Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Newsletter/Newsroom/Issue6-4

Issue 4 (Fall 2013)
Publication deadline: 12 PM Pacific-3 PM Eastern on October 15.

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Introduction

 * Editor:

Final push for 2013 goals

 * Editor: Fredddie

As we go through the last two months of the year, let's take a moment to review our project goals for 2013. We have had great success with one of our goals, while the other two are stagnant.


 * 1) Lower our relative WikiWork to 4.400.
 * This is where we have had our greatest success. When the year started, we had 49,888 classes across 10,951 articles, which gave us a relative 4.556.  We currently have 0 classes across 0 articles, which gives us .  So while we have added nearly 200 articles over the year, we have still reduced our relative wikiwork by .  However, our work is not yet finished.  We still have  classes remaining until we reach our goal.
 * 1) Destub 25 states
 * Over the course of the year, only two states (Idaho and Washington) have been destubbed. The good news is that there are fifteen states that have no more than 25 stubs and five states with no more than 10.
 * 1) Interstate and US Highway cleanup drive
 * Despite adding three Featured Articles in the Interstate Highway category, we have had only marginal success improving these articles.

Luckily, there is still time to accomplish our goal, and it's easy to work on all three goals at the same time by editing any of these stubs:


 * Interstate 15 in Montana
 * U.S. Route 19 in Georgia
 * U.S. Route 20 in Oregon
 * U.S. Route 28
 * U.S. Route 36 in Illinois
 * U.S. Route 45 in Illinois


 * U.S. Route 97
 * U.S. Route 310
 * U.S. Route 341
 * U.S. Route 395 in Oregon
 * U.S. Route 411

NYSR

 * Editor: Rschen7754

Following a [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_U.S._Roads&oldid=580558366#Proposed_demotion_of_WikiProject_New_York_State_routes discussion], the last remaining state highway WikiProject, New York, was demoted to a task force in October. Supporters of the move cited the inactivity of the project, as well as a desire to have the U.S. Roads project not be partitioned. Today, for the first time in its history, USRD is one whole project working together across state lines for the development of U.S. road articles in the United States. Let's welcome the New York roads project back into the family!

Templates, Lua, and sister projects

 * Editor: Rschen7754

Work continues to convert all of our templates to Lua code in order to decrease load times and improve readability. Happy5214 has converted several portions of Template:Infobox road, as well as Template:Jct. In the meantime, Scott5114 has written documentation for Template:Routelist row, our new replacement template to support state highway lists. Out at Wikidata, work continues to add basic data to road items. At Meta, we discovered that there are 63 Wikimedia sites with information on U.S. roads, including 53 language Wikipedias. And at Wikisource, the first of the California Highways and Public Works Journals has been uploaded for proofreading. We are excited at the possibilities that all this will bring, and look for more updates in the months to come!

Project news

 * Editor:

Be sure to look through Article Alerts and WT:USRD.

State updates
Write the updates below. If signatures are present, remove them before adding to the newsletter.
 * California
 * Many recent GAs have been written, including California State Route 905, California State Route 209, and Interstate 805. Plans are to get I-805 to FA status. California State Route 52 was Today's Featured Article on August 12, 2013. The eventual goal is to finish getting the San Diego County road articles to GA status or higher before moving to Imperial County.


 * Iowa
 * After almost a year-long lull of activity, two articles, U.S. Route 6 in Iowa and Iowa Highway 25, achieved Good Article status within hours of each other. US 6 is now at ACR awaiting reviewers.


 * Kansas
 * At the beginning of the year, Kansas had only nine articles at GA-Class or higher. Since then, that number has more than doubled as, thanks to a recent surge in content creation, the state now has twenty recognized articles, five of which have been promoted to that status since the last issue. One of them, Interstate 470 (Kansas), is now at ACR. &mdash;TCN7JM


 * Maryland
 * The ongoing county-by-county sweep of Maryland state highway articles is nearing its conclusion. More than half of the highways in Montgomery County have been improved to B-class or higher. Montgomery County is the 23rd and final county to be swept as part of this process that began in April 2010 in Worcester County. Besides finishing improving articles in Montgomery County, upcoming work will include working on several state-wide routes of all three types&mdash;Interstates, U.S. Highways, and state-numbered highways. There are 11 Start-class articles remaining; work is underway to eliminate those so that the lowest class among Maryland road articles is C-class. The most recent article to be upgraded was Interstate 97. The improvement of this article from Start-class to B-class shortly before this newsletter went to press resulted in the Maryland task force achieving a wikiwork average of exactly 3.000, meaning the average article in the Maryland task force is B-class.


 * Michigan
 * Brockway Mountain Drive was Today's Featured Article on October 14, and Interstate 196 is currently at FAC. If promoted, this would be the sixth article for the state promoted in 2013. Since the last newsletter, Interstate 75 in Michigan and U.S. Route 23 in Michigan were each promoted at FAC, meaning the articles representing the longest highway of the three major types (I, US, M) in the state have been Featured. U.S. Route 8 and U.S. Route 141 were also promoted to A-Class since the last newsletter.  Imzadi 1979  →   07:02, 26 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Pennsylvania
 * Recently, straight-line diagrams from PennDOT were discovered that provide mileage for state highways in feet. An override was added to PAint that can allow the feet to be converted to miles accurate to three decimal places. The process has begun to use the SLD mileages in Pennsylvania road articles.  Dough 48  72  13:39, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Leaderboard and stub count

 * Editor: TCN7JM

This is a list of the top ten states as of November 11, 2013.

All states in the top ten remain in the same order as the last issue. Michigan's relative WikiWork continues to plummet, and it is close to becoming the first state to have raised all articles to B-Class or higher; U.S. Route 31 in Michigan is the only remaining article assessed lower than B-Class in the state. For complete statistics updated almost daily, head on over to WP:USRD/A/S. Now here is how the project looks as a whole.

Two articles have been promoted to featured article status since the last issue, both of them in Michigan. They are Interstate 75 in Michigan and U.S. Route 23 in Michigan. Interstate 196 is currently our only article at WP:FAC, but there are a plethora of articles at WP:HWY/ACR that need reviewers.

Selected article/picture from portal
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