AARoads:The Interchange

Centralized discussion for the AARoads Wiki

If you would like to request various user rights or permissions, please use AARoads:User rights requests;
To request deletion of a page, please use AARoads:Deletion requests;
To view a list of administrators, please see AARoads:Administrators;
For urgent requests and lighthearted banter, join our Discord server;
For all other comments or concerns, please post below.

Archives: 1, 2

Debates about Scope

Bridges/tunnels

This discussion has been closed and is preserved as an archive of the decision of the community. Please do not modify it!

The vote counts come down to in 5 favor, 3 opposed, 1 neutral. There is consensus to include bridges/tunnels, but there still needs to be criteria defined as to when to include them. --Rs chen 7754 02:44, 20 January 2024 (EST)

I'm torn on this one. The big ones will still have their articles on Wikipedia, so we don't need to decide for a while. Imzadi 1979 → 14:02, 19 June 2023 (EDT)
I think these might fall outside our scope. Dough4872 16:05, 19 June 2023 (EDT)
Except for something like wikipedia:Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel where the road is the bridge, I think this is outside our scope. --Rs chen 7754 19:14, 19 June 2023 (EDT)
- Something to consider: for that topic, we'd probably write it and title it as the highway designation and only mention the tunnel in a secondary capacity. In other words, we'd have merged it the other way.
This question is easier to answer "no" now that tunnels are part of the bridge project on Wikipedia. V C 20:54, 19 June 2023 (EDT)
As I've said on Discord, only where it feels like we need them. Golden Gate, Tappan Zee, I-35W collapse. Things of that nature. –Fredddie™ 21:56, 20 June 2023 (EDT)
- I'm sure the editing community we'd attract would probably create some of these anyway. I say we revisit the topic later when there's a bit more stability in the rest of the article corpus. Imzadi 1979 → 23:25, 20 June 2023 (EDT)
Yes, but not actively. As long as the Wikipedia article is useful for our needs let's just link to that one, and clone or create articles here as needed when the Wiki-a-holes strike. Moabdave (talk) 14:08, 21 June 2023 (EDT)
As needed, as per Moabdave. Scott5114 (talk) 23:51, 21 June 2023 (EDT)
Generally agree with Moabdave, most bridge articles seem to be fine on Wikipedia at the moment, but if notability requirements get pushed up higher on enWiki, there might be a need to bring some articles over to AARoads.JJBers (talk) 09:46, 19 September 2023 (EDT)
Some bridges and tunnels are important enough to highway coverage that I think we should have articles on them, like we do for other pieces of infrastructure (e.g. interchanges), but I think most of them are out of scope. (So essentially what Fredddie said.) TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 00:18, 25 October 2023 (EDT)

City streets

This discussion has been closed and is preserved as an archive of the decision of the community. Please do not modify it!

The vote counts come down to 8 in favor, 4 opposed. There is consensus to include city streets, but there still needs to be criteria defined as to when to include them. --Rs chen 7754 02:46, 20 January 2024 (EST)

Not really. There will be some crossover/overlap, but I'd like to stick to roadways with state/provincial highway designations or major county road designations. Imzadi 1979 → 14:02, 19 June 2023 (EDT)
City streets have a different character and fall outside our scope which focuses mostly on numbered highways. Dough4872 16:05, 19 June 2023 (EDT)
Outside our scope, but I could see making exceptions for something like wikipedia:Santa Monica Boulevard. --Rs chen 7754 19:14, 19 June 2023 (EDT)
Most city streets are outside of our scope, but I support including principal arterials in this wiki, at minimum as part of a list article. Which level of government maintains the road and whether the road is numbered should not override the importance of a street for serving to move traffic. V C 20:57, 19 June 2023 (EDT)
I'll go against the grain here and support having articles on major streets in most cities and even some small towns or rural regions, provided they are identified as important by a higher body/level of government. Sounder Bruce 02:02, 20 June 2023 (EDT)
I'm OK with them to a degree. I think we could have a really good article on Broadway in NYC. But I would enforce a limit of how many streets we should have. 1 article per 50,000 residents is a number that has come up before. –Fredddie ™ 21:56, 20 June 2023 (EDT)
Same reasoning as bridges and tunnels. If the wikipedia article is usable for us, use it. If it's not, then we can create our own.Moabdave (talk) 14:10, 21 June 2023 (EDT)
No. A comprehensive article on, say, Broadway in New York City is going to cover a lot of ground that, frankly, none of us are interested in or good at writing or researching. Better to leave that to the urbanists. Scott5114 (talk) 23:51, 21 June 2023 (EDT)
Massively in favor; the only difference between roads and streets is whether a government's slapped a route number on it. The argument of streets not being important enough is inconsistent- if that were true, we'd have to wipe New Jersey Route 59 from this wiki. Streets in a city are equally as important as roads out in the country. BMACS 1002 18:00, 13 August 2023 (EDT)
I want to say yes but then we're gonna have to have a real discussion on what constitutes a notable city street. T C N7JM 06:46, 31 August 2023 (EDT)
Big yes. Why? At least in Toronto, some very important roads simply have no number because Toronto doesn't use numbered routes. I would argue that Yonge Street in Toronto would be more important than the majority of numbered county roads in the rest of the province. Similarly, Winnipeg has a ton of numbered city routes, but I'd argue that a lot of those are rather insignificant. Andrepoiy (talk) 12:56, 3 October 2023 (EDT)
I'm okay with having some streets, especially major arterials that are highways in all but a number designation. I think streets that are more significant for cultural reasons are better suited to Wikipedia, though, and minor streets probably aren't suitable to either place. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 00:21, 25 October 2023 (EDT)

City streets: inclusion criteria

Seeing as that in over a year we haven't come up with some criteria, I will propose some reasons for inclusion below. Additional proposals are welcome. Proposals 1-4 are copied from the former w:Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Streets. --Rs chen 7754 01:21, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

@Imzadi1979, Dough4872, Viridiscalculus, SounderBruce, Fredddie, Moabdave, Scott5114, BMACS1002, TCN7JM, Andrepoiy, and TheCatalyst31: since you commented a year ago. --Rs chen 7754 01:22, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

This might upend the apple cart we've got going below, but to me the important question is "is it interesting as a road, or as a place?" If it's interesting just as a place, then that's probably not in our bailiwick since the article is going to be talking about things that aren't what we're interested in: the road infrastructure itself. If it's interesting as a road, then it probably is something we want to write about, whether it's a numbered route or not. So to use a few examples from Las Vegas:

Las Vegas Boulevard is in because it was US-91 (and will probably end up becoming the nucleus of a U.S. Route 91 in Nevada article eventually). LVB is an interesting example because it is interesting both as a road and as a place—but that means the article we have here should probably have a totally different focus than what a good article on The Strip would have, i.e. we are going to be talking about the casinos a lot less and the infrastructure a lot more.
Desert Inn Road (w:Desert Inn Road) is currently not in because it was never a numbered highway, but it probably should be in because of the "superstreet" section (the tunnel thing under LVB)
Decatur Boulevard should probably stay out because it's just a bog-standard arterial that really isn't too different than any other street in the valley (but it has an enwp article because the Las Vegas Review-Journal—the same outfit that runs a column on the preceding day's slot machine jackpots—did an article about it on a slow news day once).

So what I would like to see come out of this discussion is a set of criteria that expresses this idea in a more objective way than "I know a good road article when I see it". —Scott5114 ↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 02:08, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Those are my thoughts too and why I haven't voted on 1-4, but apparently others disagree. --Rs chen 7754 02:10, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Las Vegas Boulevard shouldn't be in just because it's former US91 (former alignments may warrant mention on that highway's page). It should be in, and its own article, because it's an (unsigned) Nevada State Highway. Agree that the article should be more focused on the road stuff, but will point out that the casinos and such are road stuff, due to making the road an All American Road. Si404 (talk) 03:47, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Of course, the portion of LVB that's NV-604 isn't the portion that most people think of when you say "Las Vegas Boulevard", i.e. the Strip, which is fully Clark County controlled, which is why the county can do ridiculous things to it in order to run car races for rich people on it. The casinos and such are worth mentioning as a traffic generator, but our article in its final form is definitely not going to be doing anything like calling out every casino by name along it, the focus we want as a project is on roads as infrastructure, not as a destination in its own right. The latter is something that Wikipedia (and Wikivoyage) does just fine, so if we focus overly much on it we're just duplicating effort to produce something that's not particularly unique. —Scott5114 ↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 15:51, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Economy

The street has become synonymous with an industry or organization (Wall Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, Madison Avenue, Fifth Avenue)

Weak support I could go with these, but I won't argue if nobody else wants them. –Fredddie ™ 01:38, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Weak support Dough4872 09:43, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Oppose—this goes along more with the place vs. road distinction mentioned above. Imzadi 1979 → 18:52, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Oppose per Imzadi; these streets are more notable for what's on the street than the street itself. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 00:55, 28 October 2024 (EDT)

