For those of you who don't know, I'm also an admin over at Wikipedia, where I do a lot of work with the U.S. Roads WikiProject (USRD for short). Well, we've got lots of articles that need expansion, and a lot of states have exactly zero people editing them, so we need more roadgeeks! If you're interested in participating, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_U.S._Roads/New_user_orientation – this is a new page we've put together to help new users. So if you've ever thought about contributing (or contributing more), this page can help you make sense of things!
Editing at Wikipedia is a lot of fun, especially if you like learning highway history, because you're always turning up new things about the roads you're writing about. You get to meet more roadgeeks too!
If you've got any questions, post away!
I've posted some to the Arkansas Highway pages, but the format seems tedious. Especially when some ignorant twit just starts entering stuff without any sort of verification. :pan:
I used to work on the Dutch wikipedia, but got tired of all those linguistic purists there. The Dutch wikipedia is large in quantity, but small in quality, it is nowhere near the English wikipedia, so I almost always use the English wikipedia first. For instance, if you look up the Dallas, Texas page on the Dutch wikipedia, it's about 7 sentences of text, some uninteresting trivia and that's it.
I've done edits off and on whenever I've been able to find published sources to back them up, but too often things happen, yet there's no published source that denotes what has happened (such as the recent signing of M-311). Honestly I'd love to keep articles up-to-date as possible, but that's hard to do when all I have to go on is original research, which is strictly verboten by Wikipedia. That (amongst other things) has kept me from becoming a more active Wikipedia editor.
I've done occasional "fixes" on a few Minnesota pages here and there, but I've found it easier (when I've had the motivation to begin with) to update my own highway pages...
Quote from: rawmustard on December 31, 2009, 09:19:43 AMHonestly I'd love to keep articles up-to-date as possible, but that's hard to do when all I have to go on is original research, which is strictly verboten by Wikipedia. That (amongst other things) has kept me from becoming a more active Wikipedia editor.
Some of the most knowledgeable British Roadgeeks had a similar problem and then also had the problem that their websites were treated by one aggressive user as not good enough to be sources, and also plagiarised by others without source links. Add to that the odd numpty adding information that's full of crap on there.
I don't think any of the more involved SABRE members work on the UK roads wikiproject anymore, mostly because of the SABRE Wiki (http://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki), which doesn't trash hours in archives researching, nor copies members websites (but rather acts as a portal for them). Plus, unlike wikipedia, we can have lots of very small pages without fear of deletion for not being interesting enough (as chosen by someone with no knowledge or interest in the topic).
I already indirectly work on Wikipedia. It's a result of allowing creative commons for my photos on my Flickr account. I've gotten feedback from a few people (from roadgeeks and those who aren't roadgeeks) that they are using my photos in order to complete their Wikipedia articles.
Quote from: english si on December 31, 2009, 10:00:44 AM
Quote from: rawmustard on December 31, 2009, 09:19:43 AMHonestly I'd love to keep articles up-to-date as possible, but that's hard to do when all I have to go on is original research, which is strictly verboten by Wikipedia. That (amongst other things) has kept me from becoming a more active Wikipedia editor.
Some of the most knowledgeable British Roadgeeks had a similar problem and then also had the problem that their websites were treated by one aggressive user as not good enough to be sources, and also plagiarised by others without source links. Add to that the odd numpty adding information that's full of crap on there.
I don't think any of the more involved SABRE members work on the UK roads wikiproject anymore, mostly because of the SABRE Wiki (http://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki), which doesn't trash hours in archives researching, nor copies members websites (but rather acts as a portal for them). Plus, unlike wikipedia, we can have lots of very small pages without fear of deletion for not being interesting enough (as chosen by someone with no knowledge or interest in the topic).
I find that Wikipedia is a good entry point into our roads hobby, much like nycroads.com served as an entry point into the hobby for me just over 10 years ago. Regarding a wiki, it has been suggested to me to turn Gribblenation into a wiki on more than one occasion. While I am opposed to that idea, I do think that an independent wiki focused on United States and Canadian roads and a little more flexibility than Wikipedia would be a good idea. It's just a matter of finding the right people who can be dedicated to running a roads wiki and a web hosting provider that allows the creation of a wiki on one's site.
