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Moved to WT:USRD#problems with U.S. Route 48 because this is US-specific. Imzadi 1979 → 22:07, 1 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I couldn't find anything at Wikipedia:Article titles or here about titles of articles about roads. I think all the road articles in Category:Roads in the Republic of Ireland are misnamed. They have been pointlessly standardised at Mnn motorway (Ireland) or Nnn road (Ireland) or Rnnn road (Ireland). I think they should be as follows (using Rnnn for example, mutatis mutandem for the others):

Rnnn

if there is no other article called Rnnn

Rnnn (road)

if there is no other article about a road called Rnnn

Rnnn (Ireland)

if there is no other article about something in Ireland called Rnnn

Rnnn (Irish road)

otherwise. (e.g. to distinguish "N17" (song) from N17 (Irish road)

The relevant policies being

• WP:COMMONNAME (roads in Ireland are generally called "R101" not "R101 road")
• WP:PRECISE "Be precise, but only as precise as necessary."

I was going to propose this at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Ireland-related articles, but I thought I'd check here in case it could be couched or objected to in more general terms. jnestorius^(talk) 18:46, 10 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If not already, surely there will be some military hardware, pesticide, or some other notable object in the world known as N17. As such, sooner or later a form of disambiguation will have to be standardized. You can learn from the past mistakes of the US Road's wikiproject by doing a little research now and avoiding the edit wars later if you can document why the adopted naming scheme was established.

The scheme needs to allow for the inevitable conflicts between similarly numbered highways in other provinces/countries/whatever as well as the inevitable uses of the abbreviation outside of roads. I will also say that the US Road's wikiproject always uses a fully disambiguated title, even when not necessary. For example, New Mexico State Road 6563 is the article title used, even though I'm pretty sure there is no wikipedia article for any other highway numbered 6563. This is done mostly for ease of template coding.

I'm not familiar with common terminology in Ireland, so I can't comment other than to explain how the disambiguated wikipedia naming convention came to be in the US, and you can judge if that logic applies to Ireland or not. In the US "Road, route and highway" are all used somewhat interchangeably with regional preferences for one of the 3. This resulted in some edit warring between editors where one of the three was favored. The problem was compounded as many wikipedia editors were using terminology borrowed from roadgeek websites, where it is common to use the state abbreviation as differentiators creating yet another standard. For example, many road geek websites use CA-1 for what Wikipedia currently titles California State Route 1, as a short hand way of differentiation from the other Highway 1's in the USA. The problem is, almost nobody outside of the roadgeek world uses that term for a highway; CA-1 is more likely to be associated with California's 1st congressional district outside of roadgeek circles. The highway is colloquially known just as "Highway 1"; however hundreds of other highways share that colloquial title. The official title used by Caltrans is "State Route 1" with an abbreviated form of SR 1, but again, at least a dozen other highways have that same official title. After numerous rounds of edit wars and straw polls the current naming scheme was established. With that said, I myself would have preferred "State Route 1 (California)" for a disambiguated title but have resigned myself to the accepted scheme.

Hope that history lesson helps. =-) Dave (talk) 21:04, 10 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In Michigan, our state highways are numbered with the form M-n (and have been since 1919). Our articles on M-6 or M-28 are at M-6 (Michigan highway) or M-28 (Michigan highway), respectively. Since "highway" isn't part of the official name, it is in the parenthetical so that readers have some idea what the subject is (a highway) and not just where it is (Michigan). There aren't other items currently numbered M-185, so M-185 redirects to M-185 (Michigan highway). (M28 is also a Messier number for a galaxy someplace, and there are M6 motorways, etc.) All of the articles are consistently titled with the disambiguator even though its strictly not necessary for two reasons. It won't break templates like the infoboxes, or {{jct}} that generate the links, even if the redirect could have been reversed so that the disambiguated form is the redirect. (It wouldn't matter if the templates point to the redirect, really.) Second though is that the title describes what M-185 is as I mentioned above.

Personally, I'm used to this naming convention which has been in use since 2006, and I would suggest that you copy it for Ireland in some way, but that's just my 2p. Imzadi 1979 → 21:25, 10 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

One final thought, to clarify what has been expressed by Imzadi and myself. Road articles tend to make heavy use of templates. (infoboxes, junction lists, etc.) If you stick with the proposal of having 4 different naming schemes for the same set of articles, (depending if disambiguation is necessary and to what degree) you are setting yourself up for a nightmare scenario in coding the templates. That's why the US Roads always uses a fully disambiguated title, even if not necessary; to have a single naming scheme that is guaranteed to work for all articles in the set. Dave (talk) 22:24, 10 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict)I think you'll find some pushback from editors in the UK about renaming the Irish motorways to "Mnnn motorway". I recall some kind of kerfuffle a few years ago over naming the motorway articles. Long story short, UK editors got their way and have the primary topic for "Mnnn motorway". I don't agree or disagree, that's just how it is currently. I think South Africa uses the Nnnn nomenclature, too, so we need disambiguation there. As far as I know, the R numbers in Ireland are unique, but I could be (and probably am) wrong. I would probably name them "Rnnn road".

