We had a small discussion on this subject in one of the other threads but it was kinda off topic so I thought I would start an actual thread for it.
The U.S. Roads Project at Wikipedia is made up of roadgeeks like the kind that populate this forum...a few of our members are active here! We strive to keep our articles accurate and error-free as a point of pride, just like the other Wikipedians in other fields do. Unfortunately our project is very large and wide-ranging and several states don't have a dedicated editor helping them out. Which means errors might get introduced, either by our own fallibility or by drive-by editors introducing them and nobody noticing. If you have an error that needs fixing and can't/don't want to resolve it yourself feel free to post it here.
agentsteel53 was having problems with the accuracy of some of our historic shields. Let's discuss it!
Also, some of you might have concerns with with people uploading your work to Wikipedia when you don't want them doing so. I am an admin on Wikipedia so I will be happy to take care of any of these kinds of problems. You can PM me or email me in these cases.
Finally we can always use some help! If you're interested in contributing (it's fun! really!) but aren't sure where to start or you find things like <ref>'''[[this]]'''</ref> daunting, I'll be happy to point you in the right direction!
Great! I'll be an active discusser here. We should provide some links to USRD pages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:USRD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:USRD)
I have been involved, off and on, with WP:NVSR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NVSR). I can help anyone trying to get used to wikipedia with coding and all of that sort of thing.
Can we rename his the inaccurate roads thread? :rolleyes:
Sorry, I had to...
Quote from: voyager on January 28, 2009, 12:26:46 AM
Can we rename his the inaccurate roads thread? :rolleyes:
Sorry, I had to...
The point of this thread is for you to point out where it's wrong so we can fix it. So what problem did you find that makes you think our coverage is inaccurate?
I saw wikipedia and honestly didn't read any of it. Figures...
Ah-ha!
What I really miss on wikipedia are traffic volumes. I think only a few articles have traffic volumes, mostly as in "this bridge is one of the busiest in the world with over 300,000 AADT" - and then a link to some kind of old newspaper article.
I'm kind of a traffic volume geek too, downloaded as much as possible from every DOT, but some DOT's have those stupid interactive maps that don't work properly or slow. I like to have XLS or PDF files :sombrero:
Anyhow, it would be a hell of a job to keep all wikipedia articles up-to-date with traffic volumes.
Quote from: Chris on January 28, 2009, 05:33:11 AM
What I really miss on wikipedia are traffic volumes. I think only a few articles have traffic volumes, mostly as in "this bridge is one of the busiest in the world with over 300,000 AADT" - and then a link to some kind of old newspaper article.
I'm kind of a traffic volume geek too, downloaded as much as possible from every DOT, but some DOT's have those stupid interactive maps that don't work properly or slow. I like to have XLS or PDF files :sombrero:
Anyhow, it would be a hell of a job to keep all wikipedia articles up-to-date with traffic volumes.
As you may have seen, I started ADT data for all the Interstates, and it took a long time to compile that, and now its way out of date. Additionally some states, like Texas, wanted to charge for ADT data, so I never got every state's information. I won't be updating that information again either, as it was very time consuming.
Quote from: aaroads on January 28, 2009, 11:51:29 AM
Additionally some states, like Texas, wanted to charge for ADT data, so I never got every state's information. I won't be updating that information again either, as it was very time consuming.
Whoa!
check it out (http://www.dot.state.tx.us/apps/statewide_mapping/StatewidePlanningMap.html) :cool:
Quote from: Chris on January 28, 2009, 05:33:11 AM
What I really miss on wikipedia are traffic volumes. I think only a few articles have traffic volumes, mostly as in "this bridge is one of the busiest in the world with over 300,000 AADT" - and then a link to some kind of old newspaper article.
I'm kind of a traffic volume geek too, downloaded as much as possible from every DOT, but some DOT's have those stupid interactive maps that don't work properly or slow. I like to have XLS or PDF files :sombrero:
Anyhow, it would be a hell of a job to keep all wikipedia articles up-to-date with traffic volumes.
Hm, that's an idea. I pitched it to the other guys; let's see what they think of it.
WA uses AADT data
Quote from: Michael on February 10, 2011, 01:17:15 PM
I just got the shields from Wikipedia and put them next to each other. It literally took 5 minutes. In my opinion, the 15 in the photo you posted is too narrow (Series C?) for the shield. I-99 doesn't bother me like it does some people. I just don't want US 15 to be truncated to Williamsport.
ah, good old Wikipedia, using '70 spec shields for its US-55 article.
the 15 could probably use Series D digits as it is a 1 1/2 digit number. I think NY's policy back in the day was D for single digits, C for two, even for routes 11 and 15. (I can barely tell the difference between a Series C and a Series D digit "1" so don't ask me for sure on 11.)
as for why I dislike the '70 spec - it's just an aesthetically displeasing mishmash. A "design by committee", almost. Just this morning, looking at California's 1957 spec cutout vs the '70, I was struck just how hideous the '70 was even compared to the '57, which is a tiny bit wider than the "classic" shape and could likely support two Series D digits just fine.
Quote from: agentsteel53 on February 10, 2011, 01:47:56 PM
Quote from: Michael on February 10, 2011, 01:17:15 PM
I just got the shields from Wikipedia and put them next to each other. It literally took 5 minutes. In my opinion, the 15 in the photo you posted is too narrow (Series C?) for the shield. I-99 doesn't bother me like it does some people. I just don't want US 15 to be truncated to Williamsport.
ah, good old Wikipedia, using '70 spec shields for its US-55 article.
the 15 could probably use Series D digits as it is a 1 1/2 digit number. I think NY's policy back in the day was D for single digits, C for two, even for routes 11 and 15. (I can barely tell the difference between a Series C and a Series D digit "1" so don't ask me for sure on 11.)
as for why I dislike the '70 spec - it's just an aesthetically displeasing mishmash. A "design by committee", almost. Just this morning, looking at California's 1957 spec cutout vs the '70, I was struck just how hideous the '70 was even compared to the '57, which is a tiny bit wider than the "classic" shape and could likely support two Series D digits just fine.
At the time that we started making proper vector shields on Wikipedia the only MUTCD we could dig up was the 2003 one because that was the only one on the FHWA site. We hadn't found any older ones.
That said we do have 1961, 1948, and 1928 shields now, thanks largely to your efforts to inform everyone about the differences.
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2Fc%2Fc4%2FUS_15_%25281961%2529.svg%2F200px-US_15_%25281961%2529.svg.png&hash=33f3c9635992de574d656af0e1b89ba118a4cdf9)
wow! I just went to my favorite bugaboo - the US 55 page - nice job there!! I approve of this!
keep it going - I'd love to see any obsolete routes shown with the historic style markers appropriate to when they were last in use.
and would it be too much to ask to use the state/US cutout format for state-specific US route pages? :sombrero:
Quote from: agentsteel53 on February 12, 2011, 07:34:54 PM
wow! I just went to my favorite bugaboo - the US 55 page - nice job there!! I approve of this!
keep it going - I'd love to see any obsolete routes shown with the historic style markers appropriate to when they were last in use.
That's the general idea!
Quoteand would it be too much to ask to use the state/US cutout format for state-specific US route pages? :sombrero:
But that contradicts the above :spin:
Quote from: Scott5114 on February 16, 2011, 12:18:04 PM
But that contradicts the above :spin:
I mean to use the latest spec for the overview pages (i.e. "US Route 66") and to use a state-named 1948 spec for something like "US Route 66 in Illinois".
Who cares about the articles as long as they have pretty pictures?
Quote from: agentsteel53 on February 16, 2011, 12:44:39 PM
Quote from: Scott5114 on February 16, 2011, 12:18:04 PM
But that contradicts the above :spin:
I mean to use the latest spec for the overview pages (i.e. "US Route 66") and to use a state-named 1948 spec for something like "US Route 66 in Illinois".
I can see why you would suggest that but we always try to stick with the most recent spec that was in use for that segment. For most articles, that'll be the '70 spec. (I think we use the '61 specs for Arkansas since that's what they post–we should anyway–I'll check in just a bit).
If state-specific specs are available, we use those. California and Oklahoma interstate articles use those states' respective standards.
Quote from: Scott5114 on February 16, 2011, 11:28:00 PM
I can see why you would suggest that but we always try to stick with the most recent spec that was in use for that segment. For most articles, that'll be the '70 spec. (I think we use the '61 specs for Arkansas since that's what they post–we should anyway–I'll check in just a bit).
If state-specific specs are available, we use those. California and Oklahoma interstate articles use those states' respective standards.
then hopefully you go with '61 spec for the several states still using it. Arkansas indeed, and also Mississippi comes to mind.
and as for the extinct routes, please do put up '26 spec for things like New Mexico US 366 and whatnot.
Quote from: agentsteel53 on February 16, 2011, 11:49:05 PM
Quote from: Scott5114 on February 16, 2011, 11:28:00 PM
I can see why you would suggest that but we always try to stick with the most recent spec that was in use for that segment. For most articles, that'll be the '70 spec. (I think we use the '61 specs for Arkansas since that's what they post–we should anyway–I'll check in just a bit).
If state-specific specs are available, we use those. California and Oklahoma interstate articles use those states' respective standards.
then hopefully you go with '61 spec for the several states still using it. Arkansas indeed, and also Mississippi comes to mind.
and as for the extinct routes, please do put up '26 spec for things like New Mexico US 366 and whatnot.
I'm trying with Michigan. I have the 1948 series of diamonds created and ready to deploy to the articles when I get the 1919 series made and remake the 1926 series. If I'm going to change all of the cutouts in the articles, I will do it when I get the full sets made. The problem is that the typefaces don't exist pre-1948. We have a bot that will take a template and a list of numbers and output/upload all of the shield graphics we could want in SVG format... but only if it has the typeface available.
That said, the other day, some anonymous editor changed the M-56 shield on the M-21 article to the 1926 cutout, even though the number was retired in the 1980s. I guess he was confused by the other related routes (M-21A and M-210) that were pre-1948 and wanted everything to match! Oh well.
Hi -
I just visited the Wikipedia page for I-95 in Maine and was disappointed to see the old exit numbers have been removed from the exit list. (I mean, of course, they used to appear alongside the current ones.) On the chance that that was done by someone here, I think that we should really hesitate before removing historic information that someone may be interested in. Just my two cents.
That said, I'm very non-participative on Wikipedia - I think I've done one edit ever - but know how to get at the history page. Would clicking on "undo" in the right places make deleted information visible to me without changing it for the public?
Quote from: Michael in Philly on August 12, 2011, 09:03:19 AM
Hi -
I just visited the Wikipedia page for I-95 in Maine and was disappointed to see the old exit numbers have been removed from the exit list. (I mean, of course, they used to appear alongside the current ones.) On the chance that that was done by someone here, I think that we should really hesitate before removing historic information that someone may be interested in. Just my two cents.
That said, I'm very non-participative on Wikipedia - I think I've done one edit ever - but know how to get at the history page. Would clicking on "undo" in the right places make deleted information visible to me without changing it for the public?
The best way to do this is often to display the history and then click the "cur" link to the left of the past revision you're interested in seeing. It will highlight the differences between the current version and the old one. If you use "prev" it will show the differences between that version and the immediately-preceding one.
It's not a foolproof method, but it's often the easiest way to display changes. You can always view the full text of any old revision by simply clicking on the time and date in the history–all old article versions are saved. But doing that isn't always helpful because it won't always be apparent where something was changed.
The "undo" idea may not work because often it will say "this edit cannot be undone," usually if there are multiple conflicting edits since then. But yes, you can always try clicking "Undo" and then simply do not save the page after you click it–instead use your "back" button or click somewhere else.
I tried putting a request in for a map of "Texas State Loop 306" but nothing has happened yet. I guess it's a low priority? But could someone help me with this? (I'm "DCBS18" on Wikipedia"
BigMatt
Quote from: Michael in Philly on August 12, 2011, 09:03:19 AM
Hi -
I just visited the Wikipedia page for I-95 in Maine and was disappointed to see the old exit numbers have been removed from the exit list. (I mean, of course, they used to appear alongside the current ones.) On the chance that that was done by someone here, I think that we should really hesitate before removing historic information that someone may be interested in. Just my two cents.
That said, I'm very non-participative on Wikipedia - I think I've done one edit ever - but know how to get at the history page. Would clicking on "undo" in the right places make deleted information visible to me without changing it for the public?
The general guideline looks to be that old exit numbers will be removed from an article when the state DOT has removed transitional signage, no longer publishes the old numbers on maps distributed to the public or about 5 years. One of Wikipedia's core policies is that "Wikipedia is not a collection of indiscriminate information". Once the transition is complete, the specific old exit numbers aren't really useful for the general public that reads our articles. Roadgeeks might different levels of interest, but Wikipedia is written for a general audience. (Trust me, we get enough crap from some people on the site for even writing highway articles in the first place...)
Bleh. Old exit numbers are definitely useful information, e.g. for cross-referencing something that was written before the renumbering.
Quote from: 1995hoo on August 12, 2011, 10:47:00 AM
Quote from: Michael in Philly on August 12, 2011, 09:03:19 AM
Hi -
I just visited the Wikipedia page for I-95 in Maine and was disappointed to see the old exit numbers have been removed from the exit list. (I mean, of course, they used to appear alongside the current ones.) On the chance that that was done by someone here, I think that we should really hesitate before removing historic information that someone may be interested in. Just my two cents.
That said, I'm very non-participative on Wikipedia - I think I've done one edit ever - but know how to get at the history page. Would clicking on "undo" in the right places make deleted information visible to me without changing it for the public?
The best way to do this is often to display the history and then click the "cur" link to the left of the past revision you're interested in seeing. It will highlight the differences between the current version and the old one. If you use "prev" it will show the differences between that version and the immediately-preceding one.
It's not a foolproof method, but it's often the easiest way to display changes. You can always view the full text of any old revision by simply clicking on the time and date in the historyall old article versions are saved. But doing that isn't always helpful because it won't always be apparent where something was changed.
The "undo" idea may not work because often it will say "this edit cannot be undone," usually if there are multiple conflicting edits since then. But yes, you can always try clicking "Undo" and then simply do not save the page after you click itinstead use your "back" button or click somewhere else.
I figured it out - thanks.
Quote from: bulldog1979 on August 12, 2011, 05:30:25 PM
Quote from: Michael in Philly on August 12, 2011, 09:03:19 AM
Hi -
I just visited the Wikipedia page for I-95 in Maine and was disappointed to see the old exit numbers have been removed from the exit list. (I mean, of course, they used to appear alongside the current ones.) On the chance that that was done by someone here, I think that we should really hesitate before removing historic information that someone may be interested in. Just my two cents.
That said, I'm very non-participative on Wikipedia - I think I've done one edit ever - but know how to get at the history page. Would clicking on "undo" in the right places make deleted information visible to me without changing it for the public?
The general guideline looks to be that old exit numbers will be removed from an article when the state DOT has removed transitional signage, no longer publishes the old numbers on maps distributed to the public or about 5 years. One of Wikipedia's core policies is that "Wikipedia is not a collection of indiscriminate information". Once the transition is complete, the specific old exit numbers aren't really useful for the general public that reads our articles. Roadgeeks might different levels of interest, but Wikipedia is written for a general audience. (Trust me, we get enough crap from some people on the site for even writing highway articles in the first place...)
Hmm. Not trying to make an issue of this (personally, as long as the old version of the page is available to me, as it turns out it is, that's cool. IF - IF - I can really trust them not to at some point purge old versions.). But, well, as to the idea that Wikipedia's not "indiscriminate, " I'd say there's a fine line between "exhaustive" and "indiscriminate," and Wikipedia pushes right up to it - and that's not a criticism: that's why I love it! And what non-roadgeek looks at exit lists? (And the fact that "we get crap for writing highway articles at all" carries no weight at all with me. Not coming from you but coming from the crap-givers: no one's holding a gun to their heads forcing them to read them. Unless there are server-capacity issues....)
THAT SAID, has anyone considered an off-Wikipedia Roads Wiki, we're we could be as geeky and indiscriminate as we damn well please?
Quote from: Michael in Philly on August 12, 2011, 07:14:33 PM
Quote from: bulldog1979 on August 12, 2011, 05:30:25 PM
Quote from: Michael in Philly on August 12, 2011, 09:03:19 AM
Hi -
I just visited the Wikipedia page for I-95 in Maine and was disappointed to see the old exit numbers have been removed from the exit list. (I mean, of course, they used to appear alongside the current ones.) On the chance that that was done by someone here, I think that we should really hesitate before removing historic information that someone may be interested in. Just my two cents.
That said, I'm very non-participative on Wikipedia - I think I've done one edit ever - but know how to get at the history page. Would clicking on "undo" in the right places make deleted information visible to me without changing it for the public?
The general guideline looks to be that old exit numbers will be removed from an article when the state DOT has removed transitional signage, no longer publishes the old numbers on maps distributed to the public or about 5 years. One of Wikipedia's core policies is that "Wikipedia is not a collection of indiscriminate information". Once the transition is complete, the specific old exit numbers aren't really useful for the general public that reads our articles. Roadgeeks might different levels of interest, but Wikipedia is written for a general audience. (Trust me, we get enough crap from some people on the site for even writing highway articles in the first place...)
Hmm. Not trying to make an issue of this (personally, as long as the old version of the page is available to me, as it turns out it is, that's cool. IF - IF - I can really trust them not to at some point purge old versions.). But, well, as to the idea that Wikipedia's not "indiscriminate, " I'd say there's a fine line between "exhaustive" and "indiscriminate," and Wikipedia pushes right up to it - and that's not a criticism: that's why I love it! And what non-roadgeek looks at exit lists? (And the fact that "we get crap for writing highway articles at all" carries no weight at all with me. Not coming from you but coming from the crap-givers: no one's holding a gun to their heads forcing them to read them. Unless there are server-capacity issues....)
THAT SAID, has anyone considered an off-Wikipedia Roads Wiki, we're we could be as geeky and indiscriminate as we damn well please?
For legal reasons, old revisions can't be purged, as then Wikipedia would be in violation of the CC-BY-SA license which requires documentation of everyone who's ever edited a page. Besides, they have no reason to do so, as a wiki with no old revisions is sort of pointless, because then you can't revert. (Look up Metababy for an idea of what a wiki with no revisioning capability is like.)
The Wikipedia roads editors have considered forking from Wikipedia but there are enough problems with getting editors on
Wikipedia, with the name brand and all the infrastructure that draws people to work on the project. All of the time that would need to be spent importing the pages from Wikipedia (as long as all of the templates, photos, and shield images that the pages depend on) wouldn't really be worth it. There's over 5000 articles alone...