I have been working on a Dutch-language wiki about highways. So far I covered all freeways in the United States and most U.S. Highways. It took me two years, and I'm not done yet, I also covered various countries in Europe and countries like Japan, South Korea, Israel and Brazil.
The main problem with wikipedia is the original research ban. Almost anything is original research in the wiki I'm working on.
I'll modify errors that I find to be particularly egregious (eg claims that US-87 runs along I-25 from Buffalo Wyoming to Raton NM without deviation), but I have my own highway pages to put up and write, and those take a ton of time, so I just don't find myself with the energy to update Wikipedia, although in an ideal world I would love to.
Quote from: dougtone on December 31, 2009, 10:12:46 AM
I find that Wikipedia is a good entry point into our roads hobby, much like nycroads.com served as an entry point into the hobby for me just over 10 years ago. Regarding a wiki, it has been suggested to me to turn Gribblenation into a wiki on more than one occasion. While I am opposed to that idea, I do think that an independent wiki focused on United States and Canadian roads and a little more flexibility than Wikipedia would be a good idea. It's just a matter of finding the right people who can be dedicated to running a roads wiki and a web hosting provider that allows the creation of a wiki on one's site.
We explored that scenario a while ago when we were evaluating the option of forking from Wikipedia. We decided against this because the Wikipedia site gives us so many advantages (server space, being one of the top 10 sites on the Internet, peer review, infrastructure to deal with problem users, and so much more) that we would not have otherwise. We have had quite a few highway articles featured on the main page of Wikipedia before.
While the serve space and publicity issues would be there, peer review would exist in the form of other road geeks (rather than people that know nothing about roads and are wrapped up in Wikipedia's politics) and infrastructure for dealing with problem users could easily be created (you could even copy Wikipedia's own policy). Of course, this does assume that you would use the same software as Wikipedia does rather than try to create your own code from scratch.
I believe that server space could be mitigated by hosting it on wikia or some other service.
Publicity probably can't be solved.
Wikipedia also focuses more on general interest; making articles that are useful to everybody, not just the roadgeek. This is helpful when you want to show your work to other people. The purpose of peer review is to provide a different perspective, and also get help from better copyeditors and writers.
The advantage of having such a system where anybody can edit and where people go every day is that we arguably have one of the best websites for US roads on the Internet.
Jimmy Wales needs to stop begging me for money in huge letters as the very first thing I see on each page and then perhaps I can take the site a bit more seriously.
when I first clicked "turn off the shameless panhandling" I didn't mean "replace it several days from now with even more shameless panhandling".
by the way, give me some money, everyone. I will buy vodka with it. Vodka is good [citation required].
Quote from: agentsteel53 on January 01, 2010, 09:52:07 PM
Jimmy Wales needs to stop begging me for money in huge letters as the very first thing I see on each page and then perhaps I can take the site a bit more seriously.
when I first clicked "turn off the shameless panhandling" I didn't mean "replace it several days from now with even more shameless panhandling".
by the way, give me some money, everyone. I will buy vodka with it. Vodka is good [citation required].
Adblock does the trick for me... The filter I use for it is "http://upload.wikimedia.org/centralnotice/*"
If you have a user account, you can turn it off permanently ;)
Quote from: algorerhythms on January 01, 2010, 10:56:21 PM
Adblock does the trick for me... The filter I use for it is "http://upload.wikimedia.org/centralnotice/*"
sweet! adding the filter now. I hope they don't try to end-run it by changing the location of their propaganda machine.
Quote from: algorerhythms on January 01, 2010, 10:56:21 PM
Adblock does the trick for me... The filter I use for it is "http://upload.wikimedia.org/centralnotice/*"
Nice I'm also adding the filter now. I also hate the big and bold letters beggin me for money on every single page.
===
As for the road articles, I usually read them for some background information on a particular highway especially some of the ones in other countries that not covered on any roads website. I also use their road sign and shield pictures for sketchup models and other uses such as the MC 401 in my avatar.
Quote from: Scott5114 on January 01, 2010, 11:11:09 PM
If you have a user account, you can turn it off permanently ;)
I've found that user account switch to be less permanent than I had hoped. (Mainly, because of the cookie settings I use, the message would reappear when I went to log back in after restarting Firefox.) So, in my experience the Adblock solution works best.
