Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Newsletter/Issues/Volume06/Issue03
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| Volume 6, Issue 3 • Summer 2013 • About the Newsletter |
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.jpg) Summer is upon us once again, and projects are blooming around USRD. Work is on-going towards updating the infoboxes used by the project. We're cross-pollinating other sister projects with activity as well. Efforts continue at Wikidata, and now a new project has opened up at Commons. We also welcome another sister WikiProject this season with the foundation of Hong Kong Roads. We've been tending to article promotion efforts in recent months, and some bad weeds have been pruned. For the first time in many years, some serious, and fruitful, attention has been turned to our article naming conventions. We cover these news items in this issue, along with your usual assortment of regular features. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rewriting Infobox road and incorporating Wikidata
  This summer, we are conducting a rewrite of {{Infobox road}} as well as other templates used by USRD. There are three main focuses of our rewrite:
Our hope in doing this is to update our template infrastructure so that it will support us for the next several years, and fully support the latest technologies being deployed across Wikimedia. User:Happy5214 is leading the way in these conversions, with assistance from myself and User:Scott5114. Currently many of our templates have TemplateData, and {{Jctbtm}} is being revised to incorporate {{LegendRJL}}. Infobox road is being rewritten section by section, and Template:Jct will be rewritten to use that codebase. We will keep you posted on any changes that require massive changes on articles, but we hope to minimize them. On Wikidata, we continue to build our part of the knowledge base with data items like d:Q19183, which has showed up on a few articles on the Occitan Wikipedia, such as oc:Rota 78 de l'Estat de California. Many maps for roads in Germany were immediately deployed when Infobox road was given the ability to pull information from Wikidata. We hope to make more and more use of Wikidata as we begin to explore efforts to have our high-quality articles translated into the 285 other languages that have a Wikipedia, and generate road articles on the English Wikipedia where the road is not located in a country that speaks English natively. We are excited about these possibilities as we begin developing worldwide connections through the U.S. Roads project on Meta, and through some USRD editors' growing involvement on other projects like Commons, Meta, and Simple English Wikipedia, as well as cross-wiki venues. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Driving around the Pearl of the Orient
 On June 28, CycloneIsaac (talk · contribs) founded WP:WikiProject Hong Kong Roads (HKRD) "dedicated to the highways and roadways of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region". This is the sixth WikiProject dedicated to the roads in a country (or equivalent), and the second created in 2013. The Hong Kong Strategic Route and Exit Number System is the region's numbered route system, incorporating major roadways, bridges and tunnels. Interchanges on the system are numbered sequentially. Currently, the articles have been retagged for the new project, and a relative WikiWork places HKRD at 5.96. The highest assessments at the moment are C-Class articles, and the project has two DYK credits and four current members. Unlike USRD, HKRD includes bridges and local streets in it scope. |
Fixing our shields licensing
 Recently, the USRD project has decided to go through our shields and make sure they are properly licensed. Most of our shields were made several years ago and the licenses used on them are inconsistent and may be improper. In order to remedy this, the project is going through the shields of all 50 states and the territories along with national shields such as the Interstate, US, and default county shields and making sure they are properly licensed. To accomplish this, we need to check out state and national MUTCDs to make sure the shields are in there and that the shields are freely licensed. If the shields are in the federal MUTCD, we need to tag them as "PD-MUTCD". In addition, if a shield is public domain in a state MUTCD, we need to tag them as "PD-MUTCD-[state]". The effort on properly licensing our shields can be found at commons:COM:USRD/L. Any help with the effort would be appreciated!
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Assessment roundup
This is a list of the top ten states as of August 10, 2013.
All of the top ten states have remained in the same position since the last issue. However, Delaware's relative WikiWork has risen from 2.206 to 2.222 due to a good article being demoted. For complete statistics updated almost daily, see WP:USRD/A/S. Now here is the project as a whole.