Quote from: BigMattFromTexas on August 12, 2011, 01:06:13 PM
I tried putting a request in for a map of "Texas State Loop 306" but nothing has happened yet. I guess it's a low priority? But could someone help me with this? (I'm "DCBS18" on Wikipedia"
BigMatt
Maps take a long time to make (especially if nobody has a setup of TX data...setting up a new state is a labor-intensive process in QGIS). That means that they're prioritized, by means of the article's assessment (the higher articles will get maps first). If you want your article to get a map quicker, improve it to B-class (or even better, get it a GA rating).
You can also learn to make maps yourself. If you go to USRD's IRC channel they will generally be glad to help.
Edit: Where did you put the request at?? I'm not seeing anything on the map request page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_U.S._Roads/Maps_task_force/Requests)...
Edit 2: Oh, okay, it was
over a year ago. Yeah, it looks like the map request was deferred until the article is improved beyond the state it's in. When that didn't happen the request was archived. Improve the article and then put in the request again.
www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki is basically the British road geeks way around all the annoying wikipedia guys talking about 'notability', 'original research' and 'unreliable sources' on one hand, while others plunder the members' sites and plagiarize them, so that added together works out to perhaps 60% of content that isn't original research on WikiProject:UK roads' better articles has been plagiarized off of a SABRE member source.
http://routes.wikia.com and www.wegenwiki.com are also non-wikipedia roads wikis (French and Dutch languages respectively)
Notability and original research are the big problems with roads on Wikipedia - is some small road notable? Unlikely and it only takes one jobsworth to notice it's existence to go bye-bye. Can you make the article decent easily without adding material you yourself have researched? It's rather hard without ripping off someone else's research in the process. You can't play by Wikipedia's rules and make a comprehensive road directory, IMV.
Not to mention that there are some kinds of original research/non-notable information that we wouldn't want, e.g. everything in fictional highways. Wikipedia's dispute resolution sucks, but it's better than nothing.
Note: I used to be a Wikipedia editor, but quit a few years ago after the MMORPG element got to be too much, with people pumping out shitty articles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_Route_676_(Middlesex_County,_New_Jersey)) and removing important but uncited stuff from existing articles to get 'good article' and 'featured article' badges. Now I edit OpenStreetMap, which is based on original research (mainly of factual information) and has an obviously almost nonexistent notability bar.
Quote from: english si on August 12, 2011, 08:05:13 PM
Notability and original research are the big problems with roads on Wikipedia - is some small road notable? Unlikely and it only takes one jobsworth to notice it's existence to go bye-bye. Can you make the article decent easily without adding material you yourself have researched? It's rather hard without ripping off someone else's research in the process. You can't play by Wikipedia's rules and make a comprehensive road directory, IMV.
I agree with some of your points. A lot of the decisions that the USRD folks have to make are influenced by the non-roads part of Wikipedia. It is a difficult balancing act between keeping roadgeeks happy and keeping non-roads Wikipedians happy.
I am not really familiar with the state of the British road articles, but in the US we perpetually face the problem of too many roads and not enough editors. It is problematic when someone creates thousands of county road articles (C-roads would be the closest UK equivalent) and fails to maintain them or improve them to an acceptable standard. Additionally there is the hazard that someone will happen on a small road article such as that and attempt to get
all roads articles removed, which just wastes the editors' time having to defend their work. This is why "notability" is often enforced on the lower class local roads. It doesn't happen so much with Interstates/motorways, state highways/A routes, etc.
In my experience direct plagiarism of roadgeek websites is rare, though if you have performed research into some historical facet of the road or calculated mileposts or something like that, that information may be written into the article and a citation given to your work, but this is not objectionable because it is not plagiarism. If blatant plagiarism has occurred there are processes to deal with it and get the copied work removed.
Quote from: Scott5114 on August 12, 2011, 08:20:45 PM
I am not really familiar with the state of the British road articles, but in the US we perpetually face the problem of too many roads and not enough editors. It is problematic when someone creates thousands of county road articles (C-roads would be the closest UK equivalent)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Centralized_discussion/B_roads_in_the_United_Kingdom
We've had members of the roadgeek community that maintain websites attempt to remove information from Wikipedia articles under copyright violation or plagiarism claims. Remember, that under US copyright law, you can't copyright a fact or a date. If your website says that X road opened on Y date, and a Wikipedia article repeats that information, no copyright violation has occurred, especially if your site is listed as the source. Now, if the sentence is lifted word for word, that's different. Let Scott5114, myself or someone else connected to the project know so that we can deal with it.
Then again, there's also the issue that most roadgeek websites aren't supposed to be used as sources in articles on Wikipedia anyway. For all of the respect and esteem I have for those that run and maintain their own websites, there's a policy on Wikipedia against using "self-published" sources. I'm not saying that roadgeek websites are publishing any incorrect information, but since there is not a formal editorial process at work to vet the information published on each website, they're not considered "reliable sources" under the policy. The same policy also excludes any book published with a vanity/on-demand publisher, most blogs, etc. Once again, I didn't say that any roadgeek website is unreliable, just that the policy says we have to stick to sources by acknowledged experts or sources published by groups with editorial oversight and a reputation for accuracy. Certain roadgeeks' sites may be accepted as sources if we can demonstrate that reputation.
Quote from: NE2 on August 12, 2011, 05:47:00 PM
Bleh. Old exit numbers are definitely useful information, e.g. for cross-referencing something that was written before the renumbering.
The issue only recently came up for discussion, but given our need to write for a generalized audience, old exit numbers may still fall outside of the realm of specific details left out of articles going forward except during a transition period. The point you expressed wasn't brought up in that discussion, so I'll pass it along and see if that concept changes anything. The templates that can be used to general junction/exit list templates were recently changed to create old exit numbers. We might update them to minimize or differentiate the old numbers differently using the template, and they might be added back in the future.
The UK roads project has their own issues entirely.
Typically, the only old revisions that get deleted are ones containing copyvios, or where something has to be removed for legal reasons (someone's contact information got posted, death threats, etc). Administrators (Scott5114 and myself) can at least give you a clue as to what the deleted content was in the first case. I don't think we can just post deleted revisions, but we can at least comment about it.
As far as forking from Wikipedia... we've had this discussion quite a few times. And what it boiled down to was that the benefits of being on Wikipedia are better than the disadvantages, right now. If that ever changed (Wikipedia passed a guideline that caused serious harm to the project, for example) I suppose we could revisit the discussion, but then we have to discuss server hosting, migration, etc.
Quote from: Scott5114 on August 12, 2011, 08:20:45 PMIn my experience direct plagiarism of roadgeek websites is rare, though if you have performed research into some historical facet of the road or calculated mileposts or something like that, that information may be written into the article and a citation given to your work, but this is not objectionable because it is not plagiarism. If blatant plagiarism has occurred there are processes to deal with it and get the copied work removed.
What if both text
and citations are lifted from a roadgeek website and lightly edited so that the verbiage is no longer a word-for-word match, and there is no attribution to the website. What recourse does the site owner have? Even if his words have not been stolen, he has been deprived of recognition and credit for his hard work excavating in archives to bring the information to light.
Quote from: Scott5114 on August 12, 2011, 08:03:00 PM
The Wikipedia roads editors have considered forking from Wikipedia but there are enough problems with getting editors on Wikipedia, with the name brand and all the infrastructure that draws people to work on the project. All of the time that would need to be spent importing the pages from Wikipedia (as long as all of the templates, photos, and shield images that the pages depend on) wouldn't really be worth it. There's over 5000 articles alone...
I'd be more inclined to participate if it was
NOT a part of Wikipedia.
I had a contributor ask to start up a wiki through AARoads, and I started setting up Mediawiki (https://www.aaroads.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page) for him to try out. He then disappeared after just copying the main site index onto the Wiki main page and it has sat idle since then. If anyone is interested in messing with it, let me know.
Quote from: J N Winkler on August 13, 2011, 12:06:59 AM
Quote from: Scott5114 on August 12, 2011, 08:20:45 PMIn my experience direct plagiarism of roadgeek websites is rare, though if you have performed research into some historical facet of the road or calculated mileposts or something like that, that information may be written into the article and a citation given to your work, but this is not objectionable because it is not plagiarism. If blatant plagiarism has occurred there are processes to deal with it and get the copied work removed.
What if both text and citations are lifted from a roadgeek website and lightly edited so that the verbiage is no longer a word-for-word match, and there is no attribution to the website. What recourse does the site owner have? Even if his words have not been stolen, he has been deprived of recognition and credit for his hard work excavating in archives to bring the information to light.
US copyright law does not recognize the "sweat of brow doctrine" anymore, only the creative expression. In a court case called
Feist v. Rural, the Supreme Court ruled on this very issue. In that case, Feist Publications copied the contents of a phone directory published by Rural Telephone Services Co. In that case, the copying entries from Rural's phone books into Feist's directories was ruled not to be a copyright violation. From the Wikipedia article, "The fact that Rural spent considerable time and money collecting the data was irrelevant to copyright law, and Rural's copyright claim was dismissed."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural
Now, plagiarism is separate from copyright violations. If text is copied and only minimally reworded, it is can still be plagiarism even if the changes are sufficient to avoid copyright issues. That's a different issue, and Wikipedia's policies also prohibit plagiarism in addition to copyright violations. Taking an exact wording, swapping in a few synonymous words but maintaining the original sentence structures, is still plagiarism. There is an exception though for phrases that are so simplistic that the information can't be expressed any other way without changing the meaning.
The key difference here is that you can't copyright or plagiarize pure facts (like a name and a phone number in a phone book or the date a road opened) but you can copyright or plagiarize the
expression of that fact. Some expressions will be so basic though to fail to gain protection, but the bar on that is low. In either case, anyone can edit a Wikipedia article to change or remove wording, or tell rschen7754, Scott5114 or myself to look into a specific situation.
Quote from: Scott5114 on August 12, 2011, 08:03:00 PM
The Wikipedia roads editors have considered forking from Wikipedia but there are enough problems with getting editors on Wikipedia, with the name brand and all the infrastructure that draws people to work on the project. All of the time that would need to be spent importing the pages from Wikipedia (as long as all of the templates, photos, and shield images that the pages depend on) wouldn't really be worth it. There's over 5000 articles alone...
You mean 10,000 in the US alone. :P
More of the same bullshit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/I-73/74_North%E2%80%93South_Corridor
Just in case anyone is curious, but Wikipedia got some press today related to highways:
Reimink, Troy (November 20, 2011). "Paul B. Henry Freeway (M-6) lands on Wikipedia front page on 10th anniversary of first phase opening (http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2011/11/paul_b_henry_freeway_m-6_lands.html)". The Grand Rapids Press.
Quote from: NE2 on February 16, 2011, 03:52:03 PM
Who cares about the articles as long as they have pretty pictures?
Oh, you're funny. :-P
In any case I've been struggling to prove a lot of what I wrote on Wikipedia. I've got into some pretty heated arguments with administrators over certain facts about roads that don't fit in with their standards, and citing sources for articles about roads on Long Island is quite difficult when you're stuck in Florida, and are surrounded by relatives who trash all your research!
Quote from: D-Dey65 on November 28, 2011, 11:11:10 PM
In any case I've been struggling to prove a lot of what I wrote on Wikipedia. I've got into some pretty heated arguments with administrators over certain facts about roads that don't fit in with their standards, and citing sources for articles about roads on Long Island is quite difficult when you're stuck in Florida, and are surrounded by relatives who trash all your research!
Well, it's not just personal standards... make sure you're complying with the website's
policies. If you aren't, anything you add is subject to deletion, per policy.
In the old days, I was a USRD editor, but I didn't have the time to edit pages so I had to stop. Good luck on the destubbing goal!
My biggest critique of the Wikipedia roads articles is that they are at once too specific, yet too general. For example, I've lately been browsing through the US Highway system, trying to better comprehend it, since it escapes me in a way the Interstates never have. While WP does have comprehensive articles on all the US routes, I can't say they've helped me grasp how the routes fit into the system, or into the nation's infrastructure generally.
Picking, at random, the US 12 article, in the first paragraph we have two statements of the highway's termini along with an approximation of its length and the Interstates that supplanted it. It seems to me that this paragraph should instead mention what general corridor US 12 serves nationally, which major cities it connects, and which broad regions it serves in the states or groups of states it traverses. Perhaps there are unifying aspects to its route that make it a cohesive whole, something more than just the string of its waypoints (this is very satisfyingly true of US 11, in my opinion, as it follows the spine of Appalachia and aligns much of the nation's coal and steel belt, and similarly reflects its socio-cultural surroundings)...
We then follow with a series of excessively detailed routing descriptions by state, but these read largely as turn-by-turn instructions and don't give a sense of the overall scheme. At the least, these sections ought to be preceded by multi-state or regional assessments of the route's course.
The history section is, I think, most important to understanding what US routes are. Some of the articles have wonderful history treatises, but others, like the one in question, are kind of just lists of facts and dates.
I don't mean to criticize excessively, as I do appreciate the effort and contributions that go into these articles, but when I refer to WP on other topics I do it first for a general grasp of the topic. And, despite being a long-time roads scholar, sometimes I want to read about roads in the same way.
I think the issues you're having are attributable to a number of things. One of them is Wikipedia's sourcing requirements–it is difficult to look at a length of road and say what its "purpose" is; to do so we would have to have a citation from an independent article in a newspaper or something saying "US 12 was built to serve X purpose", we can't just try to come to our own conclusion and state that as fact. In some cases it's blatantly obvious, like a state highway spur to a small town that would otherwise be off the beaten path, but in that case it is generally preferred to state the facts and leave the rest for the reader to workout himself. Social geography is a territory that is hazardous to wade into because things like "the Steel Belt", "the Bible Belt", "Appalachia", "the Ozarks", "the Upper Midwest" et al tend to have ambiguous borders and it is very easy to run into a situation where people want to bicker back and forth about whether the road really serves the Steel Belt or whatever.
Another issue is sort of the way that work is organized on Wikipedia. The roads project is broken down into subprojects by state. Makes sense in a lot of cases, but for the comprehensive multi-state route articles (we call these the "main article" for the route) it sort of breaks down because there might be half a dozen state subprojects involved, some of which only exist on paper. Say for I-35: the TX, OK, KS, MO, IA, and MN projects are all partly responsible for keeping the I-35 article awesome. However, the KS and MO projects (and maybe the MN project) basically exist as dormant shells, with nobody actually actively working on those states' articles unless some charitable active editor from a bordering state takes a couple hours off from editing their preferred state to improve a couple articles. That means the main articles for the routes that traverse multiple states can become uneven in quality from state to state.
Editing outside of their familiar state is a major barrier to most people–for each state you have to learn what the DOT makes available in terms of historical maps, other historical data like changelogs, mileposts, etc., and what non-DOT resources are handy, like what newspapers are likely to have covered highway construction, whether their archives are free or not, how easily searchable they are, etc. Each editor carries a lot of this information in their mind for their particular state, and the prospect of having to "relearn" that information to become proficient in multiple states is unpleasant. There are some people that put in the effort, though. Also the prospect of editing in a state far from home that you have no connection to is deathly dull to many people and it shows in the quality of the articles produced, which also suffers from the fact that the editor has little first-hand knowledge about the conditions on the ground.
In addition to the main articles on a route, there are also "state-detail" articles (like "U.S. Route 52 in Illinois") that examine a segment of route in a particular state. These are often improved by the relevant state project quicker than the main articles because there is less route that needs to be covered and you only have to deal with one state's worth of resources for the article. However, the issue of certain states having no active editors to cover them remains apparent. Someone is supposed to go through at some point and merge the relevant information from the state-detail articles to the main article, forming a cohesive summary, but often this is forgotten.
Also, what usually makes or breaks a particular main article is simply whether it's been touched by a proficient editor or not. Well-done history sections have to be researched and written. The history sections that are just smatterings of facts tend to be the result of random passersby adding their notes to the article or an editor finding out a fact while researching something else and adding it to the article so they have the fact handy for when they fix up the article later. What we are aiming for eventually is something more resembling the articles on US 113, US 131, and US 491–these are the current gold standard of US route articles–do those fall more in line with what you'd like to see?
Quote from: empirestate on December 04, 2011, 02:18:48 AM
My biggest critique of the Wikipedia roads articles is that they are at once too specific, yet too general...
We then follow with a series of excessively detailed routing descriptions by state, but these read largely as turn-by-turn instructions and don't give a sense of the overall scheme. At the least, these sections ought to be preceded by multi-state or regional assessments of the route's course.
I echo the comments of empirestate. The excessive detail, in particular gets me. Very few are going to read the turn by turn instructions. A map is much more efficient and understandable way to convey that type of information, but also routes are tweaked frequently enough that these instructions easily get out of date.
Another issue I have is that there are errors that seem to be caused by the author not personally being familiar with the subject road. I have seen articles that seem to be based on little more than what Google Maps shows - and that is not necessarily correct. I guess this is a result of an effort to have an article for every route - even the most minor ones - in whatever system.
Another funny thing is that because articles must have citations, you sometimes see more recent changes called out even when they are minor. If a certain route was significantly truncated or altered in the 1960s, but was slightly moved in 2010, you tend to see the recent change called out because an online press release or article can easily be cited.
It all depends a lot on how knowledgeable and thorough the author really is, and that is the crux of the issue for me.
It is a tough call. I applaud the effort, but nothing will ever be perfect.
Quote from: Scott5114 on December 04, 2011, 10:17:53 AM
What we are aiming for eventually is something more resembling the articles on US 113, US 131, and US 491–these are the current gold standard of US route articles–do those fall more in line with what you'd like to see?
Yes, those are definitely much better.
I see how the process and requirements of Wikipedia are going to limit what the articles can do, and ultimately, my own ideal of what they should be is probably beyond what would be allowed. I'd envision an article about a highway to be an overall assessment of the road's function in the abstract first, digested into a nice summary by an observant editor, and that smacks an awful lot of Original Research to me.
This is why I've always thought we should start our own wiki rather than use Wikipedia. While Wikipedia has a lot of great articles, in terms of being "the encyclopedia everyone can edit", it fails miserably because of the bureaucratic culture that's developed. I remember a few years ago they got called out by the press for saying that someone who was alive was dead, and since then they've been so paranoid that they've developed strict policies that arguable destroy their original vision.
