Talk:U.S. Route 51 in Illinois

Article issues

1. The lead is way short and lacks any summary of the History section.
2. The RD section needs to be rewritten south to north. Until it is done, the RD should not be counted as a section under the WP:USRD/A scheme for assessing the article. Frankly, it should also be much longer for a 415.95-mile-long (669.41 km) highway.
   1. In doing so, the wikilinks should be to other state-detail articles, like U.S. Route 20 in Illinois, not U.S. Route 20.
   2. All U.S. Highways should be abbreviated when mentioned. The first Interstate Highway should have its name spelled out in full with the abbreviation listed in parentheses afterwards. Then all other Interstates can be listed by abbreviation on subsequent mentions. Ditto any state highways mentioned.
   3. "U.S. #" should not be used as an abbreviation; drop the periods and match the output to {{jct}}.
   4. Any and all lengths should be using {{convert}}.
   5. Any whole numbers under 10 (so one through nine) should be spelled out as words. As an example, "two-lane" is correct in running prose, but "2 lane" is wrong.
   6. Also, when a measurement is used an adjective, the number is hyphenated to the unit: "two-lane" ("lane" is the unit), "10-mile" ("mile" is the unit). {{Convert}} can handle this with the |adj=on function.
   7. A road doesn't "make a concurrency"; they "run concurrently". Roads don't "make" anything, but they do have routes that run places. Also, "concurrency" (noun), or "runs concurrently" (adverb) is one of those uncommon terms that should be linked to concurrency (road).
   8. "US 51" (and similar) should have a non-breaking space ( ) between the "US" and the numerical portion of the abbreviation. This prevents the letters from appearing on one line and the numbers on the next if a web browser needs to put "US 51" near the end of a line.
3. The History section is pretty inadequate.
   1. The United States Numbered Highway System was created on November 11, 1926, and there are ample sources for that date. If US 51 in Illinois was part of the original system, then why aren't we listing its exact creation date in both the infobox and the history section? You can check

      United States System of Highways Adopted for Uniform Marking by the American Association of State Highway Officials (Map). 1:7,000,000. Cartography by U.S. Geological Survey. Bureau of Public Roads. November 11, 1926. OCLC 32889555. Retrieved November 7, 2013.

      to see if it was part of the original system, and there are a handful of good sources out there that can be used to cite the 1926 date, like:

      McNichol, Dan (2006). The Roads that Built America. New York: Sterling. p. 74. ISBN 1-4027-3468-9.

      Weingroff, Richard F. (January 9, 2009). "From Names to Numbers: The Origins of the U.S. Numbered Highway System". Highway History. Federal Highway Administration. Retrieved April 21, 2009.

   2. "Bloomington–Normal" should have an en dash (–) not a hyphen.
   3. Decades do not have apostrophes in them. "1960's" is the possessive form of "1960", as in "1960's presidential election cycle". "1960s" refers to the whole decade.
   4. Any history between 1926 and the 1960s? It will need to be added before this could ever be considered for B-Class, even if the RD and RJL were complete and properly cited.
4. There are a handful of reference errors
   1. The Pantagraph is the name of a newspaper, a published work. It is not a |publisher=. Rather, it should be listed in either |work= or |newspaper=. (It doesn't matter which is used as the parameter names are aliases and therefore equivalent.) Since the name of the city where it is published is not included in the newspaper's name, |location= should be added. The New York Times or the Chicago Tribune would not need |location=, but The Pantagraph does.
   2. |format=PDF should be explicitly added anytime a linked source is a PDF. The special little icon that appears for many readers won't appear for all, and it may be removed completely at some point. (The special icons for other types of courses, like MP3s or Word documents have already been removed.)
   3. Dates should be in a consistent format, which for an article on a highway in the US is "Month DD, YYYY", not "DD Month YYYY". The "YYYY-MM-DD" format is acceptable too, but it's not natural and I'd suggest you avoid it completely.

If the RD were rewritten in the proper direction,the article could be bumped to Start-Class. If an appropriate RJL table were added, it could then be C-Class. If the RD were of an appropriate length, with a History section that doesn't omit entire decades, and if the RJL had all of its mileposts, then it could be B-Class. If then the lead summarized all of the section of the article in some way and the citations were up to snuff, this article would likely pass a GA nomination. Imzadi 1979 → 15:25, 17 February 2015 (UTC)