4 ms·

It's really funny - just this morning I was reading the Wikipedia article for Interstate 94, which led me to the WikiProject that maintains it (US Roads) and an

• starkparker 3y ago
  A couple points on their complaints: you _can_ cite primary sources, but you can't _rely_ on them. That's beyond notability altogether. It's still relevant to why Roads would want to fork (there aren't a lot of news publications doing feature stories on random highways) but it comes down to informal nonenforcement giving way to a few hardasses flagging everything they can as soon as their attention is turned toward a particular domain. Because there's very little effort required to flag articles for deletion, and the burden to keep is often on the contributors doing research on a 7-day timeframe if there are even just one or two editors supporting deletion, most times the contributors eventually give up running the research treadmill and the content gets deleted anyway. And WP:GEOROAD is a subject-specific notability guideline, like WP:NSPORT is. Those aren't immutable; NSPORT was fundamentally changed in 2022,[1] and those changes now justify all these deletions of international footballer articles created before. If the Roads editors have all left, there'll be little or no opposition to changing WP:GEOROAD,[2] and deletions of that content from WP could get done even faster. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Sports_notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(geographic_features)#Requesting_feedback_re._GEOROAD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(geo... - and I see some of the editors who participated in NSPORT-related deletions this summer also in there advocating to change GEOROAD and make it more explicitly defer to GNG, and therefore easier to delete articles.
  • gregmac 3y ago
    > Because there's very little effort required to flag articles for deletion, and the burden to keep is often on the contributors doing research on a 7-day timeframe if there are even just one or two editors supporting deletion, most times the contributors eventually give up running the research treadmill and the content gets deleted anyway. Pretty much sums up the problem with every community-run moderated site. It directly leads to the downfall because contributors get discouraged and leave, and eventually all that's left is people with the same view as the heavy-handed moderators. Having hours of work wiped out from editors/moderators who've spent less than a minute on it sucks. Stackoverflow is another notable example of this.
• a3_nm 3y ago
  As much as I think that Wikipedia notability guidelines are way too strict, I'm wondering -- is it necessarily a bad thing for editor communities to split off and create separate specialized wikis? As long as the other wikis are also under a free license (here, CC BY-SA 4.0), you can always import back the articles into Wikipedia. So maybe it can be a useful way for communities to "incubate" articles?
  • starkparker 3y ago
    It's not a bad thing in concept, and probably won't be a bad thing in execution since Roads has a pretty solid core of editors moving. They've already implemented technical improvements on AARoads, like better and newer road maps. The potential is there. It's often a bad thing in practice, much like how splitting off entirely separate social networks for specific subjects is often a bad idea. If there aren't enough people or activity, interest wanes. If the project relies on one or two heavily active editors, it collapses when they're unavailable. If you never hit critical mass for SEO or can't/don't know how to promote your content, all the work is done in a vacuum and everyone sees the Wikipedia stubs over your stuff anyway. Fandom (as in the company), as awful as it is, largely exists by virtue of participation in the subjects where there's enough interest to facilitate it; the mass wiki-farm infrastructure gives them enough of a SEO boost to dominate even some of the wikis that fork off of Fandom to escape its policies. > you can always import back the articles into Wikipedia. So maybe it can be a useful way for communities to "incubate" articles? Developing an article on a separate wiki has additional technical and administrative overhead. CC BY-SA requires attribution. Wikipedia attributes contributions by article history. The only way to import article history is via Special:Import. You have to be an admin or have import rights to use Special:Import on Wikipedia. If you can clear all those hurdles, then in theory you can import changes with the required attribution from another wiki. But if the imported changes conflict with changes made in parallel on Wikipedia, resolving them can be very contentious, especially if any of the editors involved disagree on the resolution. Or the import might fail, because Special:Import isn't particularly robust. And as the forked wiki admin, do you decide to set up scheduled imports _from_ Wikipedia to keep up with upstream? These forks often split because Wikipedia is deficient in some way beyond just editing the text. AARoads' fork's use of improved maps, for instance, would probably break the article on Special:Import because it looks like they use different wiki templates and modules.
• riwsky 3y ago
  Roads fork? Trivial.