Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Newsletter/Newsroom/Issue6-3

Issue # (Summer 2013)
Publication deadline: 12 PM Pacific-3 PM Eastern on July 15.

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Introduction

 * Editor:

Infobox road rewrite / Wikidata

 * Editor: Rschen7754

This summer, we are conducting a rewrite of Infobox road as well as other templates used by USRD. There are three main focuses of our rewrite:
 * Rewriting in Lua to make the code more readable and faster to be processed and displayed
 * Including TemplateData for VisualEditor compatibility, so that those using VisualEditor can have additional assistance in using our templates.
 * Incorporating Wikidata functionality so that data statements from that database can be included in English Wikipedia articles.

Our hope in doing this is to update our template infrastructure so that it will support us for the next several years, and fully support the latest technologies being deployed across Wikimedia. User:Happy5214 is leading the way in these conversions, with assistance from myself and User:Scott5114. Currently many of our templates have TemplateData, and Jctbtm is being revised to incorporate LegendRJL. Infobox road is being rewritten section by section, and Template:Jct will be rewritten to use that codebase. We will keep you posted on any changes that require massive changes on articles, but we hope to minimize them.

On Wikidata, we continue to build our part of the knowledge base with data items like d:Q19183, which has showed up on a few articles on the Occitan Wikipedia, such as oc:Rota 78 de l'Estat de California. Many maps for roads in Germany were immediately deployed when Infobox road was given the ability to pull information from Wikidata. We hope to make more and more use of Wikidata as we begin to explore efforts to have our high-quality articles translated into the 285 other languages that have a Wikipedia, and generate road articles on the English Wikipedia where the road is not located in a country that speaks English natively. We are excited about these possibilities as we begin developing worldwide connections through the U.S. Roads project on Meta, and through some USRD editors' growing involvement on other projects like Commons, Meta, and Simple English Wikipedia, as well as cross-wiki venues.

Fixing our shields licensing

 * Editor: Dough4872

Recently, the USRD project has decided to go through our shields and make sure they are properly licensed. Most of our shields were made several years ago and the licenses used on them are inconsistent and may be improper. In order to remedy this, the project is going through the shields of all 50 states and the territories along with national shields such as the Interstate, US, and default county shields and making sure they are properly licensed. To accomplish this, we need to check out state and national MUTCDs to make sure the shields are in there and that the shields are freely licensed. If the shields are in the federal MUTCD, we need to tag them as "PD-MUTCD". In addition, if a shield is public domain in a state MUTCD, we need to tag them as "PD-MUTCD-[state]". The effort on properly licensing our shields can be found at commons:COM:USRD/L. Any help with the effort would be appreciated!

Feature 3 (if needed)

 * Editor:

Note: If you suggest a story then you are volunteering to write it, unless someone else decides to do so.

Project news

 * Editor: Fredddie

Recently, there was a request for comment on WT:USSH regarding the disambiguation of the four Interstate Highways, I-76, I-84, I-86, and I-88, that had separate sections in different parts of the country. It was proposed that the eight articles in question use location-based disambiguation instead of "east" or "west"; for example, Interstate 88 (west) would become Interstate 88 (Illinois). The articles that went through more than one state would use the route's terminal states. After some discussion, it was discovered that no previous on-wiki discussion about disambiguation occurred. Consensus leaned towards location-based disambiguation and the articles were moved accordingly.

On July 1, VisualEditor (VE), the new WYSIWYG editor which allows users to contribute to Wikipedia without learning wiki markup, was launched for all logged-in users of the English Wikipedia. However, editors who use VE are unable to edit templates, such as Infobox road or Attached KML. TemplateData was created to help VE users edit templates. Rschen7754 and Evad37 have worked at adding TemplateData for the templates used by this project. Read VisualEditor/TemplateData tutorial for more information on how to implement this new tool.

Since the last issue, Fredddie has taken the initiative to update the Map and Shield request pages to make them a little more user friendly. Most notably, automatic archiving was introduced as a way to clear completed requests and to declutter the pages. Efforts on the shield request page seem to have paid off because as of press time there is only one request remaining, the lowest number of requests since 2006 when the page was created.

State updates
Write the updates below. If signatures are present, remove them before adding to the newsletter.
 * Georgia
 * The state of Georgia was doing horribly at the release of the last newsletter. Due to a renewed effort to expanding stubs in the state, and using Category:Stub-Class Georgia (U.S. state) road transport articles and Category:Georgia (U.S. state) road stubs as guides, Georgia has dropped over 100 stubs, which has brought its wikiwork down under 4.900. In addition, many new redirects for various bannered routes in the state were made. —Morriswa


 * California
 * After a brief hiatus, Interstate 8 was improved to GA status, and a substantial rewrite was done of California State Route 78, a FA since 2009. --Rschen7754 23:19, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Leaderboard and stub count

 * Editor: TCN7JM

This is a list of the top ten states as of August 10, 2013.

All of the top ten states have remained in the same position since the last issue. However, Delaware's relative WikiWork has risen from 2.206 to 2.222 due to a good article being demoted. For complete statistics updated almost daily, see WP:USRD/A/S. Now here is the project as a whole.

We have added four featured articles since the last issue—Michigan State Trunkline Highway System, California State Route 75, Interstate 96, and Interstate 496—as well as 21 net good articles: 28 promotions, and seven demotions. Michigan State Trunkline Highway System is the first ever article on a highway system to be promoted to FA status.

Selected article/picture from portal
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