User:Sebwite/archive1

Sebwite is an anonymous Baltimore area user, interested in transportation, including articles about streets, roads, neighborhoods, and public transportation in the Baltimore area, as well as many other related topics.

During the past two years, with the help of others, I have written and contributed to articles on the Maryland Transit Administration and its bus routes, numerous streets and roads in Baltimore City and County, and landmarks in the area. I have also written about many universal transportation concepts and created a lot of templates to link related articles in these areas together.

One of the hardest-to-answer questions is what makes a road or a bus line notable?

In my opinion, a public bus line generally is notable because of its impact on the region it serves. A municipal bus line is a service provided by a government agency. Many, especially in major cities, are used by tens of thousands of people on a single day. Each bus line has a story behind it, often dating back to when streetcars rolled around major cities. Whenever a change is made to a bus line, it does not come without a fight from someone. Officials are sometimes voted in and out of office over bus lines.

I very strongly encourage those in other cities with comparable levels of expertise in the area's transit system to do the same. To get an idea of what types of articles have been written on the local transit system, see what links from Maryland Transit Administration.

Roads
Another one of my interests is in streets and roads

Once again, what makes a road notable, so it deserves an article?

Few roads around the world, with the exception of some freeways, are known to those who do not live near them or otherwise frequently travel on them. But international fame is not a requirement for notability in Wikipedia. Seemingly, most Wikipedians consider a road to be notable on the basis of it being numbered alone. But there are many roads out there that are not numbered, yet more can be written about them than some numbered roads.

In my opinion, a road can be (but is not always) considered notable if it meets at least 1-2 of the following criteria:
 * Is at least several miles in length, using one or more names
 * Has an interchange with an Interstate or other Limited Access Highway.
 * One or more notable landmarks are located on that road. What I generally think of as a notable landmark is usually one that has a Wikipedia article, or can have one, but in cases where a landmark seems significant, but it is unlikely an article will ever be composed (such as a private school), I have substituted an external link to the landmark's official site.

Some streets and roads are seemingly borderline in importance for Wikipedia, and I have come up with a new idea to write about them. I have added sections to the articles on various Baltimore suburbs listing all the roads within those suburbs that have some significance, and explaining why. I have also included roads that do have their own articles, with a "main article" link. See Pikesville or Owings Mills for examples. This could be a model for writing about roads everywhere.

Other articles
I have been motivated to write about other topics, such as neighborhoods and certain landmarks in Baltimore (such as hospitals) out of writing about roads and buses. What has initiated so many of these articles is I have mentioned them in road and bus articles, but the internal links have come out red, so I have created stubs on these in order that the original articles successfully link to them. Some of these stubs include Baltimore area hospitals. Though I have worked in hospitals before, I still do not have knowledge about the history of these hospitals. If any of these article are still stubs, expanding them is appreciated.