Welcome to Source Notes, a Future Tense column about the internet’s information ecosystem.
Wikipedia, road infrastructure, and drama—one of these things doesn’t sound like the other. But when Ben, also known as bmacs001, posted a TikTok video promising to “spill the tea” on how the site treats road and highway articles, the Wikipedia contributor suspected that people would find the topic intriguing: “Forty of Wikipedia’s most prolific editors have seceded and made their own wiki, and I’m among them.”
Ben was part of the contingent of Wikipedia editors who contributed to the site’s pages covering road and highway infrastructure—everything from Interstate 80 and Route 66 to tinier highways on the side of the Jersey Shore. “We’ve been chugging along doing our own thing on the ’pedia for the past two decades now, but in the past couple of years, our little corner of the site has come under attack,” Ben said. Faced with so much hostility, Wikipedia’s highway enthusiasts felt they had no choice but to break away and form a separate project: AARoads Wiki.
With over 800,000 views and counting, the nearly four-minute TikTok video is a testament to how even extremely niche topics gain visibility on the platform. As the post’s top comment put it, “I’m so here for interstate Wikipedia drama.” But behind this seemingly amusing clash of nerds is a far more pressing issue: how to reconcile 20 years of Wikipedia’s core principles and values with the practical demands of present circumstances.
Before diving into the nuances of the Wiki-policies, it’s worth pointing out a distinction among the Wiki-people. There are railfans—train enthusiasts whose (at times) obsessive interest has been highlighted in TV shows and documentaries. On Wikipedia these railfans tend to improve the site’s articles on freight and high-speed rail lines, or public transportation options like the subway. But there is another subspecies: so-called roadgeeks. Ben (who uses they/them pronouns and requested that their surname not be published) pointed out that these two types of users have somewhat different motivations. Roadgeeks are drawn toward the immediacy of the subject matter—since many users drive on roads every day—while railfans gravitate toward the historical aspect, since locomotives aren’t nearly as common as they once were. Then again, what’s true in the United States does not necessarily hold true for countries where rail travel is more prevalent. Ben suspected that many European and U.K. Wikipedians who are railfans would likely be more drawn to roads if they lived in the U.S., suggesting that the railfan-roadgeek spectrum is in part a function of culture.
One flashpoint that inspired the recent revolt was a strict interpretation of the site’s reliable sourcing policy. Take the example of an article about West Virginia Route 891, a short east–west highway that ends on the Pennsylvania state line. A volunteer editor seeking to contribute content to the page might use information found on the West Virginia Department of Transportation’s website as a reference source. However, policy sticklers are likely to deny this usage because DOT is a primary source for highways (directly involved in the subject matter). According to the site’s policies, Wikipedia should be based mainly on reliable secondary sources, such as newspapers.
Angry road editors like Ben are up in arms, claiming that this hard-line interpretation of the guideline does not reflect the realities of the situation. With local newspapers going out of business left and right, there are rarely any other sources to draw from for these kinds of articles. Why not allow Wikipedians to cite from DOT, which is responsible for publishing highway routes?
Then again, it’s worth remembering that most of the time Wikipedia has good reasons for the prohibition against primary sources, especially with government entities. A state’s DOT content might generally be reliable—but allowing Wikipedians to cite from other primary sources, such as China’s Central Propaganda Department, is not a risk worth taking. The question is whether there is some way to recognize an exemption, granting that some types of primary sources may be reliable while still protecting the integrity of the rule.
Wikipedia’s road editors have also struggled with the site’s prohibition against original research. Returning to the example of West Virginia Route 891: An easy way to support the statement that this highway runs east–west is to reference a map that shows it going that direction; however, citing such a map is considered “original research” by some of Wikipedia’s most hardcore policy enforcers.
Again, Wikipedia has good reasons for prohibiting true original research—the policy has helped stop users from adding pseudoscience about Bigfoot excursions to the site, for example. But road editors are understandably frustrated when “no original research” is applied to exclude maps. Why should someone have to search out a second source to confirm in words what the map communicates in visual form?
Finally, there’s the issue of Wikipedia’s notability guideline—the principle that only topics that are truly “worthy of notice” should be included on the encyclopedia. Lack of notability is the reason why the proposed articles about many aspiring influencers get deleted every day. Roadgeeks tend to argue that highways are generally notable, and hence should not be screened for lack of encyclopedic importance, or at least not to the same extent as minor celebrities.
So far, general notability has not stopped a few Wikipedia editors from trying to delete the articles for lesser-known highways like West Virginia Route 891. In their TikTok video, Ben talked about how one particularly censorious editor tried to “destroy our entire side of Wikipedia” by tagging countless articles about roads and highways as non-notable topics that should be purged. “The people who want to destroy, the only work that they need to do is destroy. Creating involves a lot more work, so we’re trying to fight back against people who have more time for deleting stuff,” Ben told me in an interview.
It’s possible that younger Wikipedia editors like Ben, who’s in their 20s, have a different understanding of notability than did their predecessors. Where an entry on West Virginia Route 891 would have been too obscure to meet the criteria for print encyclopedias, those limitations do not apply to the digital platform—and haven’t for decades. Understandably, the rising generation feels less nostalgia for the prior model or its gatekeeping. “There’s this Encyclopedia Britannica-fication of the site that some people want to make happen,” Ben said.
“It’s bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy.”
When I first heard that Ben and the team of 40 Wikipedia editors split from the site to create the separate AARoads Wiki, I couldn’t help but feel a little sad. The new project has accrued more than 15,000 articles about North American highways since it began—although most of them are just forks from existing Wikipedia content. Sure, separate wikis have sometimes been entertaining, like Wookiepedia for Star Wars—but rivals to Wikipedia typically fizzle out into obscurity. In the near term, the secession harms not just Wikipedia itself, which needs robust road information, but also generative A.I. tools that rely on Wikipedia as training data. Maybe there’s room to interpret existing Wiki policies—sourcing, notability, no original research—in a more practical way that can keep other Wikipedia road editors from jumping truck.
While the new AARoads Wiki is making progress, disputes have broken out among the rebel forces. Some users argued that the project should focus solely on highways, while others advocated for a broader scope. A recent decision not to port over Wikipedia’s existing articles about city streets remains contentious. And some users have taken to participating in both projects simultaneously—AARoads Wiki and Wikipedia—and not maintain a clean divorce.
The pavement isn’t always smoother on the other side.
Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
"Exit" - Google News
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Why Wikipedia's highway editors took the exit ramp. - Slate
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