Weak support – Necessary to really round out our coverage of what readers expect. Sounder Bruce 02:15, 30 October 2024 (EDT)

Oppose Rs chen 7754 02:56, 30 October 2024 (EDT)

History

The street was the site of an important historical event (Clark Street)

Oppose important and historical introduces a degree of subjectivity. –Fredddie ™ 01:38, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Oppose - Don’t think an event makes a street important enough to have an article here. Dough4872 09:43, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Oppose—again, this is the place vs. road distinction. Imzadi 1979 → 18:53, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Oppose as currently worded, needs a more limited scope. --Rs chen 7754 21:29, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Oppose as currently worded, though I might support a limited scope (e.g. transport history specifically). TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 00:55, 28 October 2024 (EDT)

Oppose' – Agree with the place issue. Sounder Bruce 02:15, 30 October 2024 (EDT)

Oppose - I support the idea but not as currently written. Need to put more specifics than just "historical event" Dave (talk) 20:17, 5 November 2024 (EST)

Media

The street has been mentioned by name in a major motion picture, song, television show, or other mainstream media (Wacker Drive, Santa Monica Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard)

Weak support I could go with these, but I won't argue if nobody else wants them. –Fredddie ™ 01:38, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Weak support Dough4872 09:43, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Oppose this particular wording. As I reflect on this, I think we need something a little bit stronger before half of the LA boulevards are imported. --Rs chen 7754 11:20, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

I think the proposal immediately below should supercede this one. --Rs chen 7754 00:32, 30 October 2024 (EDT)

Oppose—again, place vs. road comes into play here. Imzadi 1979 → 18:53, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Oppose as worded. If a street is culturally significant for transport-related reasons a la Route 66, I'd support including it, but a mention isn't enough. (Incidentally, Wacker Drive is significant as a roadway without even touching the movies that were filmed there, and I'd support including it regardless.) TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 00:55, 28 October 2024 (EDT)

Weak support – Again, what readers might expect here. Sounder Bruce 02:15, 30 October 2024 (EDT)

Documentary

The street has been the subject of a documentary or an article in a major media source.

Comment: Are there any examples of this? –Fredddie ™ 01:38, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

What comes to mind is Lombard Street (San Francisco) and Yonge Street, where it doesn't fall into the criteria above but where it is something that could be considered. --Rs chen 7754 01:41, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Weak support Dough4872 09:43, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Maybe—if the documentary is about the history of the roadway itself. This starts to get out of the bounds of the objection I have about Media one subsection up because we're no longer dealing with tangentialities but specifics. Imzadi 1979 → 18:55, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support based on the examples given; this reads to me as "this street is interesting, and generates coverage, for transport reasons" which is the sort of street I'd like to see included. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 00:55, 28 October 2024 (EDT)

What gives me pause is Scott's example of Decatur above. A documentary, sure; but just one web article? --Rs chen 7754 01:00, 28 October 2024 (EDT)

I think we would have to work on the wording, but what about a proposal along the lines of "The street - not the neighborhood, the actual street - has been the subject..."? --Rs chen 7754 00:33, 30 October 2024 (EDT)

Support – Culturally significant streets will have plenty of citations that go beyond just their surroundings. Sounder Bruce 02:15, 30 October 2024 (EDT)

Expressways

This discussion has been closed and is preserved as an archive of the decision of the community. Please do not modify it!

This passes with unanimous support. --Rs chen 7754 20:57, 8 November 2024 (EST) The street has characteristics of a major highway such as interchanges or grade separation.

Support --Rs chen 7754 01:24, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support –Fredddie ™ 01:38, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support Dough4872 09:43, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support—if the roadway in question in these cases were maintained by the state DOT (or equivalent), it would likely be a state highway. Imzadi 1979 → 18:56, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 00:55, 28 October 2024 (EDT)

Support, but only if these characteristics are a significant portion of the street instead of just a handful of underpasses. Sounder Bruce 02:15, 30 October 2024 (EDT)

Numbered route

This discussion has been closed and is preserved as an archive of the decision of the community. Please do not modify it!

This passes with unanimous support. --Rs chen 7754 20:57, 8 November 2024 (EST)

The street is currently or was formerly part of a major numbered highway (however, a merger into the article on that highway should also be considered).

Support with that important caveat. --Rs chen 7754 01:24, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support per Rschen –Fredddie ™ 01:38, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support in that I put on AARoads:Cleanup that Mercury Boulevard should be merged into U.S. Route 258. We may want to do the same with Arlington Boulevard (already imported) and U.S. Route 50 in Virginia. Markkos1992 (talk) 07:24, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support - However, these should be merged with numbered highways where possible. Dough4872 09:43, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support but Merge—where possible, these either should be in the History section of the numbered highway article, or they should be redirected to the appropriate business route article/section, if that's the case. Imzadi 1979 → 18:58, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 00:55, 28 October 2024 (EDT)

Support – For some streets on long state routes, it might be pertinent to split them from their parent numbered route's article (e.g. Aurora Avenue in Seattle has such a long history of its own). Sounder Bruce 02:15, 30 October 2024 (EDT)

Plazas, squares, gardens

Features such as this where multiple roads meet should also (in addition to the above) fall under the previous criteria about junctions, which should be amended to note that at least one road in scope must be part of the junction.

Support. --Rs chen 7754 01:30, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support per Rschen, agree on the requirement –Fredddie ™ 01:38, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support and would add that such places with Zero Points/Numbering Hubs in them shouldn't be excluded just because none of the roads are in scope anymore. (eg Bank or Point zéro (which hasn't had any numbered roads reach it since way before cars existed and so no road there has ever been in scope). Si404 (talk) 03:47, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

I think we could argue that those concepts have systemwide importance, and we do generally allow articles that have to do with the system as a whole. --Rs chen 7754 15:14, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support Dough4872 09:43, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support—using the criteria for junctions generally. If the junction/plaza/etc. has system-wide significance, it should be covered someplace, be it a stand-alone article or a section in the system's article, depending on available content/size. Imzadi 1979 → 19:01, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support, and I agree with Si404's point about zero points (pun intended). TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 00:55, 28 October 2024 (EDT)

Support – It's road infrastructure, in the end. Sounder Bruce 02:15, 30 October 2024 (EDT)

Residential streets

This discussion has been closed and is preserved as an archive of the decision of the community. Please do not modify it!

This passes with unanimous support. --Rs chen 7754 20:58, 8 November 2024 (EST)

Streets that predominantly serve a residential purpose, in most cases, are not eligible for inclusion.

Support. --Rs chen 7754 01:30, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support –Fredddie ™

Support Dough4872 09:43, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support—these are just not in scope for us, generally speaking. Imzadi 1979 → 19:02, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Support TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 00:55, 28 October 2024 (EDT)

Weak support Sounder Bruce 02:15, 30 October 2024 (EDT)

Purpose

In general, articles on city streets, just as with other road articles, should focus on the history and description of the road itself rather than on the places it passes through, although the article can mention such details.

Support not sure this is necessary, but as a general summation statement. --Rs chen 7754 00:31, 30 October 2024 (EDT)

Support - The primary focus of street articles should be the road infrastructure, but we should mention major points of interest along the street. Dough4872 10:44, 30 October 2024 (EDT)

Hyper-specific road hardware and features

Things like "Thrie-beam guardrail", "3M programmable signal head", "Brifen cable barrier", etc.

Yes, if we can ensure that the content is in depth enough and not overly commercialized—AARoads may well be the only place on the Internet where some of these things are discussed, and it would be helpful to document what we know as a reference tool. Scott5114 (talk) 23:51, 21 June 2023 (EDT)
I think we can cover these features. Dough4872 21:36, 22 June 2023 (EDT)
The more I think about this one, the more I think that we don't need articles about these topics. Instead we can work them into general articles about guardrails, traffic lights, and barriers. –Fredddie ™ 20:50, 24 October 2023 (EDT)
No. I can't really say that I am a fan about more generic articles like Traffic light either, just because they will not be deleted from enwiki and probably will be left to stagnate here. --Rs chen 7754 22:35, 24 October 2023 (EDT)
Yes, though I think Fredddie's approach of covering these in the general articles makes sense in most cases. I think we can recruit some specialists to the wiki to write about these (for instance, there are a bunch of traffic light fans on the forum). TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 00:27, 25 October 2023 (EDT)
I know this discussion is old, but maybe the Annex for the specifics? OrdinaryGiraffe (talk) 00:24, 12 June 2024 (EDT)

Road map companies

Such as Rand McNally, Automobile Blue Book, Ordnance Survey, concentrating of course on their mapping of roads. NE2 (talk) 03:28, 16 November 2024 (EST)

Consensus considered harmful?