Quote from: deanej on December 04, 2011, 12:35:26 PM
This is why I've always thought we should start our own wiki rather than use Wikipedia. While Wikipedia has a lot of great articles, in terms of being "the encyclopedia everyone can edit", it fails miserably because of the bureaucratic culture that's developed. I remember a few years ago they got called out by the press for saying that someone who was alive was dead, and since then they've been so paranoid that they've developed strict policies that arguable destroy their original vision.
I agree 100%, and if you didn't make it so obvious already, this doesn't just apply to road-related articles. Speaking of starting your own wikis, there happen to be road-related wikis already, and here's one;
http://reststops.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
Quote from: deanej on December 04, 2011, 12:35:26 PM
This is why I've always thought we should start our own wiki rather than use Wikipedia. While Wikipedia has a lot of great articles, in terms of being "the encyclopedia everyone can edit", it fails miserably because of the bureaucratic culture that's developed. I remember a few years ago they got called out by the press for saying that someone who was alive was dead, and since then they've been so paranoid that they've developed strict policies that arguable destroy their original vision.
I dunno about that one. The policies have always requested/required references to back added material. They've just tightened it a bit more on BLPs: Biographies of Living People. That's not necessarily a bad thing though.
As for forking, it's hard to drum up the same level of traffic that a top 10 website on the Internet can produce. The article on M-6 received about 22,900 page views on Nov. 20 (http://stats.grok.se/en/201111/M-6%20%28Michigan%20highway%29), compared to a couple dozen most days. Its appearance on the site's Main Page even made the local newspaper (http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2011/11/paul_b_henry_freeway_m-6_lands.html) as a result. I know some roadgeek websites hit the press in relation to an existing news story, but how many of those websites generate a news story on their own?
The policies were always there, but they weren't always enforced in a bureaucratic manner. Wikipedia's founders envisioned that the rules would just be guidelines and only brought up to deal with issues. I've read that the founders are shocked at how the present Wikipedia administration is enforcing the rules that they wrote without thinking about what would happen were they to be enforced.
Quote from: deanej on December 18, 2011, 12:10:28 PM
The policies were always there, but they weren't always enforced in a bureaucratic manner. Wikipedia's founders envisioned that the rules would just be guidelines and only brought up to deal with issues. I've read that the founders are shocked at how the present Wikipedia administration is enforcing the rules that they wrote without thinking about what would happen were they to be enforced.
Considering that Jimmy Wales has been actively involved in the project from day one to the present, I find it doubtful he's too shocked about anything. (He's got a userpage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales) and edits (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Jimbo_Wales) and everything.) I've certainly never read any posts by him saying such a thing, and if he did, everyone would probably know about it pretty quick. The other founder, whose name I can't remember right now, left the project fairly early on and became a vocal critic of just about everything about Wikipedia shortly thereafter, trying to start a competing encyclopedia that gave only qualified experts the ability to edit. Unsurprisingly, that model failed, probably because qualified experts have better things to be doing than writing encyclopedias.
I see it as the difference between a young small business and a corporation. When a company is small and everyone knows everyone, the folks in charge can be more lax about rules because everyone knows what is expected because there is one or two managers that see all the employees in the building on a daily basis. As the successful business grows into a large corporation there are more layers of management and stricter rules are laid down, which it probably doesn't make sense to adhere to like the gospel, but that is done anyway. It's seen as necessary to ensure everyone is treated uniformly, because the top execs probably don't get to talk to all the employees themselves and have to exercise their will through more junior managers.
Quote from: deanej on December 18, 2011, 12:10:28 PM
The policies were always there, but they weren't always enforced in a bureaucratic manner. Wikipedia's founders envisioned that the rules would just be guidelines and only brought up to deal with issues. I've read that the founders are shocked at how the present Wikipedia administration is enforcing the rules that they wrote without thinking about what would happen were they to be enforced.
And given the very real consequences related to BLPs, those rules have to be enforced regarding those subjects. We have a policy on WP restricting the use of "self-published sources", which means that unless the narrow exceptions apply, we can't use them. No blogs, no books published through vanity publishers, no self-published websites (like most of the various roadgeek websites). The reason is that there is no "editorial oversight" of the content, there's no one but the author reviewing what's been written before publication. That isn't to say that the information is wrong, but with a newspaper, their editors have a reputation to uphold so they take some responsibility for the content. The community drew a bright line around SPSs, and crafted a policy that says not to use them unless certain exceptions apply.
Because there isn't the level of concern and potential damage related to highway articles in most cases, the policy against SPSs isn't as strictly applied to highway articles like it would be for an article on a living person. In other words, I will use the Wisconsin Highways website put together by Chris Bessert as a source for historical information on WI highways, and I make sure that there is a footnote crediting it as the source. I don't use his Michigan site anymore for MI highway articles because I'm at a stage that I can't. For an article to be listed as a Good Article, using a SPS isn't allowed, and the Featured Articles require "high-quality reliable sources". This isn't a knock on Chris, rather a reflection of the fact that he isn't acknowledged as an "expert" in the field of history or the history of highways by the broader community. Even though I can't/don't use Michigan Highways as a source, I do link to the site at the bottom of every MI highway article. As it stands right now, of the little over 200 MI highway articles, 9 are FAs and 115 are GAs. The remainder are just below GA status on the scale.
Quote from: Scott5114 on December 18, 2011, 04:30:26 PMI see it as the difference between a young small business and a corporation. When a company is small and everyone knows everyone, the folks in charge can be more lax about rules because everyone knows what is expected because there is one or two managers that see all the employees in the building on a daily basis. As the successful business grows into a large corporation there are more layers of management and stricter rules are laid down, which it probably doesn't make sense to adhere to like the gospel, but that is done anyway. It's seen as necessary to ensure everyone is treated uniformly, because the top execs probably don't get to talk to all the employees themselves and have to exercise their will through more junior managers.
The transition from charismatic to bureaucratic leadership has been a well-known phenomenon since Max Weber described it in
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. I don't think anyone (aside from aficionados of unusual forms of social organization) objects
per se to Wikipedia developing into a bureaucracy bound by impartially enforced rules as its content and its responsibilities expand. Bureaucracy, in the view of Weber and many other writers on the subject, is a necessary accompaniment of scale. What tends to attract criticism are the features of Wikipedia's bureaucracy that tend to distinguish it from established bureaucracies within government and the blue-chip corporate world, combined with frequent use of jargon in management-oriented pages, which adds to the difficulties outsiders (including casual Wikipedia editors like myself) face in sussing out institutional arrangements.
Government bureaucracies tend to be hierarchical and the hierarchies are relatively easy for people outside government to understand and navigate. In the British civil service, for example, you know that an assistant principal (postholder of a certain administrative grade, not a school administrator) is a pretty important mid-level official; the CEO of an executive agency is less important than a minister or a departmental secretary; that anyone identified as "Chief Accounting Officer" of an agency or department is a pretty important person indeed; etc. By convention the government publishes a Civil Service List which sets forth the title of each official, his or her position within the hierarchy, and his or her annual salary. What are Wikipedia's equivalents of assistant principal, agency CEO, chief accounting officer, etc.? Where is Wikipedia's equivalent of the Civil Service List?
Governments and corporate bureaucracies are also constrained by budgets. Money has to be requested from third parties (either legislators or civil servants in an unaffiliated department) in order to staff bureaux and fund performance of their appointed duties. Once granted, the money has to be accounted for to the funders after a defined interval, and this report has to compare the results obtained from money expended with the purposes for which it was originally appropriated. This mechanism for accountability helps prevent the unjustified proliferation of bureaux, multiplication of employees within the bureaux, and expansion of responsibilities undertaken by a given bureau. Where is the budget of Wikipedia? Where are Wikipedia administrators required to account for their use of resource? What are their job descriptions? What are the charges of the organizational units for which they are responsible?
By mentioning all of these issues, I do not mean to assert that Wikipedia lacks a defined hierarchy, financial discipline, or any of the other institutional furnishings that attach to bureaucracies better understood by the man in the street. What I mean to underline is that Wikipedia's hierarchical arrangements are a closed book to outsiders. The same is true of any mechanisms it may have in place to ensure that resources (including not just money from donations but also the most important kind of resource of all, the time of knowledgeable editors) are spent as efficiently as possible. Wikipedia also suffers from the problem that the typical casual editor's first contact with management usually occurs in a negative context, as the result of some other editor (generally some vaguely defined type of "higher up") objecting to an edit on the basis of criteria which are hard to find and not always possible to apply objectively. The casual editor, if he or she sticks to his or her guns, then gets ushered into an appeals process governed by obscure forum selection rules, where it seems that anyone with the time and ego commitment to write screed after screed after screed can carry the day regardless of the merits of his case.
This particular discussion dealing with a project scope expansion (WikiProject UK Roads to cover road bridges and tunnels in addition to surface highways) was recently pointed out, by a Facebook friend, as an example of Wikipedia bureaucracy gone wrong:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_UK_Roads#Amendment_of_scope
Note that there is more than a screenful of discussion, most of it from a single objector, on what should be a fairly simple and straightforward technical change. This objector lost me at "PR, GAN, ACR or FAC."
My Facebook friend offered the link with this sarcastic observation: "Hells bells, they might even add some useful content one day if we're not careful!"
Quote from: bulldog1979 on December 18, 2011, 05:00:52 PM
As it stands right now, of the little over 200 MI highway articles, 9 are FAs and 115 are GAs. The remainder are just below GA status on the scale.
And how many are actually good? :bigsass:
Quote from: J N Winkler on December 18, 2011, 06:33:26 PM
Government bureaucracies tend to be hierarchical and the hierarchies are relatively easy for people outside government to understand and navigate. In the British civil service, for example, you know that an assistant principal (postholder of a certain administrative grade, not a school administrator) is a pretty important mid-level official; the CEO of an executive agency is less important than a minister or a departmental secretary; that anyone identified as "Chief Accounting Officer" of an agency or department is a pretty important person indeed; etc. By convention the government publishes a Civil Service List which sets forth the title of each official, his or her position within the hierarchy, and his or her annual salary. What are Wikipedia's equivalents of assistant principal, agency CEO, chief accounting officer, etc.? Where is Wikipedia's equivalent of the Civil Service List?
Wikipedia does have a hierarchy of "higher-ups" but this hierarchy is largely irrelevant to the lay person because it bears no relevancy to editorial decisions. I am an administrator, but I have no greater say in what the content of an article is than you do. Administratorship is simply a trusted position granted more technical tools that allow an editor more latitude to defend the encyclopedia against unconstructive edits ("vandalism")–among them are user blocking, page protection, quick reversion ("rollback") ability. Wikipedia cultural values hold that adminship is supposed to be "no big deal" and the position is often likened to being janitorial in nature; achieving adminship is frequently referred to as "getting the mop" or simply "the tools". Above adminship lie positions that are similarly more technical in nature, the
bureaucrat and the
steward. Both of these positions have rights granted which are even more obscure and seldom needed; the bureaucrat, for instance, has the ability to add and remove certain special flags to user accounts (like a flag indicating an account is used by an automated bot) and promote users to adminship.
However, this hierarchy as mentioned above is ultimately irrelevant to editing, as all decisions on Wikipedia stem from the consensus of the involved parties. This is why Wikipedia has so many policies–a need to document all of the consensuses that the community has reached on various issues. Unfortunately this is somewhat poorly organized and rather cumbersome to the newcomer. The U.S. Roads project chose to address this by creating a new user orientation page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_U.S._Roads/New_user_orientation) which quickly lays out some of the basic policies, style guidelines, and cultural norms for someone interested in U.S. Roads in particular.
QuoteGovernments and corporate bureaucracies are also constrained by budgets. Money has to be requested from third parties (either legislators or civil servants in an unaffiliated department) in order to staff bureaux and fund performance of their appointed duties. Once granted, the money has to be accounted for to the funders after a defined interval, and this report has to compare the results obtained from money expended with the purposes for which it was originally appropriated. This mechanism for accountability helps prevent the unjustified proliferation of bureaux, multiplication of employees within the bureaux, and expansion of responsibilities undertaken by a given bureau. Where is the budget of Wikipedia? Where are Wikipedia administrators required to account for their use of resource? What are their job descriptions? What are the charges of the organizational units for which they are responsible?
The budget of the Wikimedia Foundation is also irrelevant to the average editor. So as to avoid the possibility of bias brought on by advertising, the Foundation's expenses are covered through donations, usually solicited through donation drives somewhat similar to what you would see on public television in the US. (This is why you occasionally see "A Personal Appeal From Jimmy Wales" or some such plastered on the top of each page.) The only people on the payroll of the Foundation are those performing behind-the-scenes non-editoral duties–think the office workers, people running the servers, responding to press inquiries, etc. The vast majority of the budget, however, is simply spent keeping the servers running. The Foundation instructs editors to disregard any sort of financial or software-performance issues in editorial decisions and generally keeps out of the way altogether unless they need to step in due to some dire legal issue, which is infrequent.
QuoteBy mentioning all of these issues, I do not mean to assert that Wikipedia lacks a defined hierarchy, financial discipline, or any of the other institutional furnishings that attach to bureaucracies better understood by the man in the street. What I mean to underline is that Wikipedia's hierarchical arrangements are a closed book to outsiders. The same is true of any mechanisms it may have in place to ensure that resources (including not just money from donations but also the most important kind of resource of all, the time of knowledgeable editors) are spent as efficiently as possible.
All of the information in this post is freely available somewhere on the site but as mentioned before there is just so much to read on Wikipedia's back-of-house operations that it is very overwhelming. Efficiency is, well, non-existent; because people work on a volunteer basis and are free to edit just about any page sometimes you will have many inefficiencies on that front. In U.S. Roads this manifests itself as having as many as half a dozen editors interested and actively editing articles on roads in the Northeast but close to none looking after articles on roads in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Missouri, etc.
QuoteWikipedia also suffers from the problem that the typical casual editor's first contact with management usually occurs in a negative context, as the result of some other editor (generally some vaguely defined type of "higher up") objecting to an edit on the basis of criteria which are hard to find and not always possible to apply objectively. The casual editor, if he or she sticks to his or her guns, then gets ushered into an appeals process governed by obscure forum selection rules, where it seems that anyone with the time and ego commitment to write screed after screed after screed can carry the day regardless of the merits of his case.
Editorial disputes are supposed to be resolved by everyone involved sitting down as equals and trying to form a consensus together. Of course this often fails precisely because someone decides to "stick to one's guns" and refuse to work with the other party. That's when editorial dispute resolution processes kick in, in the form of third-party mediation or, worst comes to worst, arbitration. The problem is that it's generally not that clean because someone will have stepped on some policy at some point (often 3RR, the three revert rule meant to curb edit wars) and the other party will make things worse by posting to an administrative noticeboard attempting to get someone to intervene. Other times discussions will spread because someone is seeking an outside opinion and then the discussion will get spread to that page. MeatballWiki terms this a "forest fire" (http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/ForestFire). In my six years on Wikipedia I have only been involved in such "forest fire" type debates two or three times. I don't think they are all too common for the average savvy editor, as long as controversial areas (such as anything that lends itself to nationalism) are avoided.
QuoteThis particular discussion dealing with a project scope expansion (WikiProject UK Roads to cover road bridges and tunnels in addition to surface highways) was recently pointed out, by a Facebook friend, as an example of Wikipedia bureaucracy gone wrong:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_UK_Roads#Amendment_of_scope
Note that there is more than a screenful of discussion, most of it from a single objector, on what should be a fairly simple and straightforward technical change. This objector lost me at "PR, GAN, ACR or FAC."
My Facebook friend offered the link with this sarcastic observation: "Hells bells, they might even add some useful content one day if we're not careful!"
The abbreviations arise from the fact that the same dozen policies or so are often referenced again and again in a discussion and it becomes tiresome to type "three revert rule", "no original research policy", "assume good faith", etc. over and over again. Usually you are addressing a room full of experienced Wikipedia editors and thus it is reasonable to assume that everyone is familiar with the acronyms. Generally they will be linked at their first appearance in a discussion, but if not, they may be looked up by prepending "WP:" to them and visiting that page (e.g. visiting the page "WP:3RR" redirects the reader to the "three revert rule" policy page).
We also have an IRC channel #wikipedia-en-roads on Freenode where new editors can come and ask us questions. During the evening hours there's always someone on who can answer your questions.
Nowadays, we don't really have to worry about the road articles getting deleted, or about the articles getting wrecked. There have been precedents set in place that protect us, for the most part. There's a lot of Wikipedia drama going on around the encyclopedia, but there's a few of us that monitor those discussions and keep the others informed about what they need to know, and we're able to keep it out of the roads areas. The roads projects have been relatively peaceful for a few years now; sure, there's debates, but we're able to keep those somewhat civil and contained.
As it stands now, the hypothetical scenarios of forking from Wikipedia haven't been honestly considered for years.
(Wow, I didn't realize this thread was still going, over 2 years later!)
Quote from: rschen7754 on February 13, 2012, 04:33:16 PMNowadays, we don't really have to worry about the road articles getting deleted, or about the articles getting wrecked. There have been precedents set in place that protect us, for the most part.
Which is interesting as road articles tend to be either original research or plagiarism - both banned by WP - the latter for obvious reasons, the former a bit less obvious. I guess it's a rare case of pragmatism and content over rules and regulations.
I think it's one of the cultural differences between British and US roadgeeks - British ones mostly dislike wikipedia: part of it is history and another part geography.
History - in the early days of SABRE, a complete route list was started - the actual one is very awkward (a series of 1:10k maps with each route number on them and little-to-no cataloguing) and no public lists existed at the time. Along with that came projects to supplement CBRD's listings of motorways with descriptions of A1-99 and then A100-999 (which were grouped on webpages 10 to a page, earning the title 'roads by ten'). These group efforts were hosted on SABRE. The 'digest' and the 'First 99' and 'R10' projects were maintained by people posting updated/improved on the forum, some people adding descriptions for B roads and 4-digit A roads, and then someone updating the .html pages. This wasn't great, and after years of talk, we finally installed a wiki, which merged the projects and allowed a lot more scope (junctions/interchanges, 'primary destinations', other important destinations, service areas, bridges) and no middle man. In the US, there's team websites like AA roads, state/region-specific websites, well maintained lists of roads that are accessible, and so on: not until recently, with the AA roads forum, has there been something that resembled a go-to place for all US roads knowledge.
Geography - the US is huge, and different people made sites for their different areas, add to that state routes - data for each area is fragmented, and state roads aren't nationwide - it wasn't a group project to list and describe roads, but rather the work of just a few.
