tl;dr Driving directions are now considered obsolete and will be archived. This new project replaces them.
Okay, short update: In my estimation, the experiment of city location descriptions is a success.
I'm now working to implement this new scheme for all cities of ATS. With just me working, that'll still take at the very least a year to complete, probably longer. But writing city location descriptions is more efficient than writing driving directions. Thus, unlike driving directions, which always were going to need multiple contributors, it is possible for a single person to complete all city location descriptions eventually.
Even so, help is of course very welcome.
Contributing[]
If you'd like to give this a try yourself, please check out the following pages to learn how you can contribute:
The new help page details the style guidelines. They are not quite finished yet, but are probably good enough for use. I'd like to hear about any thoughts or difficulties you're having while working with the guidelines, so that we can improve them further.
The project page summarizes current status and future plans. Note that I generally don't "watch" city pages—there are just too many of them. So I might not necessarily become aware of your edits. Therefore, after you add location descriptions to a city, I'd ask you to please update the project page's "Status" section to show your work. You can also let me know of your plans in advance if you like, so that we can coordinate.
Future of driving directions[]
- Main article: Project:Driving directions#Sunsetting driving directions
With the introduction of city location descriptions, the existing pages for company driving directions are becoming obsolete. They will need to be marked accordingly, and pointers on company pages will also need to be adjusted. I've prepared templates for this, e.g. {{Driving directions project end}}. I plan to put these into place on all affected pages this November.
Even though driving directions are obsolete, they should not be deleted.
Keeping old content online is cheap, it provides a lot of value, and it honors the work of its contributors. However, I think we should move the old driving directions pages to a new naming scheme. In future, they likely won't be updated any more and will fall out of date. Additionally, they currently show up prominently in search results, which is always undesirable for obsolete and archived content.
Please consider the following alternatives for new names (using Chemso (Directions) as an example):
- Driving directions:Chemso
- Archive:Chemso (Directions)
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- Custom namespaces can provide an extremely clean solution to this problem.
- A custom namespace seems rather over-engineered for this purpose. Also, custom namespaces are apparently a finite resource on Fandom.
- Project:Driving directions/Chemso (= Truck Simulator Wiki:Driving directions/Chemso)
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- A series of subpages to Project:Driving directions is an obvious choice, and seems relatively clean as well.
- The "Project" namespace may be used for archiving content, although this is probably uncommon.
- This wiki's Project namespace currently sees little use.
- User:Nautofon/Driving directions/Chemso
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- Subpages to my own user page seem like a pretty bad idea here: While I may have founded the project, there were many contributors, and their work doesn't belong to me.
- User:Driving directions/Chemso
- User:Directions archive/Chemso
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- In the abstract, such user names don't make sense at all. (Who are "Ms. Directions" or "Mr. Archive"?)
- A new dedicated user account just for this purpose might be a good pragmatic compromise in case there is no consensus for any other option.
I'd appreciate your opinions on these options (or any others you come up with) in the comments below.