Talk:QLine

Rewrite
Someone with a better technical understanding needs to rewrite this entire page to reflect that the two competing groups long ago have melded the two plans together along the roadway. With the draft evironmental impact study (DEIS) having been released earlier in the year, we can add facts like the exact length of the line, number of stations/stops, proposed brand of vehicle, average and peak frequency, capitol costs for the ENTIRE line now that they been merged, etc...Anyone want to take a crack at this? --Criticalthinker (talk) 00:00, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

M1
Heads up, but the original M1 plan is back on. LaHood is giving them three months to show a solid plan for the pared down line.--Criticalthinker (talk) 04:26, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Woodward Avenue Streetcar
Another heads up. It seems the name of the project has been formally changed by MDOT to "Woodward Avenue Streetcar" project from "Woodward Avenue Light Rail". Perhaps, the article's name needs to be changed to reflect this change in scope. --Criticalthinker (talk) 03:11, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Really, can someone do the formal renaming of this page to reflect that the light rail project is dead, and that this transit option has been reproposed as a streetcar? Here is the MDOT link to the Woodward Avenue Streetcar project.  Also, to be sure, whatever Governor Snyder proposed earlier in the year was not an actual or solid proposal, rather an outline.  The Woodward Avenue Streetcar is something seperate from his bus rapid transit plan, so this doesn't need to get much more than a mention in this article. --Criticalthinker (talk) 09:23, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm a bit disappointed in the renaming. M-1 Rail is the company running the line, not the name of the line, itself.  Officially, according to MDOT, this will be known as the Woodward Avenue Streetcar.  "Detroit M-1 Rail Line" is probably not the most accurate name for the page. --Criticalthinker (talk) 06:11, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Rendering
I am very tempted to remove the current rendering of the project in the infobox. It is a year's old rendering, and doesn't accurately depict what's being built. This part of the streetcar, downtown, will actually be off-wire. I'm sure there has to be a better depiction of the project someone could get a photo for from M-1's website --Criticalthinker (talk) 10:56, 30 July 2014 (UTC)

Please don't unnecessarily rewrite references
In this pair of edits another contributor unnecessarily rewrote some of the article's reference. I restored them to their original form.

Some people prefer to put all the fields of a cite template all on a single line. Other people prefer to put each field on a single line. It makes maintenance much easier. Personally I find the all fields on one line practically unreadable. I don't believe there are any wikipedia guidelines that recommend that cite templates should use either the one field per line style, or the stuff all fields on a single line.

But I know that if I fail to follow the principle of "if it is not broke, don't fix it", and put the hard to read cite template into my preferred form, I will seriously erode the usefulness of the revision history system for other contributors.

If a contributor makes some contributions to an article, they should be able to come back days, weeks, months or years later, and use the feature that shows the difference between versions to see how it has been changed, since their last visit. And the utility of that feature is very, very strongly eroded when a contributor unnecessarily rewrites references.

Sometimes I return to articles I edited months ago, and a diff between the last version I worked on and the current version lights up like a christmas tree -- suggesting the article has undergone extensive changes. But, after taking five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour, stepping through each individual revision, to see where the article intellectual content was changed -- I often find there were only small changes to the editorial content. I pretty regularly find that there have been no changes to the editorial content, at all.

This is a huge waste of time. And I really resent when it is made necessary by contributors who unnecessarily rewrote references.