Additional history - we found out, several years ago, that wikipedia users were basically stealing SABRE members research - normally uncited. At the same time, we found that the websites that the research was put on - when they were actually being cited - were then being considered unreliable sources. In fact, this last week, I've heard that the original (and only complete) list of British Roads - from 1922, is considered unreliable as they didn't make that many copies 90 years ago and it's hard to get your hands on a copy (though there's certainly one in the British Library, and another in the National Archives). J.N.'s Facebook friend has spend a couple of years trying to heal the rift between SABRE and WP, to little avail and every little bit of news has been "they make our horrible admin days look great" (which is really saying something, given how awful our days as the Society for Anal Bureaucratic Regulating Everything was).
Quote from: english si on February 13, 2012, 08:15:40 PM
In fact, this last week, I've heard that the original (and only complete) list of British Roads - from 1922, is considered unreliable as they didn't make that many copies 90 years ago and it's hard to get your hands on a copy (though there's certainly one in the British Library, and another in the National Archives).
Bullshit. Presumably it's under crown copyright, hence public domain, so it can be transcribed onto Wikisource. (Even if it wasn't, that shouldn't make it unreliable.)
Quote from: english si on February 13, 2012, 08:15:40 PM
In fact, this last week, I've heard that the original (and only complete) list of British Roads - from 1922, is considered unreliable as they didn't make that many copies 90 years ago and it's hard to get your hands on a copy (though there's certainly one in the British Library, and another in the National Archives).
That source is reliable. The number of available copies doesn't make or break a source as reliable or not; the publisher/author does.
^^ http://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=576804#p576804 <-post saying that idiots are at play in WP:UK Roads. I know it's a reliable source, and fits WP's definition, but it is considered to be unreliable by nincompoops!
Crown copyright is the same as normal copyright, just it's 50 years, not 70 years - it is public domain because of its age, not because of its authors.
It can be transcribed onto Wikisource, but SABRE will get irate without decent proof that the transcriber put in some effort to obtain the document and didn't plagiarize it. SABRE has a full list transcribed on its wiki, someone having gone to the trouble of paying to digitally copy (photos, IIRC) the copy in the British Library and then sharing it with a few others, so they could help the laborious task of copying it by hand to the SABRE Wiki. The photocopies are copyright the copier, under UK copyright law. The transcription on the Wiki is copyright SABRE.
Anyway, I think it might be that the 1922 Road Lists were considered unreliable as the reference was to the SABRE Wiki (helping the end user, as they could then actually read the original source) transcription - which as a wiki, isn't reliable under WP rules. This is despite Wikisource being a wiki, but if someone just copied and pasted the wiki code (with permission) from SABRE to Wikisource, the change of location would make it a reliable source <facepalm>. If it is the case that the reference was pointing you to the SABRE Wiki, then it is still nincompoops tagging it as unreliable and shows one of the worse aspects of Wikipedia - that there's a lot of people whom the end user isn't the person to please, but the rules applied with no common sense.
Quote from: english si on February 14, 2012, 05:51:35 AM
It can be transcribed onto Wikisource, but SABRE will get irate without decent proof that the transcriber put in some effort to obtain the document and didn't plagiarize it. SABRE has a full list transcribed on its wiki, someone having gone to the trouble of paying to digitally copy (photos, IIRC) the copy in the British Library and then sharing it with a few others, so they could help the laborious task of copying it by hand to the SABRE Wiki. The photocopies are copyright the copier, under UK copyright law. The transcription on the Wiki is copyright SABRE.
Fuck SABRE and fuck British law allowing creativity-less copyright. Wikipedia rightly ignores the latter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain#Non-creative_works
Quote from: NE2 on February 14, 2012, 02:42:13 PMFuck SABRE and fuck British law allowing creativity-less copyright. Wikipedia rightly ignores the latter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain#Non-creative_works
That's the root of the dislike between SABRE and WP - people spend hours in archives doing research and then Wikipedia come along and steal the facts that the SABRE members found (and then call the sites where the research was published unreliable sources) and declare it like some sort of right, despite breaking the law (including US, see below). And, of course, Wikipedia doesn't allow anything other than this plagiarism, as that would be 'original research'.
I've just looked through my collection of old books where the content is out of copyright as written years and years ago. All of them have stuff like "Text copyright 1995" or whatever. The actual work is out of copyright, but the book is in copyright. The most aggressive one was the one imported from the States: "Copyright 2008... All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher" they did the formatting and made "numerous corrections" to the 1845 translation. Technically, according to that draconian list, I'd be unable to quote it in essays - having to find the original (or an alternative) translation.
And, of course, Wikipedia puts a Creative Commons licence on it's own material, restricting use, so they don't want me to be able to copy some list of facts off their site and putting it under a different CC licence (eg no licence). It seems they do believe in copyrighting facts - I can't just pull a list off of WP and dump it somewhere else on the web unless I have the same CC licence on that site.
With the 1922 roads lists, the original content is obviously not copyrighted - however as SABRE members have made corrections, and the formatting, then we have just as much right to copyright it as the American publisher of my old book (we have much less rigid copyright terms too, IIRC). Wikipedia users ought to be able to reference the source if they want (and SABRE members don't have a problem with it in the case of the 1922 road lists, which isn't a pooling of research and there's no creative input other than formatting and correcting some spelling errors - the problem is at the WP end), but they apparently can't as it is on the wrong wiki despite the objections to the SABRE Wiki as an unreliable source equally applying to WikiSource.
Photos of old documents are copyright for exactly the same reasons as photos of old paintings, old buildings, ancient geology, etc are copyright. Ditto photocopies. Making a copy of the copy without permission is theft. Making your own copy of the original isn't. I'm certainly not talking about if someone goes and puts the document, from an original copy, on wikisource (which is highly unlikely) - I'm talking about if someone uses our copies (photo or wiki) without permission (far more likely, due to the magpies on WP).
If Wikipedia did not consistently and systematically steal research from SABRE member's websites and then attack those websites as unreliable, then SABRE would be much more friendly to WP. I've had a look round WP this evening and found quite a bit of work lifted from stuff I've done for the SABRE wiki - often with no citations. Most blatantly is a list of destinations that aren't considered 'primary' anymore where they have (wrongly) added a couple of incorrect places: mistakes we at SABRE initially made - including one that is spelt wrong, in a way that I am nearly unique in misspelling it - but then quickly corrected. Sure it's simply compare two different online documents made 15 years apart, but they can't even do that without pilfering the answers off someone else. Facts might not be copyright, but surely mistakes are? I'm not wanting to bring a lawsuit, or anything, just it's so fucking rude for these thieving twats not to even care about fixing errors in the stuff they stole when they are fixed on the original! :pan:
I'm not talking here about US road pages - just the UK ones, which seem to be edited by cockwombles who don't have a clue, with occasional useful information either put there by outsiders, or by people from SABRE who put it there years ago before the problems, or more recently out of embarrassment at how wrong/bad the article was. This is a discussion about "to wikipedia, or not to wikipedia" and I'm explaining both why British roadgeeks, on the whole, tend not to wikipedia, and why SABRE has it's own wiki.
Just what I expected - a response full of bullshit, throwing around terms like theft.
Publishers, by the way, like to add unenforceable terms. Doesn't mean they can prevent you from copying public domain text or images.
QuoteLondon (Goswell Road, Upper Street, Holloway Road, Archway Road) - Barnet - Baldock - Stamford - Grantham - Newark-upon-Trent - Doncaster - Wetherby - Boroughbridge - Northallerton - Darlington - Durham - Newcastle-upon-Tyne - Berwick-upon-Tweed - Haddington - Edinburgh
Assuming this is the way the original document formats it, there's nothing you can do to prevent me from copying this text anywhere. The 'notes' column is of course copyrightable.
Now, if I were an actual researcher, I'd want to see the original because of possible errors in transcription (if SABRE had photocopies of the original, this would do just as well - and no, these cannot be copyrighted by the copier, and certainly neither can a transcription derived from them). But this has nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with good research practices. If you want to know what the Bible originally said, you go to the earliest known copy (or photos of it), not to a Gideon's.
In addition to the specific case of the 1922 road list that Simon cites, the London Ringways have been a sore point between SABRE and Wikipedia. The bulk of the archives research on these proposals was done by Chris Marshall (owner of Cbrd.co.uk) and Steven Jukes (owner of Pathetic.org.uk), and they wrote it up only later to find bits and pieces of their work used on Wikipedia without attribution. I can remember an episode several years ago when Wikipedia editors posted in SABRE to the effect that they based their Ringway articles on their own archival research rather than Chris' and Steven's sites, but there were still enough similarities to give rise to the suspicion that the Wikipedians were depending on Steven and Chris for the overall narrative while "salting" the text with their own sources to obscure the extent of the plagiarism.
As matters now stand, Wikipedia does have a page on the Ringways but it is very short, with most of the citations coming from Chris' site. There are some citations to Times articles which are probably a result of access to the Times article database at universities. One citation is indirect--it is a link labelled "Highway Development Survey, 1937" (i.e., Bressey report) but instead of the actual book, which is still available at a number of university libraries in the UK, the link takes you to a roadgeek website page about it (now no longer actively maintained).
If I may interject, a similar situation erupted a few years ago in Ontario with regards to the history of highways in Ontario. Back in those days, Wikipedia wasn't sourced like it is today, and a situation arose whereby a website that details the History of Ontario's King's Highway's would make regular updates and they would magically appear, un-sourced, and usually almost verbatim a few days later. A feud ensued, and it seems like there is still bitterness today (surprisingly, emulated by members who weren't even involved in the kerfuffle all of those years ago).
Wikipedia is a neat idea, objectively I can't deny that, but as a fellow highway webmaster it has been frustrating over the years to see Wikipedia grow in popularity at the hands of sites such as my own which helped lay some of the ground work for information about highways in the first place.
As an analogy, Wikipedia is the Wal-mart of information on the internet. It's everywhere, and it has everything.
Quote from: AsphaltPlanet on February 14, 2012, 06:43:21 PMAs an analogy, Wikipedia is the Wal-mart of information on the internet. It's everywhere, and it has everything.
Personally I call it a McDonald's of information, but the underlying point is the same--there is an element of competition between quality on some third-party sites and accessibility on Wikipedia which flows directly from Wikipedia's scale and role as a one-stop shopping point for information.
Quote from: J N Winkler on February 14, 2012, 06:48:05 PM
Personally I call it a McDonald's of information, but the underlying point is the same--there is an element of competition between quality on some third-party sites and accessibility on Wikipedia which flows directly from Wikipedia's scale and role as a one-stop shopping point for information.
Sounds like a reasonable analogy. I find Wikipedia to be rather shite on reliability grounds, but knowing what to look for makes it a lot easier to find a better source.
Quote from: NE2 on February 14, 2012, 06:16:53 PMJust what I expected - a response full of bullshit, throwing around terms like theft.
What else is taking someone else's work without asking?
QuoteAssuming this is the way the original document formats it, there's nothing you can do to prevent me from copying this text anywhere.
oh indeed, but technically it would still be illegal, while unenforceable (see below).
QuoteNow, if I were an actual researcher, I'd want to see the original because of possible errors in transcription
Of course - I fully agree, but the issue being discussed in this train of coversation was why wikisource would count as a valid source, but the same thing elsewhere on the web wouldn't.
Quote(if SABRE had photocopies of the original, this would do just as well - and no, these cannot be copyrighted by the copier, and certainly neither can a transcription derived from them).
25 years copyright for re-published works that the original is out of copyright, according to the Bodleian library at Oxford (http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/services/copy/copyright#1-4), under UK (EU?) copyright law - add to that the National Library of Scotland's views about maps their staff have scanned and you have two of the most important places for dealing with out-of-copyright material in the country concurring. Oxford says "you may not copy the whole of, say, a Dickens novel if the printed work you are using as the source of the copy was published in the last 25 years."
QuoteBut this has nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with good research practices. If you want to know what the Bible originally said, you go to the earliest known copy (or photos of it), not to a Gideon's.
Indeed, and WP:UK Roads is an example
par excellence of bad research practices, so they won't do anything of the sort.
Quote from: english si on February 14, 2012, 07:38:43 PM
Quote from: NE2 on February 14, 2012, 06:16:53 PMJust what I expected - a response full of bullshit, throwing around terms like theft.
What else is taking someone else's work without asking?
If you mean hacking into the server and deleting it, you could call that stealing. Otherwise 'taking' is just as bogus a term.
Quote from: english si on February 14, 2012, 07:38:43 PM
25 years copyright for re-published works that the original is out of copyright, according to the Bodleian library at Oxford (http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/services/copy/copyright#1-4), under UK (EU?) copyright law - add to that the National Library of Scotland's views about maps their staff have scanned and you have two of the most important places for dealing with out-of-copyright material in the country concurring. Oxford says "you may not copy the whole of, say, a Dickens novel if the printed work you are using as the source of the copy was published in the last 25 years."
According to Wikipedia (heh) this only applies to previously unpublished works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_right
Here's the relevant UK law: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1996/2967/part/II/crossheading/publication-right/made
This obviously does not apply to a government document that was sent to libraries. Any attempt to apply this to such is so-called "copywrong" and reflects badly on the attempter.
If I carried on my quote from the Bodelian (http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/services/copy/copyright#1-4), then it would have talked about Publication Right - it's not what I, or they, were talking about:
QuoteThere is a similar right called 'publication right' that may apply to old material being published for the first time. This also lasts for 25 years. Apart from this there are no restrictions for out-of-copyright publications.
The only reason why this is even an issue is due to how Wikipedia contributors treat SABRE members hard work - like they have some right to simply grab any bit of information and dump it on Wikipedia without doing any work, or sending people to the place where the people who've done the work have presented it better and more accurately.
And OK, it's not taking - but an analogy is that you spend ages researching some academic project, only for someone to use your work, without asking or crediting, and get away with it - oh, and they take first drafts and don't fix the errors over on WP:UK Roads, reflecting badly when they do actually bother to source the information. Plagiarism, is what it is and if you look at Dictionary.com (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/plagiarism) then you'll see that one of the synonyms is "theft".
Quote from: english si on February 14, 2012, 08:45:55 PM
If I carried on my quote from the Bodelian (http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/services/copy/copyright#1-4), then it would have talked about Publication Right - it's not what I, or they, were talking about:
QuoteThere is a similar right called 'publication right' that may apply to old material being published for the first time. This also lasts for 25 years. Apart from this there are no restrictions for out-of-copyright publications.
If you're talking about the first sentence, that refers to "the typographical and other material aspects of the work". Not the underlying text, which is non-copyrightable. Certainly not the broad strokes of plot or where a road goes.
Think of it this way: if you take a picture of a road sign, you own the copyright to that picture. But if you take the same sign and put it in a scanner, the scan is not creative, hence non-copyrightable. And in either case, the fact that the border is 1/2 inch wide is not copyrightable.
Quote from: english si on February 14, 2012, 08:45:55 PM
The only reason why this is even an issue is due to how Wikipedia contributors treat SABRE members hard work - like they have some right to simply grab any bit of information and dump it on Wikipedia without doing any work, or sending people to the place where the people who've done the work have presented it better and more accurately.
Which has nothing to do with copying a public document.
It's not theft if the source is cited (as required by Wikipedia these days). If it's not cited, you should put a note on the articles in question, as the authors broke wikipedia policy.
If I go and spend an hour doing research and say "Route 49 was built in 1933" and you use my research to say the same thing on your site, how is that stealing? You just researched and found my site. Even if you didn't properly cite me as a source, I didn't actually do anything to cause the route to be built in 1933. I have no legitimate claim on it. You can steal the way I worded the information, but you can't "steal" the fact itself, and anyone who says otherwise can firmly blow it out their ass.
Quote from: english si on February 13, 2012, 08:15:40 PM
Which is interesting as road articles tend to be either original research or plagiarism - both banned by WP - the latter for obvious reasons, the former a bit less obvious. I guess it's a rare case of pragmatism and content over rules and regulations.
Maybe in the UK Roads project (which the US Roads project has been at odds with for quite a while), but not in the US Roads project. We don't let that stuff fly in the US articles.
A lot of the maps for eastern Interstates and US routes, and possibly some Indiana state routes, should probably be updated to show the newly-opened / signed parts of I-69...
I'll ask around about it.
Quote from: agentsteel53 on February 12, 2011, 07:34:54 PM
wow! I just went to my favorite bugaboo - the US 55 page - nice job there!! I approve of this!
keep it going - I'd love to see any obsolete routes shown with the historic style markers appropriate to when they were last in use.
and would it be too much to ask to use the state/US cutout format for state-specific US route pages? :sombrero:
The US 55 page features a "neutered" cutout shield. It looks silly. It should be replaced by a state name shield, either Iowa or Minnesota would be fine.
Quote from: Scott5114 on February 16, 2011, 11:28:00 PM
If state-specific specs are available, we use those. California and Oklahoma interstate articles use those states' respective standards.
For Oklahoma, you should use the "prison font" signs. They're disappearing, but they are technically the newest style and they're unique.
Lol no
Who cares if the article sucks shit as long as it has pretty pictures?
PS: your sig rules.
Quote from: Scott5114 on February 16, 2012, 01:58:06 PM
If I go and spend an hour doing research and say "Route 49 was built in 1933" and you use my research to say the same thing on your site, how is that stealing? You just researched and found my site. Even if you didn't properly cite me as a source, I didn't actually do anything to cause the route to be built in 1933. I have no legitimate claim on it. You can steal the way I worded the information, but you can't "steal" the fact itself, and anyone who says otherwise can firmly blow it out their ass.
Lighten up, Francis.
Let's not forget also that you
do have to cite your sources, not just to give credit for someone's prior research, but also to provide confirmation that you didn't just make some shit up.
Quote from: Special K on November 26, 2012, 08:19:37 AM
Let's not forget also that you do have to cite your sources, not just to give credit for someone's prior research, but also to provide confirmation that you didn't just make some shit up.
Which is the problem using Wikipedia for roads. If I drive a road every day, and actually pay attention to the road from a roadgeek perspective, shouldn't I myself become a valid source? I can't imagine most roadgeeks making something up on a road article, but countless times I've seen a [citation needed] on Wikipedia next to something that is obviously correct, it just happens to be something they observed in person.
For example, say I edit the I-86 (east) article to mention that it is not signed in Binghamton. I have no academic paper on I-86 signage; I don't even have a news article or anything. It shouldn't be necessary, because the fact that I recently drove the road and saw the signage (or lack thereof) should be plenty enough.
