Why Wikipedia’s Highway Editors Took the Exit Ramp

hedge@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 96 points – Why Wikipedia’s Highway Editors Took the Exit Ramp
slate.com

Not sure technology is the best place to put this...any suggestions for a cross post?

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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.

That is a bit silly to be honest

It's also rather inaccurate. One can use a primary source like the DOT for information to add to an article. It's just that a primary source like that doesn't contribute to general notability and importance of the subject matter. The subject needs to be shown to have relevance that has been covered in other forms than just primary sources.

Yeah, alternatives for USRoads editors were proposed such as editing on Wikidata (on which the notability criteria is basically just "you can prove online that it exists") and having them contribute on large list articles instead of separate articles for each roads. They took none of them.