Wikipedia likes to make a big deal about not being a democracy. There are reasons for this; wikipedia:Wikipedia:Polling is not a substitute for discussion has a good summary of most of the arguments. (One I've seen made, which that page doesn't really touch on, is that this prevents people from recruiting meatpuppets or sockpuppets to bolster their side.) Instead, editors look to establish a consensus on topics of discussion.

Consensus is a laudable goal and one we should shoot for whenever possible. However, the downside of consensus is that sometimes it's not achievable, because one or two people involved in the discussion just do not possess the ability in any fiber of their being to just shut the fuck up and drop it already. When one of these people wedges themselves into a consensus-driven process, the result is just a discussion that goes around and around in circles and never ends. In discussions where there's a deadline for reaching a decision, like a deletion discussion, this often leads to a "no consensus" outcome that has all the gravitas of a tied NFL game or a hung jury. At best, it's a temporary end to the discussion; at worst it's a waste of everyone's time who participated.

So what I'd like to propose is that AARoads wiki is a democracy. At least, some of the time. If we have a nice, simple discussion where it looks everyone is more or less on the same page and just needs to hammer out details (like everything on this page above this section), great, we go with that and let the discussion go to its natural conclusion. (The analogy would be to a voice vote in a legislature.) But if it doesn't look like there's likely to be an agreement, perhaps we should just go ahead and do an actual poll of some kind. Our community will probably be small enough that even one or two people not agreeing with everyone else will likely constitute a large enough percentage of the respondents that the traditional yardsticks of "consensus" won't really be useful. Also, I've personally never cared for the fuzziness of what threshold constitutes "consensus" anyway; as far as I can tell it's mostly just admins eyeballing the discussion and saying "yeah, that's good enough for me". Supposedly strength of argument is to be taken into account, but if your argument is really strong enough, you should be able to influence a vote anyway.

wikipedia:Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 201#RfC on draftifying a subset of mass-created Olympian microstubs is a good example of the absolute unholy mess that can result when using this approach. TLDR (because there really is too much to read) is that there was a bunch of arguing that went on for pages and pages, an admin closed it no consensus, someone brought it to an appeal forum and managed to browbeat the closing admin into withdrawing his closure, and then another admin came along and closed it in favor those doing the browbeating. If it were just a simple matter of counting votes rather than a judgement call, the closure would have been a lot more simple and tidy. (Well, maybe not... but that's what community bans are for. ;) )

For straightforward pass/fail two-option polls, a simple (50% plus one vote) majority would probably suffice. For multiple-option polls (e.g. what Wikipedia calls RFCs), it would probably be a good idea to do something like instant-runoff voting, a.k.a. ranked choice voting (just because we're voting doesn't mean we have to import the bad ideas of democracy like first past the post!). We would also need to establish when a discussion goes to a vote; I imagine someone calling for a vote and then someone else seconding it would be enough to trigger one. I do think we would need to clarify that a vote isn't necessarily permanently binding and can be overturned by a later discussion or vote, but maybe we should specify a limitation on when a new vote can take place, to keep sore losers from triggering repetitive vote-a-ramas. (Perhaps another vote on the same subject cannot take place for some fixed time period. Or we could borrow a rule from the US Senate and say that nobody can start a vote and then also vote the same way as they did last time. Or do something like a California recall election, where some percentage of the total number of voters in a given vote must call for a new vote to overturn it.)

I'd like to hear everyone else's thoughts on this, because it would be a pretty substantial change from Wikipedia, but I think it might be a worthwhile one that would stave off some unnecessary drama. —Scott5114 ↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 01:32, 22 June 2023 (EDT)

I like this idea and we should consider implementing mw:Extension:SecurePoll, which has the option for single-transferable voting. That way there is even more objectivity to the results. –Fredddie ™ 01:46, 22 June 2023 (EDT)

I agree with the thrust of it but not with SecurePoll. Besides being able to see where people are at in real time and potentially their reasons for voting that way, I do not have a lot of faith in the usability of the SecurePoll extension and its maintenance or ease of use.

Some other thoughts: I would suggest scrapping the canvassing policy and replacing it with a minimum edit count (and tenure?) required for voting. Of course during the first few months we might have to relax that requirement. --Rs chen 7754 02:01, 22 June 2023 (EDT)

Yeah, the canvassing policy is stupid and I don't support bringing it over. I'm not so sure a tenure requirement is really necessary, although some states do have a tenure requirement for voting (in Nevada it's 30 days, for instance). If there is no tenure requirement, I do think it should be routine procedure to automatically checkuser any new account voting in a poll. —Scott5114 ↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 02:15, 22 June 2023 (EDT)

I think we might run into problems in Europe if we did that. Also, CU only does so much as it is deleted after 3 months (and of course, we have database constraints). --Rs chen 7754 02:24, 22 June 2023 (EDT)

I fully support the idea of making this wiki more of a democracy and using majority votes and RCV for multiple option items as opposed to the consensus idea that Wikipedia uses. Dough4872 15:21, 22 June 2023 (EDT)

I was thinking about it a little more. I was thinking SecurePoll originally because it's a Mediawiki thing. But we're not relying on the WMF, so we don't need to use their solutions. A simple Google Form, which are free and fairly easy to use, gets the job done just as well. And so long as you have the link and everyone is truthful in saying who they are, we can have transparency in voting. –Fredddie ™ 19:33, 22 June 2023 (EDT)

I like the idea of just having the vote take place on the wiki itself using some sort of RCV template. Then have an open-source script that you paste the wiki text into and it tells you the result. The benefit of this arrangement is that anyone could then run the same script and verify the result.

This means that votes would be public, which they aren't with SecurePoll or a Google form, but I'm fine with this as 1) this is the way discussions on wikis normally are anyway 2) public votes are used in legislatures, which is probably a better model for what we'll be doing than the "private citizens voting for a candidate" model 3) the reasons for secret ballot are so that you don't face repercussions for your vote or be bribed to vote a certain way (since with a secret ballot nobody can know whether the bribe was successful or not. Repercussions can be handled with the conduct policy, and if you're bribing people for votes on a road wiki, you're just kind of pathetic. —Scott5114 ↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 19:44, 22 June 2023 (EDT)

Personally I like to see what way people are voting and why, because it might influence my own decision - and I often tailor my comments that way too. Because otherwise we have to allow voter's guides for secure polls. --Rs chen 7754 20:09, 22 June 2023 (EDT)

Wikipedia's governing by consensus policy is a joke. As is clearly visible at most contentious RFC's,AFD's, RFA's etc. typically one side browbeats the other in to submission until the abused party gives up. Consensus has come to mean which side shouts the loudest and wont' back down. I'll be quite happy if I never hear that horribly misused wikiword again. I'm ok with keeping Wikipedia's convention of including a rational with a vote so that the judge can give it more or less weight. However, if we go that route I would request we include a rule you CANNOT reply to someone else's !vote. You can say "support per X" or "I disagree with X's reasoning" but in YOUR vote space. None of this browbeating the other side into submission crap that has become the norm in Wikipedia. I would actually make it a blockable offense, I feel that strongly about it. Dave (talk) 19:07, 22 June 2023 (EDT)

Approval or range, not ranked choice. See https://rangevoting.org, more specifically https://rangevoting.org/CompleteIdioticIRV2.html. HotdogPi (talk) 19:30, 8 September 2023 (EDT)

You know, I think I like approval voting in a wiki context, as it would be dead simple to implement and easy to understand (just sign your name to everything you approve of; no comments in the votes are needed because there's no need for oppose votes). —Scott5114 ↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 17:30, 16 September 2023 (EDT)

This is very interesting to me, coming from OSM, where the term "consensus" has only ever been used as either a cluebat or a lament about partisan gridlock. On the OSM Wiki, canvassing is not only allowed but basically expected, and there's basically no control against sockpuppetry in the chaos that is OSM's fragmented communication landscape. The wiki's tagging proposals require a three-quarters supermajority. [1] However, since the wiki is merely supplemental documentation for the actual database, there's no guarantee that an approved or rejected proposal leads to any outcome other than words on a page. This greatly lowers the stakes, so that it would be utterly pointless to game the system. Unfortunately, a close call will inevitably generate reams of afterparty debate, punctuated by calls for consensus.

Given all the discussions that always go around in circles anyways, I've always looked up to English Wikipedia's nod to the idea of striving for consensus, even though it all goes downhill from there. (I also participate in another Wikipedia that counts votes.) I don't have any objection to the proposal to scrap consensus as a process, because a community as young as this one needs to experiment with new approaches rather than cargo-cult old traditions. That said, it may be worth (re)reading rfc:7282 for any principles that would be worth keeping in some other fashion.