Another example: A few years ago I edited the Speed Limits in the United States article's North Carolina section to add US 17 from Elizabeth City to the VA line to the list of non-freeway roads posted at 60 mph. This was based solely on my observation driving the road back when I lived down there. None of the other roads listed have citations, so I didn't worry about it, but isn't this technically not sufficient by Wikipedia standards?
Well, yeah, but having never interacted with you before, how do we know you're a valid source? There are people crazy enough to lie about living in Binghamton and seeing I-86 signed there for God knows what reason. Or what if two random people disagree on something? Two local experts arguing over whether it's signed or not. Better to just avoid that can of worms altogether by sticking to valid sources. Many times they are not too difficult to find, anyway; these days DOT map archives are common. Oklahoma even publishes changelogs for some highways with the exact date the Highway Commission approved extensions/reroutes/truncations.
Quote from: Scott5114 on November 26, 2012, 09:56:39 AM
Well, yeah, but having never interacted with you before, how do we know you're a valid source?
Which is my point - Wikipedia doesn't, though they should. The fact that someone's a long-time member on here, for example, should go a long way toward indicating that we're experts on roads.
QuoteThere are people crazy enough to lie about living in Binghamton and seeing I-86 signed there for God knows what reason.
I'm sure there are. But I specified "most roadgeeks", not "most people".
QuoteOr what if two random people disagree on something? Two local experts arguing over whether it's signed or not.
That's the one time it should be necessary to require a citation, as follows:
Person A edits an article.
Person B questions the validity of the edit.
Person A responds that he observed it recently driving the road.
Person B is still doubtful so asks for proof.
Person A, B, or even C pulls up a news article or DOT information proving or disproving A's claim, or goes and drives the road themself.QuoteMany times they are not too difficult to find, anyway; these days DOT map archives are common. Oklahoma even publishes changelogs for some highways with the exact date the Highway Commission approved extensions/reroutes/truncations.
Ah yes, but not in cases of a speed limit, or a road being signed or not. To use an Oklahoma example, AASHTO never approved an extension of US 377, but ODOT signed it anyway.
And sure, there are all kinds of MassDOT sources proving that US 1 was moved onto I-95/93 through Boston, but signage still exits for the old routing, and is sparse at best for the new routing.
Quote from: deathtopumpkins on November 26, 2012, 09:34:11 AM
For example, say I edit the I-86 (east) article to mention that it is not signed in Binghamton. I have no academic paper on I-86 signage; I don't even have a news article or anything. It shouldn't be necessary, because the fact that I recently drove the road and saw the signage (or lack thereof) should be plenty enough.
The part to the east of Binghamton is actually signed. Signage on I-81 north has the shields, and I think there's one reassurance marker somewhere eastbound. Other signage is indeed absent though, as is signage on I-81 (as I-81 does not meet modern interstate standards, and/or because it would end in the multiplex).
Quote from: deanej on November 26, 2012, 11:28:04 AM
Quote from: deathtopumpkins on November 26, 2012, 09:34:11 AM
For example, say I edit the I-86 (east) article to mention that it is not signed in Binghamton. I have no academic paper on I-86 signage; I don't even have a news article or anything. It shouldn't be necessary, because the fact that I recently drove the road and saw the signage (or lack thereof) should be plenty enough.
The part to the east of Binghamton is actually signed. Signage on I-81 north has the shields, and I think there's one reassurance marker somewhere eastbound. Other signage is indeed absent though, as is signage on I-81 (as I-81 does not meet modern interstate standards, and/or because it would end in the multiplex).
I was using I-86 solely as an example. ;-) Though when I spent last weekend (11/17-18) in Binghamton I never saw a single 86 shield except for the stretch just east of the 81 multiplex, which seemed fully signed. The portion approaching I-84 once you get out of the mountains was also fully signed, just with all the shields covered up.
Quote from: deanej on November 26, 2012, 11:28:04 AM
The part to the east of Binghamton is actually signed. Signage on I-81 north has the shields, and I think there's one reassurance marker somewhere eastbound. Other signage is indeed absent though, as is signage on I-81 (as I-81 does not meet modern interstate standards, and/or because it would end in the multiplex).
That's hilarious. The route is good enough to carry an existing interstate, but it's not good enough to co-sign a different interstate. :-D
FTR, I-86 is in fact signed in random places well east of its current end. The "END" banner is uncovered at I-84, even though the Interstate is meant to continue to I-87.
Quote from: deathtopumpkins on November 26, 2012, 10:15:18 AM
QuoteOr what if two random people disagree on something? Two local experts arguing over whether it's signed or not.
That's the one time it should be necessary to require a citation, as follows:
Person A edits an article.
Person B questions the validity of the edit.
Person A responds that he observed it recently driving the road.
Person B is still doubtful so asks for proof.
Person A, B, or even C pulls up a news article or DOT information proving or disproving A's claim, or goes and drives the road themself.
That's part of the problem. A lot of what we know about roads is considered original research. Here in the community we know who is and isn't trustworthy, and we're good about providing photographic evidence for things when we can, but for Wikipedians outside the roadgeek community it isn't so easy to just trust in all that.
Quote from: deathtopumpkins on November 26, 2012, 10:15:18 AM
Quote from: Scott5114 on November 26, 2012, 09:56:39 AM
Well, yeah, but having never interacted with you before, how do we know you're a valid source?
Which is my point - Wikipedia doesn't, though they should. The fact that someone's a long-time member on here, for example, should go a long way toward indicating that we're experts on roads.
QuoteThere are people crazy enough to lie about living in Binghamton and seeing I-86 signed there for God knows what reason.
I'm sure there are. But I specified "most roadgeeks", not "most people".
But that's the thing–we don't know who "most roadgeeks" or "most people" are. We don't know if you're an enthusiast who actually likes getting things right or the sort of idiot that posts comments on road articles on news sites. Membership here means nothing–you know as well as I do that this place has had its fair share of people who don't know shit from beans.
And while such a policy might be workable for roadgeek related articles, the site needs one policy to cover everyone, and I assure you such a policy would fall apart pretty quickly when Palestinian "experts" and Israeli "experts" go at it. Actually, it's fallen apart in the road project before. Shall the title of the article be "Oklahoma State Highway 55" or "State Highway 55 (Oklahoma)"? It matters a lot to some people, apparently!!
Quote
Ah yes, but not in cases of a speed limit, or a road being signed or not. To use an Oklahoma example, AASHTO never approved an extension of US 377, but ODOT signed it anyway.
And sure, there are all kinds of MassDOT sources proving that US 1 was moved onto I-95/93 through Boston, but signage still exits for the old routing, and is sparse at best for the new routing.
Speed limits are the sort of detail we tend to omit because reading about every single speed limit change on a long route is usually way too much detail and would make the article long and unreadable. That's exactly the sort of thing roadgeek sites are good at covering and we let them cover it. On shorter routes it may be comparatively more important so it might be included. In such a case, I'd imagine there has to be some sort of DOT resource detailing the speed limits. However, finding it might entail digging through straight-line diagrams or a GIS database, or perhaps even scrounging through local laws or doing a FOIA request.
When we run into situations where the signed route doesn't match the DOT inventory of the route, we follow the inventoried route, and note that signage doesn't match.
As for US-377, well, I wrote the article on it, tell me how I did Welp, apparently I used an unreliable source. Way to shoot your point in the face, Scott.
Quote from: BigMattFromTexas on August 12, 2011, 01:06:13 PM
I tried putting a request in for a map of "Texas State Loop 306" but nothing has happened yet. I guess it's a low priority? But could someone help me with this? (I'm "DCBS18" on Wikipedia"
BigMatt
Unfortunately there's many articles that need maps and few map-makers. Therefore we've given the priority to the articles that are the most complete. However, we can always use your help! I've sent you a welcome message on Wikipedia.
QuoteThat's part of the problem. A lot of what we know about roads is considered original research. Here in the community we know who is and isn't trustworthy, and we're good about providing photographic evidence for things when we can, but for Wikipedians outside the roadgeek community it isn't so easy to just trust in all that.
Good point, Duke, and I agree.
One thing that seems to be missed here (unless I'm the one who missed it) is that maps can be used as sources. I've posted links to online, official state maps to source information that either I myself wrote or that someone else wrote, but where the writer was flagged with 'citation needed'. Historical information can be tricky because it's often difficult to cite with a map, since many states maintain only current maps online. This is one of the few things that MS has done right; all of the historical state highway maps published by MDOT since the 1920s are available online, so they can be used to document quite a bit of info about dates of construction, old alignments, etc.
But even where old maps are either not available or irrelevant, you should be able to find the info you need if you try hard enough. Think of a few choice words from whatever information you want to document and search them. For instance, I wanted to add a fact I had heard about since childhood - that the first stretch of rural, paved US highway was constructed in Mississippi - to whatever article it would have been relevant to, which I didn't know. I can't remember what the exact search was that finally worked, but I remember spending about a half-hour or so doing nothing but trying different search strings until I found what I was looking for in a US govt document: that the original routing of US 45 through Lee County, MS utilized a long stretch of the first paved road in the South, constructed in 1915. I had the fact I wanted and the source, and I added both to the US 45 article.
There are a lot of people who know every bit as much about birds as anyone here knows about highways, but unless those people are certified, published ornithologists then Wikipedia is not going to allow them to self-source any info they might add about birds. The same goes for highways, as it seems to me that it should.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_19_in_Florida#Taylor_County_to_Jefferson_County
"it intersects with Madison County Road 150 (also known as Creek 150)"
Yeah, uh, this is a TIGER screwup where they erroneously expanded CR 150.
zomg mod abuse
I posted over in the Midwest - Great Lakes board, but Monday marks the centennial of the creation of the State Trunkline Highway System in Michigan. With a bunch of help from others, we got the article on the system promoted to Featured Article status in time. About 15 or so minutes ago, when the servers rolled over to tomorrow's date (May 13), the article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as "Today's Featured Article". The article was nominated to run on the occasion of the centennial.
Good stuff on the interstate highway system on Wikipedia :clap:, as long it's properly taken care of and (all?) the informative edits are within the online encyclopedia's guidelines or standards.
I used to edit on wikipedia for a few years before I grew tired of it and learned the amount of edits are questionable...or inaccurate. :hmmm: Apparently, wikipedia has an article of future interstates and takes it with a "pinch of salt". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Interstate_Highways
Quote from: NE2 on February 16, 2011, 03:52:03 PM
Who cares about the articles as long as they have pretty pictures?
Honestly, that's my only interest in improving Wikipedia. The photos tend to offer legitimacy, if things are called into question. (Of course, anyone could doctor a photo, but that's a another matter.)
Some of the major tenets of WP have become muddied:
"Assume good faith." and
"Don't be a dick", essentially go out the window with some of the petty arguments and administrative-maintenance nonsense that goes on behind the scenes. (I'm not accusing the admins/editors here of such shenanigans, and I understand that if an article is to be improved, it requires the oversight and editorial view of someone who isn't involved nor interested in roads.) While I understand that there's a need for making articles consistent in appearance and content, a lot of it comes across as time-wasting nitpicking, which doesn't interest me.
Sure, sources are nice, and desirable, when available, but really any source is better than none at all, and they seem to be bent out of shape over some of the so-called "original research". I could take a photo of something, and without much doubt, it's instant credibility. But going through some factbook seems to bother others. Isn't taking care of the vandalism and pointless new pages enough (having created a few articles, and waded through the approval process, it seems that maybe 5% are serious pages)?
So yeah, I add photos...I stopped trying to edit or create articles, unless I see an tiny error or two that I can correct and confirm. I don't have the time nor patience for it anymore, so while I do appreciate the work, patience, and help you guys do, it's not quite for me. I can't recall seeing any road articles that really bothered me (unless it was just lacking content).
Sup shitty "good article": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_State_Route_249
Care to be specific?
Not the best writing. Bad grammar, extraneous information, and just cumbersomely poor wording choices. Sample:
Quote
There is no section of SR 249 that is included as a part of the National Highway System, a system of routes determined to be the most important for the nation's economy, mobility and defense.[6][7] The highway is maintained by the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) like all other state routes in the state. The department tracks the traffic volumes along all state highways as a part of its maintenance responsibilities using a metric called average annual daily traffic (AADT). This measurement is a calculation of the traffic level along a segment of roadway for any average day of the year. In 2009, ODOT figured that lowest traffic levels were the 820 vehicles used the highway daily on the section that is concurrent with SR 2. The peak traffic volumes were 6,720 vehicles AADT along a section of SR 249 between US 127 and SR 15.
Yeah, that. The fact that it's not NHS is unnecessary, and the AADT wording is padded to hell (and pretty useless to the layman without an indication of how busy these figures mean the highway actually is - better would be simply linking to the ODOT AADT in the external links).
Also:
QuoteSR 249 heads southeast from the Indiana—Ohio state line, as a two-lane highway passing through farmland, with some houses. The route passes over the St. Joseph River and turns due east. The highway has an intersection at SR 49, in rural Defiance County. After the intersection with SR 49 the highway enters farmland and woodland, with a few houses. The route has an intersection with SR 2, this intersection is the western terminus of the SR 2 concurrency. The concurrency heads east, passing through farmland, until SR 2 turns north in the community of Farmer. SR 249 heads east having an intersection with US 127. The route turns southeast, before ending at an intersection with SR 15 in Ney.[4][5]
Emphasis added.
Okay, anyone care to edit this? I know nothing of the road, so I'm not sure what I can do there.
Quote from: NE2 on September 28, 2013, 06:56:16 AM
Also:
QuoteSR 249 heads southeast from the Indiana—Ohio state line, as a two-lane highway passing through farmland, with some houses. The route passes over the St. Joseph River and turns due east. The highway has an intersection at SR 49, in rural Defiance County. After the intersection with SR 49 the highway enters farmland and woodland, with a few houses. The route has an intersection with SR 2, this intersection is the western terminus of the SR 2 concurrency. The concurrency heads east, passing through farmland, until SR 2 turns north in the community of Farmer. SR 249 heads east having an intersection with US 127. The route turns southeast, before ending at an intersection with SR 15 in Ney.[4][5]
Emphasis added.
Especially since right in introductory paragraph it says:
QuoteThe whole route is a rural two-lane highway and passes through farmland.
It doesn't seem necessary to elaborate, turn-by-turn, how the route continues to enter areas of farmland. In fact, my main disappointment with the route descriptions is that they read like junction lists and DOT maps that are slightly adapted into prose, but still retain a primarily laundry-list character. This is more than just aesthetic; the first sentence of the description is this:
QuoteSR 249 heads southeast from the Indiana—Ohio state line...
Not really, it doesn't; it's almost entirely an east-west route. Only the first kilometer or so is NW-SE, but the prominent placement of this sentence serves to introduce the route as having that bearing overall. I think with most of these route descriptions, the point-by-point character of a junction list needs to be more thoroughly digested and presented as a cogent narrative, perhaps something like this:
"State Route 249 begins at the western edge of the village of Ney, continuing the path of State Route 15 where that road turns north toward Bryan. SR 249 strikes due west across the northwest quadrant of Defiance County and crosses the St. Joseph River just before its end at the Indiana state line, where it continues as DeKalb County Road 40S. It is entirely rural in character, traversing an area of section-line roads and tilled fields of [whatever crop is prominent there] interrupted by scattered homes and farm buildings."
And so on; if you really want to include route junctions (possible here but unwieldy for longer routes), you could condense it as:
"Along its length, SR 249 intersects US 127 just west of Ney, overlaps State Route 2 for two miles west from Farmer, and meets State Route 49 between Hicksville and Edgerton."
Quote from: empirestate on September 28, 2013, 11:17:22 AMIt doesn't seem necessary to elaborate, turn-by-turn, how the route continues to enter areas of farmland. In fact, my main disappointment with the route descriptions is that they read like junction lists and DOT maps that are slightly adapted into prose, but still retain a primarily laundry-list character. This is more than just aesthetic; the first sentence of the description is this:
QuoteSR 249 heads southeast from the Indiana—Ohio state line...
Not really, it doesn't; it's almost entirely an east-west route. Only the first kilometer or so is NW-SE, but the prominent placement of this sentence serves to introduce the route as having that bearing overall. I think with most of these route descriptions, the point-by-point character of a junction list needs to be more thoroughly digested and presented as a cogent narrative, perhaps something like this:
"State Route 249 begins at the western edge of the village of Ney, continuing the path of State Route 15 where that road turns north toward Bryan. SR 249 strikes due west across the northwest quadrant of Defiance County and crosses the St. Joseph River just before its end at the Indiana state line, where it continues as DeKalb County Road 40S. It is entirely rural in character, traversing an area of section-line roads and tilled fields of [whatever crop is prominent there] interrupted by scattered homes and farm buildings."
I agree with your criticisms, but I think even this rewrite doesn't completely address them because it is still quite heavy on details that fail to address the "So what? Why should we care?" factor. (As an example, it seems unnecessary to specify the type of crop, and that description may in any case be inaccurate at any given point in time if the farmers in that area generally practice crop rotation. It seems equally redundant to say that the farmland is punctuated by houses and barns, because those appurtenances are generally recognized as part of modern farming and thus can be considered to be included in the phrase "farmland.") I suggest that a rewrite could be made even more brief by exploiting these salient facts:
* For most of its approximately 15-mile length, SR 249 is a county section line road, the main exceptions being the "grid snap" segment immediately east of the Indiana state line and the connection to SR 15 in Ney.
* SR 249 is a feeder state highway lying entirely in Defiance County in northwest Ohio.
Here is how I might do it:
"Ohio State Route 249 is a feeder state highway lying in rural Defiance County in northwest Ohio. It begins at the Indiana state line and ends at SR 15 in Ney, overlapping an east-west county section line road through level farmland for most of its length."
(I considered writing "cultivated alluvial bottomland" instead but didn't since it is only an educated guess on my part that this is the case.)
The advantage of specifying that SR 249 overlaps a county section line road and that it runs through cultivated farmland is that you can draw on the reader's understanding of these concepts to communicate very quickly that the highway is very straight and flat with few curves except for "grid snap" segments and connections to other state highways. The reader thus reaches a decision point very quickly: "I like primary state highways that are glorified county section line roads, so I'll read more," or "This sounds like a boring drive, so I'll stop reading." In contrast, the Wikipedia article gets too far in the tall weeds and is almost as bad for this purpose as, say, a list of curve PCs, PIs, and PTs with northings and eastings.
Quote from: J N Winkler on September 28, 2013, 12:46:20 PM
(I considered writing "cultivated alluvial bottomland" instead but didn't since it is only an educated guess on my part that this is the case.)
