Is AARoads notable enough for a Wikipedia article?

[Rothman]

Wasn't bugo the one behind creating AARoads' ugly sister?  The site that looked like this one but promised less stringent moderation?  And it went phtbbbbbbt in short order?

I was one of the original founders of AAroads, but A and A pushed me out without even having the courtesy to tell me. One day, I happened to go to the website and noticed that it said AAroads: Copyright by AN and AF with no mention of me. I don't know why or when they decided to get rid of me, but I suspect this was their plan all along.

So, you weren't the one behind the attempted rival to AARoads?  Those were good times.

[bugo]

Sounds like you were wrong and reverted based upon the sources cited.

Sounds like you are making an uneducated guess based on nothing but your biases towards some forum members. The truth was that the tone and bias of the article was slanted, and instead of stating facts it stated a biased opinion, and I removed one phrase in an order to get rid of some of the bias. It was reverted. If you're going to make statements like that when you don't know what you're talking about, you need to quit doing it.

[Rothman]

Sounds like you were wrong and reverted based upon the sources cited.

Sounds like you are making an uneducated guess based on nothing but your biases towards some forum members. The truth was that the tone and bias of the article was slanted, and instead of stating facts it stated a biased opinion, and I removed one phrase in an order to get rid of some of the bias. It was reverted. If you're going to make statements like that when you don't know what you're talking about, you need to quit doing it.

No, I am removing the bias from your assertions about what happened.

[bugo]

No, I am removing the bias from your assertions about what happened.

No, you are making claims that are just guesses and are not based on reality.

[Rothman]

No, I am removing the bias from your assertions about what happened.

No, you are making claims that are just guesses and are not based on reality.

I was basing them on the information you provided.  So...I guess you did not describe reality?

Ah, it was you behind "biproads."  Heh.  Funny you dodged that in your previous response.  Embarrassed?

https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=16595.msg2163939.msg#2163939

[bugo]

Ah, it was you behind "biproads."  Heh.  Funny you dodged that in your previous response.  Embarrassed?

Oh, that. I thought you were talking about this site. biproads.com was an elaborate troll. If it were anything else, don't you think it would still exist?

[Rothman]

Ah, it was you behind "biproads."  Heh.  Funny you dodged that in your previous response.  Embarrassed?

Oh, that. I thought you were talking about this site. biproads.com was an elaborate troll. If it were anything else, don't you think it would still exist?

Oh, for Pete's sake...Whatever helps you sleep at night.

[kphoger]

Wasn't bugo the one behind creating AARoads' ugly sister?  The site that looked like this one but promised less stringent moderation?  And it went phtbbbbbbt in short order?

I thought you were talking about this site.

Work on your reading comprehension.

[Rothman]

Wasn't bugo the one behind creating AARoads' ugly sister?  The site that looked like this one but promised less stringent moderation?  And it went phtbbbbbbt in short order?

I thought you were talking about this site.

Work on your reading comprehension.

I think he read what I had written perfectly and decided to respond the way he did deliberately.

[gonealookin]

AARoads.com ranks pretty high on the list of sites being used to train AI, according to this Washington Post article.

Tech companies have grown secretive about what they feed the AI. So The Washington Post set out to analyze one of these data sets to fully reveal the types of proprietary, personal, and often offensive websites that go into an AI's training data.
...
To look inside this black box, we analyzed Google's C4 data set, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile English-language AIs, called large language models, including Google's T5 and Facebook's LLaMA. (OpenAI does not disclose what datasets it uses to train the models backing its popular chatbot, ChatGPT)

The Post worked with researchers at the Allen Institute for AI on this investigation and categorized the websites using data from Similarweb, a web analytics company. About a third of the websites could not be categorized, mostly because they no longer appear on the internet. Those are not shown.

Out of 15 million unique domains, a rank of #1,667 is pretty elite territory.

[kphoger]

Well, I guess we'd better start hunting for and deleting any posts we don't want people to find when using ChatGPT...

[formulanone]

Well, I guess we'd better start hunting for and deleting any posts we don't want people to find when using ChatGPT...

I can't wait until AI says "because it bips" as an answer.

For scale of how unusual that seems, at another forum I participate in which has over 300,000 members over 20 years, was ranked around 17,000th. But it probably means that we have lots of data that can't be found anywhere else (or it defaults to the crawling with first two letters of the English alphabet a lot).

Travelmapping.net was around 9 millionth.

edit: my blog made the list, at around 7 million. It has about 10 posts in it.

[Rothman]

Well, I guess we'd better start hunting for and deleting any posts we don't want people to find when using ChatGPT...

Which ones wouldn't we want people to find?

[kphoger]

Well, I guess we'd better start hunting for and deleting any posts we don't want people to find when using ChatGPT...

Which ones wouldn't we want people to find?

The ones that reveal potentially embarrassing information about you if someone were to put "Compose a biography of ____ ____?" into the bot, I suppose.

[Scott5114]

Who knows if it crawls the entire domain or not? It may well have just been crawling the parts of the site Alex maintains. I know if I was building a project like this, I would explicitly avoid incorporating forums and things like that into the dataset, because there's generally no value in indexing things like MMM or HighwayStar's rants about Baltimore or Poiponen's weird ideas or whatever else.

But then that's the problem with ChatGPT, isn't it? That we don't know for sure what data is in it and what isn't? Funny how the company is called OpenAI but they don't actually open source any of their stuff...