– Minh Nguyễn ^💬 18:24, 16 September 2023 (EDT)

Implementation

So as a point of order: it seems that we've moved to majority voting in some form for many of the discussions. Is that what we will go for? And shooting down the notion of a canvassing policy as enwiki has it? --Rs chen 7754 01:46, 10 November 2023 (EST)

Yes, it seems that the consensus is not caring about consensus, funnily enough. We should probably create a procedure page codifying how AARoads:Approval voting works. —Scott5114 ↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 17:25, 10 November 2023 (EST)

I think that we need more clarity on what "approval voting" is. Is it the default mode of making decisions, or a decision making process of last resort (i.e. ArbCom)? Most of the recent polls have allowed rationales, for example, and I would be strongly opposed to omitting those by default. --Rs chen 7754 14:09, 28 November 2023 (EST)

I've attempted to clarify my thoughts on that at AARoads:Approval voting. The goal of not having rationales after votes is not to disallow voters from justifying their votes, but rather to avoid a rehash of a debate that should have already happened. I think there are benefits to clearly separating the "debate" and "voting" portions of a discussion, which I've tried to outline in the link above; after all, nearly every legislature in the world does this. —Scott5114 ↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 16:06, 1 December 2023 (EST)

I strongly disagree. The approval voting process seems to be predicated that every discussion, or at least a number of them, that need such a formalized process are as a result of contentious discussion. That is quite divorced from the reality that we are a wiki that is not bureaucratic and does not thrive on process, unlike English Wikipedia - and thus discussions tend to die out and need to be revived. Disallowing rationales would not be a benefit here and would disenfranchise or at least make it harder for people from giving opinions late in the process. It would require aggressive clerking which is unfriendly. It would make us more bureaucratic than English Wikipedia, which is really saying something. Not to mention that the mechanics of approval voting favor earlier proposals over later ones. The legislature argument is a red herring: they don't operate in asynchronous environments like we do.

This is also not to mention that numerous polls have already taken place on this wiki, on this very page, and have generated results. "Approval voting" as proposed is set up to be a process that nobody uses; as the initiator of many polls, I intend to keep them titled as polls to avoid invoking the bureaucracy that "approval voting" requires. --Rs chen 7754 21:22, 1 December 2023 (EST)

Is this something that can be closed now? Approval voting seems to have been implemented and is working well. –Fredddie ™ 17:15, 2 January 2024 (EST)

Under Scott's definition, there has only been one approval vote on this wiki. Everything else has not been an "approval vote", because it has comments, among other things. --Rs chen 7754 20:15, 2 January 2024 (EST)

Spain

So it seems like there are interested editors for Spain. This is my understanding of Spain.

E roads - import
AP - motorway - autopista - import
A - expressway - autovía - import
R - radial motorway - import
N - national road - import
C - regional road - import
Community/Provincial roads - some provinces have a higher level for expressways, a normal level, and/or a lower level (communities are collections of provinces) - are listed as tier 5 on TravelMapping. Do we import these? (This is the part I'm not 100% sure about - how the regions/provinces/autonomous communities all relate to road maintenance).
Local roads - should not be imported.

Is this correct? Any further thoughts? --Rs chen 7754 18:20, 5 May 2024 (EDT)

Also - we should talk about names. We have "A-1 (autovía)", but then "Autovía A-2". Also - do we keep "Autovía" or just drop it and leave it as A-2? (But then we probably have to put something in for disambiguation so we might as well just leave it?) For the N roads we have "N-4 road (Spain)" - but there are a few M roads called "M-45 (Spain)". The E-roads have "European route E1 in Spain" which seems a little redundant. --Rs chen 7754 18:25, 5 May 2024 (EDT)

A-nn becomes a little murky in Andalusia, where A- is the prefix for that autonomous community. I think Autovía A-nn is enough to disambiguate, but for Andalusia A-nn (Andalusia) would be in order. Quite a few of the articles listed in w:Category:Transport in Andalusia are misnamed (they're not all autovías). –Fredddie ™ 20:24, 5 May 2024 (EDT)

Expanding further, Spanish roads are sort-of color coded. I made a chart in the before times at WP:HWY/RM/R where I sort of explain it (tl;dr: blue, green, orange, and red should be included here). –Fredddie ™ 20:31, 5 May 2024 (EDT)

To further complicate things, eswp uses names for motorways (I prefer to use this term for both AP and A, as there are practically no standard differences, the only one being if it is/was tolled). I'd go for "Autovía A-2" and so on. As for colors, I'd definitely add yellow as a few regions use it and it's also the standard for provincial roads. Leudimin (talk) 10:54, 7 May 2024 (CEST)

And the colour coding is more important than prefixes for what class the road is - the prefixes tell you where the road is/who looks after it, the colour is about standard/importance (though the maps my parents gave me from their recent holiday in Lanzarotte are terrible at showing the correct colours of the cartouches, which are all LZ-prefixed!)

Blue, Red, Orange (and Green E Roads) is what I included on TM. In many Autonomous Communities that's quite a decent network, but in others (eg Andulucia where it's mostly Autovia/future Autovia corridors) its pretty threadbare and the next layer down is quite important. Definitely at least listicles for Yellow, Green and Purple, but possibly full articles depending on how the AC does things. Si404 (talk) 13:07, 7 May 2024 (EDT)

1. The "regional roads" mentioned above as "C -" are extinct nowadays (not to be confused with Cataluña's road network). The list of regional roads can be imported from this Wikipedia page and, to my eyes, would work best as a separate page.

Additionally, if desired, the historic list of national roads can be taken from this blog page.

2. "AP" actually stands for Autopista de Peaje, Autopistas that were never tolled such as the A-49 bear just the letter A, which stands for both "autopista" and "autovía". These two should be imported into the same list page.

3. Autopistas and autovías owned by Spain bear names (such as A-7 being Autovía del Mediterraneo). I believe these names are relevant enough to motorways that their articles should be titled as this instead. This and my other thoughts on naming conventions, I will add in a moment to the AARoads:Naming conventions page. Shedingtonian (talk) 12:58, 7 May 2024 (CEST)

About importing from eswiki: we do have the technical capabilities to do that, though I do need to make some minor code changes. I would need a list of what is needed to be imported, though. Also, this would likely take place after everything from enwiki on Spain is imported. --Rs chen 7754 14:47, 7 May 2024 (EDT)

So would this work for naming conventions:

Autopista AP-nn/A-nn
Autovia A-nn
A-nn (Andalusia) – for non-autovias
pre-nn (region) – pre = regional prefix (R, B, C, M, Ma, etc.) and region = autonomous community or province
N-nn (Spain) – national roads

I think every article should be disambiguated consistently. Enwiki would only disambiguate as necessary and it gets confusing which ones are or are not disambiguated. –Fredddie ™ 16:08, 8 May 2024 (EDT)

Autovía should have the accent.

Eyeballing the proposals, the biggest differences I see:

(Andalusia) versus (Andalusia, Spain) (also, AA:NC has a different spelling)
Using the named motorway (in addition to? in place of?) the number. I would be opposed to in place of, as we strongly tend towards using numbers whenever possible. (Not sure what we will do with Australia where we might not have a choice). In addition to - it's not unprecedented (see China on enwiki), though it makes maintenance a bit more tricky and requires redirect creation right away. --Rs chen 7754 21:09, 9 May 2024 (EDT)

Andalusia is the English spelling so we should go with that. I don't think it's necessary to use ", Spain" in disambiguators more than necessary. I have two problems with naming articles by their denominación. One, AA:TITLES says we should name the article by the route number and create any pertinent redirects. Remember, we've moved some Florida articles back from their road names to their route numbers. That all being said, I don't see anything wrong with Autovía A-1 starting with "The Autovía del Norte (Spanish for 'Northern Motorway'), numbered A-1, is...". And two, even if we did use the route names, not all of the roads have them, so that would create the inconsistency we don't want. –Fredddie ™ 03:29, 10 May 2024 (EDT)

Yeah, honestly what you're saying makes sense, it'll be easier to have the name of the motorway or road at the top of the article. Though I don't understand the distinction of using the accent in "autovía". If one word can retain its accent and original spelling, why cannot area names, doubtlessly more relevant, also bear their actual accents and spellings?

Also, something I just realized going off of the structure of the other listed article titles, shouldn't the structure be more like "Spain A-X Autovía", "Cantabria CA-X road", "Guadalajara GU-X road (Spain)"?
(I reckon I should've realized this before writing all of that stuff in the AA:NC page, oops-)

And also something else, the main reason for writing (region, Spain) as opposed to (region) is duplicate names, for example Guadalajara Spain versus Guadalajara México. One could mistake a highway for being in one region instead of the other if they were only going off of the article's title. Shedingtonian (talk) 12:49, 10 May 2024 (CEST)

Looking at M-x (Michigan) and K-x (Kansas) as the already decided alphanumeric article title formats (which is very different to the numeric titles' <type in words> <number> format), with reference made to global ones in the decision making, presumably the consistent format is <route number> (<jurisdiction>)? Therefore Spain would be

AP-nn (Spain) / A-nn (Spain) / N-nn (Spain) / <city-prefix>-x (Spain) for national roads
<relevant prefix)-nn (autonomous community) for autonomous community roads

?

