Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Newsletter/Issues/Volume10/Issue01

Welcome to the temporary return of The Center Line to the English Wikipedia.

This is the first issue of The Center Line since 2017, and a lot has happened in the last 6+1⁄2 years. We've added eight new Featured Articles to the project since the last issue. The project has updated a number of templates. We created a standard format for the tables in list articles, like List of Interstate Highways in Washington. We've expanded our archive of reports from AASHTO and started transcribing them to Wikisource. We updated the {{jct}} template to add additional display capabilities like directional banner plates, and finally we lived through a global pandemic and still kept editing.

Since August 2022, our project has faced several external challenges that made several members question the viability of editing on Wikipedia in ways that Covid-19 didn't. The notability of highway articles in general became a focus of New Page Patrollers. Additionally, the ability to continue using maps as sources was called into question. Since then, we initiated an RfC to clarify if there was support for long-standing citation practices, namely could we continue to cite maps as sources in our articles? The results of that RfC were mixed. While chatting amongst ourselves online, it became clear that continuing to hope that another RfC or deletion discussion would go our way was an exercise in futility. In the background to all of this, other categories of articles were on the chopping block. First it was articles on Olympic athletes, and then it was cricket and area code articles.

Thus we announce on Wikipedia today some serious news. A core group of U.S. Roads editors have taken the important steps to fork the project to its own wiki. Hosted as part of the AARoads family of websites, the new AARoads Wiki was founded on June 15, 2023. In the months since, we've imported over 15,000 articles from the English Wikipedia covering the the U.S. Roads and Canada Roads wikiprojects along with the collection of templates needed to support them. The international roads articles from the other roads projects have been backed up for future importation to the new wiki, meaning we can be hosting articles on British and Australian Roads in the near future.

The wiki exited its beta phase on September 7 with an announcement on the AARoads Forum. A TikTok video about the fork has garnered over 58,000 likes and over 389,000 views in 24 hours at the time of writing. The launch of the wiki will also be covered in the next issue of The Signpost.

The project members are not abandoning the ideals of Wikipedia the the open knowledge community. Many of us will continue to edit on the site in other topic areas. We will continue to upload photos to Wikimedia Commons. We've partnered with OpenStreetMap's North American mapping community to provide maps in infoboxes and elsewhere on the wiki. Wikipedia's road articles included OSM-based maps too, but we've migrated from Wikimedia Maps to the newer OSM Americana, which are fully interactive in the infobox itself, allowing readers to pan and zoom without entering a full screen map. They can even be rotated! These maps also dynamically overlay highway markers on the base map. Americana is still a work in progress, and we'll be working closely with them to polish the maps over the coming months.

With all of these developments, this is the final issue of The Center Line to be published on the English Wikipedia. While USRD will continue to exist, much of its editor activity is leaving. The newsletter will be transferred to a new home on the AARoads Wiki for future issues. All Wikipedia editors interested in roads and highways are welcome to create an account and join us.

Until next time, see you on the road!

This is the last issue to be published on the English Wikipedia. The next quarterly issue should be out in the winter on the new AARoads Wiki.

• Imzadi1979 (editor)
• Rschen7754 (editor emeritus)