Quote from: agentsteel53 on January 01, 2010, 11:15:38 PM
Quote from: algorerhythms on January 01, 2010, 10:56:21 PM
Adblock does the trick for me... The filter I use for it is "http://upload.wikimedia.org/centralnotice/*"
sweet! adding the filter now. I hope they don't try to end-run it by changing the location of their propaganda machine.
Yes, that works nicely. Thanks, folks!
My general rule on charities is, "Don't call me, I'll contact you if I want to give."
Waiting for en.wikipedia.org...
Reading en.wikipedia.org...
Transferring data from en.wikipedia.org...
Done
Shouldn't that count as "contact"? ;)
I'll start up a "Anybody want to work on AARoads" thread. :cool:
There a site named Wikia www.wikia.com who hosts various wiki devoted to books, movies, cartoons, mangas,etc.... maybe we could host an highway wiki there. Maybe we could cover the United States, Canada but also Australia, Mexico, Europe, etc.....
Quote from: Stephane Dumas on January 07, 2010, 05:18:14 PM
There a site named Wikia www.wikia.com who hosts various wiki devoted to books, movies, cartoons, mangas,etc.... maybe we could host an highway wiki there. Maybe we could cover the United States, Canada but also Australia, Mexico, Europe, etc.....
Wikia isn't generally good if you're looking to make a serious project. Lots of ads as well.
Quote from: Juliancolton on January 08, 2010, 05:08:54 PM
Quote from: Stephane Dumas on January 07, 2010, 05:18:14 PM
There a site named Wikia www.wikia.com who hosts various wiki devoted to books, movies, cartoons, mangas,etc.... maybe we could host an highway wiki there. Maybe we could cover the United States, Canada but also Australia, Mexico, Europe, etc.....
Wikia isn't generally good if you're looking to make a serious project. Lots of ads as well.
Yes, and you have to abide by the Wikia policies for what you can do with your site (I think there's provisions for shutting it down if it goes inactive, you have to get the topic approved, other Wikias can get merged into your Wikia on whim, etc.) I looked into this back in the 2007 era when we considered forking from Wikipedia, but I wasn't really crazy about the idea.
Might be simpler for one of us to start a wiki site about highways.
Why - when we all have sites already? well, most of us :-D
Quote from: agentsteel53 on January 01, 2010, 09:52:07 PM
by the way, give me some money, everyone. I will buy vodka with it. Vodka is good [citation required].
Unless and until you spill vodka on your Snuggie, and you end up drunk and smelling like Russia.
I am a beginner-of-sorts on USRD. I've been on Wikipedia since at least 2006. I want to help out as much as possible.
My main areas of focus is Interstate highways, U.S. highways, and state routes (especially Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina).
I suppose I need to go back and see how forked-up the Arkansas Highways pages are these days. :whip:
Quote from: US71 on April 26, 2012, 05:24:27 PM
I suppose I need to go back and see how forked-up the Arkansas Highways pages are these days. :whip:
The pages aren't that bad... I have added a good number of Louisiana highways (got tired of adding, so I'm revamping the pages to conform them to the rest of the articles), and two or three Arkansas highways, mostly in Southeastern AR.
I did some work on Wikipedia a few years ago but haven't lately. With the whole thing about citing sources it was too much like writing a research paper for me.
I've edited several pages about roads on wikipedia trying to improve the sight. Wiki haas really good facts but they also have alot of made up ones too.
Quote from: sr641 on May 09, 2012, 07:48:11 PM
I've edited several pages about roads on wikipedia trying to improve the sight. Wiki haas really good facts but they also have alot of made up ones too.
The quality of Wikipedia's vision is, itself, a made up fact.
I've noticed recently that the info boxes and expandable boxes in Wikipedia articles on Interstates, US Routes and State Highways are now FHWA green. Whose idea was that? I quite like it like that, much better than the default pale blue color. Also a fan of the FHWA yellow highlights for major interstates / US Routes
Quote from: national highway 1 on July 08, 2012, 11:56:24 PM
I've noticed recently that the info boxes and expandable boxes in Wikipedia articles on Interstates, US Routes and State Highways are now FHWA green. Whose idea was that? I quite like it like that, much better than the default pale blue color. Also a fan of the FHWA yellow highlights for major interstates / US Routes
That would be my doing in both cases. We had used a different shade of green at one point, but I had it changed to MUTCD green. You'll also notice that the color in the infoboxes on former highways is a gray, under construction is a paler orange (MUTCD orange is way too bright for that application)., and various scenic or historic highways have the brown and white as well. Canada uses MUTCD blue for freeways, the UK uses motorway blue, A road green and yellow or black and white as appropriate. Each country can have its own color scheme in the infobox very easily. The pale blue remains a default for any country that hasn't had its schemes implemented or customized.