This pre-existing convention also means a lot of other European countries already have their naming convention sorted, not just Spain.

'European route Enn' would need changing to 'Enn (Europe)', but given that officially the network is called the 'international E-road network' (AGR Article 1) with the routes called 'E-roads' (AGR article 4.2) and the only use of the term 'European' in the AGR is referring to the title of the Agreement "European Agreement on Main International Traffic Arteries (AGR)", keeping the wikipedia made up term 'European route' ought to go anyway! Si404 (talk) 07:34, 10 May 2024 (EDT)

Just using a couple routes in Castilla–La Mancha for example, it would be "A-40 (Spain)" and "TO-21 (Castilla–La Mancha)", right? I'm OK with that. I'm also OK with E-roads going to "E-nn (Europe)". –Fredddie ™ 11:02, 10 May 2024 (EDT)

It would be "A-40 (Spain)", "TO-21 (Spain)" as a city-prefixed route that's part of the national network (it's listed here with the AP-n and the A-n and the N-n roads), "CM-40 (Castilla–La Mancha)". Si404 (talk) 13:10, 10 May 2024 (EDT)

PS: we only add states to 3dis if they aren't unique - cf Interstate 787 (whose 2di needs a state disambiguation). Due to being uniquely numbered in the country, routes like TO-21, B-20, M-40, SE-30, etc should have their page titles formatted in the same way as intercity routes like A-1, N-III, AP-8, N-634, etc. It's just a different way of doing spur/loop routes. Si404 (talk) 13:20, 10 May 2024 (EDT)

I do think the E-roads should be changed per the above.

The reason we went with the numeric titles (see /Archive 1) that we did was mostly inertia; however either way we went, something was going to be inconsistent. We had concerns about New York, where the official name is "New York State Route", which would be inconsistent with "State Route x (California)".

We should probably figure out how much we translate to English and how much we don't. To preview some of the weeks ahead, we have A2 autostrada (Poland), Voivodeship road 119, Otoyol 7. I think that will answer some of the questions above.

Also, I think we should be consistent with disambiguation, and would lean more towards using the region (we don't call it M-25 (United States)), but Guadalajara is famous enough even though it is just a city, and probably will be confusing. --Rs chen 7754 11:05, 10 May 2024 (EDT)

Would it be "A2 autostrada (Poland)" or just "A2 (Poland)"? Do we need to have the system description given it's in the alpha bit of the alphanumeric thing? They only exist because Wikipedia covers more than roads. Voivodeship road 119 / Bundesautobahn 100 are all numeric-only with the shield design telling you the network, and the "<system> <number>" format would be per the existing principle created for US/Canadian roads (leaving aside the stuff that arises from Voivodeship being semi-translated, road being definitely translated, but the German terms are not translated). "Otoyol 7" would be O.7 (Turkey) as alphanumeric on signs.

The Guadalajara routes memtioned are way down the pecking order - below 4-digit Autonomous Community roads - I can't imagine we'd have anything more than a listicle (and it's the province, not the city, and OSM shows no GU-roads near the city itself). Si404 (talk) 13:10, 10 May 2024 (EDT)

So on one hand, I lean more towards using the English name for place names, for ease of use (and linking back to enwiki place name articles). But then, we aren't translating out road system names consistently either. We could omit them entirely when the name isn't official, but then for some countries there are article title distinctions between motorway and highway and road. And ~~Voivodeship~~ Road 119 is probably not sufficient for a title either. --Rs chen 7754 14:25, 10 May 2024 (EDT)

Yes, for me, it's less an issue of whether we translate or not, but consistency in doing so. Si404 (talk) 14:57, 10 May 2024 (EDT)

Do we need to have the system description given it's in the alpha bit of the alphanumeric thing? Probably not in the particular case cited, and maybe where it makes sense it should be cut out. A- can mean both autovía and autopista in Spain though, so we still have that problem.

Some other thoughts about translating versus not: the countries are place names too, and I don't want to disambiguate with N-nn (España). It gets even worse for non-Latin languages. But then we have to be concerned about transliteration. --Rs chen 7754 20:09, 10 May 2024 (EDT)

Autopista and Autovia, while not interchangable terms, are indivisible terms. Not only does English Wikipedia put both together, inseperately, but Spanish Wikipedia does too. 'that problem' is only a problem if we go out of our way to make it one. Si404 (talk) 17:51, 15 May 2024 (EDT)

As an update, I still anticipate importing Spain this weekend while we're still hammering out the naming conventions - we can always move them later (as I suspect will happen with the E-roads pretty soon). --Rs chen 7754 14:21, 10 May 2024 (EDT)

Poll: naming conventions

It seems that these questions will come up with just about every country, so we might as well attempt to address them now. Ideally this would be additional Guidance under AARoads:Content policy#Article titles. There could be other proposals added. --Rs chen 7754 20:05, 11 May 2024 (EDT)

Didn't realize this poll was intended to be global in nature, since it's under the "Spain" section. Makes sense to do it systematically though. – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 21:31, 19 May 2024 (EDT)

This discussion has been closed and is preserved as an archive of the decision of the community. Please do not modify it!

The proposal passes. --Rs chen 7754 12:47, 27 May 2024 (EDT)

For route numbers with alphabetic prefixes, words that are entirely redundant to the meaning of the alphabetic portion of the route, or are generic ("road", "highway") should generally be omitted.

Example: E23 (Europe), N1 (France)

Support. --Rs chen 7754 20:06, 11 May 2024 (EDT)
Support—since we're a roads wiki, the extra words would be generally assumed. That's why we moved "M-1 (Michigan highway)" to just "M-1 (Michigan)" after all. Imzadi 1979 → 20:19, 11 May 2024 (EDT)
Support - I think this naming convention works well for routes with alphabetic prefixes. Dough4872 22:06, 11 May 2024 (EDT)
Support - reasons already given by others. Si404 (talk) 08:52, 12 May 2024 (EDT)

This discussion has been closed and is preserved as an archive of the decision of the community. Please do not modify it!

The proposal passes, with the note that the common English name should be used rather than overtranslating names that are commonly used. --Rs chen 7754 02:35, 5 June 2024 (EDT)

Place names used to disambiguate (as a suffix or a prefix) should be translated to English.

Possible addendum: Where there is doubt, the title used by English Wikipedia for the locality should prevail.

Support. Because if we don't, we run into a whole host of problems (non-Latin alphabets, multiple languages spoken in a locality, using non-English country names, etc.) --Rs chen 7754 20:06, 11 May 2024 (EDT)
Support—our working language here is English. Imzadi 1979 → 20:19, 11 May 2024 (EDT)
Support - Since this wiki is in English we should translate place names to English. Dough4872 22:06, 11 May 2024 (EDT)
Support, with caveats - the standard English name should be used (eg Spain rather than España), but names shouldn't be translated if they aren't in common English usage (so Lower Saxony rather than Niedersachsen, but Alpes-Maritimes rather than 'Maritime Alps' for the French department). I believe this is what is being proposed anyway, but the phrasing is a little off - "Use English language place names for disambiguation" rather than "translate names into English" - the latter suggests that road in Beijing should be disambiguated with 'North Capital'! Si404 (talk) 08:52, 12 May 2024 (EDT)
- That is my intention (and it would be covered by the addendum if we decided to go that route). --Rs chen 7754 19:34, 12 May 2024 (EDT)
Support – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 21:31, 19 May 2024 (EDT)

This discussion has been closed and is preserved as an archive of the decision of the community. Please do not modify it!

Where practical, system names should be translated to English, using an agreed-upon title. Exceptions can be made for system names that are used relatively commonplace by English speakers or where there is no direct translation. --Rs chen 7754 02:10, 8 June 2024 (EDT)

System names should be translated to English, using an agreed-upon title.

