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Rogue Editors Started a Competing Wikipedia That’s Only About Roads (gizmodo.com)

gizmodo.com Rogue Editors Started a Competing Wikipedia That’s Only About Roads

A group of Wikipedia editors wrote 15,000 articles on US roads and highways. But after a fight over the platform's rules, they went rogue.

Rogue Editors Started a Competing Wikipedia That’s Only About Roads
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Rogue editors started a competing Wikipedia that's only about roads

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  • This is the best summary I could come up with:


    For 20 years, a loosely organized group of Wikipedia editors toiled away curating a collection of 15,000 articles on a single subject: the roads and highways of the United States.

    People drive on them every day, but they don’t give them much attention,” said editor Michael Gronseth, who goes by Imzadi1979 on Wikipedia, where he dedicated his work to Michigan highways, specifically.

    “The New York Times isn’t going to write an article about maintenance on highways in the middle-of-nowhere Texas or Colorado,” said Ben M., a roads editor known as BMACS001 on Wikipedia, who asked to withhold their full name.

    After years of permissiveness, a growing contingent of Wikipedia editors started to argue that such a scenario counts as an interpretation of the map, and therefore, it’s illegitimate original research.

    Faced with a mass deletion of their hagiographies on Dragonite and Garchomp, the Pokémon editors forked their articles over to a new website, Bulbapedia, where their work continues.

    AARoads actually predates Wikipedia, tracing its origins all the way back to the prehistoric internet days of the year 2000, complete with articles, maps, forums, and a collection of over 10,000 photos of highway signs and markers.


    The original article contains 1,541 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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