Wikipedia:Featured list removal candidates/List of state highways in Marquette County, Michigan/archive1


 * The following is an archived discussion of a featured list removal nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The list was kept by The Rambling Man 17:25, 21 June 2009.

List of state highways in Marquette County, Michigan

 * Notified: WP US Roads; primary editor already aware of FLRC.

I am nominating this for featured list removal because I think it fails criteria 3.b. This article is a content fork of the Marquette County, and has only 9 entries. Nergaal (talk) 14:56, 11 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep - Doesn't fail 3b in my opinion. It would be ridiculous to merge the article in its entirety to Marquette County, Michigan, and if we pruned the content, we'd lose valuable information. – Juliancolton  &#124; Talk 15:05, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep - The article broadly covers the state highways in Marquette County and would be too unwieldly to merge into Marquette County, Michigan. Dough4872 (talk) 16:19, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment - I don't think this is a content fork of Marquette County, Michigan, but it might be a fork of a more general article on ALL highways in Marquette County, Michigan. Exactly how many county highways are there in Marquerre County? If it is sufficiently few, then both county and state highways should be listed in one article - rst20xx (talk) 17:05, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep - This is ridiculous, Nergaal, Imzadi1979 has spent almost 15 months working on this entire topic and you're going to crash it? This article meets FL criteria, and I have asked if he would be willing to add the 2 decommissioned routes, which would make it 11 items, thus keeping it past the 10 item thing.3 1/2 years of Mitch32 17:35, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment - Okay, okay, relax everyone. From my point of view, the list is not in gross breach of 3b.  It could do with some tidying up (e.g. moving those sprayed around references into a nice ref column for instance), the lead could be expanded a touch and moved away from "... list of ... " leading sentence.  The precision of the road lengths is incredible (i.e. 0.001 km = 1 centimetre/centimeter, is this really how accurately US highways are measured?), sorting per municipality is a complete waste of time - no sense in sorting per free text, references have a mixture of linked and unlinked dates, are we overcategorised (i.e. State highways of Michigan is presumably a subset of Roads and highways in Michigan?).  Little things, but enough of them to need addressing.  Agreed it falls into the gap for "min 10 items" but this "limit" is under discussion.  The Rambling Man (talk) 17:44, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Not trying to be confrontational here but I don't massively appreciate you saying "FLRC director-sort-of-bloke calling", it's like you're saying "I'm in charge around here so I know how 3.b) works better than you do." While I disagree with Nergaal that merging into Marquette County, Michigan is a good idea, I think until we know exactly how many county routes are in Marquette County, it's impossible to say whether this needlessly splits county highways off separately from other highways. Also I think that Mitch's reaction is overdone because even if this one article hits a snag, it's just this one article, which can always be brought back up to scratch, it's not like Nergaal's nominating EVERY article in the topic for removal, just one - rst20xx (talk) 19:55, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Ok, ok, once more. This whole "nomination" seems to have become unduly inflamed.  I'm definitely not asserting anything other than my opinion.  I've happily remove my jovial comment.  I'm pretty sure all I did was to try to identify the issues I saw immediately when looking at the list.  I certainly have nothing against Nergaal, nothing against Marquette County, no hidden agenda.  I just saw this FLRC getting really heated really quickly.  It turns out that I've made it worse.  Point is we need to focus on the criteria, and in my opinion it's borderline 3b, nothing more.  But more significantly for me were the other issues I raised.  So hopefully we can all relax, focus on the list and then come to a solution.  Also, it's essential that we all learn that "merging" is simply nothing to do with this process.  If we demote a list, fine.  If we don't, fine.  Merging a list into the main article is nothing to do with FLRC.  The Rambling Man (talk) 20:17, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * OK, that's fine, sorry. But 3b failures is when a list shouldn't even exist on its own in the first place, and when a list possibly fails 3b because it should be combined with another list that doesn't even exist yet, it's difficult to know where to take it. You can't open a merger discussion because there's nothing to merge to - rst20xx (talk) 20:38, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Question can anyone give me any reason why this list should not be a part of Transportation in Marquette County, Michigan, or perhaps Roads in Marquette County, Michigan instead? If the latter, not all the other roads need to be listed, but instead some comments about the other road types present in the whole county would suffice. In such a form, the article would not be artificially trimmed to a limit that barely passes minimum FL criteria. Nergaal (talk) 18:01, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Extra question - have you notified the relevant editors that you have nominated this for demotion? The Rambling Man (talk) 18:09, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * In Nergaal's defence he put a note about this in the FTC discussion that caused this FLRC, which I would be grossly shocked if Imzadi1979 isn't watching. He'll know - rst20xx (talk) 19:53, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Not the point really. We tend to notify specific users and specific wikiprojects whenever a list is nominated for demotion, and those notified are listed in the FLRC.  The Rambling Man (talk) 20:18, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I have notified the roads wikiproject as it is the only one listed on the talk page. I am sorry if I did not put too much careness into this nomination, as I hoped that by now the main contributor would have asked for a review himself. Nergaal (talk) 20:58, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep — and a few comments from the originator of the list:
