Talk:U.S. Route 24 in Ohio

Comments from Imzadi1979

• My general practice is to match the full name of a highway in the lead to how the infobox represents it. In this case, the infobox uses "U.S. Route 24" for Ohio, but you used "US Highway 24", which is the style from Michigan. Michigan is ahead of the curve on following the guidance from the 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, which the rest of the project lags behind. (Chicago says to use "US Route" not "U.S. Route", and generally drops periods from abbreviations like that.) Additionally, Michigan is a "highway state" while Ohio is a "route state". In other words, we have "state trunkline highways" or "state highways", and Ohio has "state routes", so ordinarily we'd use "U.S. Route" for any United States Numbered Highway in the state of Ohio.
• "Ohio-Indiana" and "Michigan-Ohio" should have an en dash (–) instead of a hyphen (-).
• "Maumee, Ohio" and "Toledo, Ohio" can have the state name piped out because it is clear from the "In Ohio," part at the beginning of the sentence. Once you establish that you're only going to talk about the Ohio segment, you only need to indicate the state name when talking about locations in other states.
• " Interstate 475" should be followed by "(I-475)" to introduce the abbreviation convention. Since this junction is listed in the exit list and infobox using the abbreviation, the highway should be spelled out once in full with that abbreviation afterwards. Additionally, once an Interstate is mentioned in text, all other Interstates can be abbreviated on first mention because the convention has been established.

  This is similar to the rule journalists use whereby "Bill Clinton" on first use, and just "Clinton" on subsequent usage.

• In the lead, you use "(US 24)", but in the RD, you've used "US-24". (Hopefully that has a non-breaking space,   there instead of a regular space.) Since {{jct}} uses a space for Ohio, you should too for consistency. In the future, USRD may standardize all states to use the same punctuation in abbreviations like this, but for now you should follow however {{jct}} is set up for each state. (Michigan also does not use a hyphen, even if MDOT does. The Chicago Manual of Style does not use the hyphenated form for US Highways, and manuals like that on styling and formatting text are more appropriate guidance on such matters than DOTs for a generalist publication like Wikipedia.) This inconsistency especially stands out on the row for exit 39 in the exit list table.
• Your second paragraph of the RD section is really history information and should be separated out.
• In situations like "in Fort Wayne, Indiana were", there needs to be a comma after the state name.
• The RD should be greatly expanded. Depending on the details, I would expect that section to have at least two or three solid paragraphs.
• ODOT has an archive of of their historical road maps freely available for download. You'll need a program that can read the MrSID graphics format, but there are several free programs or plugins for that.
• The section for the junction/exit list table is misnamed per WP:USRD/STDS. Given how many interchanges are listed, it should be called "Exit list", however it could be either "Major intersections" or "Junction list" depending on how other articles are formatted in that state.
• "Maumee-Toledo city line" needs an en dash as well, not a hyphen.
• ODOT gives milepost information to two decimal places on the straight-line diagrams (SLDs), which can be downloaded on their website.
  • You will have to double check, but I believe the SLDs reset their distances at county lines, meaning you'll need the mileage for the Paulding–Defiance county line to add to all of the mileages in Defiance County to get the statewide milepost for those junctions. Then you'll need to add the first county line mileage to the Defiance–Henry county line to get a total adjustment to add to all of the distances in Henry County. You'll need to repeat this process for each county until you get to the end and compute the Lucas–Monroe county line (Ohio–Michigan state line), which will be the official length of US 24 in the state.
• You have "Indiana state line" at one end and "Continuation into Michigan" at the other. These should match up, and the latter text is the better since it implies the state line and tells the reader that the highway continues.
• The concurrency information should be listed first in the notes ahead of the incomplete interchange info. The reason I say that is you're using the concurrency color, so the concurrency should have priority in the notes.
• "Lucas County Highway 53 / Waterville" might be formattable using {{jct}} to get the proper marker. Also, a destination city should not be joined to the roadway/highway with a slash.
• "SR 25 / Anthony Wayne Trail", and similar formats, may be wrong. I want to say that SR 25 follows the Anthony Wayne Trail, and if so, the template should be using |name1=Anthony Wayne Trail, which will put the name in parentheses, instead of |road=Anthony Wayne Trail, which uses the slash. I know SR 2 is Airport Highway, so that should be switched there.
  • You may want to add |name1=Telegraph Road to the continuation at the Michigan state line for consistency.
• There are some formatting errors in your references:
  • "Ohio Department of Transportation" is a publisher, not a work, so it should be placed in the appropriate parameter of the citation templates so that it doesn't appear in italics. The rule is that only the name of a long-form publication, or a long-form published work, is in italics. The organization that publishes the work, if listed, is in roman (plain) text. The New York Times (name of the paper) vs. The New York Times Company (the corporation).
  • Dates should be consistently formatted. You shouldn't use "Month DD, YYYY" formatting for the publication dates and switch to "DD Month YYYY" for the access dates. In theory, you can switch to the ISO style (YYYY-MM-DD) for access dates, but you shouldn't mix the other two types. Also, since this is a road in the US, the "DD Month YYYY" format shouldn't be in use at all.
  • This one is a little tricky, but the name of the newspaper in Toledo has been called The Blade since the 1960s although they use http://www.toledoblade.com/ as their domain name. Personally, I would switch that to use The Blade as the title of the publication, and then include | to indicate the location of publication. (We normally omit an explicit location on newspapers if it's included in the name of the paper, but if it isn't, most style guides say it should be given. My hometown paper is The Mining Journal, and I have to add the "(Marquette, MI)" to differentiate it from the trade paper in London.)
  • An optional change to the title of the article from The Blade is to put it in Title Case instead of Sentence case. Your other two titles are given in Title Case (capitalizing the first word, the last word, all verbs and all words five letters or more) versus the Sentence case (only the first word and proper nouns capitalized) used on that article. You can alter the capitalization from what the source uses. In fact, APA style says that article titles should only be given in Sentence case in citations, and Chicago would tell you to give them in title case unless your publisher says otherwise. Our MOS doesn't have an explicit rule (although MOS:CT indicates a preference for Title Case) other than to be consistent in an article.
  • The other optional change to the article title would be to drop the periods in the "U.S. 24" to be consistent with the rest of the article. The AP Stylebook, which is the style guide used by newspapers, requires the periods in highway abbreviations like that, yet we don't use them on Wikipedia. (Only one state was using them, Arkansas, but {{jct}} was changed to drop them.) Again, Chicago's last edition has explicitly dropped the periods in "U.S.", and most of the rest of the world has stopped using them long ago. Our MOS already lists "US" first and "U.S." second, indicating that our in-house preference follows that usage. It's such a minor change, but it really does improve consistency in the article. And before you say it, no, you aren't required to exactly quote the newspaper's headline; you can tweak the formatting as long as you leave the words themselves alone.

