User:Maclean25/Roads

Why I am against road articles

After several debates, those in favour of keeping road articles have argued that roads are: verifiable, well known to many people, well used by many people, and crucial to a particular location. That is a strawman argument. Yes, it is true but it misses the point. The point is not to create articles on every possible thing. It is to determine the best way to describe and write about that thing. The articles should not discuss (at least solely) the effects of the road, the experience of people using the road and the things that exist within 50 meters of the road.

Roads are not best discussed in independent articles. They are not independent things. It is like writing an article on one specific sentence of a book. Yes, the sentence is verifiable, has been read many times and is important to the book. However, it requires context. A road is a piece of an infrastructure/transportation system. Why aren't articles written about the transportation network or pattern of a city? Why is that discussion fragmented into hundreds of articles?

Roads are not places. Places are destinations, somewhere to go. Roads are means, not ends. They are no-man’s-land. Some roads have evolved into places or were designed to be places. These deserve articles but they would be describing a place, and not a road. The road is just a strip of asphalt on the ground. Their designations (names) are artificial, just a fancy coordinate system.

Another argument I have against roads, which has less to be with the purpose and more to do with the quality, is that roads are best described as geographic map features. A simple line can summarize paragraphs of text.

I hope one day a road article, on a non-significant road (ie. historical or cultural), can be created that recognizes and discusses a road for what it is. I envision it including an origin, history, geography, purpose, composition, etc. However, we are simply not there yet. Instead of writing articles on topic we know, many impatient editors have chosen to just boost their edit count by acknowledging the existance of a road. I would gladly take one good article over a thousand stubs.

--maclean25

OK; I understand your point; I just happened to drop by here while doing some of the electoral district work. But while I agree with your overall comments above, there are certain instances where roads themselves are places and/or historical events/processes. e.g. the Alaska Highway/Alcan Highway, the Cariboo Wagon Road, the Douglas Road, Waddington's Road, the Mission Mountain Road or Going-to-the-Sun Road; other roads' histories may be more banal - say, the development of the Sea-to-Sky Highway (BC Hwyt 99) in its various phases - ultimately it's an evolution, however, of the Lillooet Cattle Trail, the lower portion of which was called the Howe Sound Trail after the upper part of the route was abandoned (major political fiasco, BC 1870s. It's a bit more straightforward with passes - Rogers Pass, Kicking Horse Pass, Crowsnest Pass, Allison Pass, Bonner Pass, Loveland Pass etc. because they're only sections/localities on a much longer road/highway (Hwy 1 for the first two, Hwy 3 for Crowsnest and Allison, I-70 currently for the Bonner Pass and Loveland Pass.Skookum1 23:24, 3 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Yes, that is why I give the qualifier "a non-significant road (ie. historical or cultural)". There are many roads that are historically, culturally, or socially significant and, as such, have many resources available from which to write an article. The problems have been coming from the creation of tens of thousands of articles on generic roads being written solely from personal knowledge of locals (ie. original research). --maclean25