 * No, I wasn't specifically notified of this, but that's beside the point; I still found it, and I'm commenting now.
 * There are 9 current or recently former state trunkline highways in the largest county in the state of Michigan. There are two highway designations that were once used that could be added, but there's a catch. The highway that used to be M-15 was renumbered to US 41, and the highway that used to be M-45 was renumbered to M-95. The highways didn't change hands, the roadways weren't moved, just the numbers on the signs and maps changed. The current M-15 is near Saginaw and the current M-45 is near Grand Rapids... both on the other peninsula of Michigan and nowhere near Marquette County. The history of M-15 as it relates to Marquette County is covered in the US 41 article. Ditto on M-45/M-95.
 * There are roughly a very conservative estimate over 200 county-maintained roads in the county. As explained in the actual article, if it's not a state highway or a city street in Michigan, it's a county-maintained road. Michigan hasn't allowed townships (the only other type of municipality in the county) to maintain roadways since 1932. I would actually put a better estimate at the number of county-maintained roads closer to a thousand.
 * The article already discusses the other types of roadways besides the two types of state trunklines in the county.
 * As for the accuracy of the mileages, the MDOT Control Section Atlas does measure control section lengths to the thousandth of a mile. Yes, I understand that means that the article is giving the lengths of the highway to the nearest 5-foot increment, but that is what the source says. I actually need to go through all the Michigan highway articles before long since the 2009 atlas has been published, but the Marquette County map is at (P.S. 0.001 km would be a meter, not a centimeter, by the way. The measurements from MDOT are in miles.)
 * As for other ways to improve the article, I'm all ears.
 * I will oppose trying to shoe-horn all the county roads into the article due to sheer size. I wouldn't have an authoritative source for county road lengths since the county road commission doesn't publish an equivalent to the control section atlas. My only source to catalog the county roads would be a county Land Atlas and Plat Book, which is coming to me here in the Grand Rapids area by interlibrary loan request.
 * Imzadi1979 (talk) 22:02, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * P.S. #2, I didn't ask for an FLRC after the comments on the FTC because I don't think this article and its topic merit demotion. Imzadi1979 (talk) 22:04, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, OK, if it is closer to 1000 then we obviously can't include them here and for me, that would be the issue addressed. I would like to know the number though so I await the arrival of the book - rst20xx (talk) 23:23, 11 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep - Per Mitch's comment. –CG 02:26, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment - I feel it meets the criteria, although it could use some tweaks mentioned in earlier comments - making the municipalities column unsortable, massaging the first sentence of the lead, etc. Geraldk (talk) 16:34, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I did some cleanup work, but I don't know how to make that column unsortable. I added in separate rows for the renumbered former designations, moved the references over to a separate column, cleaned up various other little things, and massaged the prose at the start of the lead. Any further suggestions or comments? Imzadi1979 (talk) 03:26, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep. I took care of the unsortability. I'd like to reiterate again that FLR does not exist as a tool to force editors to merge articles. Further, I think that a suggestion that this could theoretically be merged into an article that doesn't exist yet is a little iffy. Finally, I think everyone who is forcefully trying to implement 3b should take care not to be overly zealous in trying to implement it - this is an excellent list with a significant and useful body of information. Geraldk (talk) 21:57, 13 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep The article meets all criteria. This is what criterion 3b says; let's break it down:
 * " In length and/or topic, it meets all of the requirements for stand-alone lists;" Check
 * "it is not a content fork," Check
 * "does not largely recreate material from another article," Check
 * "and could not reasonably be included as part of a related article." Check – Adding a list of roads as well as the necessary history and background information to the main article would be adding UNDUE weight, IMO. Also, I doubt there is available information besides this to create a "Roads/Transportation in Marquette County, Michigan" article. Dabomb87 (talk) 15:48, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep Seems to meet the criteria ... – ( iMatthew  • talk ) at 01:20, 20 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.