I'm slowly converting the various navigation boxes to MUTCD green, and I put the MUTCD yellow in on the Interstates/US Highways navbox as well. I'm happy to hear that someone noticed and likes the changes!
Let me clarify that I'm not solely responsible for all of these as others have contributed in various ways.
((sorry about the blast from the past/dust bin....))
I have been working for a little while on the US 175 Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_175), which has sorely needed some help. I would add topical photos of various kinds if I could, but I'm in-between cars (and jobs) right now. There are a few "ref"s needed, but I could get them with visits to 2 or 3 libraries. Otherwise, I have found many sources so the dreaded top banner of you-know-what shouldn't rear its ugly head, I don't think.
So, would there be anyone who wikis or webmasters that would give the article a once-over (without too many volleys of eggs and tomatoes, please)?
(As with any site, it's not 'done' yet, of course.)
At a quick glance the biggest issue is indeed the sourcing. http://texaspopculture.blogspot.com/2013/03/route-66-detour.html wouldn't be considered a reliable source under Wikipedia rules.
The detail for the Route description section is a bit on the high side - I would suggest removing the speed limits and some of the minor details. External links generally aren't integrated into the main text of the article. I would integrate the "Notable people" section into the rest of the history, and perhaps cut down on some of the details.
If you get the sourcing issues resolved, it could easily be a Good Article candidate.
Quote from: rschen7754 on March 28, 2017, 09:40:32 PM
At a quick glance the biggest issue is indeed the sourcing. http://texaspopculture.blogspot.com/2013/03/route-66-detour.html wouldn't be considered a reliable source under Wikipedia rules.
The detail for the Route description section is a bit on the high side - I would suggest removing the speed limits and some of the minor details. External links generally aren't integrated into the main text of the article. I would integrate the "Notable people" section into the rest of the history, and perhaps cut down on some of the details.
If you get the sourcing issues resolved, it could easily be a Good Article candidate.
Thanks for the overview and genuine opinion. I guess my bias shows in some of the passages :D . Since I've had so much to do with the whole highway over the years, I guess the descriptiveness was just me trying to give the grand tour in words, so to speak. I know I can source at least some of the remaining parts when I would be able to come upon at least 2 or 3 libraries. I was kinda torn on the notables, should I tell more about them (since none of them have their own Wikipedia articles), or just leave it at their ties to the highway. The
Route 66 filming in Crandall has precious little referencing it in the web so I guess I was kind of excited to see the blog posting. One thing besides the sources that is undone is the mileages on the exits-intersections chart. I'm afraid the TxDOT number of 111 miles for the whole highway is a bit off, but with no mile markers, there really isn't any good way to measure (from an amateur's viewpoint) what the real distance, between towns as well as all together, is. I would like to do more on the history (I know there is more to do, like where the 'old roads' are, how some proponents in the past wanted the highway to extend further (in both directions), as well as other topics), but that's more far-off library visits and otherwise more unsourced passages. I guess the only reason there would be links in the article was because the subjects don't have their own Wikipedia articles, but I can do a search again or retype them unlinked if it comes to it. One thing I ran across a while back is that the US 175 article is on Wikipedia's list of needing a better infobox map. I'm not sure how well I'd be able to draw one for the infobox. I think the entry meant that a closer-scale version of the highway on a map would be a good addition.
So, 'Good Article', maybe eventually. I know it's better now than it was, though.
I fix inaccurate info when I see it but I don't heavily edit any pages as Wikipedia can be a pain in the ass to edit.
When it comes to roads and highways, much of the Wikipedia info is incorrect or out of date.
That's not to say it's the fault of anyone on here. Often times, it could be people that don't really know what they're talking about editing the stuff. Or info was updated 5 years or more ago, but just was never improved upon.