Support—our working language here is English, as I noted above. We should give the names in articles in their native form, but our primary usage will be in English. Imzadi 1979 → 20:19, 11 May 2024 (EDT)
Support, with caveats I think that generally this is the principle that should be used. We should mitigate this as much as possible by omitting it when it is unnecessary, such as the Turkey example given above. Not sure what this would mean for Bundesautobahn 27 - it could just be A27 (Germany), but I am not sure what that means for the Interstate system, which is another system that has an official abbreviation that does not appear on the signs. I am not entirely sure about the autopista/autovia question above; in cases where there is not a 1:1 translation or where the foreign word is used even in English-language media, we should consider exceptions. --Rs chen 7754 20:35, 11 May 2024 (EDT)
Support - We should translate system names to English unless there is no direct translation. Dough4872 22:06, 11 May 2024 (EDT)
Support, with caveats While it is pretty obvious to translate 'Routes Nationales', 'Državne Ceste', 'Estradas Nacionais', 'Rutas Nacionales', 'Εθνικές Οδοί', 'Nationalstroossen', 'Drogi Krajowa', etc to 'National Roads', subdivisions get a big shaky - 'Drogi Wojewódzka' - would have a direct translation of 'Dutchy road' but we would probably go with Voivodeship road, which is not a full translation into English. Again my issue is more with the 'translate' wording than the principle. Rschen's point about where we use the foreign word in English (cf my similar point about place names) is also true - we do say 'autobahn', 'autoroute', etc in English. We'd even say 'Route Nationale' in conversational English (eg I didn't want to pay the autoroute toll, so I took the route nationale instead'). The same happens with railways - we tend to use local terms (no one says 'I went on the London Subway', 'I went on the Paris Underground', 'I went on the New York Metro', etc) if they are going to be understandable. Si404 (talk) 08:52, 12 May 2024 (EDT)
Support, with caveats - I think the guiding principle here should be the accessibility of the title to a user who only speaks English. This means something like 'Državne Ceste' absolutely needs to be translated but local language terms that are easy on the native English speaker's tongue like 'Autoroute', 'Autostrada', etc. are best left alone. Duke87 (talk) 21:14, 19 May 2024 (EDT)
Support with caveats. Sometimes English accepts loan words (with little rhyme or reason), which we can be pragmatic about. Additionally, translations from some languages can be imprecise or create their own ambiguities. The article text should provide the native name at the earliest possible opportunity (i.e., in the lede sentence and any infobox). Attested translations are preferable to ad hoc translations. In case of doubt, a more specific poll can resolve the question by country or system. – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 21:31, 19 May 2024 (EDT)

Resuming the Spain discussion

@Fredddie, Leudmin, Shedingtonian, and Si404: So coming back to this once the above discussions have been closed. It seems that Autopista and Autovia are not in the proposed naming conventions [2], so there is that. It seems that we have decided to drop the words "motorway" and "road", so we will need to drop those from the proposal. Also, I have a significant issue with using official text names for what appear to be less major routes; that violates our norms on using the number instead. (There is of course the Australia question; however, here we're talking at the level of provincial highways, and provinces are a level down from territories in Spain). --Rs chen 7754 02:20, 8 June 2024 (EDT)

@Leudimin: (correct name this time) --Rs chen 7754 02:22, 8 June 2024 (EDT)

At a larger scope, do we want to keep the motorway descriptor in the page titles for alphanumeric routes? Autovía, autopista, Autoroute, Autostrada, etc. Maybe only in cases where there might be some ambiguity that parens won't fix (A is the prefix for Andalusia, for instance)? Otherwise, yes, drop any road descriptors and just have the alphanumeric and disambiguator (C-12 highway (Spain) → C-12 (Catalonia)). –Fredddie™ 21:15, 23 June 2024 (EDT)
- I would say no; pretty much all the Western European countries would still work, plus @Shedingtonian: didn't use the descriptors in the original proposal. --Rs chen 7754 00:56, 29 June 2024 (EDT)

Community/city/destination lists in lists

I've been converting various Canada provincial highway lists to use Template:Routelist row. Nova Scotia does have a destinations list in some of the tables, but our template does support it so I went ahead and converted it to not lose data: List of Nova Scotia provincial highways.

But then we have List of Prince Edward Island provincial highways, which has both a local names column and a destinations column, and our templates do not support adding both. Should we add support for another column? Or in order to standardize with other lists in the US, should one or both of those columns be removed entirely? I will note that International E-road network also has a destinations column. --Rs chen 7754 23:58, 2 June 2024 (EDT)

I think we can add support for another column since the table needs in different countries and subnational units of the world will vary. For some places, it might be more useful to list destinations served than in other places. Dough4872 00:17, 3 June 2024 (EDT)

A few more cases in point:

List of Yukon territorial highways which has an (unsourced) Old column, plus a local name column (arguably, some of those articles should be moved to Yukon Highway X)
List of Northwest Territories highways which has a local name column and could be moved similarly. --Rs chen 7754 01:45, 4 June 2024 (EDT)

A-Class and B-Class criteria

I've created the first drafts of AARoads:Assessment/A-Class criteria and AARoads:Assessment/B-Class criteria. These are to be the standards by which we judge if an article merits either of those grades. The B-Class criteria borrows heavily from Wikipedia's GA criteria, but it's been modified a bit for our circumstances. The A-Class criteria uses the same 6-item list concept, but uses the more stringent concepts from Wikipedia's FA criteria. A few criteria are the same on each list. Imzadi 1979 → 21:16, 7 June 2024 (EDT)

One thing that could be clarified is what "high-quality" is. Does that exclude self-published roadgeek sources?

Also, or line if the content is not in prose will that cause problems with RJL? --Rs chen 7754 21:36, 7 June 2024 (EDT)

Road signs in X articles

I'm going to clean up these articles so they're not a photo dump of every road sign. Ideally, the formatting will be the same on each article. That being said, what road signs must be included? –Fredddie ™ 16:12, 6 August 2024 (EDT)

Isn't a photo dump of every single sign the point of these articles? I guess if you want to take a different tack, focus on directional signage (where there's usually difference vs other countries), and point out any unique/interesting triangle/circle signs while handwaving away signs that are nothing out of the ordinary saying "most other signage is similar to other countries that adopt the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals". Eg Spain having yellow instead of white on roadwork signs and the unique Autovia sign. Look at this bit of an article I'm surprised we've not yet imported for what's different (though its usually little more than slightly different stylisations). Si404 (talk) 16:32, 6 August 2024 (EDT)

That will be imported, though it will be delayed. Imports of something that was over 1000 revisions on enwiki take a lot more work. --Rs chen 7754 20:16, 6 August 2024 (EDT)

No worries that it's not imported, I'm more surprised that it wasn't done when either the Europe-wide articles, or the signs in European country ones were. That it has so many changes means its obvious why it hasn't yet been. Si404 (talk) 14:17, 7 August 2024 (EDT)

Yeah, you're kind of on the right track of what I was thinking with handwaving away most of the ordinary signs. Finland using a yellow background instead of white for warning signs is something worth pointing out. I think there should be some examples, just not all of them. These are the signs I was thinking of showing, which if you look at the comparison of European signs article on enwiki these have entries for each country:

Stop
Yield/Give way
Curve
Crossroad
Pedestrian crossings
Wild animals
Railroad crossings
Roadworks
Do not enter
No trucks
Height limit
Weight limit
No Parking
No Passing/Overtaking
No Pedestrians
Speed limits
Go straight/No turns
Keep right/left
Expressway/motorway regulations
Route markers
Motorway signage (big green signs)
Conventional road signage (little green signs)
Entrance to built-up area/city limits

I'll create a couple sandboxes to demonstrate. –Fredddie ™ 18:36, 7 August 2024 (EDT)

Selected picture

IMHO, it's time for some fresh content in the selected picture section of the main page. This leads me to ask two questions:

Has anybody done any testing to how many pictures we can add to the queue before the server becomes burdened?
What is the criteria for a "selected picture". I have a few in mind that are descent pictures to add to the rotation but they have never been evaluated as a quality picture on commons (which IIRC was the criteria for the wikipedia portal).

Unless consensus dictates otherwise I'll change the main page to use all photos in the queue and possibly add some more to the rotation. Dave (talk) 02:28, 16 August 2024 (EDT)

Eastern Europe, part 4, and next steps

Last batch of Eastern Europe:

Russia - 65 articles (including the Asia part). M - main arterial road (system extends to Central Asia), A - other arterial road (system extends to Central Asia), R - regional road, N - local road. A number of weird articles, such as this one at AFD now.
Armenia - only existing article is a list. A (motorway), M - main road, R - regional road
Azerbaijan - 6 articles. M - main road, R - regional road.
Turkey - 50 articles. O - Otoyol - motorway, D - national road, Provincial road - starts with 2 digit provincial code.
- Will need to rename articles. It seems that the period is used as the separator between letter and number.
- What do we do with the provincial roads for naming? [3]
Cyprus - 15 articles. A - motorway, B - main road, E - regional road, F - local road, D - routes in the Northern Cyprus portion (de facto part of Turkey).

