Especially in today's world of misinformation, I believe in reliable sourcing and verifiability.
I do not believe in the pedantic misinterpretation of said policies by some as a means to systematically delete an entire topic area of content that has existed and been the work of hundreds of editors over the past two decades.
I do not intend to make substantial edits to the English Wikipedia under the current state of affairs, outside of attempts to make a (perhaps futile) attempt to resolve the situation. --Rschen7754 03:07, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
A copy of a post I made at [1]
I am afraid that it is going to take several RFCs to get back on track at this point. I've tried to share my opinion but also be fair-minded with this summary - of both the issues and their implications on articles:
- Are there certain classes of roads that are inherently notable? Currently the list is national, state (and purposefully pushing lower classes to GNG) - however not every country works that way (notably, the United Kingdom, where the decision was that B roads were not notable, among other things). The word "typically" in the section of WP:GEOLAND sucks - what does it mean? I have generally read it to mean that such highways are notable unless there is a reason to make an exception (very short roads, second-class roads). Others have read it to devalue the entire sentence.
- And before the concept of inherent notability is dismissed so easily - is this leading to systemic bias? In California every state highway could pass GNG on newspaper articles alone. In less developed countries (Global South) digital newspaper archives are harder to come by and the government might not even have a transportation website. There is also often a language barrier - there are literally thousands of road articles on German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese Wikipedias that do not exist here, do some digging at d:WD:HWY to see what I mean. Are non-English speaking countries being disenfranchised?
- Is there an argument to be made on the importance to society? There are plenty of other subject articles that are arguably less notable to society that are still here and not facing this amount of scrutiny.
- Are there classes of roads that are okay to be mentioned in a list but nowhere else? Some US states go a bit overboard on numbering state highways and this has been a compromise between including every member of a class versus having an article that will never be more than 2 paragraphs long.
- Are maps primary sources? Policy never says they are, and in fact this discussion explicitly removed "maps" from the list of primary sources.
- Are maps from the government department of transportation more or less reliable?
- Is it okay to have an article that only cites maps? A GA? A FA?
- Government documents are primary sources, but what can they be used for? Citing the legal definition of a route? Calculating mileages? What are the bounds of WP:CALC?
- Is reading a map "original research"? Policy is silent on this point and only uses vague terms like "analysis" that have been interpreted subjectively and I suspect there is a generational gap here as well. Plot summaries are less objective than this. Are certain facts more acceptable than others? Reading symbols is one thing, reading from a satellite layer is another (and there is dispute even among road editors here).
- Is Google Maps less reliable than other (printed) maps? The recent RS/N discussion didn't have a consensus in any direction. [2] If the answer is no, this would mean a significant lag in updating articles after roads change.
- What are the parameters of acceptable use of maps in the history section? Some have raised WP:SYNTH concerns, however IMO there are ways to say that in X year, a road existed that aren't OR. Newspaper articles are preferable, however there are many situations where entire years of newspaper archives are missing.
- And if the answer to all the map questions is no, then that means that the entire "Route" section for a lot of articles has to be deleted, even for articles that unambiguously meet GNG because of the (sometimes hundreds) of newspaper articles in the History section. Most people want to read about how the road is today, and a history-only section would fail the "comprehensive" part of WP:WIAFA. If we can't use maps to tell them about that, then what?
- WP:BURDEN - following this policy to the letter means that we should write a bot and code it to delete every unsourced statement on this site. That seems irresponsible to me. And yet, the section starting with "Whether and how quickly material should be..." is utterly unenforceable and gameable with WP:POINT-style actions.
- I will also point out that many BURDEN deletions have been made on the premise that maps are not reliable sources, when there is no consensus to that effect - bringing into question the use of BURDEN to justify the revert as one that basically seals the revert war shut.
- WP:BEFORE - some of the aforementioned AFDs like the Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/M1 (Durban) one appear to have been knee-jerk reactions. Should it be required to look for sources before nomination?
- No article (road or non-road) is going to be perfect and most inevitably fall short of Wikipedia standards in some way. Then what? Delete? Tag? And the sheer number of articles means that we can't catch everything, and even some GAs get passed that we have no control over because anyone (road or non-road) can review a GA. And how do we promote proper editing without chasing editors away? In almost all the road editors I welcomed recently their page was littered with template after template
- Is it within the scope of NPP to patrol edits of established editors? The business where this article was repeatedly marked reviewed and unreviewed seems wrong, if it was with the admin tools it would be called wheel warring. IMO once an article is marked reviewed it should leave NPP and be handled through normal processes.
- The proposed mass deletion RFC is also applicable here. And there are probably other questions I have missed.
I will also just ask this and put things in perspective - if you're going to make accusations of editors (real people), at least source them as well as you are asking of our articles (which are about inanimate objects). After all, this is policy. Dozens of editors have spent collective centuries working on these articles, and have worked hard to bring them up to Wikipedia standards as they understood them, and also as GA and FA reviewers and delegates have also understood them (yes, even in 2022). Many articles have appeared on the Main Page and gathered tens of thousands of views. Many of these changes would be significant shifts to the model of article writing, and some would be unsustainable and push editors off the site if put into practice. So yes, things are tense on our side and have been for the last few months. I hope you can understand why. --Rschen7754 03:10, 2 December 2022 (UTC)