User:Rschen7754/The time is now

It has been over four months since the AARoads Wiki has gone public. Meanwhile, some road editors believe that they can continue editing English Wikipedia, sometimes concurrently with AARoads Wiki. While this is not prohibited, this is not a wise decision for several reasons.

English Wikipedia is not a safe editing environment

• These articles were deleted or redirected, against GEOROAD (the inherent notability of state/provincial highways): [1][2]National highway over 1000 miles long[3]
• A steady wave of road-related AFDs continue. Even if there is some legitimacy to these requests, the number and tone of the discussions is worrying, with many openly attacking GEOROAD and road editors. [4][5][6][
• Even ridiculous AFDs [7] are tolerated and not given a SNOW close.
• Three Michigan road GAs were delisted: [8][9][10] Many of the votes were political and wanted a certain outcome despite further edits made to the articles. One was sent to AFD [11] and while the outcome was Keep, there were many anti-road editors who did not vote.
• A personal attack was made against road editors [12] and nothing was ever done about it.
• Continued indiscriminate tagging of state highways for notability continues to take place, against GEOROAD: [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]
• It took two relists to get this hoax article deleted: [21] and it was being used as a vehicle to attack GEOROAD.
• Legitimate article contributions are being revert warred over: [22][23]
• An E-road article was redirected, against GEOROAD: [24]
• The Wikimedia Signpost used a sensationalist headline that is borderline ableist to refer to the Gizmodo AARoads article: [25]
• At least one recent administator candidate faced additional scrutiny for their enthusiasm for editing road articles: w:Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Candidates/NoobThreePointOh
• Two prominent road editors were blocked by an arbitrator for "canvassing" in October: [26]
  • I will note that ArbCom is not telling the whole story here. I am pretty sure that I could have gotten the blocks overturned, but since I had already resigned adminship at that point, I did not think it was worth it.
  • The policy of our Discord has always been that while overt requests/pressure to !vote a certain way will not be tolerated, there will be honest and frank discussion of "elephants in the room". (I will also note that AARW has no canvassing policy).
• After posts made on the Highways WikiProject letting others editors know where most of us had gone, I faced threats of blocking from an administrator: [27] As I stated, this is Twitter-like behavior.
  • The last two points show to me that the leadership of English Wikipedia seems to have taken a really authoritarian turn. Quite frankly, if all the road articles there were deleted today, it would make things a lot easier for us. But on the whole I believe that Wikipedia has been good for society and the Internet, and I worry about the far-reaching consequences of its downfall.

Editing English Wikipedia road articles harms AARoads Wiki

• Wikivoyage is a fork of Wikitravel. This fork happened in 2012. Yet even today, Wikitravel is always higher on the Google search results and Wikivoyage often does not show up at all. Why? The SEO algorithms devalue content that is seen as duplicate.
  • The longer the English Wikipedia road articles remain around, the longer that Google shows only those articles and not those of AARW.
  • The longer that content is copied back to English Wikipedia, the more that AARW is seen as a duplicate of English Wikipedia.
  • The longer that there are road editors and some extent of a community on English Wikipedia, the longer that the wiki community is divided and efforts are wasted supporting English Wikipedia.
  • The road community likely cannot support keeping two sets of articles afloat.
• There is the age-old principle of not helping the competition.
• We have enough work to do on AARoads Wiki as it is. Trying to maintain another site is not a good use of our time, especially when there is a serious risk that the work on English Wikipedia will be deleted in the end.

It would be emotionally unintelligent of me to not acknowledge that some of us have spent decades on the English Wikipedia. I was the founder of USRD, and even a steward. In the decisions leading up to the fork, I was not among the first to push for it, and it took me months to get to that point. However, at the end of the day I realized that in order for us to save the road articles, we would have to essentially save the entire site and play a political game of getting all the troublemakers banned. If I was 10 years younger, maybe I would have gone for it. But this was not going to be sustainable for what is supposed to be an enjoyable hobby. It came to a point where fork or no, I knew that I did not want to continue as an editor on English Wikipedia. I won't pretend that there aren't problems with a fork, but to me this seemed to be the more sustainable option.

Sidebar: I am skeptical that Wikipedia will be around in 10 years (at least, as a viable site; it could be like Twitter and circling the drain). But, I find it hard to fault AARoads editors who contribute to other subject areas on English Wikipedia, as in most cases there is no AARoads equivalent fork - and this essay is not about that.

Pledge

I do not believe that we should by policy enforce any sort of noncompetitive agreement against those who still choose to contribute to the English Wikipedia (in the area of road transport). However, I will not be promoting editing both sites. Therefore:

• I will not be contributing any longer to the English Wikipedia mainspace (outside of required edits for file moving on Wikimedia Commons). I will not be participating in the English Wikipedia community, outside of a few limited scenarios which I will not publicly disclose.
• I have zero intentions of responding to any Good Article Reassessment, Featured Article Review, or Article for Deletion nomination of any road article on the English Wikipedia. That includes all articles that I contributed to in California. While WP:OWN is still a thing, I would kindly request that other AARoads editors not attempt to save any California road articles from the above processes.
• Other administrators may choose to fulfill requests to import editors' work from English Wikipedia to AARoads in cases where editors are editing both sites. However, I will not be using my time or resources to fulfill those requests.
• I do not believe that splitting the US and Canada road articles apart from the rest of the world is a sustainable solution, and I will be working to bring the rest of the road articles over.
  • Update Oct 2024: most of Europe, Africa, and the Americas were imported; some of Asia has been imported