As far as what to do after this: there is some interest in Zambia. One could argue that we should just import the rest of Africa, around 450 articles. I do have a few concerns about some of the countries - for example, Kenya and parts of Tanzania are written on the basis of random newspaper articles and not by numbered roads. There were a few other renumberings that the articles partly reflect that made a mess. Egypt is not worth importing at all [4]. Or we move on to Asia - I don't want to leave Japan (high quality) out too long. --Rs chen 7754 23:15, 17 August 2024 (EDT)

After Europe, I think we can move on to Africa, since there is an interested editor and not a terribly large amount of content to import. Then after that we should head over to Asia and start with Japan. Dough4872 23:35, 17 August 2024 (EDT)

I think we should import the rest of the former USSR (aka the 5 -stans in Central Asia) after this update, if only because it would complete all the countries on the E-road network. I'm not sure how much there is to import for those countries, though. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 00:18, 18 August 2024 (EDT)

That is about 15 articles total. --Rs chen 7754 00:39, 18 August 2024 (EDT)

I'd say that getting the -stans in is an easy-enough thing then if only a dozen articles Si404 (talk) 03:00, 18 August 2024 (EDT)

I also agree we should do the former USSR -stan countries after Europe, in order to complete the countries on the E-road network, then move on to Africa and after that the rest of Asia. Dough4872 10:59, 18 August 2024 (EDT)

Azerbaijan

Should it be M1 (Azerbaijan) or M-1 (Azerbaijan)? Current article [5] --Rs chen 7754 18:01, 26 October 2024 (EDT)

Turkey

What about Otoyol 30? Motorway 30 (Turkey)? Or O.30 (Turkey)? --Rs chen 7754 21:22, 26 October 2024 (EDT)

For reference, we have D.915 (Turkey), but Provincial road 34-27 (Turkey) --Rs chen 7754 21:24, 26 October 2024 (EDT)

Is there any indication in Turkey that any Otoyol 30 is more prevalent than O.30? Regardless, whatever we decide with regards to Brazilian state disambiguators should also apply to Turkish provincial roads. –Fredddie ™ 01:43, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Go with O.30 - it's what's on the signs Si404 (talk) 03:29, 27 October 2024 (EDT)

Eastern Africa (Africa, part 5)

Comoros - 0 articles
Djibouti - 13 articles. RN - National roads - but articles are currently titled National Highway x (Djibouti). RN is used on the shields. Rename?
Eritrea - 0 articles
Ethiopia - 11 articles. A - trunk road, B - link road, C - main access road, D - collector road, E - feeder road - unclear as to where to draw the notability line (D/E?)
Kenya - 47 articles, however, probably one of the worst examples of GNG syndrome. (Though, some think that it may be that the numbers were just introduced later).
Madagascar - 44 articles. RN - national route, RIP - secondary route. Probably will need to consider some renames for both RN and RIP (the latter is missing a space).
Mauritius - 0 articles.
Rwanda - 1 article. NR - national road, DR - district road. Am concerned this may suffer from GNG syndrome (see above section)
Seychelles - 0 articles
Somalia - 2 articles. Not clear what the road numbering system is, given the fraught political situation. Maybe just import and figure it out later.
South Sudan - 6 articles. Some disagreement on sources as to how the numbering system works.
Sudan - 0 articles.
Tanzania - 28 articles. T - trunk road, R - regional road
Uganda - 93 articles - thought to no longer have active road numbering, so GNG was the only criteria used for inclusion on English Wikipedia.
Mayotte - 0 articles
Reunion - already imported

Rs chen 7754 14:47, 8 September 2024 (EDT)

NB: I alphabetized the countries and moved a couple around just a little bit (they were zero article countries, anyway). Now they match African Union country groupings. –Fredddie ™ 22:12, 9 September 2024 (EDT)

Route nationale (Madagascar)

Do we want to go with Route nationale 3a (Madagascar)? National Route 3a (Madagascar)? RN 3a (Madagascar)? --Rs chen 7754 20:59, 7 November 2024 (EST)

Djibouti

National Highway 11 (Djibouti), but signs say RN-11 and article says RN-11, presumably for Route nationale. --Rs chen 7754 21:03, 7 November 2024 (EST)

Rest of Asia (Asia, part 6)

Afghanistan: 11 articles. Importing national highways, keep articles at Route x (Afghanistan) for now
China: 394 articles. G - national highways (1, 2, 4 digits are motorways, 3 are conventional roads), S - provincial roads, X - district roads - Xiandao only, Y - local roads (not notable).
- Most articles are named like G1 Beijing–Harbin Expressway. Do we remove the name and just say G1 (China)?
- What about the S routes? Do we do the same? Do we use the province name to disambiguate?
Macau: List only.
Hong Kong: Will be omitting Hong Kong at this time per above.
North Korea: 6 articles. There may be a numbering system, but not much is known.
Taiwan: 72 articles. National freeway, Provincial expressway, Provincial highway - numbered 60+, County highway (are the state equivalent now that provinces were abolished), Township road (might not be notable), City road (might not be notable)
- “National Freeway x” does not refer to the location at all - leave as is? We leave the Texas FMs without a disambiguator.
Japan - 698 articles. E - expressway, National highway, Urban expressway - done by city, Prefectural road - (equivalent of state highway)
- Expressways are currently named. Do we move them to Exx (Japan)? Probably need to verify that there is a 1:1 mapping of name to number first.
South Korea: 152 articles. Motorway, National road, Local road - Jibang-do (2 digit: national funding, 3 digit: provincial funding), Metro road - done by city, some may/may not be notable. --Rs chen 7754 21:39, 22 September 2024 (EDT)

China: remove the name from the title once imported, S roads get disambiguated by province as that's the jurisdiction.
Japan: there's not a 1:1 mapping - a small number of named expressways bear two numbers, a bigger number of numbered expressways use more than one named expressway (ditto Indonesia)

Si404 (talk) 06:01, 23 September 2024 (EDT)

Should we move China National Highway x to Gxx (China) as well? --Rs chen 7754 02:06, 7 October 2024 (EDT)

@Rschen7754: Here's a decoder ring of the PRC road numbering system:

Prefix	Chinese	Pinyin	Literal meaning
G	国道	guódào	national highway
S	省道	shěngdào	provincial highway
X	县道	xiàndào	county highway

Even though the UK's "M" stands for "motorway", those are exceptions to the otherwise sequential lettering scheme. In other words, A and B don't actually stand for anything. China's prefixes resemble the abbreviations used in U.S. road systems (e.g., "I" for Interstate, "SR" for state route) or Germany's ("A" for Autobahn, "L" for Landstraße). In English, I think most published literature just refers to the roads by conventional names that specify the endpoints. References to the numbered names are all over the place: "Provincial Highway 103" [6][7][8], "Yunnan Provincial Highway S245" [9], "No. 103 provincial highway" [10], "provincial highway S359" [11], "Highway S210" [12], "Guo Dao" [13], and "the G6 Expressway" [14]. Of these, I get the sense that "Provincial Highway 103" is the most common, but it's hard to say for sure. – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 16:22, 8 October 2024 (EDT)

This is interesting. I went looking at zhwiki for any inspiration and it seems they use the shortened version of the expressway names for their article titles. Using G5613 Baoshan–Lushui Expressway as an example, zhwiki calls it the Baolu Expressway: zh:保泸高速公路 translation. Any mention of the route number seems to be in passing. Their version of {{Jct}} seems to eschew the G-number for the name of the expressway as well.

Ultimately, I think "National/Provincial/County Highway nn (China/province/county)" is the way to go for us. From there, we can start each article, again using G5613, "National Highway 5613 (Chinese: 5613国道; pinyin: 5613 Guódào , abbreviated G5613) ..." and mention the expressway names. –Fredddie ™ 15:26, 9 October 2024 (EDT)

Surely we don't use 56<small>13</small> but 5613 in article titles? ;P

What about Japan and Indonesia? Japan has been a bit more proactive in putting its Exx numbers on signs than Indonesia it's Tol xx numbers (which don't seem to cover routes where construction started after the numbering was done 5(?) years ago - or at least even id.wiki doesn't have a more up-to-date source), and site standards say 'go with numbers over names'. Si404 (talk) 19:01, 9 October 2024 (EDT)

We can format the title, {{Guodao title}} was created for that purpose. See G5611 (China) for a demonstration. –Fredddie ™ 19:16, 9 October 2024 (EDT)

Re Japan, if it's fairly easy to rename we should go ahead and do it, but if there's a significant number of named expressways that don't correlate to numbers, then put it off for now. --Rs chen 7754 01:38, 14 October 2024 (EDT)

@Fredddie: Yes, Chinese tends to clip multi-syllable place names and make blend words out of them. In writing, it's analogous to Western initialisms or acronyms. Sometimes these blend words make their way into English, as in the colloquial expressway names. – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 12:45, 10 October 2024 (EDT)

For the record, I support Fredddie's proposal for China. --Rs chen 7754 01:28, 16 November 2024 (EST)

Japan

So we have a similar situation to U.S. Highways in Japan. All of the articles are titled "Japan National Route nn", but the category and capstone article are "National highways of Japan". Do we want to move to "National Route nn (Japan)" or "National Highway nn (Japan)"? –Fredddie ™ 19:54, 18 October 2024 (EDT)

State Highway 1 (New Zealand)

I'd like to propose splitting SH 1 (NZL) into two articles by island. All told, SH 1 is about 2000 km in length and the island segments are roughly 1000±50 km each. There is also List of major junctions on New Zealand State Highway 1, which by splitting the main article, I would merge this into the relevant pages. There is also the Category:State Highway 1 (New Zealand), to which I would be receptive to doing an Interstate 90 in Illinois style merger. –Fredddie ™ 17:43, 15 October 2024 (EDT)

Okay. --Rs chen 7754 20:35, 15 October 2024 (EDT)
It seems to me that both spur routes would go to the North Island article. Also I presume that the original page will become a dab page. Markkos1992 (talk) 21:43, 15 October 2024 (EDT)
- Yes that's the idea. I'd probably code Jct such that {{Jct|country=NZL|SH|1N}} would point to State Highway 1 (North Island) so we didn't necessarily have to use dab all the time. –Fredddie ™ 22:24, 15 October 2024 (EDT)

Update, these are now at Draft:State Highway 1 (New Zealand), Draft:State Highway 1 (North Island), and Draft:State Highway 1 (South Island) –Fredddie ™ 18:42, 8 November 2024 (EST)

Brazil

Of the 7 countries remaining, this is by far the easiest to handle.