Just remember, redirects are cheap. As long as the reader gets to the content, ridiculous links and titles like County Sligo's Most Excellent Ribbon of Pavement N17 are fine. –Fredddie™ 22:46, 10 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for feedback all. This comment:

You can learn from the past mistakes of the US Road's wikiproject by doing a little research now and avoiding the edit wars later if you can document why the adopted naming scheme was established.

I was kind of hoping this Wikiproject would have documented this kind of thing somewhere so each new editor/country wouldn't have to re-invent the wheel. jnestorius^(talk) 13:31, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:State route naming conventions poll/Account. You could also read the poll itself, parts one and two. The ArbCom case is probably not relevant to your interest. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 13:46, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Scott, you're too modest. =-) Jnestorius, this got so bad back in the day it even made WP:LAME (do a search on that page, you'll find the above mentioned dispute). You don't need to read it, but you might get a laugh or two. Dave (talk) 18:33, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

More generally, I think some points -- certainly the one about template usage -- warrant being made in the general Wikipedia:Article titles. After all, Wikiproject guidelines are meant to supplement the general policies, not override them. If the general rule is defective in a particular project, it is probably so in other projects and needs a general tweak. The wisdom of the projects should feed back up. jnestorius^(talk) 14:20, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the template situation could be resolved in another fashion using redirects. Let's assume for a moment that Michigan's M-n articles weren't all at "M-n (Michigan highway)", but some, like M-185, were at the bare highway designation only. We could still point a redirect from "M-185 (Michigan highway)" to "M-185", and the jct template, the browser section of the infobox and the like would all still point to the correct article through the redirect. The downside is that we would lose the benefit of the article title including a bit of an explanation of what the subject is. (Note that in the US, most states name their highways with some form of "State Highway/Road/Route n", so Michigan is an anomaly in not indicating that its highways are highways in the naming scheme used.) Imzadi 1979 → 18:54, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The name of the current page shows in bold rather than as a wikilink. If a transcluded page links to the page (as templates should) this work, but if it links to a redirect ot the paage it doesn't. That's one drawback of relying on redirects. OTOH, I don't believe an article title needs to explain its topic (that's what the opening sentence is for) unless for disambiguation. jnestorius^(talk) 19:18, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think what you want to avoid is, (let's use Imzadi's Michigan example) is having templates that could point multiple titling schemes depending on if the article needs disambiguation and to what level. All of the US Roads templates when passed a number and the state of Michigan will link to the article "M-xxx (Michigan highway)". So next week when Proctor and Gamble introduce their new organic shampoo, M-185, and as such M-185 now requires disambiguation, the templates will still work. However were the templates coded as such, "if nnn=6 or nnn=28 link to M-nnn(Michigan highway) else link to M-nnn" we would have to add yet another clause in the template every time a new article encroaches on one with a similar title a highway number. I'd advise to pick a naming scheme like Nxxx (Ireland highway), or similar, that can be used for template coding that is guaranteed to work even if McDonalds introduces a revolutionary new hamburger filling called the N-17 (or North Korea launches a new missile the N-17, whatever). If a country only has 30 highways, the if-else template coding may be manageable; however, some of the templates used by the US Roads project are used in 20,000+ articles, you can see the futility of trying to manage templates without a standardized naming scheme in place. Dave (talk)

Well, we're talking about two kinds of templates here. Navboxes (which USRD tends to avoid) have to list to whatever the actual title is. Taking the Interstates in Michigan, for a moment, I-375 is titled "Interstate 375 (Michigan)" because there is another I-375 in Florida. I-496 is just "Interstate 496" though because there are no others. The {{I-75 aux}} has the state name(s) in parentheses as needed, but I-575 in Georgia doesn't as it's unique. We're talking about things like {{jct}} that create the "<graphic><link>" constructions used in the infobox junction list and the junction list section of the article.

USRD tends not to use navboxes that list every highway in a state preferring instead to link articles together by the lists and categories. Once a navbox gets big enough, it's going to "pollute" the "What links here" list for an article because every highway links to it. It's hard then to know which articles are discussing it. (For instance, M-28 has no connection to M-73 or M-69 in a physical or historical sense so those two shouldn't appear in the list of incoming links.) The other concerns are that larger navboxes take up a lot of screen space, and they even slow down the loading of the page. For that reason, USRD tends to restrict their use to compact groupings, like I-75 and its auxiliary highways, instead of larger groups like every Interstate or even every highway in one state. (Michigan has 200+ highway articles reflecting the current and former designations in use, and even more designations in use that redirect into another article, like Connector M-44 which is a section of the M-44 article.) Imzadi 1979 → 19:59, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

To all interested editors: I have proposed an edit to the protected template {{jct}}. It is a minor edit that simply passes {{{country}}} through to the subtemplate {{jct/statename}}, so that the subtemplate can differentiate between states that have the same abbreviation, namely Western Australia and Washington, and the Northern Territory and Northwest Territories. You can view the edit at the sandbox, and comment at the talk page. - Evad37 (talk) 16:53, 14 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]