Category talk:Highways

Naming

• In looking at Wikipedia [1], it calls state highways in Alabama "State Routes", as in "Alabama State Route 75" instead of Alabama Highway 75. I know locally we call them Highway 75, Highway 280, etc. What should be the standard? Also on this category page we have Highway 280 and Highway 31, should we go with the "U.S. Highway xxx" or the "U.S. Route xxx" format used on Wikipedia [2]? I am just wondering because a good number of my bank articles refer to US Highway 280, etc. --Wheresdib 07:04, 12 October 2006 (PDT)

• The main difference between us and Wikipedia is that we don't want to disambiguate between Alabama state highways and Mississippi state highways. I started out thinking it would be nice to just use the most common name for the main article (with redirects from alternate names), but it turns out that doesn't work so well when we have US highways and state highways with the same number. At this point, following Wikipedia style may be the way to go and I apologize for setting a poor precedent. --Dystopos 08:08, 12 October 2006 (PDT)

• Wikipedia recently adopted standards for state highways. In summary, Wikipedia articles about Alabama state highways are to be titled "Alabama State Route X," while a simple "State Route X" is used to refer to them in the text (unless the state would be ambiguous, which is unlikely here at BhamWiki). I propose we use this standard here.

According to Wikipedia, "U.S. Route" is used more often in federal law and committe reports, but "the use of U.S. Route or U.S. Highway on a local level depends on the state." It's not official research, but just doing Google searches limited to "site:al.us" for the terms returns 20+ results "U.S. Route", but 1000+ for "U.S. Highway." My personal feeling is that "highway" is also used much more often by the local populace than "route."

I therefore propose articles about such stretches of road be titled "U.S. Highway X", with redirects created for "Highway X", "US Highway X", and "U. S. Highway X". Furthermore, I propose articles open with something like "U.S. Highway X (also known as U.S. Route X)". Please feel free to blow my proposals out of the water if you disagree, I just figured we needed to start somewhere.

--Lkseitz 08:36, 12 October 2006 (PDT)

• That seems pretty reasonable to me. --Dystopos 10:09, 12 October 2006 (PDT)

• I completely agree that we should use the "Highway" reference opposed to "Route", especially when referring to an address such as "1234 U.S. Highway 280. Addresses in Birmingham are not listed as "1234 U.S. Route 280" and more often than not just say "Highway 280" or "U.S. 280". The local venacular is fine to use as long as we are referencing the standard format (Route), as Lkseitz recommended. I just wish that Wikipedia had gone with "Highway" for Alabama instead of "Route". --Wheresdib 10:48, 12 October 2006 (PDT)

• (Boy, this is getting long.) Okay, after further consideration I'd like to reverse myself on the state highway/route issue. (Just call me Mr. Vacillator.) While I think we all look to Wikipedia for inspiration and guidance, BhamWiki is free to chart its own course to better serve the local community. I applied the same Google search as above on the state issue and discovered "state highway" is more common than "state route." Furthermore, I think having a consistent policy for both U.S. and state highways would make it easier on contributors. So I'd say we should apply the same policy to state highways as the one I gave above for U.S. highways. Where state and U.S. highways share a number, the "Highway X" page should be a disambiguation page instead of a redirect page. --Lkseitz 15:31, 12 October 2006 (PDT)

• This also seems reasonable to me, and I would like to personally defend vacillation as a lifestyle. --Dystopos 16:02, 12 October 2006 (PDT)

• Short and sweet: This means that we can say create a stub for Highway 75 instead of having to say State Highway 75 or Highway 280 instead of U.S. Highway 280? Then do redirects to the actual page which we will name U.S. Highway X or Alabama State Highway X, and disambiguation pages only for those that overlap? --Wheresdib 16:53, 12 October 2006 (PDT)

• More or less. You've got the disambiguation part. And yes, Highway 75 would be created as a redirect page. (Typically after an Alabama State Highway 75 article is created.) For clarity, I would suggest using either State Highway 75 (or Alabama State Highway 75) the first time you reference it in an article (and thus when you link it). Subsequent uses, however, could simply say Highway 75. That's just my opinion. --Lkseitz 18:42, 12 October 2006 (PDT)

Just a much belated FYI. At some point I discovered that Alabama DOT does not use numbers already used by U.S. highways within the state when numbering state highways. So there will be no conflicts. However, I still believe we should maintain our current adopted policy. --Lkseitz (talk) 09:27, 27 December 2014 (PST)

Category naming

Okay, I modified the only two articles related to our discussion here (U.S. Highway 31 and U.S. Highway 280) as proscribed and created all the redirect pages. (It turns out there were already some links to Highway 31 that weren't working because the correct redirect pages didn't exist yet.) So my next question is do we need to rename the existing categories (Category:Alabama Highway 25, Category:Alabama Highway 75, Category:Highway 31, Category:Highway 280), to duplicate the article naming convention we're establishing? I'd say yes, but wanted input before I tackled that. And only Dystopos can delete categories. --Lkseitz 09:27, 16 October 2006 (PDT)

• It makes sense that the category names would fall prey to the same demands as the article names (just don't change Category:UAB). --Dystopos 09:51, 16 October 2006 (PDT)