Wikipedia:WikiProject Australian Roads/News/January 2014

=January 2014= Welcome to 2014 – a new year and new opportunities, in the real world and on Wikipedia. While you are celebrating the future, don't forget the past... take a look back with the second issue of The U Turn from WikiProject Australian Roads. – Evad37, Issue 2 Editor

News summary

 * There is a now a portal for Australian roads, which you can contribute to!
 * The projects has a new article standards department, covering the project's advice on article content and style.
 * The AURD shields department has closed down, with requests for shields are now undertaken at the new global WikiProject Highways Route Markers page. Recent request that have been fulfilled include:
 * Golden Pipeline Heritage Trail.svg Standard numbered tourist drives, and one non-numeric route
 * Old Brisbane and Melbourne freeway routes
 * Our project was featured in The Signpost on 9 October 2013! (Read the interview)

New and improved
The spring months have seen a number of article spring up the assessment ladder. The project also achieved it's first Featured Article, which was quickly put onto the Main Page! Thank you to all contributors and reviewers of the project's latest batch of recognised content.

Kwinana Freeway, nominated by, was promoted to A-Class on 12 August 2013, was promoted to Featured Article on 14 September 2013, and appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's Featured Article on 22 September 2013

Tonkin Highway, nominated by, was promoted to Good Article status on 7 August 2013, and was promoted to A-Class on 31 October 2013

Monaro Highway, nominated by, was promoted to Good Article status on 16 November 2013

Abbotsford Bridge, created by, appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 11 September 2013. It was also nominated by, and promoted to Good Article status on 16 September 2013.

Majura Parkway, nominated by, was promoted to Good Article status on 5 August 2013

Guildford Road, created by, appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 21 December 2013.

Great Eastern Highway, nominated by, was promoted to Good Article status on 28 November 2013

Assessment

 * Graphs of our progress (and the raw data) can now be found at Google Docs spreadsheet, maintained by Evad37 and update once a month:
 * As well as the newly improved content listed above, a reassessment push in December saw a slight upwards trend in quality in the lower-class article. The percentage of articles classified as stubs has now dropped from 60.75% in July 2013 to 56.68% for January 2014, with the relative wikiwork factor decreasing from 5.51 to 5.45 over the same period.
 * Pages can now be assessed as Redirect-class, Disambig-class, and Portal-class. In the assessment banner, pages classified as redirects or disambiguation pages will automatically be marked as map not applicable and KML not applicable without having to set the needs-map or needs-kml parameters

Resources

 * New traffic volume templates are available, which build a table of data: traffic volume top, traffic volume row, traffic volume bottom
 * The old LegendRJL, used at the bottom of road junction lists, was deprecated on 13 August 2013‎, and replaced by an updated version of Jctbtm. The new template uses a Lua module, and allows for colour keys relevant to the table above to be displayed, instead of including all colours, whether used or not. Read more at the Templates for discussion log entry (20–27 August 2013)
 * Project members are reminded not to use Roadgeek or other self-published sites as references – they are not reliable sources for Wikipedia. If you see these sites (such as OzRoads, Paul Rand's Expressway, or Main Roads Victoria) used as references, please tag them with . Eventually, or as soon as possible, such references should be replaced with citations to reliable sources.

Miscellaneous

 * Our other departments are still around! Check out the Discussions Library for old consensus forming discussions, or find friendly helping hand with Advanced Permissions
 * Australian Roads is now on Wikidata! Check out the project page and perhaps lend a helping hand.

Credits

 * Editor:
 * Contributors:

Comments

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