User:Imzadi1979/Sandbox4

To keep this simple, I'm only putting a single topic up for discussion. WP:SPECIALSTYLE sums up the issue nicely: "Wikipedia has its own set of guidelines for article layout and naming. Facts on a subject should be drawn from reliable sources, but how content is styled is a matter for the Wikipedia community." My topic is a matter of style, not of accuracy. How should we consistently punctuate the abbreviation for a mainline component of the United States Numbered Highways? Any choice we make will be arbitrary, and it will clash with some state agencies' usage, which is acceptable. The best sources for style in a general publication like ours are not DOT documents, but books on style like The Chicago Manual of Style or even The Associated Press Stylebook.

Looking at how things are done in print, and using U.S. Route 1 as a subject, we could have:

• "US 1" (various state DOTs, CMOS in terms of periods, {{jct}} depending on state)
• "US-1" (various state DOTs, CMOS in terms of periods, {{jct}} depending on state)
• "U.S. 1" (AP and AASHTO)
• "U.S.-1" (some city street signs)

I think we should just arbitrarily pick one to avoid having multiple versions in use in the same article, like we do with U.S. Route 491 now. That highway involves three states, two of which are using the first format and one that's using the second. Because each state differs in how they name their state systems, we can tolerate more variation there, with "SR 1", "SH 1", "M-1", or the others based on the state's name like "NY 1", but this one here deals with a single, national, highway system so some harmonization is a good thing.