That kind of specificity is a hallmark of Wikipedia. At least two of those words should be links to other articles. As for its accuracy, I'm not so sure either. Without looking at a map, this sounds like part of what was once the Great Black Swamp before it was drained for agricultural use. Does that change your educated guess?
Just my two cents, NE2; don't write an article on any roadway whatsoever unless you can verify for yourself that 1) the roadway exists in the state's route logbook, 2) the route was commissioned by state and AASHTO officials, and 3) all the maps verify that the route exists along with the roads it intersects with.
I don't know anything on how to build a Wikipedia article or how to edit one, but the way I see it in regards to SR 249, that would be the way I would do it. 1) Verify that SR 249 exists in the logbook, 2) SR 249 was commissioned, and 3) all maps (Google, MapQuest, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) indicate that SR 249 exists. You'd have to basically drive SR 249 to know what it is about. That is the approach I take if I was to write an article on a particular Montana roadway like I-90 or US 789 because I've either A) driven on them, or B) rid the route as a passenger. You really need to put more thought in how you approach what you know about certain roadways in every state, much like SR 249 because the Average Joe Q Public that visits Wikipedia and sees what you have written initially may be inclined to say "This person is a complete whackjob" or "This person is a biggot" or things like that and they'll probably challenge your article to the fullest extent to where Wikipedia will essentially just remove the whole page altogether.
Please do more research and maybe look up photos of SR 249. People are more keen to looking at your Wikipedia article on SR 249 if it has a detailed map of where it starts, where it ends, what roads it intersects, the mileage, and some photographs either by you or by others (you'd have to ask the holder of the photos, of course, to use them via commons agreements and so forth). Once you've done that, then people who thought "This person's a whackjob" or "a biggot" at first will perhaps change their point of view and be inclined to think "This person is on to something. He/she knows something about this subject that I have yet to learn and am eager to know more."
You'll get better, trust me. You just have to put more thought into the article or the powers-that-be of Wikipedia will challenge it and will eventually turn it down.
AARoads... the http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/ (http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/) of the U.S. Roads WikiProject. :happy:
In all seriousness, we do appreciate hearing any concerns that you have about Wikipedia articles. Please feel free to let any of us who are active in both sites know if there are issues (though I suppose Scott5114 is the best one to contact as he's the most active of us here). We also do need more knowledgeable editors on Wikipedia, and can help you get started if you want to join us!
As far as the concern about articles being boring, consisting of turn-by-turn driving directions through farmland, and giving no indication as to why the road was built... it's a known problem, to say the least, especially with our articles on shorter routes. It's something that we are trying to address as we work with newer editors, but it is not an easy problem to fix. With that being said, there are some articles on Wikipedia that are actually of high quality (such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_96, and most of Michigan in fact); the variations are well known.
Quote from: Billy F 1988 on September 28, 2013, 04:31:32 PMJust my two cents, NE2; don't write an article on any roadway whatsoever
You could have ended there!
OK, I jest - NE2 knows quite a lot and is a keen roads researcher - he'd make great articles, though not if he has to deal with a Wikiwonk getting in his grill (like what happened with many UK roadgeeks, hence why SABRE has its own wiki).
However he didn't write the article, just posted it as an example of bad writing called good by WP...
Quote from: rschen7754 on September 28, 2013, 04:50:00 PMIn all seriousness, we do appreciate hearing any concerns that you have about Wikipedia articles.
My concern is that they are on Wikipedia.
New Hampshire doesn't give as much information as Massachusetts does. I live near the border, and I look at both states. (I do not have the username 1 there.) I (you might be able to guess my username) had to write the route junctions for two routes, and the description for one of them.
I recently realized how much the Ohio state route markers on Wikipedia make me go "erk".* They're based on a very small and not-very-detailed drawing in the Ohio MUTCD, which isn't itself a very good representation of what's in the field. A better source for the proper design of the Ohio state route markers is in the Ohio Sign Design Manual. That source isn't perfect, as it essentially consists of tracing the shape from a grid, but it's the better of only two official sources.
Having traveled around much of Ohio, I'll concede that there is some variation in the shape of the route markers in the field. Most of them look more like the design in the SDM than in the MUTCD. Some of the more recent ones in one part of the state look exactly like in Wikipedia, and I suspect that's where the contractor actually got the outline for those. :banghead:
I've actually made SVG files of the Ohio state route markers, following the original grid-trace pattern in the SDM as faithfully as possible. I'm thinking about replacing the templates on Wikimedia Commons with ones using the shapes I derived from the SDM, and requesting the shield-maker bot to update all the route shields from the fixed templates. But I'm concerned such action might be seen as a kind of vandalism, or at least the needless fixing of something that "isn't broken". Note, the shapes have already been changed before; originally, the templates were based on photos, and I think the OMUTCD versions are a step backwards. Could someone more familiar with the US Roads Wikiproject community advise me on how to proceed? If necessary, I can document exactly why I think the Ohio SDM is a better source than the OMUTCD, and my process of faithfully reproducing the original design. (Much of this I already talked about in this thread (https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=9122.0).)
*Ironically, I think it's my work with the SDM that has made me more aware of the variations, causing me to dislike the WP version.
Quote from: Mike D boy on June 30, 2013, 01:12:02 PM
Good stuff on the interstate highway system on Wikipedia :clap:, as long it's properly taken care of and (all?) the informative edits are within the online encyclopedia's guidelines or standards.
I used to edit on wikipedia for a few years before I grew tired of it and learned the amount of edits are questionable...or inaccurate. :hmmm: Apparently, wikipedia has an article of future interstates and takes it with a "pinch of salt". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Interstate_Highways
That's a pretty dubious article there. I've watched it for awhile, and while some of it does have some basis in fact (I-41 is pretty close to becoming reality, we know that CA-99 is being upgraded to interstate and I-11 does have some serious plans for being built), there is a lot of fantasy there. I don't care if there is a proposed I-3 in Georgia and it got Congressional approval. That freeway will never be built.
Quote from: J N Winkler on September 28, 2013, 12:46:20 PM
I agree with your criticisms, but I think even this rewrite doesn't completely address them because it is still quite heavy on details that fail to address the "So what? Why should we care?" factor. (As an example, it seems unnecessary to specify the type of crop, and that description may in any case be inaccurate at any given point in time if the farmers in that area generally practice crop rotation. It seems equally redundant to say that the farmland is punctuated by houses and barns, because those appurtenances are generally recognized as part of modern farming and thus can be considered to be included in the phrase "farmland.")
Sure...my re-write basically aims to rephrase the existing amount of information in a more palatable way. Whether the included set of information is the correct one would be a further piece of the discussion. As for the crops line, I just threw that in as an idea of the sort of color I feel this kind of narrative needs; the specifics of the fact included, if any, would likewise be subject to consideration and verification, or exclusion.
There's also the inescapable fact that if these articles fully met my preferences of how they ought to read, they'd start to exceed the scope of Wikipedia in the first place as you'd start to get into some more qualitative and interpretive assessments. But that's okay, it's what my own website is for.
Quote from: vtk on September 28, 2013, 06:17:01 PM
I recently realized how much the Ohio state route markers on Wikipedia make me go "erk".* They're based on a very small and not-very-detailed drawing in the Ohio MUTCD, which isn't itself a very good representation of what's in the field. A better source for the proper design of the Ohio state route markers is in the Ohio Sign Design Manual. That source isn't perfect, as it essentially consists of tracing the shape from a grid, but it's the better of only two official sources.
Having traveled around much of Ohio, I'll concede that there is some variation in the shape of the route markers in the field. Most of them look more like the design in the SDM than in the MUTCD. Some of the more recent ones in one part of the state look exactly like in Wikipedia, and I suspect that's where the contractor actually got the outline for those. :banghead:
I've actually made SVG files of the Ohio state route markers, following the original grid-trace pattern in the SDM as faithfully as possible. I'm thinking about replacing the templates on Wikimedia Commons with ones using the shapes I derived from the SDM, and requesting the shield-maker bot to update all the route shields from the fixed templates. But I'm concerned such action might be seen as a kind of vandalism, or at least the needless fixing of something that "isn't broken". Note, the shapes have already been changed before; originally, the templates were based on photos, and I think the OMUTCD versions are a step backwards. Could someone more familiar with the US Roads Wikiproject community advise me on how to proceed? If necessary, I can document exactly why I think the Ohio SDM is a better source than the OMUTCD, and my process of faithfully reproducing the original design. (Much of this I already talked about in this thread (https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=9122.0).)
*Ironically, I think it's my work with the SDM that has made me more aware of the variations, causing me to dislike the WP version.
I had a hand in the current version of the Ohio shields. I wasn't so much concerned with the Ohio shape as I was the numbers, which were cringeworthy at best (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OH-209.svg#File_history). If you have something that's better, by all means overwrite the template and we'll redo them again.
Monday marks the 80th anniversary since Brockway Mountain Drive, a scenic road near Copper Harbor, Michigan, was opened to the public. The road runs along the ridge of Brockway Mountain, part of the Keweenaw Fault. It was built as a public works project during the Great Depression. In honor of the occasion, its article on Wikipedia has been chosen as "Today's Featured Article". Since the servers run on UTC, it has been displayed on the Main Page for about an hour and a half now (as of the time I'm posting this.)
This is a relatively minor gripe, but it won't stop bothering me. The map for U.S. 2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_2) shows the St. Ignace to Sault Ste. Marie portion of the highway, which was decommissioned in the early 1980s, as still active. I pointed this out on the U.S. Route 2 talk page back in July (should I have made a talk page for the map itself instead?), but nobody has acknowledged it and the original mapmaker has apparently left Wikipedia.
On a much more general note... I don't know how to Wikipedia. I've had an account since 2006, but I've made less than 40 edits and they're almost all minor. There's so much to learn about etiquette, what constitutes a good source, when to make a new article vs. expanding an existing article, etc. I don't know how to join a WikiProject or what I could contribute - especially with road stuff, because I don't know anything outside of Michigan, and Michigan already has some of the best coverage of any state. It's like there's nothing left to add in my "territory." And bulldog1979 talks a lot about Wikipedian gatherings and places that Wikipedians chat online - where are those?
There's lots of non-road stuff I see that needs help - a lot of pages for retail and restaurant chains that are disorganized or missing history, especially - and I feel like I could start fixing those. But that still doesn't answer my question of where to begin. It all seems so overwhelming.
The syntax for formatting is usually somewhere else in the page, so if you have trouble with formatting, look somewhere else in the source code.
Try fixing typos if you can.
Quote from: 1 on October 21, 2013, 05:21:53 PM
The syntax for formatting is usually somewhere else in the page, so if you have trouble with formatting, look somewhere else in the source code.
Try fixing typos if you can.
Thanks, but I mean, that's what I've been doing. Fixing typos, fixing formatting, fixing links that go to redirects or disambiguation pages, and that's about it.
But I want to do more. It's the difference between being a background player and being a member of the community. I'd like to get to the point where I'm researching and writing content that isn't there yet. There's a lot of pages and sections where the tone is way off, or it's not cited properly or whatever, and I don't want to just start writing things that are awful and need other people to come in and clean them up.
This is probably beyond the scope of this topic, and I should probably just ask the people I know like Michael (bulldog1979) in private instead. :hmmm: But this can't be the worst place to get a couple pointers.
Quote from: getemngo on October 21, 2013, 05:34:52 PM
fixing links that go to redirects
God damn it. Don't do this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirect#Do_not_.22fix.22_links_to_redirects_that_are_not_broken
Quote from: getemngo on October 21, 2013, 05:34:52 PM
Quote from: 1 on October 21, 2013, 05:21:53 PM
The syntax for formatting is usually somewhere else in the page, so if you have trouble with formatting, look somewhere else in the source code.
Try fixing typos if you can.
Thanks, but I mean, that's what I've been doing. Fixing typos, fixing formatting, fixing links that go to redirects or disambiguation pages, and that's about it.
But I want to do more. It's the difference between being a background player and being a member of the community. I'd like to get to the point where I'm researching and writing content that isn't there yet. There's a lot of pages and sections where the tone is way off, or it's not cited properly or whatever, and I don't want to just start writing things that are awful and need other people to come in and clean them up.
This is probably beyond the scope of this topic, and I should probably just ask the people I know like Michael (bulldog1979) in private instead. :hmmm: But this can't be the worst place to get a couple pointers.
Well, it doesn't help as much on that talk page because there four WikiProject banners so they appear collapsed by default, but if you expand the U.S. Roads WikiProject banner, there is a line that says, "This article has a map. If the map has an error, please work with the
maps task force (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_U.S._Roads/Maps_task_force/Requests#Requests_for_corrections_to_maps) to correct it." Following that link takes someone to the requests page where our map makers can be notified to make a correction. I just saw this on here and I'm uploading a corrected map now.
Quote from: getemngo on October 21, 2013, 05:14:25 PM
On a much more general note... I don't know how to Wikipedia. I've had an account since 2006, but I've made less than 40 edits and they're almost all minor. There's so much to learn about etiquette, what constitutes a good source, when to make a new article vs. expanding an existing article, etc. I don't know how to join a WikiProject or what I could contribute - especially with road stuff, because I don't know anything outside of Michigan, and Michigan already has some of the best coverage of any state. It's like there's nothing left to add in my "territory." And bulldog1979 talks a lot about Wikipedian gatherings and places that Wikipedians chat online - where are those?
A starting place that might be helpful for you, especially if you want to work on road articles, would be the New User Orientation of the U.S. Roads WikiProject (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:USRD/NEW). It may not help with finding something new to contribute to Michigan, but does cover some of the basics of the USRD project and general Wikipedia stuff you're asking about. Browse the USRD navigation template on that page for some other very helpful links. You can add yourself to a WikiProject simply by signing up on the participants page.
We also have a channel on Freenode IRC, #wikipedia-en-roads. If you drop by there we can help you out!
I don't contribute to Wikipedia other than small corrections because I don't want to put all that work in and not get credit for it (sure, my screenname will be listed in the edit page, but most users don't even click there) and because any random asshole can completely undo my work and replace it with total garbage.
Quote from: getemngo on October 21, 2013, 05:14:25 PM
I don't know how to join a WikiProject or what I could contribute - especially with road stuff, because I don't know anything outside of Michigan, and Michigan already has some of the best coverage of any state. It's like there's nothing left to add in my "territory." And bulldog1979 talks a lot about Wikipedian gatherings and places that Wikipedians chat online - where are those?
Joining a WikiProject is as easy as editing in the topic area and contributing to discussions on the project talk page when you're interested. You can add your name to a participants list, but lots of people do that and never really contribute, so I don't lend much credence to them.
Just because you live in Michigan doesn't mean you have to edit there. Do you have connections to another part of the country? Used to live elsewhere? Have family that you visit frequently? Go to college out of state? Failing that, every state that borders Michigan could use the help–nobody's touched Wisconsin in ages, so that might be the place to start.
Quote from: bugo on October 28, 2013, 04:21:24 AM
I don't contribute to Wikipedia other than small corrections because I don't want to put all that work in and not get credit for it (sure, my screenname will be listed in the edit page, but most users don't even click there) and because any random asshole can completely undo my work and replace it with total garbage.
The only person who really edits Oklahoma road articles is me. Seriously. I have every page watchlisted, and I pretty much never see any of them pop up as having being edited unless I did it myself. (This is not counting the automated and semi-automated typo-fix bots that go through occasionally.) People trashing articles just doesn't happen in OK. (That's a phenomenon mostly limited to CA, it seems.) Random one-off vandalism is typically caught by the people who sit around watching for that on any article, anyway.
I did an edit on a Wiki page the other day; that being for US 48. I got directed there looking for information on some of the ARC corridors, and the Wiki entry said US 48 was sparsely signed in Virginia. Nothing could be farther from the truth, as it has been fully signed for nearly 10 years now. So I changed it.
And the anal retentives continue to run the laxative factory: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=U.S._Route_385_in_Colorado&action=history
That guy is an ass.
Actually, that's far too nice to asses.
He clearly is in the wrong for changing the citation templates without consensus, but still doesn't care about creating one.
With the rest of the changes that you undid, you did something similar (remove + some other formatting stuff and have state names in wikilinks that are masked changed into abbrevs) after an edit of Scott5144 (also changed concurrent mileages, but explained why on his talk page). Scott didn't act like a dick about it and start a revert war - because he's not a dick, unlike this other guy.
In adding the citation templates, Imzadi1979 (who is also a member here, by the way, so he has read the above post) was also adding more information to the citations and harmonizing the citations with the rest of Wikipedia. The is a non-breaking space. It's a typographical nicety (it prevents line breaks between the "US" and the number in constructions like "US 385") that there's no reason to revert out.
You're being childish, Dan. You're picking a fight here when there's no reason for there to be one, other than citation templates make you sad for some inarticulated reason. Just stick to adding content and don't argue over dumb shit like this.
After looking at the article in question, I think
NE2's Imzadi1979's citations are more closely in accord with accepted conventions of scholarship since author and title are clearly identified and the cited resource is described in a way that allows a reader to form an unbiased judgment as to whether it might actually have the information the article author says it does. This is a case in point (first example is
NE2's Imzadi1979's revision, second is
Imzadi1979's revision NE2's original):
QuoteAssociated Cultural Resource Experts; Colorado Historical Society; Colorado. Department of Transportation (2002). "Appendix C: Compiled Information, Colorado Highway System" (PDF). Highways to the Sky. Littleton, CO: Associated Cultural Resource Experts. p. a-xxix. OCLC 68695471. Retrieved November 18, 2013.
Quote1923 list of state highways, reproduced in Highways to the Sky, Appendix C, p. 39
Imzadi1979's NE2's version is shorter, but omits authorship information and substitutes an interpretive description of the resource for a chapter heading. It leaves the reader asking, "What kind of thing is
Highways to the Sky?" In contradistinction,
Highways to the Sky as cited by
NE2 Imzadi1979 is easy to recognize as an example of the reference books which state DOTs prepare (or hire consultants to prepare) for their environmental planners to use in helping the agencies meet their obligations under the National Historic Preservation Act.
And while I acknowledge that Imzadi1979 was acting under provocation, language like this promotes the exact opposite of building a consensus:
QuoteYour last edit summary to the article said to "bugger off", but using that language causes me to dig my heels in a bit. You're now stuck discussing this with me until we reach a mutually agreed solution.
It is the sort of thing one says when one is trying to drive someone off.
