Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Newsletter/Issues/Volume01/Issue11

The U.S. Roads WikiProject Newsletter
Volume 1, Issue 11	18 August 2007	About the Newsletter
Introduction Summer has taken us away from Wikipedia on vacations. Therefore, this newsletter has been delayed. Apologies for the inconvenience. However, much has happened during the last month.
Cleanup system revamped By Master son The U.S. Road clean-up templates were replaced with a more robust system. The old templates were useful for sorting articles by state but the purpose of them was to mark grammar. In their place a parameter is now available on the Talk Page Banners (such as {{USRD}}) marking the article as needing attention. the rationale is stored in a {{to-do}} list as tasks. This is a good way to communicate on what improvements can be made to the article. Sources: TFD entry for the old templates, Template:U.S. Roads WikiProject/doc
Project news Nominations and votes are needed for August's selected article and selected picture. The creation of new state highway subprojects are strongly discouraged. Instead, consider helping to fix the four projects currently demoted to task forces - Nevada, South Carolina, Utah, and Alabama. Portal:U.S. Roads has been redone. Interstate 15 in Arizona has become a GA. Article Improvement Drive The current U.S. Roads Article Improvement Drive article is Interstate 79'. Last collaboration was: Interstate 35. Join the contest to receive a barnstar!
Deletion debates An archive of all previous debates. Closed The stubs and cleanup templates both were handled as described elsewhere in this newsletter. Articles for deletion/List of long-distance mileage signs in the United States took place, and the article was deleted. Ongoing An SFD is underway to delete {{California-county-route-stub}} as part of the stub cleanup. A TFD is underway to delete {{FEUS}}.
Stubs renamed By Master son The stub templates have been renamed to follow the convention set forth by WikiProject Stub Sorting. This convention is "X-road-stub" where X is the state name. The new naming scheme for the category permits a wider variety of articles to be included in these categories. In addition, more state stub templates have been created and added to the available stub templates. For a complete list of available stub templates, see WP:USRD/STUB Sources: WP:USRD/STUB, WP:SFD entry for the templates
Featured member: NE2 NE2 has been a Wikipedia editor since July 8, 2006, and he has contributed several quality articles to USRD since then. His edit count is currently 45,000. He has been responsible for the re-featuring of Ridge Route as well as the GA content of Interstate 15 in Arizona. He was also influential with the implementation of WP:USSH. Thank you, NE2, for all of your hard work! Know of an editor who goes the extra mile? Nominate him or her at WP:USRD/NEWS for the next issue. Editors can only be nominated once a year.
IRC channel goes global By Master son and Rschen7754 The U.S. Roads IRC channel has now become an all Roads IRC Channel. In an effort to extend the offer to editors around the world and to include Wikiproject Highways and WikiProject Canada Roads, the channel has been renamed to #wikipedia-en-roads. The information about the channel and all logs have been moved to WP:HWY/IRC. Feel welcome to join us. Source: WP:HWY/IRC
Minnesota bridge collapses The I-35W Mississippi River bridge was an eight-lane, 1,907 feet (581 m) steel truss bridge that carried Interstate 35W across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The bridge, maintained by the Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT), was Minnesota's third-busiest, carrying 140,000 vehicles daily. At 6:05 pm, during the Wednesday evening rush hour on August 1, 2007, the main spans of the bridge collapsed, falling into the river and onto its banks. As of August 16, 2007 11 deaths had been attributed to the collapse while two individuals remained missing and were believed to be dead. The bridge collapse garnered international attention including visits from the President, Minnesota's two U.S. senators, and swarms of media. Sources: One roadgeek's perspective By Rschen7754 Surely, this was not the first bridge collapse that America has experienced. As has been mentioned repeatedly, disasters have occurred before, such as at the MacArthur Maze this year and on Interstate 40 in Oklahoma in 2002 [1]. But this was truly catastrophic in that this spontaneously occurred during rush hour in a large city. I was on vacation during the time of the bridge collapse. Unfortunately, this event was tragic due to the loss of life involved. The death toll has not been finalized, but eleven have been confirmed dead. Our thoughts go out to the families of those who were lost. It was interesting to see the varied reactions of the community as I traveled back from Montana to Washington. Suddenly, people were worried about Montana bridges. However, there were few that were deemed unsafe to drive on. FOX News had continuing coverage of the events for the first two days of the aftermath, even though they sometimes repeated information over and over again. Witnessing the building of the Wikipedia article relating to the bridge was also fascinating. Once the vandalism and bad-faith edits went away, people posted quality information and photographs about the collapse. The article even had the proposed detours from MnDOT, the state department of transportation. Being a roadgeek and being somewhat familiar with the significance of such a bridge was also influential on my understanding of the event. In Idaho, I saw an interesting news editorial regarding the bridge collapse. CNN implied that Bud Schuster, the former congressman who was the chair of the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure in Congress, used taxpayer dollars to build projects such as Interstate 99 in his own congressional district rather than spending them on bridge maintenance. When I returned to Washington, newspaper editorials quickly reassured citizens that Washington bridges were safe. However, one article that I read the next week detailed the closing of an unsafe bridge that was scheduled to be demolished in two weeks regardless. Highway maintenance is important in the United States. The infrastructure of a nation to transport goods and people is important and should not be neglected. In this current age of environmentalism and concerns about global warming, we must be careful not to shift to the other end of the spectrum and thus be wary about conducting necessary repairs to roads and bridges.
State and national updates WP:USRD/A A massive backlog of over 300 articles has formed. Any assistance with assessment here or with Canada's 850 unassessed articles would be appreciated. WP:NYSR A new featured article (now known as selected article to prevent confusion with WP:FA) system has been unveiled. In addition to this, the Troup Howell Bridge was completed on Interstate 490 in New York.
One year after SRNC: A reflection By Rschen7754 One year ago, WP:SRNC, the state route naming conventions poll, was in full swing. This was more than just a poll; this was the culmination of a massive edit war that had lasted six months. Six administrators were chosen as judges following the arbitration case ending a month earlier. After this, two principles were drafted: Principle 1 "<State Name> <State Type> <number>" and Principle 2, which frequently used "<State Type> <number> (<State name>)". After Principle 1 was declared to have a small majority, a few flame wars erupted regarding the outcome. The flame wars continued through the second and third parts of the poll, which involved the individual state conventions and the passing of WP:USSH. After this, the page moves began, but USRD was a divided community full of hostility. In the year since this event, much of the roads community has rebuilt its good will towards each other, especially through IRC and a stronger USRD. We have moved on from SRNC and are now producing some quality edits. Subsequently, WP:SRNC has made WP:LAME. However, Lar effectively summed up the moral of the story when he said towards the end of SRNC: "The lame thing, if any, is that it all came to this." In the future, we must work cooperatively and with dispute resolution to prevent such an event from occurring again. Sources: WP:SRNC, WP:LAME
From the Editors Be part of the turnaround... now become part of the solution! Become active in highways again. Let's save the articles from being inactive and destroyed. The editors of the newsletter would like to hear from you, the reader. What do you like about the current format? What should be changed? Removed? Added? Your comments are needed. Our guess is that publication will resume every other week for the next few months. However, this is not definite at this point. Lastly, remember that this is your newsletter and you can be involved in the creation of the next issue released on September 1. Any and all contributions are welcome. Simply let yourself be known to any of the undersigned, or just start editing!
Contributors to this Issue Rschen7754 (Editor, substitute distributor) Master son (Editor)

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