I make this effort as a courtesy to other contributors. I'd like to be able to count on other contributors making the same effort to keep the revision history system useful. Geo Swan (talk) 23:20, 16 September 2014 (UTC)
 * ''Moved from User talk:Imzadi1979: I request you reconsider your practice of unnecessarily rewriting references in your favorite style. It is extremely disruptive.  If you use a script that offers this feature I request you turn that feature off.  Geo Swan (talk) 23:52, 16 September 2014 (UTC)
 * First off, there isn't an attribution issue. Text was changed in only minor ways when it was moved. However, it does make a mess of the article to have half of the references in one style, and the other half in another. Those edits made the newest footnotes conform to the same style as the rest in a few aspects. First, the others were all inline, not defined at the end of the article. Second, they were on a single line already. Third, they did not use the YYYY-MM-DD format for dates at all. Fourth, they used title case not sentence case for titles, regardless of the way original publications formatted their headlines. Fifth, they properly italicized the titles of a work instead of calling those titles the publisher.
 * In any event, the notice above every edit window comes into play here: "Work submitted to Wikipedia can be edited, used, and redistributed—by anyone—subject to certain terms and conditions." Keeping things consistently formatted early on makes things so much easier later on. These edits were not totally by script. There is one that switches dates to keep them consistent and one that will find automated fixes like removing unnecessary whitespace which I used in combination with substantive changes per the directives not to make "useless edits" that don't make any visible changes. The rest of it was manual editing  Imzadi 1979  →   00:15, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Footnotes in lead?
In this edit another contributor removed the footnote from the lead, with an edit summary of "formatting: 12x whitespace (using Advisor.js), date formats per WP:MOSNUM by script; move footnotes out of lead; citation concistency"

I checked WP:LEAD, which says: "The lead must conform to verifiability and other policies. The verifiability policy advises that material that is challenged or likely to be challenged, and quotations, should be supported by an inline citation."

So should those references be performed? Geo Swan (talk) 23:44, 16 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Because the lead is supposed to be a summary of the content of the article, we normally do not need to cite the information contained there as long as the information is actually repeated in the body of the article. Direct quotations always have to be attributed, even if they are in the lead. The same goes for "material that is challenged or likely to be challenged". The existence of the subject of this article is not something that should fall into that latter category. An announcement by government officials is also not something that should be challenged in the meaning of that policy statement.  Imzadi 1979   →   00:33, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Rename
When someone gets the time, the entire article should be renamed to reflect the offical and formal naming of this line. As it is now, it's weird to see the name of the line listed as the third name. "M-1 Rail" was the placeholder name of the line and the company developing the line. "Woodward Avenue Streetcar" is the name it's known by at the Michigan Department of Transportation. However, this is now the QLINE and the article should directly reflect that. --Criticalthinker (talk) 17:58, 25 March 2016 (UTC)
 * are you just a "critical thinker" without the ability to do anything about it? See Wikipedia:Moving a page for options on how to proceed. Secondarywaltz (talk) 18:18, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Infobox & Body
When this line opens, the infobox and the rest of the page needs to be restructured in a way that makes it consistent with other pages on transportation systems. That will require a lot a pruning from the "history" section (usually called "Background" on other pages) to include very basic facts about the development and not every little update as currently exists in the history section. The "construction" section is ridiculously long and does not need to exist; it needs to be melded into the "background" section. You'll also need a "Route" and/or "Service" section or something similar describing the route and its stops. Fortunately, we already have a "Rolling stock" section, but it might need to be tweaked to take the "history" of the procurement out. All in all, this just needs a lot or pruning. --Criticalthinker (talk) 21:03, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

Many QLine stations have wrong names
Many of the stations listed for the QLine under the wrong name. What is listed as Amtrak should be the Baltimore Street station, Sibley station should be Adelaide / Sproat Street Station, Foxtown should be Montcalm Street station and MLK should be MLK / Mack. See the QLine website. Qsheets (talk) 08:21, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
 * At least in the case of Baltimore Street it was called Amtrak during the planning stages. I'll take a look. Mackensen (talk) 12:06, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Done. Mackensen (talk) 12:56, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Baltimore Street station should probably be merged with Detroit station. It is located literally on the street in front of the Amtrak station.--Cúchullain t/ c 15:19, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Agreed - no sense in having separate articles. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 15:31, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

QLine is a Disaster of a Failure.
It’s funny how there isn’t a “public reaction” section on this wiki… if there were, it would state the obvious: QLine was a complete waste of money… flashes of The Simpson’s “Monorail”…. (facepalm) 99.60.186.228 (talk) 14:22, 4 February 2023 (UTC)


 * If it's obvious then there are presumably reliable sources making that point. Do you have some examples? Mackensen (talk) 16:44, 4 February 2023 (UTC)