We have added four featured articles since the last issue—Michigan State Trunkline Highway System, California State Route 75, Interstate 96, and Interstate 496—as well as 21 net good articles: 28 promotions, and seven demotions. Michigan State Trunkline Highway System is the first ever article on a highway system to be promoted to FA status. There is currently one article (Interstate 75 in Michigan) at WP:FAC. Additionally, two articles and a list are up for promotion at WP:HWY/ACR with two other articles being reviewed for updates and improvements. |
Project news in brief
Recently, there was a request for comment on WT:USSH regarding the disambiguation of the four Interstate Highways, I-76, I-84, I-86, and I-88, that had separate sections in different parts of the country. It was proposed that the eight articles in question use location-based disambiguation instead of "east" or "west"; for example, Interstate 88 (west) would become Interstate 88 (Illinois). The articles that went through more than one state would use the route's terminal states. After some discussion, it was discovered that no previous on-wiki discussion about disambiguation occurred. Consensus leaned towards location-based disambiguation and the articles were moved accordingly. On July 1, VisualEditor (VE), the new WYSIWYG editor which allows users to contribute to Wikipedia without learning wiki markup, was launched for all logged-in users of the English Wikipedia. However, editors who use VE are unable to edit templates, such as {{Infobox road}} or {{Attached KML}}. TemplateData was created to help VE users edit templates. Rschen7754 and Evad37 have worked at adding TemplateData for the templates used by this project. Read Wikipedia:VisualEditor/TemplateData tutorial for more information on how to implement this new tool. Since the last issue, Fredddie has taken the initiative to update the Map and Shield request pages to make them a little more user friendly. Most notably, automatic archiving was introduced as a way to clear completed requests and to declutter the pages. Efforts on the shield request page seem to have paid off because as of press time there is only one request remaining, the lowest number of requests since 2006 when the page was created. Task force reports
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Selected articles
 U.S. Route 197 (US 197) is a north–south United States Highway, of which all but 2.76 miles of its 69.93 miles (4.44 of 112.54 km) are within the state of Oregon. The highway starts in rural Wasco County in Central Oregon at an intersection with US 97. US 197 travels north as a continuation of The Dalles-California Highway No. 4 through the cities of Maupin, Tygh Valley, and Dufur to The Dalles. Within The Dalles, the highway becomes concurrent with US 30 and intersects Interstate 84 (I-84) before it crosses over the Columbia River on the The Dalles Bridge into Washington. The highway continues through the neighboring city of Dallesport in Klickitat County and terminates at a junction with State Route 14 (SR 14). |
Selected pictures
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 The State Trunkline Highway System consists of all the state highways in Michigan, including those designated as Interstate, United States, or State Trunkline highways. Maintained by the Michigan Department of Transportation, the system comprises 9,716 miles (15,636 km) of trunklines in all 83 counties of the state. Its components range in scale from 10-lane urban freeways to two-lane rural undivided highways to a non-motorized highway on Mackinac Island, where cars are forbidden. The longest highway is nearly 400 miles (640 km) long, while the shortest is about three-quarters of a mile (about 1.2 km). On May 13, 1913, the State Reward Trunk Line Highways Act was passed, creating the system. Highway numbers were first posted on signs in 1919, making Michigan the second state to do so. Michigan's first freeways were built during the 1940s. Construction on Michigan's Interstates started in the late 1950s and continued until 1992. Few additional freeways have been built since 1992, and in the early years of the 21st century, projects are underway to bypass cities with new highways. |
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 Route 37, also known as the Lincoln Avenue Freeway, is a numbered state highway running 3.47 miles (5.58 km) in Providence County and Kent County, Rhode Island, United States. The route is a nominally east–west freeway for its entire length. Route 37 serves the cities of Cranston and Warwick and is also a major east–west freeway in the Providence metropolitan area. The western terminus of Route 37 is an at-grade intersection with Natick Avenue in Cranston. The eastern terminus is a trumpet interchange with U.S. Route 1 in Warwick. Originally conceived as a freeway linking Scituate with suburban Warwick, the proposed alignment of Route 37 was later shortened to an alignment linking I-295 with I-95. Construction on the freeway began in 1963 and was completed by 1969. An eastward extension was proposed in 1966; it was to be designated I-895, but the extension was ultimately canceled. In the 1980s, Route 37 was included in proposals for an eastward extension of Interstate 84 from Hartford, Connecticut to Rhode Island, but this alignment was also canceled. RIDOT has long-range plans to extend Route 37 east to Route 117 in Downtown Warwick, but plans for a westward extension have been abandoned. |
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From the editorsThe next quarterly issue should be out in October or November. The editors of the newsletter would like to hear from you, the reader. What do you like about the current format? What should be changed? Removed? Added? Your comments are needed. Lastly, remember that this is your newsletter and you can be involved in the creation of the next issue released in the fall. Any and all contributions are welcome. Simply let yourself be known to any of the undersigned, or just start editing! |
Contributors to this issue
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