I hope this is helpful. Imzadi 1979 → 21:50, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

• @Imzadi1979: Thanks for the suggestions. I'll try to look through the Blade archives for more info later, I just wanted to get this started. Also, I can't find anything to open MrSID files on the Mac, as they apparently pulled support for the Mac a long time ago. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 12:34, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Showing interchange types in the "major intersections" table.

@User:Imzadi1979 has twice reverted my edits showing interchange type for each grade-separated junction in the "major intersections" table. They argue that such information is "not needed for a generalist audience". We've had a similar discussion earlier, where they seemed OK with a bare reference to "interchange", just not the type. In fact, as this highway has different characteristics along its length, I also included "intersection" for each row that qualifies. They seemingly inconsistently were not bothered by this, as they did not remove those facts. I return to my earlier arguments: 1) The information is correct, 2) A generalist reader can see the words "SomeTypeOf interchange" and ignore it, 3) An interested reader might follow the link, or hover over it, if supported by browser and 4) WP:IDONTLIKEIT is not a valid, policy-based reason not to include non-trivial information about an article. --Chaswmsday (talk) 22:02, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

I don't like them either, but I'm not going to remove them; nor do I like the "intersection" notes. All too often, our notes columns get bogged down by people (generally speaking, I'm not calling you out Chaswmsday) feeling the need to add every single nugget of information they can find. When that happens, the destinations column, which IMHO is the most important column in the table, gets squeezed to about 10% of the table while the notes column takes up 40%. So let me be clear; I don't hate these "notes", but they would be better off as prose in the all-but absent RD. –Fredddie™ 03:46, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Freddie, thanks for having a civil discussion with me instead of just reverting. I consider intersection type an important fact about a junction, not a random "nugget". In fact, MOS:RJL specifically calls for the "design of an interchange" to be included as part of an interchange row's Notes. I'm not sure what you mean by 10% vs 40%. Visually on a mobile device? Visually on all devices? Amount of markup code devoted to a note vs to destinations?

Nonetheless, I have no issue covering such info under the Route description only. However, @Imzadi1979: does. Under Interstate 675 (Ohio), during a recent string of edits of this very type I was making to the RD, they added this snidely-worded comment: "note to editors: don't write this section as a regurgitation of the exit list. That style of writing is quite yawn-inducing for general readers. Instead, give them a sense of where the highway goes and what a driver would see along the way." I personally don't care for this type of prose, finding it often overly WP:FLOWERY, but I wouldn't remove it unless it's inaccurate or blatantly crosses the line into boosterism. Imzadi1979's comment was added just below a 2013 "expand the section" comment urging moving prose from Notes to the RD.

Imzadi1979, in this (US 24 in Ohio) article, seems to have no problem leaving standing a recently-added (as of this date) image with the caption "Part of the new 'Fort to Port' US 24 freeway in Ohio". The word "new" violates the MOS section "Relative time references"; while "Fort to Port" is a term undefined within the article. Yet not a peep.

So, between the catch-22 of following MOS guidelines or face being selectively reverted, then trolled by un-WP:CIVIL comments on Imzadi1979's part, I cannot assume good faith. Again, not directed specifically at you Freddie, mostly to Imzadi1979. --Chaswmsday (talk) 21:01, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

@Chaswmsday: three quick points are in order here. MOS:RJL doesn't require the notes to include the interchange type. It offers some suggestions for additional information in list in the notes, but nowhere does it use a "shall" signal to require any of them.

The second is that the RD section needs to describe the route of a highway. There is a lot more to the route of a highway than its interchanges. In fact, I'd say most of a freeway's length is not contained within the interchanges. Where the road goes, what it passes, and the directions it takes to get there are all integral to the route.

Following the second point, keep the description objective, and you won't have to worry about WP:FLOWERY. That guideline has to do with biased writing and using Wikipedia's voice to make claims. It would be against the guideline to call a highway segment "scenic", but it isn't puffery to say it has a scenic highway designation. Imzadi 1979 → 05:27, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks re: parameters in jctint

@Fredddie: Thanks again for this edit. I didn't see any errors on my end, but I could have sworn that township and lspan didn't play nice together when used in the same "jctint" row, maybe that was only when I used multiple locations; also that exit="null" was sometimes necessary. Glad to see these all work OK. Now if the template writers could just do away with "mile=none". I still get a broken table if I don't include this after an mspan. --Chaswmsday (talk) 00:19, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

The idea is that you should always have a milepost, so you have to specifically turn it off if you don't want it. –Fredddie™ 02:11, 21 July 2018 (UTC)