I actually did some updates to many of the CT pages and corrected the mileposts based on the CT route logs, even doing the math for "virtual" mileposts for routes embedded within a long concurrency (ie US 6 through Hartford and US 5 along the Berlin Turnpike). Also spruced up the descriptions a bit for roads that I'm familiar with.
I might jump in to add some data here and there. When I was in college I took a class where they required me to write a wikipedia article from scratch, so I decided to make one about Orchard Road in Kane/Kendall Counties (IL). The teacher said the topic was perhaps too parochial, to which I would agree...but anything worth writing an article about already has one!!
I noticed that the page for the Missouri state highways list features a table full of blank spaces for information that ought to be pretty easy to fetch. It's a whole slew of spots just waiting to be filled with information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_state_highways_in_Missouri
I pop in occasionally, but the formatting drives me buggy.
Quote from: jeffandnicole on March 29, 2017, 12:08:51 PM
When it comes to roads and highways, much of the Wikipedia info is incorrect or out of date.
That's not to say it's the fault of anyone on here. Often times, it could be people that don't really know what they're talking about editing the stuff. Or info was updated 5 years or more ago, but just was never improved upon.
It's a daunting task; just out of the 50 states alone, there must be at least 10,000 pages, once State, US, Interstate Routes, Future, Canceled, Proposed, and other roads of importance are counted.
While some pages have far too much "turn-by-turn" information, and some with almost nothing, there's many others that are consistent, useful, and include interwiki-links.
Like real road work, it will naturally never be fully completed nor perfect...
It is about 12,000 pages IIRC.
It depends on where you look. States like Michigan and Delaware are bound to be in pretty good quality. Less "popular" states (especially ones in the South or northern Midwest) may have articles entirely missing. And don't get me started on Puerto Rico.
California needs a thorough update with all the relinquishments and realignments. Most of the San Diego articles are in fairly good shape but outside that, the quality goes downhill. It's one of the most difficult states (besides maybe Texas) and I'm only somewhat active so we'll see what happens I guess.
That's another interesting wrinkle–some states are "easier" than others. In some states, the DOT happily provides public changelogs with the exact date of every extension, realignment, and truncation. In others, you might get PDFs of each year's state map. Some don't provide anything useful and you have to rely on things like Gousha maps.
You can try contacting the DOT directly, and will get varying results that way too. I've gotten the whole gamut. Oklahoma DOT ignores their email. Missouri DOT gave me a phone call and sent over some internal maps that weren't posted anywhere on their site. The Kansas Turnpike Authority not only answered all of my questions, but edited the article for me to include some stuff I didn't have in there.
I actually re-found this forum through my Wikipedia editing of road articles. It's really hard to get sources for the Japanese road articles I've been working on, but it's a fun challenge.
Every so often I get a desire to go work on Wikipedia's highway articles in the inland west region, but I find the environment over there tends to be pretty nit-picky on small details which can be annoying sometimes. The lack of allowance for "original research" can also be frustrating especially when it's a logical conclusion I can draw myself from available sources -- like I probably can't put "This route most likely ran along X Road".
That said, I will fix any errors on sight if I happen to notice them.
I used to contribute a lot to a wiki for the SCA, but like wikipedia I got frustrated & discouraged.
Didn't AARoads.com tried to start a Wikipedia fork who focus on roads a while ago? Maybe we could revive this project.
On a off-topic sidenote, an ex-founder of Wikipedia will try to create a Wikipedia alternative titled "Encyclosphere".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PrWGMyJgpI
Quote from: US 89 on October 29, 2019, 12:37:23 AM
Every so often I get a desire to go work on Wikipedia's highway articles in the inland west region, but I find the environment over there tends to be pretty nit-picky on small details which can be annoying sometimes. The lack of allowance for "original research" can also be frustrating especially when it's a logical conclusion I can draw myself from available sources -- like I probably can't put "This route most likely ran along X Road".
That said, I will fix any errors on sight if I happen to notice them.
The attention to small details is usually a combination of desire for consistency across the several thousand road articles, along with compliance with policies that are forced upon the road projects from the rest of Wikipedia. After working on them for a while, you get the sense of how everything works and it isn't much of a bother.
The way around the "original research" policy is to simply state what the sources say–"Y map says the route ran in A area, and Z map shows the route running in B area" and so on, allowing the reader to decide that the route most likely ran along X road.