The standard stuff: the federal highways are BR-xx, the state highways are (two letter abbreviation)-xx. We just add (Brazil) to the end.

There are two problems:

List of highways in Brazil is a mess, and the responsible thing to do would be to try and split it out into separate state lists.
Category:Highways in São Paulo (state) has about 200 one-sentence stubs. Some of them are obviously copy-pasted and only have a mileage citation: "SP-xx is a state highway in the state of São Paulo in Brazil." Do we go ahead and import them, or redirect the ones that are really short to List of state highways in São Paulo? The version on enwiki exists but is not a table, so that would have to be built.

Thoughts? --Rs chen 7754 23:02, 15 October 2024 (EDT)

I agree with splitting the List of highways in Brazil into separate lists.

I think the c/p sentence sets a good low bar for importing. I did a spot check and anything that isn't more than a prosified table entry should not be imported. I can start building a table. –Fredddie ™ 23:48, 15 October 2024 (EDT)

Doing a second check, I'd be remiss if we didn't use pt:Lista de rodovias estaduais de São Paulo instead of the enwiki list. –Fredddie ™ 00:17, 16 October 2024 (EDT)

Hm, apparently I made a mistake in the original proposal about the state highways. I do think that the disambiguator should reflect the state name rather than just a uniform (Brazil). Not sure if we use the accents in São Paulo, for example. --Rs chen 7754 14:22, 23 October 2024 (EDT)

India

There has been some interest expressed in India. It is about 1200 articles. I think it should be fairly straightforward:

National highways, expressways, state highways
Do we import or otherwise try to clean up List of national highways in India by state (old numbering)?
There are a lot of planned or future roads. Do we try and filter through these? Examples: Kochi–Theni Greenfield Highway, Aroor–Thuravoor Elevated Highway. --Rs chen 7754 16:22, 29 November 2024 (EST)

I think India is good to import next since there is an interested editor. For now, I say we import whatever exists on Wikipedia. Dough4872 00:12, 30 November 2024 (EST)

Quebec Autoroute titles

Now that we have moved the provincial routes in Québec to have the accent mark in the article titles, I think we should move the article titles for the Autoroutes to also have the accent mark. This would mean Quebec Autoroute 15 would become Québec Autoroute 15. Dough4872 21:40, 30 November 2024 (EST)

For consistency, support. I thought it was implied in my suggestion. LilianaUwU ^{(talk / contributions)} 21:51, 30 November 2024 (EST)

This has been done. --Rs chen 7754 01:52, 17 December 2024 (EST)

AARoads:The AARoads Wiki is not a mirror

Food for thought. —Scott5114 ↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 23:12, 8 December 2024 (EST)

Terminii, directions, and mileposting

There was a discussion on Discord that touched on the following issues:

Lists: AA:MURA says to use these columns for terminii: Southern or western terminus and the other Northern or eastern terminus. However, that doesn't always account for how some countries or regions do their mileposts or kmposts.
Route descriptions: always following a northbound or eastbound direction (as the US standard has been) goes against the way some countries/regions do their mileposts or kmposts. I noticed today that MURA does provide for some variance in this already: Regardless of the route's length, progression should follow the mileposts as they are maintained by the appropriate agency responsible for the highway.

As far as the list columns, I could support some variance to allow for systems that are mileposted differently - perhaps "Starting terminus" and "Ending terminus" or something along those lines. I do think that there should be some rationale as to what is considered starting and ending, however - and in other places like the infobox, we should continue to use cardinal directions.

As far as the route descriptions, it looks like MURA already has the flexibility built in, however we need to practice it. There might also be implications for say, E-road articles that cross multiple countries.

Thoughts? --Rs chen 7754 14:13, 10 December 2024 (EST)

I was the one who brought up the discussion. I don't want to list the endpoints of routes like A-222 the wrong way, with the start point in second place. It is just unnatural. Leudimin (talk) 15:30, 10 December 2024 (EST)

I'm reminded of U.S. Route 42, which should be east–west overall but is signposted north–south in Ohio. Since the article describes the route as a whole, it makes sense to use a consistent set of directions, but once we split out a U.S. Route 42 in Ohio, it should exclusively use north–south directions. Most of the E road articles currently just list out component highways rather than featuring a full route description or junction list, so it's difficult to know how severely they'll be affected by the MURA guidelines. As far as I know, each E road or lettered branch of an E road has an official pair of termini in an official order (e.g. [15]), so could follow that for the international article and then defer to the kilometer posts in "country detail pages". – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 15:54, 10 December 2024 (EST)

I noticed this when categorising UK routes (though the same happens in other countries). Most countries don't use a grid (R of Ireland, GB, France and Spain are all radial from the capital). And even then, the E-road grid starts at north/west (ie top left, the logical place as you read). Forcing other countries to match the North American grids makes little sense, especially as it would mean rewriting articles to start at the 'down' (to use railway terminology) end instead of the 'up' end. Si404 (talk) 17:44, 10 December 2024 (EST)

I think we should have MURA call for the route article to be written in the direction the mileposts increase, which will vary by country and system. We may want to create a subpage from MURA to list out how they should be written for each country/system (for example US is south-north or west-east). But the issue is how do we handle exceptions. For example, the Atlantic City Expressway is written west-east even though the mileposts are east-west against the normal US convention. I would say we keep things consistent with the normal convention even if the junction list has decreasing mileposts. Dough4872 22:38, 10 December 2024 (EST)

Mileposts are not necessarily that visible, and shouldn't be the priority over the logical direction of the route within its locale - I agree. M55 (Great Britain)'s junction numbers increase from the M6, but its hectometre posts start at the sea (well 6.5km away where the motorway starts, at km 6.5) [16] so that it theorectically could be extended east of the M6 without the hassle of altering the chainage posts on the existing motorway (just the junction numbers!) and so the two don't necessarily correlate.

I think the problem here is more the automatic insistence of some templates to assume and insist that terminus_a is the southern/western one and terminus_b is the northern/eastern one rather than the manual - the manual can easily be ignored, but the templates can't. Si404 (talk) 04:54, 11 December 2024 (EST)

My view on this as a user is that above all I'd like to see some sort of sitewide consistency on it. Generally, I want to get into an article, get the facts I need, and get out quickly. For my use case, it doesn't really matter whether south or north is listed first, but it's annoying when it flip-flops according to local DOT cataloging standards since I can't just go with a blanket "the first one listed is x and the second one is y". —Scott5114 ↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 01:07, 17 December 2024 (EST)

Philippines

Of the three countries remaining, the Philippines is the least complicated.

Expressways - move to Exx (Philippines)
N roads - primary are 2 digits, secondary are 3 digits
- Many secondary routes existed under the name of the road; propose moving to Nxx (Philippines) like all the other N roads
Propose adding the circumferential and radial Manila roads.
There are tertiary roads that are nationally maintained, but unnumbered. Example: [17] Do we import these? --Rs chen 7754 02:22, 17 December 2024 (EST)
- Last I knew, PHL road articles were a mess. A sizeable portion of them were named roads that have portions of numbered highways. I'll support anything that so long as it isn't all jumbled like on enwiki. –Fredddie ™ 15:27, 17 December 2024 (EST)

AARoads:The Interchange

Debates about Scope

Bridges/tunnels

City streets

City streets: inclusion criteria

Economy

History

Media

Documentary

Expressways

Numbered route

Plazas, squares, gardens

Residential streets

Purpose

Hyper-specific road hardware and features

Road map companies

Consensus considered harmful?

Implementation

Spain

Poll: naming conventions

Resuming the Spain discussion

Community/city/destination lists in lists

A-Class and B-Class criteria

Road signs in X articles

Selected picture

Eastern Europe, part 4, and next steps

Azerbaijan

Turkey

Eastern Africa (Africa, part 5)

Route nationale (Madagascar)

Djibouti

Rest of Asia (Asia, part 6)

Japan

State Highway 1 (New Zealand)

Brazil

India

Quebec Autoroute titles

AARoads:The AARoads Wiki is not a mirror

Terminii, directions, and mileposting

Philippines

Navigation menu

Search