For 20 years, a loosely organized group of Wikipedia editors has painstakingly assembled a collection of 15,000 articles on a single topic: America’s roads and highways. Despite some minor disagreements, the Road America project has been largely progressing smoothly, but recently a long-running dispute over site rules pushed the community to the brink. Efforts at compromise failed. There was a schism, and in the fall of 2023 the editors packed up their articles and moved to a website devoted to roads and roads.it’s known AA roada promised land where the editors ultimately hope they can find peace.
“Roads are a backdrop. People drive on them every day, but they don’t pay much attention to them,” said editor Michael Gronseth, known on Wikipedia as Imzadi1979, who writes about Michigan highways. Research. But if you look beyond the asphalt, roads have a lot more to offer. It’s the nexus of history, geography, travel, and government, and it seemed like a perfect topic for Wikipedia. “But there was a shift about a year ago,” Grosses said. “More and more editors are starting to tell us that what we’re doing isn’t important enough and that we should be working on more important topics.”
This debate comes down to some of Wikipedia’s most sacred principles. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but that doesn’t mean you can write whatever you want. First, a subject must be compelling. Your grandma’s “famous” cookie recipe isn’t likely to get an article unless it’s actually famous. This website is also not a place for personal opinions. Original research is prohibited. Generally speaking, articles should have multiple sources, and there are certain rules about what counts as a citation. People are skeptical of primary sources where individuals or organizations talk about themselves. Secondary sources written by people who have nothing to do with the topic are the gold standard. For some roads, these rules become complicated.
“The New York Times is not going to write an article about highway maintenance in the backcountry of Texas or Colorado,” said Ben M., a roads editor named BMACS001 on Wikipedia who asked that he be withheld full name. “Sometimes, first-hand information is all you have.”
Wikipedia is a fragile ecosystem. The Wikimedia Foundation pays for the site’s operating costs and handles administrative issues, but no one is responsible for the platform itself. Wikipedia is a democracy, an experiment in self-government built on decades of debate, compromise, and rabbinic debate. This kind of public decision-making ties Wikipedia together, but here, it divides it.
Many books have been written about Route 66, and even minor roads in major metropolitan areas have received coverage in local newspapers. But you might be hard-pressed to find second-hand information about the Cherokee Mountain Scenic Byway in Oklahoma. So, if you wanted to write that the trail started at Tahlequah and ended at West Siloam Hot Springs, could you quote a map published by the Oklahoma Department of Transportation? You can see it with your own eyes, but it’s not described in words on the map.After years of tolerance, a growing number of Wikipedia editors are beginning to consider the situation a explain part of the map and therefore, it is illegal original research. What’s more, this is technically the primary source, as the Oklahoma Department of Transportation is responsible for building and maintaining the road. Without secondary sources, perhaps Byway was not compelling enough to warrant a dedicated article in the first place.
On sites like Wikipedia, there is an irony of disagreement over what is noteworthy and what is not. In some ways, that’s the point.The platform has over 6 million articles covering peloponnesian war arrive paper clipevery article is written by unpaid volunteers, they are meticulous, just because they care.
“For me, it’s autism. You pick one thing and you think, ‘Okay, now this is my thing,'” Ben said. “But people do get interested in all kinds of stuff, and just because it’s not something you’re interested in doesn’t mean it’s not important. We do it because we love it and we can create community around it.”
The road project has many opponents, but the main opponent is a group called the New Page Patrol (NPP). Nuclear power plants have a unique mission. When a new page appears on Wikipedia, it is reviewed by the NPP. Patrol has special editorial rights and NPP will remove new articles if they do not meet the site’s standards.
“There’s a part of the population that thinks basically anything can be published on Wikipedia. They say, ‘Hey, throw it out there! Anything goes.’ That’s not where I come down.” Former NPP member Bill Zeleny said Bil Zeleny, whose Wikipedia nickname is onel5969, due to the unusual spelling of his name.
At his peak, Zeleny said, he reviewed more than 100,000 articles a year, during which time he rejected many articles about roads. After years of frustration, Zeleni felt he saw too many new road articles that didn’t follow the rules, whole articles that, he said, simply referenced Google Maps. fed up. Zeleni decided it was time to bring the issue to the council.
“I don’t have any problem with the roads,” Zeleni said. “There are a lot of obscure topics on Wikipedia, but you have to follow the guidelines. People view Wikipedia as a joke. They think things are not serious. I put a lot of effort into making sure articles are well written, well researched, and cited Well done.”
Zeleni raised the issue at an NPP forum, sparking months of heated debate. Eventually, the problem became so severe that some editors proposed changing the official policy on using maps as sources. The rule change requires a process called a “call for input,” where everyone is invited to share their thoughts on the issue.In the space of a month, Wikipedia users wrote more than 56,000 words on this topic.For reference, this is about twice as long as Ernest Hemingway novel old man and sea.
Ultimately, the road project was a success. The vote was decisive, Wikipedia updated “No original research“Policy clarification can cite maps and other visual sources. But this is ultimately a victory with no winners.”
“Some of us feel attacked,” Grosses said. On the American Roads Project’s Discord channel, a different debate is brewing. This website is no longer secure. What happens next time you ask for advice? The community decided it was time to fork. “We don’t want our articles to be removed. It feels like we have no choice,” he said.
The Wikipedia platform is designed for interoperability. If you want to create your own wiki, you can split off and take your Wikipedia work with you, a process called “forking”. This has happened before, for similar reasons. One of the more important forks is Pokémon battles. Pikachu and Squirtle are cultural icons that deserve their own page. But by 2005, Wikipedia had accumulated a handful of articles about minor characters, and the site got together and decided that only the best and brightest Pokémon deserved a dedicated article. Faced with the mass deletion of biographies on Dragonite and Garchomp, Pokémon editors moved their articles to a new site, Pokémon Encyclopediatheir work continues.
Over the course of several months, the American Road Project did the same thing. Leaving Wikipedia is painful, but the struggle to drive editors out of the way is just as difficult for those on the other side. Some editors involved in the road fight have had their accounts deleted, although none of the former Wikipedians responded to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Bill Zeleny was one of the casualties. After nearly six years of hard work on the New Sentinel Patrol, he had reached his breaking point. The controversy pushed him too far, and Zeleny resigned from the nuclear power plant.
“I realized that a large portion of the very vocal people on Wikipedia didn’t actually care about quality,” Zeleny said. “I’m just tired of it.” He thought about leaving Wikipedia entirely, but his son convinced him to keep working. For now, Zeleny stays in the back seat, working on articles like a regular editor rather than spending his time policing new posts.
ARoads actually predates Wikipedia, with its origins dating back to the prehistoric Internet era of 2000, and includes articles, maps, forums, and more than 10,000 photos Highway signs and markings. When America’s Road Project needs a new home, AARoads is happy to help. This is a beautiful resource. It even has backlinks to relevant non-road articles on regular Wikipedia. But for some, this is not home.
“There are some members who disagree with me, but my ultimate goal is to quit,” Grosses said. “We make our articles compatible with the license, so they can be exported back to Wikipedia if the option is available one day. I don’t want to be separated. I want to be part of the Wikipedia community. But we don’t know where things will go, at the moment , we have started to act on our own.”