Talk:History of the Massachusetts Turnpike

Comments

The content that was being pasted here should be added as appropriate to the existing article before spinning it out as a separate article. Imzadi 1979 → 00:26, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Please don't do things such as that. I have just begun working on this article and you come along and unilaterally decide my work should not exist. This is an in depth article that provides significant detail on the history of the turnpike. Your complete blanking of the article was extremely bad form. Discuss this before doing this type of action. --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 05:19, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

@Jerem43: Usually, road articles do not cover the history of the road in a separate article, even lengthy history. We appreciate the work you've done, but it would be more consistent with the rest of the road articles on Wikipedia to move your content to the Massachusetts Turnpike article. You might want to check out Creek Turnpike as an example of another road article with a fairly lengthy history section as an example of what these articles usually look like. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 03:34, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm going by the Wikipedia rules on article size that articles that are at the 100k range, they article should be split for readability. As it stands now the main article sits at 47k and this one, as it stands now, is at 26k - which if merged would be 73k. When this article is finished it will probably close to 50k unto itself which means if the articles were to be merged they would be around 125k. By the standards of Wikipedia such an article would be too large and would probably need to be split into a sub-article - per Wikipedia policy. The article you mention (A very good read BTW) stands at 75k and if it were to be expanded anymore, it too would probably need to be split int 2 or more articles, preferably in summary style. Once I've finished work on this article, I will go back to the main article and rewrite the history section so that it summarizes this one as outlined in the summary style guidelines. --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 07:02, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

I dispute those totals. According to the page size tool, this article is only 19K of readable prose. (The guidelines at Wikipedia:Article size are based on readable prose size, not the total amount of wikitext.) The other article is only 18K of readable prose. Merging the two together, as they currently exist, by replacing the history section of the main article with this one would only result in 22K of readable prose, well within guidelines. I've mocked up that article at User:Imzadi1979/MassPike so you can see what I mean. That still leaves room for expansion. Imzadi 1979 → 20:40, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Why don't you wait until after I'm finished, and then we can discuss this. The material I using is from a 22 page term paper I did last semester, and I have to go through that work to remove the parts that would constitute any original research (the thesis, introduction and conclusion). After that I have to converts the stuff to HTML, import it to Wikipedia, and format it with wiki-markup, add wiki-links, reformat the citations, and add the images which I still need to upload to Commons. So far all you're seeing is what I have gone through, the sections currently in place represent only a fraction of the material and are only about 40% completed as it stands now - it only covers through the 1960s and needs some tweaks of what is there. On top of that there is no lead, which will be approximately four addition paragraphs.

As I requested before - Let me finish, please. --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 07:38, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Formatting fixes

Assuming arguendo that this separate article will continue to exist, I made a few changes.

• When the main article's infobox was shifted into its own template, that created an issue. The infobox had a non-free graphic, the MassPike highway marker. As non-free, it can only exist in articles, and only in the specific article(s) where the fair-use rationale(s) specify it will appear. There was a FUR for the main article, but not one for this article, and fair-use media cannot appear in templates. So following policy, the graphic was removed from {{Massachusetts Turnpike}}, and in doing so, it failed to appear in any article. That meant it would have been ready to be deleted in a week's time.

  I have restored the original infobox back to the main article so that marker will continue to appear there. That also meant that I could untag the graphic for deletion. This article doesn't need an infobox, so I removed it, and I tagged the dedicated infobox template for speedy deletion since it is no longer in use.

• I forced the dates to follow the standard formatting for American articles. The article was using our in-house CS1 style of citations, and our MOS says when an article has ties to a specific country, we should use the date format most common in that country. For the US, that's "Month DD, YYYY". If the citations were in MLA format, the "DD Month YYYY" format prescribed by MLA style would have been appropriate, but these were not MLA-format citations.
• I removed the access dates from print sources to remove the CS1 errors. They are currently hidden, but for those of use who have the error messages enabled, they were appearing. Also, there was a date error for the publication date on the first footnote, so I updated that citation to avoid the error. (That error message is due to be enabled for all readers in the near future.)

Imzadi 1979 → 22:52, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

I see that my changes to fix error messages have been reverted. The error messages are still an issue. Access date for offline sources are not displayed by the citation templates, and the way the years are handled in the first footnote is causing an issue, and these items do flag this article for Category:CS1 errors: dates and Category:Pages using citations with accessdate and no URL. Since there is an editor owning this article in contravention of the notice above every window ("Work submitted to Wikipedia can be edited, used, and redistributed—by anyone—subject to certain terms and conditions"), I figure it is best for me to bow out of editing the article. Instead, I will confine my interest to noting the deficiencies and issues here on the talk page so that others can take action.

I still disagree that the infobox needs to be present in this article since it is summarizing information that is not present here. I'm hoping that my edit to {{Massachusetts Turnpike}} to once again put File:Mass Pike shield.svg back into use will be respected. If not, it was set to be deleted next week because a) non-free media like that cannot appear in templates like {{Massachusetts Turnpike}}, and b) once it was removed from the template, it was not in use anywhere meaning it was subject to deletion. That file cannot also appear in this article because there is no fair-use rationale for this article for that image, and that marker is not needed here for identification purposes.

Imzadi 1979 → 01:13, 24 September 2014 (UTC)