User:Rschen7754/The interchange

Welcome to AARoads Wiki. Our editors come from many different places. A majority came from the U.S. Roads project on the English Wikipedia. A few came from editing other countries on Wikipedia as well. A good number did not edit Wikipedia at all, and some do not live in the United States. This means that we have a wide variety of backgrounds, and that we have the opportunity to interchange ideas.

With that interchange of ideas naturally comes the potential for conflict.

The American standards

The U.S. Roads Project was well known for its ability to create high-quality content. By the time we forked, we had over 70 articles featured on the Main Page, and over 1000 Good Articles. The state of Michigan had virtually all of its articles at Good Article status.

Naturally, with that level of success comes a feeling of superiority, which combined with the stereotypes of American imperialism and a genuine desire to improve road articles worldwide, has led to conflict when American road standards are imposed on road articles of other countries without a proper dialogue or understanding of the road systems in question.

If editors have concerns or feedback about MURA or other standards, they should be able to bring them to AARoads:The Interchange, and we should all work together to come up with a solution that works for everyone. In cases where there is no way to accommodate and still maintain consistency/quality (see below), editors should feel like their concerns were at least heard, even if they do not agree with the outcome.

We have to also remember that these standards were developed to be compliant with the English Wikipedia guidelines, but in certain cases, we should be open to reconsidering as we are not on the English Wikipedia anymore.

We've failed in this regard before, while we were still on Wikipedia. I will not discount that there were some editors in certain countries that were difficult, if not impossible, to work with. But looking back, I see that we failed to unite the road editing base outside of the United States and Canada. We focused a bit too much on more trivial matters, and failed to be collaborative rather than combative in coming up with a solution that worked for everyone. And while we faced strong headwinds from the deletionists and new page patrollers, this unity among road editors could have given us the leverage we needed to combat the notability challenges and remain on the English Wikipedia.

The universality of roads

We've found that everyone thinks that their local road system is unique, until they see that some features that they thought were unique are also done in other places around the world. And I come from California, which certainly is a state that likes to think it is exceptional, in a country that likes to think it is exceptional.

I've spent time above criticizing a lot of the minutiae of the standards that were largely imported from English Wikipedia. But the core of these standards works to produce high-quality content, and has done so in other countries such as Canada, Croatia, Japan, and Australia. Meanwhile, other corners of the project on English Wikipedia refused to implement these standards at the expense of quality, accessibility, and cohesiveness.

Conclusion

These are two paradigms that naturally conflict, and we need to find a balance that is right for this new site. We cannot be just a continuation of the U.S. Roads project on the English Wikipedia and blindly adopt the same standards, or we will not be able to attract and retain editors from across the world and across the Internet. We will simply have the same editors that we have had for years (minus those who refused to come over), until the project dies off as each editor moves on.

Yet at the same time, we need a set of both local and universal standards to provide a cohesive look and feel for the site and to ensure quality and accuracy of information presented. And if we do not, we will only serve to justify the criticisms of those on the English Wikipedia and in the greater roadgeek community regarding quality and accuracy, and utility.