Talk:U.S. Route 283 in Oklahoma

Improvement

I broke the redirect and made a specific article, but it needs improvement. A junction list is also needed. The U.S. Route 283 article does not show more information than what's here now. Aiden2121 (talk) 18:54, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

@Aiden2121: some comments are in order.

• If there isn't more content here than in the parent article, it's extremely premature to split this article out. Just simply building on this article by creating the junction list table would have been enough to justify splitting this out of U.S. Route 283. For now, do not be surprised if someone reverses you and converts this back to a redirect.
• A couple of basic pointers from the Manual of Style (MOS) are in order:
  • MOS:LAYOUT says that we use sentence case, and not title case, for section headings. This is also explained at WP:USRD/NEW, but put simply, the "d" in "Route description" is never capitalized. Ditto the "l" in "Junction list" and the "a" in "See also".
  • Entries listed in a "See also" section should not already be linked elsewhere in the article. U.S. Route 283 is linked in the hatnote at the top of the article, so it shouldn't be repeated in the SA section.
  • The SA section is also the appropriate place to put a link to U.S. Roads portal, a Featured Portal as well as Oklahoma portal. Portals and under-utilized, but if we link to them more often, readers will start to find the and read them. (Readership for the Michigan Highways portal jumped once it was linked from every appropriate article.)
  • Articles should be assigned to categories. Currently, this article is uncategorized.
• I don't think it is really necessary to subdivide the RD section into three subsections when it only has three paragraphs. Such subdivision should be reserved when there are going to be several paragraphs per subsection.
• RDs are the easiest sections to footnote, yet you have no references in the entire article. Pull out your paper copy of the current Oklahoma map and map out the driving directions in Google Maps (in hybrid satellite view, not the regular view) and you have two perfectly good footnotes to put at the end of every paragraph of the RD, assuming every detail can be found on those maps.
• The lead has a few issues of its own.
  • Oklahoma is a "highway state", not a "route state". By that, I mean they call them "state highways" and not "state routes". Typically, they would also call this a "U.S. Highway", not a "U.S. Route". It's perfectly fine for the article to be titled "U.S. Route 283 in Oklahoma" and then refer to it as "U.S. Highway 283" in the text. After all, we title it "Bill Clinton", but call him "William Jefferson 'Bill' Clinton" in the first sentence of that article.
  • After the first mention of the subject of this article, you should place the abbreviation in parentheses. The parentheses are not in bold, but the abbreviation should be. Also, you should use the same abbreviation as {{jct}} is using, which means dropping the periods in the "U.S. 283" and using a hyphen. Such inconsistency is quite sloppy.
  • When giving a location followed by the state where it is located in running text, the state name must be followed by a comma unless there is other punctuation there. In other words: "from Brady, Texas to Lexington, Nebraska." needs a comma after "Texas", but not after "Nebraska" because "Nebraska is followed by the period that ends the sentence.
  • "730 mile" is formatted wrong, and actually should not appear in this article. "203.7 miles" should have a metric conversion given, which you can do with {{convert|203.7|mi|km}} giving 203.7 miles (327.8 km).
  • "U.S. Highways, Interstate Highways, and Turnpikes in Oklahoma, with US 283 highlighted in red" is a very wordy caption for the map. It also leaves out the fact that the state highways are also shown. You'd have been much better off with just "US 283 highlighted in red" or even "Map of Oklahoma with US 283 highlighted in red"
• "U.S. Route 283 enters Oklahoma from Vernon, Texas. It continues north into Elmer, where it intersects Highway 5. U.S. 283 then intersects U.S. Route 62, which is with Highway 6 and Highway 44." that should be, once you add the missing abbreviation to the lead:
  • "US-283 enters Oklahoma from Vernon, Texas. It continues north into Elmer, where it intersects State Highway 5 (SH-5). US-283 then intersects US-62/SH-6/SH-44."
  • Use the abbreviations you've introduced, use the correct name for the State Highway, and introduce its abbreviation. Then you can use the normal slash formatting to join the concurrent highways together. Also, any time we have a highway's number joined with a space to either the spelled out type (State Highway 5) or the abbreviation (which doesn't apply to OK because of the hyphens), you should use a non-breaking space  

Add all of this to the missing content that doesn't really expand upon the other article, and personally I'd have redirected it back already. However, I'm taking the time to teach you some things in the hopes that you'll learn and improve this article.

Also, this is not Start-Class for USRD. If you read WP:USRD/A, you'll see that that we assess based on article sections for the lower classes. Since this only has one of the Big Three (Route description, History, Junction list), it is Stub-Class, regardless of how much text it has. I will reassess it accordingly. Imzadi 1979 → 05:13, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Since this has been left for over a week without any attentions to address any of the suggested improvements, and \Aiden2121 already said that this doesn't expand upon the content in the other article, I've redirected it back. When someone wants to spend the time to add more content to differentiate this from the parent article, then we can justify splitting out this article. Imzadi 1979 → 07:52, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

@Aiden2121: will you be adding a history section at any point? Will you be adding a junction list table? If the answer is no, then past precedent is against this remaining a stand-alone article. In the past, we had several state-detail articles for Interstates or U.S. Highways that consisted only of a lead, infobox and junction list. They did little to expand upon the content in the parent, national-detail article, and they were redirected. Here we have a similar situation, where the article has a lead, infobox, and an RD section that does little to expand upon the parent article. Please let us know if you have any intentions of expanding the article. If not, it just means the project gets to carry around another unreferenced article that duplicates existing content in another article.

Another option is to create your article at Draft:U.S. Route 283 in Oklahoma, take your time there to flesh out parts of the article, and then move it over. Imzadi 1979 → 00:09, 29 October 2014 (UTC)