Quote from: J N Winkler on November 19, 2013, 07:11:21 PM
After looking at the article in question, I think NE2's citations are more closely in accord with accepted conventions of scholarship since author and title are clearly identified and the cited resource is described in a way that allows a reader to form an unbiased judgment as to whether it might actually have the information the article author says it does. This is a case in point (first example is NE2's, second is Imzadi1979's revision):
QuoteAssociated Cultural Resource Experts; Colorado Historical Society; Colorado. Department of Transportation (2002). "Appendix C: Compiled Information, Colorado Highway System" (PDF). Highways to the Sky. Littleton, CO: Associated Cultural Resource Experts. p. a-xxix. OCLC 68695471. Retrieved November 18, 2013.
Quote1923 list of state highways, reproduced in Highways to the Sky, Appendix C, p. 39
Imzadi1979's version is shorter, but omits authorship information and substitutes an interpretive description of the resource for a chapter heading. It leaves the reader asking, "What kind of thing is Highways to the Sky?" In contradistinction, Highways to the Sky as cited by NE2 is easy to recognize as an example of the reference books which state DOTs prepare (or hire consultants to prepare) for their environmental planners to use in helping the agencies meet their obligations under the National Historic Preservation Act.
You actually have these backward. The longer one is Imzadi1979's preferred version (diff (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=U.S._Route_385_in_Colorado&diff=prev&oldid=582426862)). NE2 reverted to the short version, and then Imzadi1979 made several non-citation related edits, leaving the citations on NE2's version.
Quote from: Scott5114 on November 19, 2013, 07:30:00 PMYou actually have these backward. The longer one is Imzadi1979's preferred version (diff (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=U.S._Route_385_in_Colorado&diff=prev&oldid=582426862)). NE2 reverted to the short version, and then Imzadi1979 made several non-citation related edits, leaving the citations on NE2's version.
My apologies--after looking more closely at multiple versions of the article, I see my mistake. I have amended my previous post accordingly.
I am sorry to see bad feeling develop over this article, but I really do think readers would be better served by the longer citation.
Quote from: Scott5114 on November 19, 2013, 06:59:28 PMIn adding the citation templates, Imzadi1979 (who is also a member here, by the way, so he has read the above post)
And I wouldn't have said so on a public forum if I cared that he read it - he is the reason why WikiProject:UK Roads is shite, having pushed away British Roadgeeks. Sure, others were there causing the damage, but Imzadi1979 had his fingers in all the alienating pies.
Every time someone posts something negative on SABRE wrt something specific (and roads related) on Wikipedia, he's always there on the baddies side, stirring things up and creating bad blood.
QuoteThe is a non-breaking space. It's a typographical nicety (it prevents line breaks between the "US" and the number in constructions like "US 385") that there's no reason to revert out.
I agree, but it was easier for NE2 to revert the lot as changing those citations would have been difficult. That losing the formatting changes means that the article matches his preferences is almost irrelevant.
If you are looking for overly heavy-handed, then look at the revert back (and isn't there a rule over double reverts?) when the main point of contention - that Imzadi had gone against policy on the citations - had been clearly stated as the reason for the revert and remained unaddressed, then a reversion by NE2 would have been pointless. However the main point of contention was unaddressed and Imzadi reverted that back, despite having changed them without consensus, which is against policy (as NE2 pointed out).
The description of the revert of the revert
Quoterestoring additional details about the sources and other GF improvements to the article, take to talk if you object
was basically an "I don't give a flying fuck what the official policy about citations, I'm doing it rather than seeking to build consensus before acting". It's clear that while NE2's reversion of the GF improvements were a reason to revert, the revert was mostly about reimposing the citations that pissed NE2 off and, per policy, need a consensus to change.
I think "bugger off", while unlikely to enhance dialogue, isn't that much of an inappropriate response to that kind of "fuck you, I rule" response to citing policy. Especially if you've done most of the work on the page and someone else comes along doesn't just say that you don't own it (you don't NE2 - and Scott's points about formatting are valid), but makes it clear that he feels that he owns it and consensus isn't worth bothering with*.
*unless of course you tell him to bugger off, when he'll then bore you to death with walls of text and demand that consensus is reached just to spite you.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a roadfan site, so the citations have to look professional.
And Wikipedia:Citing templates is not policy or even a guideline. However, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD is.
Quote from: rschen7754 on November 19, 2013, 09:19:17 PM
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a roadfan site, so the citations have to look professional.
Um... most encyclopedias don't have citations at all.
Quote from: NE2 on November 19, 2013, 09:37:39 PMUm... most encyclopedias don't have citations at all.
The traditional encyclopedia does not allow its readers to edit itself. For this reason alone, fuller citations are better in Wikipedia (even when they do not add to the precision with which the cited resource can be located) since they function as a signal that the article has been adequately researched. Avoiding line breaks within route designations seems to me a bit of a fine point, but I would have kept Imzadi1979's revised citations.
It takes a lot of mental energy to carry on a dispute, so it seems more prudent to reserve it for genuine disagreements as to fact. There seem to me to be none here--this is all about presentation.
Quote from: J N Winkler on November 19, 2013, 09:50:51 PM
It takes a lot of mental energy to carry on a dispute, so it seems more prudent to reserve it for genuine disagreements as to fact. There seem to me to be none here--this is all about presentation.
Presentation and making it more difficult to edit the code.
Quote from: NE2 on November 19, 2013, 09:58:20 PM
Quote from: J N Winkler on November 19, 2013, 09:50:51 PM
It takes a lot of mental energy to carry on a dispute, so it seems more prudent to reserve it for genuine disagreements as to fact. There seem to me to be none here--this is all about presentation.
Presentation and making it more difficult to edit the code.
I don't think there is much to this argument–you pass the template various key/value pairs ("name=yada|url=yada|date=yada") and you get an automatically formatted citation. I think this is
easier for most people (certainly it is for me) than having to manually format the citation.
Quote from: Scott5114 on November 20, 2013, 06:47:48 AMI don't think there is much to this argument–you pass the template various key/value pairs ("name=yada|url=yada|date=yada") and you get an automatically formatted citation. I think this is easier for most people (certainly it is for me) than having to manually format the citation.
I don't think I completely understand NE2's point. I can see the citing style Imzadi1979 wishing to have followed causing difficulties to the extent that it removes the severability of the body text. (Body text can be said to be
severable in the sense I mean if some of it can be added or removed without damaging the citations. This does not happen, for example, if there is an
ibid. chain in the citations and the citation to which they all point is in the body text that is removed. Also, since Imzadi1979 seems keen on enforcing the convention of giving a full citation including links only the first time a particular resource is cited, editorial changes cause problems if they result in a new citation to a given resource being inserted before an existing full citation to that resource, thus requiring transfer of the full bibliographical information from the old citation to the new one.)
However, the observation that the road to economic surplus lies through specialization applies to Wikipedia editing just as it does to other fields of production. NE2 seems to me to do quite well producing content, so this strikes me as an appropriate area for specialization. I am less qualified to judge whether Imzadi1979's focus on citation formatting and other matters of style actually helps road-related Wikipedia articles gain featured-article status or survive attempts at deletion, but as long as his concern with such matters doesn't impair content provision, I don't really see a need to object. Having written a 100,000-word doctoral thesis with over 800 citations, I know full well what a thankless job it is to keep them precise and neatly formatted, so if I were actively editing Wikipedia articles, this is a job I would gladly farm off to someone else. If I were Imzadi1979, I am sure I would be tearing my hair out over all the different sources that are available for road-related research that clearly aren't anticipated by any citation templates--how do you identify authorship and title for construction plans sets, for example?
Since we're talking Wikipedia, and I am not an editor ... can someone change the leftover links to rockymountainroads.com into aaroads.com/west?
An example is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_Highway_130
Regards,
Andy
California had the same problem too, with westcoastroads.com, but I ran a tool to change all the links about a year ago. I'll see what I can do for the rest.
Unfortunately, it appears that on the German and Spanish Wikipedias, they also use the old links.
Quote from: andy3175 on November 21, 2013, 12:19:31 AM
Since we're talking Wikipedia, and I am not an editor ... can someone change the leftover links to rockymountainroads.com into aaroads.com/west?
An example is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_Highway_130
Regards,
Andy
Nothing keeps you from doing it. ;) You become an editor as soon as you click the "Edit" tab at the top of the page.
Quote from: J N Winkler on November 20, 2013, 09:31:08 AM
Quote from: Scott5114 on November 20, 2013, 06:47:48 AMI don't think there is much to this argument–you pass the template various key/value pairs ("name=yada|url=yada|date=yada") and you get an automatically formatted citation. I think this is easier for most people (certainly it is for me) than having to manually format the citation.
I don't think I completely understand NE2's point. I can see the citing style Imzadi1979 wishing to have followed causing difficulties to the extent that it removes the severability of the body text.
I think–I don't know for sure since he likes to state his opinion in short, opaque, and usually rude bursts–his objection is solely to the use of citation templates. On Wikipedia, a template is a small piece of software that works much like a software function call–when passed a number of named parameters, it performs processing on them behind the scenes and produces output. (A more visible example of one of these is the "infobox" found at the top right of each article.)
Citation templates help ensure consistent references because, as long as the input is consistent, the output will always be formatted in the same way, and will be automatically updated when changes to the reference style occur. (Imagine your document magically updating to the newest version of the MLA and you get the right idea.) NE2's objection seems to be that this makes the source code more difficult to read. I don't believe this is the case, and to what degree that it is it seems clear to me that the drawback is so minor that the benefits the templates provide overwhelm this objection.
QuoteHowever, the observation that the road to economic surplus lies through specialization applies to Wikipedia editing just as it does to other fields of production. NE2 seems to me to do quite well producing content, so this strikes me as an appropriate area for specialization. I am less qualified to judge whether Imzadi1979's focus on citation formatting and other matters of style actually helps road-related Wikipedia articles gain featured-article status or survive attempts at deletion, but as long as his concern with such matters doesn't impair content provision, I don't really see a need to object. Having written a 100,000-word doctoral thesis with over 800 citations, I know full well what a thankless job it is to keep them precise and neatly formatted, so if I were actively editing Wikipedia articles, this is a job I would gladly farm off to someone else. If I were Imzadi1979, I am sure I would be tearing my hair out over all the different sources that are available for road-related research that clearly aren't anticipated by any citation templates--how do you identify authorship and title for construction plans sets, for example?
Imzadi1979 is very much a featured-article specialist, producing more than a dozen featured articles on roads, which is something that nobody else on Wikipedia has ever done. Citations are indeed a very big part of an article becoming featured, so if there's one subject upon which Imzadi1979 can speak with authority, it's citations. (I've solicited his advice several times on this subject.)
As for construction plan sets, they are rarely cited, since it is usually more appropriate to cite a book or map showing the completed road. However, the one time I did cite one, I just did a lazy cite of "ODOT Job Piece No. 17428(34), sheet 209". A more complete approach would probably have "Staff" as the title (or perhaps the PE whose seal is attached to the sheet), "Oklahoma Department of Transportation" as publisher, "Job Piece No. ..." as title, and the sheet number as the page number.
Scott--thanks for the explanation of the template. Does it address the severability issues, such as the "first citation" problem? (E.g. if I make a full citation and give it an alias, and then cite the alias at a footnote call that precedes the full citation, will Wikipedia see this and move the full citation information to the first instance of the resource being cited?)
Quote from: Scott5114 on November 21, 2013, 11:31:32 AMAs for construction plan sets, they are rarely cited, since it is usually more appropriate to cite a book or map showing the completed road. However, the one time I did cite one, I just did a lazy cite of "ODOT Job Piece No. 17428(34), sheet 209". A more complete approach would probably have "Staff" as the title (or perhaps the PE whose seal is attached to the sheet), "Oklahoma Department of Transportation" as publisher, "Job Piece No. ..." as title, and the sheet number as the page number.
I have cited specific construction plans sets, most notably in the Wikipedia article on I-19. My citations were generally in these forms:
QuoteConstruction plans for Arizona federal-aid projects NH-19-1(110) (Arizona DOT TRACS H260701C) and NH-19-1(116) (TRACS H260702C) (most sheets sealed March 1997).
QuoteConstruction plans for Arizona federal-aid project I-19-1(81) (title sheet signed January 17, 1980).
I am not aware that any of the generally accepted bibliographic formats out there have a standard method of citing construction plans for highways. On the principle that a citation should permit easy localization of the resource and should maintain segregation among author, title, and publication data, this is what I would suggest:
* State DOT identified as corporate author, on the basis that all other possible identifications are more troublesome. (Consultants are not always identified; sheets are not always sealed by a named engineer; title sheets may have illegible approval signatures, especially if scanned from microfilm or badly mistreated paper or linen originals; actual production of the drawings might be handled by multiple technicians identified by initials only; and in the US, it is almost universally the convention that the state DOT or other owning agency is responsible for having the plans prepared, publishing them as part of the contract advertisement process, and then accepting and retaining the as-built versions of the plans as construction record drawings.)
* The phrase "Construction plans" as part of the title, but left unitalicized and unsurrounded by quotes since construction plans sets do not have titles as that concept is understood for books and journal articles.
* As part of the title, the federal-aid designation of the project if it is a federal-aid project or, alternatively, the state or state-aid designation if it has one and the format mimics that used for FAP numbers (which is generally funding type-route-section-agreement-milepost for Interstate jobs, or funding type-route-agreement for more recent non-Interstate FAPs).
* Also as part of the title, generally in parentheses, an identifying number or caption assigned by the state DOT to the project which is both persistent (unlike, say, letting call numbers) and convenient to use for localization. This is generally an alphanumeric code of fixed width that is unique to the project and can be used as a database key, such as job piece numbers for Oklahoma DOT, TRACS numbers for Arizona DOT, PID numbers for Ohio DOT, state project numbers for MnDOT, CCSJs for TxDOT, job numbers for MoDOT, PPMS numbers for VDOT, TIP numbers for NCDOT, contract numbers for Michigan DOT, ECMS numbers for PennDOT, PI numbers for GDOT, etc. If the state DOT maintains separate identifying series of project numbers, as Oregon DOT does, the project's description under each series should be cited when that is known (e.g. contract number and V-file number for recent Oregon DOT projects).
* As part of the publication data, title sheet signature date (month precision at least) or range (month precision at least) of signature dates on sheets that form a majority of the plans set.
There are several reasons I suggest putting the federal-aid project caption ahead of state-specific metadata when citing construction plans sets:
* Often, despite organizing schemes like job piece numbers or TRACS numbers, state DOTs continue to file their projects under FAP numbers or FAP "clones" which they have developed for their internal accounting use. This is partly because fixed-width project captions often go back only to the recent past--Oklahoma DOT, for example, seems not to have used job piece numbers before the late 1970's, while Arizona DOT developed the TRACS system in the early 1980's. If you go to Arizona DOT Engineering Records in Phoenix to examine paper plans, as I have done on several occasions in the past, you will find that projects are organized using the numeric parts of the FAP number (or equivalent), treating each digit group separately: e.g. construction plans for I-10-4(3) filed before construction plans for I-IG-10-4(20), which in turn are filed before construction plans for F-026(53) and RAM-600(507). There are a few states like TxDOT which developed robust fixed-width numbering early on (the CCSJ system dates from the 1950's, for example), but these are the exception rather than the rule.
* As a general rule, FAP numbers are more descriptive than numbers under fixed-width systems since they include the route number for Interstates and the FAP segment number for FAP projects. (There are exceptions, of course--Interstate projects in the early to mid-1950's, before the advent of Interstate numbering, had FAP numbers beginning with "I" where the following digit group appears to refer to a FAP segment number rather than the Interstate route number.)
* Because FAP numbers are used by the federal government for its own internal accounting purposes, they correlate with material found in NARA, such as payment vouchers.
I agree that it is getting a bit ahead of ourselves to worry about a standard citation format for construction plans sets, but in the next 10 years--editor interest permitting--I predict that they will be used much more extensively in Wikipedia articles than they are at present. We are up to about 40 states with online availability of construction plans for their current lettings (NY came onstream just last summer), and there are already four states with self-serve access to construction plans for past projects through online electronic document management systems (IA came onstream recently; MN, KY, and GA have been around for a while; I'm not counting SC because they charge a subscription fee).
Online availability of construction plans is a technological change, so it is appropriate to fit a logistic curve to its diffusion, as the economist Zvi Griliches did long ago with hybrid corn. It is my judgment that in the last 10 years we have gone from the toe to the head of the logistic curve with current letting plans, while we are still at the toe in terms of as-built plans and will take another 10-15 years to go to the head. If this thumbnail analysis is correct, then we should see states coming online with as-built construction plans at a fast pace in about five to seven years.
Quote from: J N Winkler on November 21, 2013, 12:57:32 PM
Scott--thanks for the explanation of the template. Does it address the severability issues, such as the "first citation" problem? (E.g. if I make a full citation and give it an alias, and then cite the alias at a footnote call that precedes the full citation, will Wikipedia see this and move the full citation information to the first instance of the resource being cited?)
The way references work on Wikipedia, whether a template is used or not, is through XML-style tags, of the format <ref name="foo">bar . . .</ref>. Anything can appear in between the opening and closing tags, template, plain text, or wikitext. This reference can then be called at another point on the page by <ref name="foo"/>. The parser does not require the full specification to appear first, only that it must be fully specified at some point on the page. Therefore, severability is somewhat limited, although it is simple to use the browser's find function to search for the full reference when copying text to another page.
As mentioned before, NE2's issue appears to be a dislike of the template that Imzadi1979 included between the tags. This is the raw code that Imzadi1979 included:
<ref name=list-1923>{{cite book |author1= Associated Cultural Resource Experts |author2= Colorado Historical Society
|author3= Colorado Department of Transportation |year= 2002 |chapter= Appendix C: Compiled Information, Colorado Highway System
|url= http://www.coloradodot.info/programs/environmental/archaeology-and-history/highways-to-the-sky/appendices.pdf |format= PDF
|title= Highways to the Sky |location= Littleton, CO |publisher= Associated Cultural Resource Experts |page=a-xxix |oclc= 68695471
|accessdate= November 18, 2013}}</ref>The equivalent version, including the same information that Imzadi1979 did (which NE2 reverted out), without the template (and thus missing out on the automatic-formatting and -updating benefits) would be:
<ref name=list-1923>Associated Cultural Resource Experts; Colorado Historical Society; Colorado Department of Transportation (2002).
[http://www.coloradodot.info/programs/environmental/archaeology-and-history/highways-to-the-sky/appendices.pdf "Appendix C: Compiled Information,
Colorado Highway System"] (PDF). ''Highways to the Sky''. Littleton, CO: Associated Cultural Resource Experts. p. a-xxix. [[OCLC]] [https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/68695471 68695471].
