User talk:Morriswa/Archives/2011/September

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Undated

Road Edits

I will need help if I am to appropriately edit the road articles. If you can help me, then I would be grateful. As a side note, I am a roadgeek and like looking at road maps a lot! Allen (talk) 20:40, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Just look at the various articles at Category:FA-Class U.S. road transport articles, which are the Featured Articles for the project or Category:GA-Class U.S. road transport articles, which are the Good Articles. They will be what you should be emulating with your work over time. Look through and familiarize yourself with WP:USRD/STDS, which is the project's standards page, and MOS:RJL, which is the Manual of Style page on "road junction lists".

The basic goal of any good USRD road article should be to have a fairly complete route description, a fairly complete history and a compliant junction/exit list. Toll roads will have additional sections, and some roadways will have "future" sections for verifiable proposed or confirmed changes. All basic facts should have citations to reliable sources. The various self-published roadgeek websites are not acceptable for Wikipedia purposes as citations. Any articles using them will need to have the references replaces before they can be listed as a Good Article or higher. Old DOT maps, books, and magazine/newspaper articles are acceptable for historical sources. News articles are preferable over DOT press releases, but either can be used. Once the body of the article is filled out, then you can summarize it into the lead section making sure that ever section has some mention in the lead. (The shorter junction list in the infobox is the summary for the junction/exit list table in my way of thinking.)

There are a number of resources available to help you out. If you need generalized help, ask at WT:USRD, or if that state has its own subproject, you can use those talk pages as well. Imzadi 1979 → 21:15, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

P.S. Stop making redirects for now. Concentrate on the articles. If nothing ever links to the redirect, and it's not a likely search term, it's useless. Imzadi 1979 → 21:18, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Hello

I've been trying to clear up and categorize the "other" requested articles, and I saw that you added quite a few roads to the list. If you don't mind would you please move them to the proper category here? Thanks! Ncboy2010 (talk) 23:48, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Actually, never-mind it's no trouble for me to move it, but for future reference, there's a category for nearly everything! Thanks for keeping things organized. Ncboy2010 (talk) 23:51, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

If any of those highways exist in some other form, you shouldn't be creating articles for them. Instead, those are the kinds of things that should be merged to the articles for their current active designations. There are already over 10,000 highway articles for the US; we don't need excess duplication when we're trying to expand 2011 stub articles during 2011. Imzadi 1979 → 01:02, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

If you don't mind me saying so, Imzadi1979, your last statement above seems like a contradiction to your last statement to me.

I'm stuck between making stubs/new articles/expanding other articles and not doing any of that or other stuff, all the while not having enough time to do the correct amount of research to do any of the above.

What do you suggest?

Allen (talk) 20:23, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

There is a difference between flooding us with redundant articles and expanding existing articles. For instance: the remainder of M-131 was renumbered M-119 in 1979, so M-131 redirects to the M-119 article. US 102 was decommissioned in 1928 and the roadway was made into an extension of US 141, so US 102 is in US 141's history section. US 666 was renumbered US 491; US 491's history section covers all of US 666's history and makes note of the section that was added to US 191. The M-131, US 102 and US 666 redirects aren't useless because other articles link to them and they are valid search terms (in other words, people would go searching for those exact terms). They are also valid because a full article on M-131 would be redundant to the M-119 article. Now, if someone (re-)created a stub for US 102, it would be totally redundant to US 141 and ripe for a merger. If a piece of roadway physically carried a US Highway designation in the past that it no longer carries, but it is already the subject of an article under another name, then merge the two articles together and create the appropriate redirects. For instance, CA's SR 1 was once US 101A, but that doesn't mean we need a full article on US 101A when SR 1 can cover that history properly without making a redundant article over what is essentially the same pavement.

Many of the redirects you've recently created aren't valid or very good search terms like U.S. Route 241 (Tennessee-Alabama) for a couple of reasons. One, WP:USSH, the naming convention page for highways in the US doesn't support that name. It's a cumbersome name that would be an unlikely search target. Geographically speaking, highways in the US are named and written from the southern or western ends and Alabama is south of Tennessee. The backwards order would be fine if the forwards order name was also created. (It hasn't been created yet.) Geographic ranges like that (Tennessee–Alabama) or date ranges (1927–1932) should also have a version created with an en dash (–) as well as a version with the hyphen (-), and if there is a full article, it should be located at the en dash title, not the hyphenated one. The practice has been to disambiguate former mainline highways with non-unique designations by their time periods. That's why we have M-144 (1936–1940 Michigan highway) and M-144 (1940–1973 Michigan highway) with M-144 (Michigan highway) as a set index to disambiguate between the two. When there are multiple similar business routes, geographic location is used, à la M-28 Business (Ishpeming–Negaunee, Michigan), M-28 Business (Newberry, Michigan) and M-28 Business (Marquette, Michigan) vs. M-28 Business (Michigan highway).

WP:USRD is in the middle of a drive to gain an overall net reduction of its stub count by 2011 articles in the year 2011. While there are valid reasons for creating stub articles at times, please understand that with a minimum of research, it should be possible to write a route description and create a junction list for any highway. That alone in an article is two of the "Big Three" sections, and makes an article start-class. (Assuming the two sections aren't total gibberish or inappropriately short for the length and location of the highway.) Every stub created during 2011 means one more stub to expand to reach the goal. (For instance, if on Monday our expansions or mergers have accomplished a net reduction of 1500 stubs, and then you create a brand new article that doesn't have two of the Big Three sections, then our net reduction is 1499.) Last year, we had a similar goal, and came up very short, yet this year we've gained some traction and we're on pace to reach #2011 about four days before the end of the year. So there are two frustrations at work here: the possibility of a flood of stubs derailing a major project initiative and a flood of redirects that seem to have little use or utility. There are currently 10,407  articles on US highways and 3,058 of them are stubs according to the chart at WP:USRD/A/S. We're trying to concentrate on improving what we have, and in some cases, that will mean adding additional history about former designations along the same pavement to an already existing article. Imzadi 1979 → 21:15, 22 September 2011 (UTC)