User blog:Nautofon/Driving Directions: Better Wiki Integration

tl;dr I'm working to move driving directions from their dedicated pages to new "Locations" sections in existing city articles.

As you may recall, I started working on splitting up the driving direction pages by state last fall. Once Wallbert went past the mark of 100 locations in total, keeping them all on a single page became unsustainable.

I soon realized that in theory, this should allow for better integration of driving directions into the rest of the wiki, because the split pages should have plenty of space for content other than driving directions. These should eventually be pages with names such as "Wallbert in Idaho". However, I've been struggling to come up with decent ideas to actually make these company-in-state pages pull their own weight. I mean, it seems like they would be a good spot for driving directions, but probably not too much else. And under this plan, there would eventually be hundreds of such pages. The question I asked myself was: What would a typical such page look like?

Well, it turns out, under this plan, a typical page like that would only contain driving directions for one (1) company location, and probably no other content.

That's right: When collating delivery locations by unique combinations of company and state, as this plan would have required, a whopping third of these combinations only has a single delivery location, resulting in a large number of almost empty pages. In total, three quarters of the pages would have four locations or less.

While organizing the driving directions in some geographic fashion clearly makes sense given how SCS keeps adding new content, the charts to the right show: Splitting the pages by state did solve the problem of pages with too large a number of locations (A), but it also created a new problem of too many pages with too small a number of locations (B). So this doesn't seem to be the solution we're looking for here.

Ideally, what we would want instead is a more even distribution, perhaps similar to a bell curve. Such a distribution is in fact possible to achieve (C). All we'd need to do is:

Organize driving directions by city!   (rather than by company)

Indeed, including directions or location descriptions on the existing city pages appears to offer several obvious advantages, for example:

• Likely to scale well with future map expansions
• Better integration with existing wiki content
• Easier to maintain an encyclopaedic writing style

The primary downside would appear to be the amount of work required to adapt existing content from driving direction pages to this new concept. But I believe this to be manageable.

The New Experiment

As next step, I intend to try this new idea by editing pages for a number of cities in Washington, beginning today with Aberdeen and Yakima.

I have a rough idea of how the result might look, but am not able to judge if this concept is viable until after I actually have tried it. And of course, some aspects of it may not work out like I expect them to. No way to know for sure beforehand. I'd expect this experimentation phase to last for a few weeks or so. After that, I hope to be in a position to present a conclusion in another blog post and—if all goes well—eventually move to implement it across the board.

Any feedback you might have is most welcome! I suggest to leave it as comment below this blog post.

For current status, see Project:City location descriptions.