It's important to remember that early on, it was a fight to get Wikipedia to even accept roadgeek content. This meant that the road project editors had to dot every i and cross every t to demonstrate that the articles were worth keeping around. This mindset is still part of the project.
Quote from: Stephane Dumas on November 24, 2019, 12:48:04 PM
Didn't AARoads.com tried to start a Wikipedia fork who focus on roads a while ago? Maybe we could revive this project.
I don't remember hearing of any plans to do so. The thought of forking had been raised by Wikipedia project contributors a few times whenever it looked like there was a possibility that the editing environment was getting too toxic to road contributors. In every case, it was decided that the Wikipedia infrastructure (servers, hosting, development environment) was too valuable to split away from, and that doing so would sacrifice the audience, since most people would end up on Wikipedia first anyway.
That last part (the audience) is crucial, because one of the things that the project has always struggled with is attracting editors with knowledge and enthusiasm from lower-population states. Much of the work that remains to be done can only be done through a moderate amount of research. Road research isn't particularly hard, but it does require becoming knowledgeable on where the sources are. This differs from state to state; an editor who is proficient in editing Oklahoma roads will have to learn a whole new constellation of sources to be able to edit Texas roads. An editor also needs an interest level deep enough to sustain the effort across hundreds of pages. In general, roadgeeks tend to be enthusiastic about areas they have a close personal connection to, through living there or visiting frequently for some other reason. This means there is a fair bit of collaboration in high-population states like the coasts, but the interior states tend to be more of a crapshoot as to whether a roadgeek who just happens to live there stumbled onto Wikipedia at some point and was adamant about continuing the work solo.
With that in mind, none of the forks were proposed to have the AARoads name attached, which naturally carries a fair bit of weight with the roadgeek community. This could make it easier to attract editors than a completely independent wiki. That being said, I am not entirely sure how one could relax the policies (other than throwing out the ones that entirely don't apply) without sacrificing quality.
Quote
On a off-topic sidenote, an ex-founder of Wikipedia will try to create a Wikipedia alternative titled "Encyclosphere".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PrWGMyJgpI
I knew without looking that this had to be another Larry Sanger project. This is about his third or fourth bite at the apple when it comes to establishing a Wikipedia alternative. Each time it has failed because his problem with the Wikipedia model is that experts (read: academics) do not carry enough weight. On Wikipedia, an expert has just the same amount of a "vote" (keeping in mind that Wikipedia as a rule does not conduct first-past-the-post voting) as anyone else. Which is just as well and good, since otherwise you'd have randoms claiming to have degrees and not being able to verify that, as has happened already on Wikipedia without it mattering. Then you have a whole
other set of things to argue about.
In the past, Sanger's projects have failed because either his experts are too overbearing (and people don't want to essentially deal with a boss when doing a project for fun), or the experts aren't enthusiastic about the project, and lack of participation means attempts at articles never get vetted, or a combination of both.
That being said, this attempt at a Wikipedia replacement discards the wiki model in favor of a content network model. Unless I'm misunderstanding, anyone on here could agree to write a post on their blog to Encyclosphere standards and have it be reviewed and picked up by the network. This is interesting, because it eliminates the inherent conflict that arises when multiple authors edit the same article. However, it also removes the collaborative process that makes Wikipedia a useful sort of information, and opens the door to bias, since each article would be a single-author piece.
Quote from: Stephane Dumas on November 24, 2019, 12:48:04 PM
Didn't AARoads.com tried to start a Wikipedia fork who focus on roads a while ago? Maybe we could revive this project.
Back in 2009 contributor Jessie Bender suggested adding a wiki to the site that he wanted to help organize. I looked into it and eventually installed Mediawiki successfully. But for the effort, he disappeared and after it sat idle for a several months, I ultimately just removed it.
When it came to forking, originally it was concerns like "they're deleting all the road articles" and "they're forcing standards on us that we don't want". Eventually after we got almost 1000 good articles and 60 featured articles that went away for several years.
Lately the Wikimedia Foundation itself has been the main concern with their questionable priorities in software development and their interfering in community affairs like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_to_the_Wikimedia_Foundation%27s_ban_of_Fram. But even if things went completely south I don't know if we would have the momentum to start something new (editing is down on the U.S. road articles because many of the primary contributors including myself are busy with outside matters, and there would have to be a massive investment of labor at the beginning just to get the site going).
