The SABRE Wiki needs your help!

We've got loads of pages on individual roads, the road networks in places, county road networks, highway authorities, junctions, bridges, crossings, ferries across both Britain and Ireland. Whilst some of the more obvious pages are looking reasonable, there's lots of pages that have only the basic information on them, and need expanding badly.

* I have had a look and did contribute a few route descriptions and stuff when it started up but look around and don't think there's any content I can improve.

The SABRE Wiki's Things To Do is full of things that needs doing, and that people can do with zero local knowledge. You can look around SABRE Maps in your local area and see if there's any defunct roads that are missing.

There's lots of knowledge that's locked up here on the forums, or in people's heads that aren't easy to get at, so please dive in.

* Isn't it like Wikipedia, and full of people who agenda-push?

Not at all - and we love original research! If you can fill in a route description, or simply date a junction improvement then please do.

As Steven says, there's probably plenty for you to do.

I remember a while ago I was looking at something on SABRE Maps out of curiousity, and found a whole slew of B-road changes in my local area! These had been totally missed by the Wiki at the time. You'd be surprised how you much you can learn for yourself just while messing about on the excellent maps.

There's more to do than just historical routes on the Wiki. I still really don't know much about the various models of street lights that you can see on the roads. I know concrete posts, popular in the 60s and 70s are reaching their end of life, and I've seen waves of wholesale lantern replacements on estates constructed around this era, but I'd like to know more about the specifics. I'd write about it myself except I don't know where to start in researching the subject!

I'd like to add that no knowledge of wiki code is necessary to take part.

If you go to edit a page and get put off by the swathes of odd heiroglyphics, just ignore them and type up what you have to say. We have an abundance of people capable of formatting pages who can look after that side of things; what we're short of is knowledgeable contributions.

Much better to contribute what you know than decide not to bother for a technical reason.

Perhaps you've taken a look at roads near you, and decided that they are all written up pretty well?

What about where you've been on Holiday?
Have you ever been to the Scottish Islands for instance?
If you have, then please take a look at the Island pages rating. Ideally all of these pages should be green, but as you can see most are still red. This means that they have only been given 1 or 2 stars out of 5. Some are perhaps deserving of more stars, if so, click the edit button at the top, scroll to the bottom and look for {{rating|2}}, simply adjust the number if you think the page is good enough. If not, try and improve the articles with your own knowledge.

Ok, so the Scottish Isles are a bit exotic? Take a look at Category:Birmingham the same rules apply. There's still lots of red pages, and even some black ones - that means they're really bad!

There are a few other pages like this already set up. If you can't find one for your area of expertise, but would like to help, please ask. We can either point you in the right direction or set up a new page for you!

As black ones are just unrated, there's some that are probably 2*. Rating pages is something that needs doing.

And it's not just roads - there's bridges/tunnels/ferries, places/primary destinations, service areas and junctions near you that are likely in need of improvement.

Can someone also help me find out why the "refreshLinks2" maintenance phase takes a minimum of fifteen minutes to run per edit when someone edits an A road page?

Seeing as this area is being neglected by most, I will start expanding a few roads in Ireland.

Thanks to everyone who's got (re)involved over the last few days - it's really appreciated.

Meanwhile, we're trying to work on things to make it even easier to see which articles in your local area need things added to them - watch this space!

In Wiki what does 'RAG Ratings' mean?

Red, Amber, Green- usually- to denote the status of the project. Red means project has not started, etc.

Many thanks - it makes sense.

My next question is what is the project?. Where do I find details?

It doesn't mean "project" per se, but they show the star ratings of pages within categories, so you can see which need most work very easily. Category:Bath shows what I mean.

Sorry yes- I meant in a more general sense of A project not THE. Anyway....

A section on how to even start using a wiki would be helpful for us old gits

At the bottom of the main page is a section called "Help and Things to Do", in which the first item is Help:Contents, which is a decent starting point.

Or, click "Help" on the left hand menu.

There's also the Sandbox for people to mess about with and see what it's all about.

Speaking as someone who has just gone back to the wiki, all I did was to search for a road I knew well, decided that I had something to add, clicked edit at the top of the article and made my changes. Before committing anything I clicked on Show Preview to ensure I wasn't screwing up the formatting.

I then tried another page and found that there was no content other than a single sentence. You can edit the page in the same way as before, just by adding the unformatted text you want to appear, but I decided to be bold, so I searched for a similar style page and clicked 'edit' to see how that was formatted.

It would appear there are many templates within the Wiki which will help you make a page look right, but that's a bit more advanced. However, just above the text box on the edit screen there is a series of formatting icons (a bit like the edit box for the forums) and some of the main templates are linked there.

As far as I can tell, there are two ways of creating entirely new pages. The first is to include the new page title on another page in double square brackets - [[New Page Title]]. Then save that page, click on the link which will appear in red, then click edit on that page and start writing.

The second is to search for the page title to check whether the page exists or a similar page exists. If it doesn't it will give you the option to start a new page which you can edit as before.

Whilst it is always worth checking whether a similar article exists, it is probably better to start a new page by means of an appropriate link from somewhere else - it avoids having an orphaned page which has no other pages linking to it.

Don't be afraid to try, the worst that can happen is that your change will need to be reversed if you've managed to 'break' something. But, as others have stated, there are others who know about the structure and format of the wiki who can tidy things up for you.

Cheers,

Simon

You can also simply enter the title into the URL:

http://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki/index.php?title=SomeBogusPageTitleDoNotSaveThis

and then hit create.