[Max Rockatansky]

So if a chat bot starts associating road stuff with Sault Sainte John Madden we'll know the reason?

[Hobart]

I'm going to be extremely amused if ChatGPT or some other chat bot goes on a multi-paragraph rant about how we need to build the Hypotenuse, or how speed limits need to be 37.69 miles an hour exactly, when asking it a simple question.

It's like Discord, using messages sent on their system to do the same thing. All they'll end up with is "uwu", ",,,,,,,,", and "poggers" from their bot. No matter how hard they try, their sampling source is just... not the sort of one you'd use for anything.

[thspfc]

Well, I guess we'd better start hunting for and deleting any posts we don't want people to find when using ChatGPT...

MMM was weeks ahead of his time

[Molandfreak]

Just got an email that AARoads was starting a gazetteer of road-related material since Wikipedia is no longer reliably accepting articles that are notable as part of a series. What a travesty. It's just becoming an elitist cesspool where casual editing isn't appreciated if the goal is anything less than creating a terribly bloated featured article. I never thought it would get to this point.

[Max Rockatansky]

I've been grabbing a lot of California and Arizona highway references off Wikipedia.  They probably won't disappear overnight but I figure I might as well try to preserve what I can on GN.

[Scott5114]

Just got an email that AARoads was starting a gazetteer of road-related material since Wikipedia is no longer reliably accepting articles that are notable as part of a series. What a travesty. It's just becoming an elitist cesspool where casual editing isn't appreciated if the goal is anything less than creating a terribly bloated featured article. I never thought it would get to this point.

This is true. Our wiki is not yet ready for prime-time, however. We'll make an official announcement when it is.

In the meantime, if anyone with wiki experience would like to take part in the early setup and policy discussions, please PM me to request access.

I've been grabbing a lot of California and Arizona highway references off Wikipedia.  They probably won't disappear overnight but I figure I might as well try to preserve what I can on GN.

Don't worry–Alex and I are already working with the Wikipedia roads regulars to ensure that this content isn't going to disappear off the Internet any time soon.

[Max Rockatansky]

I probably should note that some of the DOTs are equally making preservation difficult given how much of their content has been removed.  ADOT in particular purged a crap load of information from easily accessible places on the internet.  I've been encountering this problem as of late given I had a back log of Arizona blogs to write up.  I always tend to worry the same thing will eventually happen to the AASHTO database.  At least I have physical copies of the CHPWs and California Highway Bulletin if those disappear online.

[Bruce]

It's just becoming an elitist cesspool where casual editing isn't appreciated if the goal is anything less than creating a terribly bloated featured article. I never thought it would get to this point.

They'll allow a stub if it's about one of their favored subjects. Geography is not one of them.

I find that a lot of energy that these newer editors put in is for utterly useless policy debates and purges rather than trying to contribute constructively. Some of the biggest anti-road voices haven't even written a regular article from scratch in years.

I probably should note that some of the DOTs are equally making preservation difficult given how much of their content has been removed.  ADOT in particular purged a crap load of information from easily accessible places on the internet.  I've been encountering this problem as of late given I had a back log of Arizona blogs to write up.  I always tend to worry the same thing will eventually happen to the AASHTO database.  At least I have physical copies of the CHPWs and California Highway Bulletin if those disappear online.

The Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive is very helpful, but it doesn't get every last link on DOT websites. I try to save what I can, but there's gaps going back to the early 2000s.

[Molandfreak]

Just got an email that AARoads was starting a gazetteer of road-related material since Wikipedia is no longer reliably accepting articles that are notable as part of a series. What a travesty. It's just becoming an elitist cesspool where casual editing isn't appreciated if the goal is anything less than creating a terribly bloated featured article. I never thought it would get to this point.

This is true. Our wiki is not yet ready for prime-time, however. We'll make an official announcement when it is.

In the meantime, if anyone with wiki experience would like to take part in the early setup and policy discussions, please PM me to request access.

I've been grabbing a lot of California and Arizona highway references off Wikipedia.  They probably won't disappear overnight but I figure I might as well try to preserve what I can on GN.

Don't worry–Alex and I are already working with the Wikipedia roads regulars to ensure that this content isn't going to disappear off the Internet any time soon.

Can this wiki fix a pet peeve of mine with the US Highway System articles and either name each article "US Highway X" rather than "US Route X" or rename the keystone system article to "United States Numbered Route System" if the terminology has to be "US Route?"

[rschen7754]

Just got an email that AARoads was starting a gazetteer of road-related material since Wikipedia is no longer reliably accepting articles that are notable as part of a series. What a travesty. It's just becoming an elitist cesspool where casual editing isn't appreciated if the goal is anything less than creating a terribly bloated featured article. I never thought it would get to this point.

This is true. Our wiki is not yet ready for prime-time, however. We'll make an official announcement when it is.

In the meantime, if anyone with wiki experience would like to take part in the early setup and policy discussions, please PM me to request access.

I've been grabbing a lot of California and Arizona highway references off Wikipedia.  They probably won't disappear overnight but I figure I might as well try to preserve what I can on GN.

Don't worry–Alex and I are already working with the Wikipedia roads regulars to ensure that this content isn't going to disappear off the Internet any time soon.

Can this wiki fix a pet peeve of mine with the US Highway System articles and either name each article "US Highway X" rather than "US Route X" or rename the keystone system article to "United States Numbered Route System" if the terminology has to be "US Route?"

One of the first discussions that will have to take place: what to name the articles.