The Roads Project had a number of adversaries, but the chief rival is a group known as the New Page Patrol, or the NPP for short. The NPP has a singular mission. When a new page goes up on Wikipedia, it gets reviewed by the NPP. The Patrol has special editing privileges and if a new article doesn’t meet the website’s standards, the NPP takes it down.

I love this.

The Wikipedia platform is designed for interoperability. If you want to start your own Wiki, you can split off and take your Wikipedia work with you, a process known as “forking.” It’s happened before for similar reasons. One of the more significant forks was a Pokémon battle. Pikachu and Squirtle are culture icons, and they get their own pages. But by 2005, Wikipedia had amassed articles about lesser characters, and the website came together and decided that only the best and brightest Pokémon warrant a dedicated article. 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.

I. Fucking. LOVE THIS.

Thank you for introducing me to this glorious internet kerfuffle. I love this and I love you for showing it to me.

This issue is interesting in a generic sense - I have no particular interest in US roads, but the balance issue is difficult as editors are not evenly distributed - for example there are many articles about train stations in europe, but the level of detail is far from balanced wrt their relative importance ). Which leads to my question - did anybody consider a fediverse (decentralised) model of wikipedia whereby the community of interconnections gradually evolves, so inclusion / exclusion is less binary ?