Retrieved November 18, 2013.</ref>The key question: is this enough of a readability improvement to forgo the benefits of a piece of software automatically formatting and updating the reference when the prevailing reference format changes?
QuoteI agree that it is getting a bit ahead of ourselves to worry about a standard citation format for construction plans sets, but in the next 10 years--editor interest permitting--I predict that they will be used much more extensively in Wikipedia articles than they are at present.
The problem with using construction plans is not so much availability but (wrongheaded, in my opinion) policies saying that, as an encyclopedia is a tertiary source, it should only use secondary sources. Using primary sources such as construction plans, they say, allows editors to introduce an original opinion while interpreting the source. This policy makes sense when the primary source is, say, raw lab data or poll results, but not so much for engineering plans. This policy has even lead to some non-road editors taking a negative view of using maps as sources, although the prevailing wisdom is currently that a map is a secondary source, as it is based upon a primary source like aerial photos or GPS tracks.
I am unaware if any construction plan citations have been given the featured-article sniff test. I tend to avoid using them where possible and only cite them when it is unavoidable. The instance I cited above is the sign plan for the I-40 Crosstown project in Oklahoma City, used to cite the name of an planned exit to a road which has yet to be constructed. No signs are posted yet–and may not have even been fabricated at this point in time–but the road's name is clearly laid out on the sign plan. There is no other way to verify the information than by the sign plan.
Quote from: Scott5114 on November 21, 2013, 11:31:32 AMCitations are indeed a very big part of an article becoming featured, so if there's one subject upon which Imzadi1979 can speak with authority, it's citations. (I've solicited his advice several times on this subject.)
And yet he doesn't know that "Citation templates can be used to format citations in a consistent way. The use of citation templates is neither encouraged nor discouraged: an article should not be switched between templated and non-templated citations without good reason and consensus — see Variation in citation methods above." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CITECONSENSUS#Citation_templates_and_tools)? And that looks to me to be a page is official policy.
Wikipedia is about consensus, and while I prefer Izmadi's formatting, the approach he took is alienating and against wikipedia policy. When confronted with a request to create consensus, he started a revert war. Surely, as a wikipedian of good repute (apparently), he should know better than to be a dick?
Sure NE2 has been NE2, and that will irk Izmadi more, but NE2's acting as responder, not instigator here.
Quote from: Scott5114 on November 21, 2013, 11:31:32 AMNE2's objection seems to be that this makes the source code more difficult to read. I don't believe this is the case, and to what degree that it is it seems clear to me that the drawback is so minor that the benefits the templates provide overwhelm this objection.
Something to clarify about source code... it's not meant to be read in a continuous way like, you know, its output.
Similarly, when you read or edit source code, if you encounter something (especially a template or function call) you don't understand, you look it up in the documentation or find its definition in the source; you don't expand it into its definition just because "it's easier to read," breaking the standardization, modularity and reusability they provide in the process.
Quote from: english si on November 21, 2013, 02:04:03 PM
Quote from: Scott5114 on November 21, 2013, 11:31:32 AMCitations are indeed a very big part of an article becoming featured, so if there's one subject upon which Imzadi1979 can speak with authority, it's citations. (I've solicited his advice several times on this subject.)
And yet he doesn't know that "Citation templates can be used to format citations in a consistent way. The use of citation templates is neither encouraged nor discouraged: an article should not be switched between templated and non-templated citations without good reason and consensus — see Variation in citation methods above." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CITECONSENSUS#Citation_templates_and_tools)? And that looks to me to be a page is official policy.
There is little good reason to
not use them.
Quote from: Scott5114 on November 21, 2013, 06:46:25 PMThere is little good reason to not use them.
Yes, but (if you actually read what is there), policy is to need good reason
and consensus before making a switch. :banghead:
Izmadi had good reason, but made no attempt at consensus until the whole thing had blown open.
Reason not to use them: they take longer to fill in the fields, some of which are utterly useless. author=Staff (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:CTB_minutes&diff=560309959&oldid=546433094)? All of Imzadi1979's edits I've come across have been useless bling, more often than not turd polishing.
The readability of code (which is important for editors) was mainly about the nbsp crap.
Non-breaking spaces are not only useful, they're a typographical requirement in the English language, for example between a first and a last name, between a number and its unit of measurement, between a house number and a street name, etc.
author=Staff and the non-breaking spaces are both style points that have been required at FAC in the past and therefore are most likely found in the Manual of Style (though I can't be arsed to look up chapter and verse). I don't really care for the nbsp's either, but they serve a useful, if subtle, purpose in the rendered output, so I put up with them.
If you don't care about the polishing, that is your right, but if someone else wants to apply the bells and whistles to be helpful (recognizing you would rather not do it), reverting them out makes you a dick.
Not everyone wants to go through the featured article shite.
This is true, but that doesn't mean you should stop people who want to.
Dan, chill. You pick a lot of unnecessary fights, and this is one of them. You do a great job of research, and you're letting this mar that. Is this really worth the energy to make it into a mountain instead of flatland? Who gives a rat's ass what he does for behind-the-scenes formatting? Surely none of us who read it.
No, it's not worth it. That's why after testing the waters I'm not going for a swim.
Quote from: rschen7754 on November 21, 2013, 02:54:50 AM
California had the same problem too, with westcoastroads.com, but I ran a tool to change all the links about a year ago. I'll see what I can do for the rest.
Unfortunately, it appears that on the German and Spanish Wikipedias, they also use the old links.
Thanks, I really appreciate that!
Quote
Nothing keeps you from doing it. ;) You become an editor as soon as you click the "Edit" tab at the top of the page.
I haven't had time to do much of anything lately except work, and even if I had more time, I'd devote it to improving content on AARoads, not changing links on Wikipedia.
Regards,
Andy
Quote from: andy3175 on November 21, 2013, 11:39:26 PM
Quote from: rschen7754 on November 21, 2013, 02:54:50 AM
California had the same problem too, with westcoastroads.com, but I ran a tool to change all the links about a year ago. I'll see what I can do for the rest.
Unfortunately, it appears that on the German and Spanish Wikipedias, they also use the old links.
Thanks, I really appreciate that!
I got all the WestCoastRoads, RockyMountainRoads, and LoneStarRoads links I could find on the English, French, German, and Spanish Wikipedias. It is possible that they are still out there on other language Wikipedias, but hopefully the changes will eventually propagate through.
I didn't do NorthEastRoads or SouthEastRoads as I don't think there are many links to there, but let me know if that is not the case.
QuoteThe northern segment of SR 152 from Bloomingdale to Empire was first designated in 1923<ref name=ODOT1922_map>{{cite map |title=Map of Ohio Showing State Routes |url=http://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/TransSysDev/Innovation/prod_services/Documents/StateMaps/otm1922a.sid |format=[[MrSID]] |publisher=Ohio Department of Highways and Public Works |year=1922 |cartography=ODHPW |accessdate=2013-08-18}}</ref><ref name=ODOT1923_map>{{cite map |title=Map of Ohio Showing State Routes |url=http://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/TransSysDev/Innovation/prod_services/Documents/StateMaps/otm1923a.sid |format=MrSID |publisher=Ohio Department of Highways and Public Works |year=1923 |cartography=ODHPW |accessdate=2013-08-18}}</ref> however a highway numbered [[Ohio State Route 378|SR 378]] followed a similar alignment from 1916 to 1923.<ref name=ODOT1916_map>{{cite map |title=Map of Ohio Showing State Routes |url=http://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/TransSysDev/Innovation/prod_services/Documents/StateMaps/otm1924a.sid |format=MrSID |publisher=Ohio Department of Highways and Public Works |year=1916 |cartography=ODHPW |accessdate=2013-08-18}}</ref><ref name=ODOT1923_map/> The modern-day southern segment of SR 152 from Dillonvale and Smithfield was designated SR 333 by 1932.<ref name=ODOT1931_map>{{cite map |title=Map of Ohio Showing State Routes |url=http://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/TransSysDev/Innovation/prod_services/Documents/StateMaps/otm1931a.sid |format=MrSID |publisher=Ohio Department of Highways and Public Works |year=1931 |cartography=ODHPW |accessdate=2013-08-19}}</ref><ref name=ODOT1932_map>{{cite map |title=Map of Ohio Showing State Routes |url=http://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/TransSysDev/Innovation/prod_services/Documents/StateMaps/otm1932a.sid |format=MrSID |publisher=Ohio Department of Highways and Public Works |year=1932 |cartography=ODHPW |accessdate=2013-08-19}}</ref> By 1937, SR 152 was extended south to Smithfield and by 1938, SR 152 took over the entire alignment of SR 333 and traveled continuously from Dillonvale to Empire.<ref name=ODOT1936_map>{{cite map |title=Map of Ohio Showing State Routes |url=http://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/TransSysDev/Innovation/prod_services/Documents/StateMaps/otm1936a.sid |format=MrSID |publisher=Ohio Department of Highways and Public Works |year=1936 |cartography=ODHPW |accessdate=2013-08-19}}</ref><ref name=ODOT1937_map>{{cite map |title=Map of Ohio Showing State Routes |url=http://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/TransSysDev/Innovation/prod_services/Documents/StateMaps/otm1937a.sid |format=MrSID |publisher=Ohio Department of Highways and Public Works |year=1937 |cartography=ODHPW |accessdate=2013-08-19}}</ref><ref name=ODOT1938_map>{{cite map |title=Map of Ohio Showing State Routes |url=http://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/TransSysDev/Innovation/prod_services/Documents/StateMaps/otm1938a.sid |format=MrSID |publisher=Ohio Department of Highways and Public Works |year=1938 |cartography=ODHPW |accessdate=2013-08-19}}</ref> Between 1942 and 1944, the segment between Smithfield and [[U.S. Route 22 in Ohio|US 22]], which was a gravel and earth-surfaced road, was removed from the State Highway System.<ref name=ODOT1942_map>{{cite map |title=Map of Ohio Showing State Routes |url=http://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/TransSysDev/Innovation/prod_services/Documents/StateMaps/otm1942a.sid |format=MrSID |publisher=Ohio Department of Highways and Public Works |year=1942 |cartography=ODHPW |accessdate=2013-08-19}}</ref><ref name=ODOT1944_map>{{cite map |title=Map of Ohio Showing State Routes |url=http://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/TransSysDev/Innovation/prod_services/Documents/StateMaps/otm1944a.sid |format=MrSID |publisher=Ohio Department of Highways and Public Works |year=1944 |cartography=ODHPW |accessdate=2013-08-19}}</ref> With the exception of a small extension of the northern segment towards Bloomingdale when the US 22 freeway opened, the two segments of SR 152 have remained unchanged since.
No sir, nothing wrong with that.
Would it be an acceptable compromise to enter nonbreaking spaces directly into the source code, rather than using the entity?
Quote from: vtk on November 22, 2013, 09:08:14 PM
Would it be an acceptable compromise to enter nonbreaking spaces directly into the source code, rather than using the entity?
Problem with that would be that you wouldn't know which spaces were breaking and which weren't.
Quote from: NE2 on November 22, 2013, 08:08:39 PM
No sir, nothing wrong with that.
The unreadability here is due to the large number of references in comparison to the amount of prose. It wouldn't be any better if the references were presented in clear text.
I may be confusing Wikipedia syntax and LaTeX, but isn't there a way to define the references separately from the text, so you can just format the reference as something like <ref name=blah />?
Quote from: Scott5114 on November 22, 2013, 09:29:45 PM
The unreadability here is due to the large number of references in comparison to the amount of prose. It wouldn't be any better if the references were presented in clear text.
The unreadability is due to the references being all separate despite being to several maps within the same collection. One reference - [[Ohio Department of Transportation]], [http://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/Planning/TechServ/TIM/Pages/OfficialTransportationMaps.aspx Official Transportation Maps], years - at the end of the paragraph is all that's necessary, but no, that's not enough for Mr. 1979.
Quote from: Scott5114 on November 22, 2013, 09:29:45 PM
Quote from: vtk on November 22, 2013, 09:08:14 PM
Would it be an acceptable compromise to enter nonbreaking spaces directly into the source code, rather than using the entity?
Problem with that would be that you wouldn't know which spaces were breaking and which weren't.
Unless the textarea has a way of visually differentiating different types of whitespace. Which is a feature that might come in handy in a few different situations here and there.
-moz-show-nonprinting-characters: none|whitespace|breaks|all
Quote from: algorerhythms on November 22, 2013, 09:52:45 PM
I may be confusing Wikipedia syntax and LaTeX, but isn't there a way to define the references separately from the text, so you can just format the reference as something like <ref name=blah />?
I've seen VC do that on some of his (Maryland) articles, actually.
Of course, there's VisualEditor, though whether it's stable enough to write a Featured Article yet is debatable.
Quote from: algorerhythms on November 22, 2013, 09:52:45 PM
I may be confusing Wikipedia syntax and LaTeX, but isn't there a way to define the references separately from the text, so you can just format the reference as something like <ref name=blah />?
As I understand it yes, you can do that if the same reference appears multiple times – for all but one instance of the reference. The reference still has to be defined somewhere in the article, in one of the places it's used. Of course, if a reference is used only once, there's only one place it can be defined.
Quote from: vtk on November 22, 2013, 10:36:31 PM
Quote from: algorerhythms on November 22, 2013, 09:52:45 PM
I may be confusing Wikipedia syntax and LaTeX, but isn't there a way to define the references separately from the text, so you can just format the reference as something like <ref name=blah />?
As I understand it yes, you can do that if the same reference appears multiple times – for all but one instance of the reference. The reference still has to be defined somewhere in the article, in one of the places it's used. Of course, if a reference is used only once, there's only one place it can be defined.
Not exactly, I've seen it defined at the bottom of the article too, similar to Latex.
Quote from: rschen7754 on November 22, 2013, 10:32:14 PM
Quote from: algorerhythms on November 22, 2013, 09:52:45 PM
I may be confusing Wikipedia syntax and LaTeX, but isn't there a way to define the references separately from the text, so you can just format the reference as something like <ref name=blah />?
I've seen VC do that on some of his (Maryland) articles, actually.
Of course, there's VisualEditor, though whether it's stable enough to write a Featured Article yet is debatable.
Okay, looking at one of the articles he's written, here's an example of using that format. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_219_in_Maryland) All of the reference information is in one place, and the text calls the references by name rather than putting the information inline with the text.
In regard to the text NE2 quoted, I am a little surprised nobody mentioned that there is an implied comma splice error in the first sentence ("however" used as a coordinating conjunction, which it is not), as well as at least one footnote call that falls within the middle of a sentence, which is often considered poor form since it makes body text hard to follow.
Quote from: NE2 on November 22, 2013, 08:08:39 PM
Quote...
No sir, nothing wrong with that.
Quote from: J N Winkler on November 23, 2013, 09:31:24 AM
In regard to the text NE2 quoted, I am a little surprised nobody mentioned that there is an implied comma splice error in the first sentence ("however" used as a coordinating conjunction, which it is not), as well as at least one footnote call that falls within the middle of a sentence, which is often considered poor form since it makes body text hard to follow.
So what are you two doing to fix these egregious errors I've made?
Quote from: Mr. Matté on November 23, 2013, 02:05:32 PMSo what are you two doing to fix these egregious errors I've made?
I fixed the comma splice error I noted, which also fixed the (lone, as it turned out) instance of a footnote call within a sentence. I haven't attempted to fix the citations since I feel that job should be reserved for an editor who is familiar with the source material, which I am not.
NE2 does have a point in that the citations in their existing format make the body text hard to read in code view (I had to refer back to the formatted body text in a separate tab in order to figure out where to locate the cursor to begin making my changes). And while the unreadability can be mitigated to an extent by introducing an additional layer of abstraction (e.g. an alias for the most commonly cited source or well-formed superset of sources), that remedy--as well as the use of templates--steepens the learning curve for new editors and introduces maintainability issues.
Quote from: J N Winkler on November 23, 2013, 02:28:29 PM
Quote from: Mr. Matté on November 23, 2013, 02:05:32 PMSo what are you two doing to fix these egregious errors I've made?
I fixed the comma splice error I noted, which also fixed the (lone, as it turned out) instance of a footnote call within a sentence. I haven't attempted to fix the citations since I feel that job should be reserved for an editor who is familiar with the source material, which I am not.
NE2 does have a point in that the citations in their existing format make the body text hard to read in code view (I had to refer back to the formatted body text in a separate tab in order to figure out where to locate the cursor to begin making my changes). And while the unreadability can be mitigated to an extent by introducing an additional layer of abstraction (e.g. an alias for the most commonly cited source or well-formed superset of sources), that remedy--as well as the use of templates--steepens the learning curve for new editors and introduces maintainability issues.
Overall that's not a problem with just road articles on Wikipedia; it is expected that all high-quality articles use references that are formatted "properly".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor (a WYSIWYG editor) would have solved the problem, but the Wikimedia Foundation borked up the launch, and the community forced it to be mostly removed from the site.
Quote from: J N Winkler on November 23, 2013, 02:28:29 PM
I fixed the comma splice error I noted, which also fixed the (lone, as it turned out) instance of a footnote call within a sentence. I haven't attempted to fix the citations since I feel that job should be reserved for an editor who is familiar with the source material, which I am not.
I didn't know you had an account on Wikipedia (or if I did at one point, I forgot). The fix is appreciated.
I have an account on Wikipedia (username 1 was already taken), and I have edited articles in southern New Hampshire (usually by adding junction lists) and northern Massachusetts (usually by fixing errors). MA 129 used to have 2 western ends, according to Wikipedia. Also, MA 28 had vandalism for 17 days (I-995, I-80, exit numbers on non-freeway sections), and I fixed it. I have about 70 edits.
Quote from: 1 on November 24, 2013, 11:35:49 AM
Also, MA 28 had vandalism for 17 days
17 days? Clutch the pearls!
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alabama_State_Route_33&diff=583059849&oldid=564138530 (the actual reason was that 33 was east-west and 36 was north-south, and Alabama changed to directional parity in 1957, but that's original research without a better source than maps)
Apologies for the bump, but this Slate article on Wikipedia's bureaucratic creep may be of interest to some:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/06/wikipedia_s_bureaucracy_problem_and_how_to_fix_it.html
Heh, I know who that is :O
Getting your user account renamed is probably one of the most bureaucratic things on Wikimedia though. You have to go to each language Wikipedia/Commons/Wikisource/Wiktionary etc. that you have an account on and make a request, and prove that the account is yours. There's also usurpations, and global account deletion...