, and I fear we'd be no different. Or too sporadic in number for adequate coverage. On the other hand, I know there's lots of people who overlap these boards with The Wiki, and from what I hear, there's occasional disagreements with Open Street Map users.

Then again, I tend to only add my photos - especially in articles where there are none - which keeps me out of the bureaucracy loop. Nobody seems to question that, and that's how I like it. Ironically, the one time I fell "afoul" of staff was when someone used a mis-attribution in AARoads' Shield Gallery to back up their point.