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.
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.
On a off-topic sidenote, an ex-founder of Wikipedia will try to create a Wikipedia alternative titled "Encyclosphere".
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.