Not to mention all of the antispam measures that would have to take place (I was a Wikimedia steward for a year and there's entire stewards where all they do is remove spam).
I'm not sure of the "massive investment of labor" part–I just migrated a wiki not too long ago. It's a small wiki (~200 pages), but the majority of labor was converting from the old wiki engine's markup to MediaWiki. Going MediaWiki to MediaWiki you can use Special:Export and Special:Import to make things easier (and preserve contrib history), and you don't even have to worry about transferring files if you're exporting from Wikipedia, since the base MediaWiki install still links to Commons.
On a specialist AARoads wiki, I assume we could avoid spammers by doing a similar "user must be approved by an admin before editing" scheme as we do on the forum and requiring registration to edit, since there would be no Foundation mandate to allow editing by anons.
It's not just the page imports (10000+ for the US), it's that we would have to import every single template that we use. We would also have to set up all sorts of policies since I don't think "just do it like it was done on Wikipedia" would fly with newer editors. That and having to keep up with all the MediaWiki patches.
I would rather keep everything on Wikipedia.
Quote from: rschen7754 on January 16, 2020, 01:07:57 AM
I don't think "just do it like it was done on Wikipedia" would fly with newer editors.
I would think "just do it like it was done on Wikipedia, except for cases where we decide otherwise" (in other words, start from Wikipedia's policies and making changes as needed, rather than from scratch) could work. If someone was willing to import all the stuff and do all the admin maintenance, at least.
A state route that is 3 miles long in a rural area is at least as notable as a village with a single digit population, and the latter is definitely going to be kept in any deletion discussion.
Also, many more people will read about road articles if it's on Wikipedia itself compared to if it's in its own wiki.
Quote from: rschen7754 on January 16, 2020, 01:07:57 AM
It's not just the page imports (10000+ for the US), it's that we would have to import every single template that we use. We would also have to set up all sorts of policies since I don't think "just do it like it was done on Wikipedia" would fly with newer editors. That and having to keep up with all the MediaWiki patches.
Other than the biggies (infobox road, the RJL templates) I think that would be doable. Most of the more complex templates, like the cite templates, could be re-implemented in a simpler form to ignore edge cases that don't apply to road articles (would we really need coding to handle scholarly journals?), and for templates that are only used once or twice across the project, judicious substing would be possible.
I wouldn't worry about policy too much. Wikipedia has long had so many policies that they're a turn-off to newbies. No need to replicate that; streamlining would be better where possible.
I do think in a roadgeek-focused wiki, though, you would have to make allowance for sources that Wikipedia deems non-reliable. By which I mean, if some other roadgeek already did the research on their personal site, I don't think the new community would be okay with disallowing that as a cite. I would argue for a tier-based system, where personal sites are citeable (Tier A), but should be replaced by news articles (Tier B) or DOT sources (Tier C) whenever possible. The FA equivalent would still have to be free of Tier A sources.
Quote from: 1 on January 16, 2020, 12:43:56 PM
A state route that is 3 miles long in a rural area is at least as notable as a village with a single digit population, and the latter is definitely going to be kept in any deletion discussion.
Neither of these were a given back when the roads project first started. Someone initially automatically generated all of the US city articles from US Census data (this is why they all read the same for the smaller cities). At the time it was very controversial ("do we really need all of these articles?" "if we allow this then we will have to allow articles on every village in Ghana too"). At one point it was necessary for me to have a road notability FAQ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Scott5114/Highway_notability_FAQ) to refer people to.
Going through this shaped some of the mindset of the road editors, and partially explains why we usually don't have full articles on things like FM roads and county routes.
I just added "retroreflectivity" to Wiktionary.
California State Route 76 is the featured article today (June 20).
Quote from: rschen7754 on December 14, 2019, 02:33:28 AM
When it came to forking, originally it was concerns like "they're deleting all the road articles" and "they're forcing standards on us that we don't want". Eventually after we got almost 1000 good articles and 60 featured articles that went away for several years.
On a lot of non-road articles, I can relate to that quite easily. I've been at it for a good 15 years or so, and far too often the powers that be on Wikipedia, as well as the Wikimedia Commons just piss me off.