Wikipedia improvement

[jagged ben]

Hi guys,

This is general solicitation, for folks who may be interested, to improve and create various railroad related pages on Wikipedia. I've noticed that a lot of railroad info on the site is of poor quality or (more often) is badly organized.

I just added the Double-stack car page to the site, having noticed that there was no such page and that stack cars were, rather incorrectly, only discussed as a type of gondola.

I'm also interested myself in improving the Intermodal freight transport page.

I think it would be great if someone created a Spine car page, as no such page exists and spine cars weren't even mentioned on the intermodal page until I added a mention yesterday. Perhaps there's someone here who considers himself an expert?

You may also want to check out the pages for various railroads that you are a fan of. I've noticed that the history section of the UP page, for example, is not well done.

If you don't want to mess with Wikipedia editing but have suggestions, post them here. It would also be great to list good books or magazine articles that can serve as references on Wikipedia.

(Incidentally, I won't be defending Wikipedia here from the various criticisms that have been leveled against it. Suffice to say that it's becoming quite popular among people I know and so I think it should be as good as it can be, and that's why I'm soliciting participation.)

[Triplex]

I don't go there as often as I used to, but I have worked on many rail articles - I suppose principally diesel locomotives. I guess I should get back to work.

I'd like to add a request for help with the Dieselisation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia page. I wrote a lot of that but never organized it well, and I'd really like some more knowledgeable people to confirm or deny the information.

[slambo]

Among the participants here are some Wikipedia admins like myself, the primary maintainer of the Trains portal. When I first started editing in 2004, the rail content there was exceptionally sparse. There are more than 16,000 articles about rail related topics now and more are getting added all the time. At the NMRA convention in Anaheim, I'll be presenting a clinic about progress in WikiProject Trains (my notes are also on the wiki).

There's a large amount there, and there's an enormous amount of data that still needs to be added and referenced. We have a quick list of article topics that have not yet been started in case you need some more ideas on where to help.