Why Wikipedia’s Highway Editors Took the Exit Ramp

After they seceded, they made their own wiki.

Wikipedia, road infrastructure, and drama—one of these things doesn’t sound like the other. But when Ben, also known as bmacs001, posted a TikTok video promising to “spill the tea” on how the site treats road and highway articles, the Wikipedia contributor suspected that people would find the topic intriguing: “Forty of Wikipedia’s most prolific editors have seceded and made their own wiki, and I’m among them.”

Ben was part of the contingent of Wikipedia editors who contributed to the site’s pages covering road and highway infrastructure—everything from Interstate 80 and Route 66 to tinier highways on the side of the Jersey Shore. “We’ve been chugging along doing our own thing on the ’pedia for the past two decades now, but in the past couple of years, our little corner of the site has come under attack,” Ben said. Faced with so much hostility, Wikipedia’s highway enthusiasts felt they had no choice but to break away and form a separate project: AARoads Wiki.

With over 800,000 views and counting, the nearly four-minute TikTok video is a testament to how even extremely niche topics gain visibility on the platform. As the post’s top comment put it, “I’m so here for interstate Wikipedia drama.” But behind this seemingly amusing clash of nerds is a far more pressing issue: how to reconcile 20 years of Wikipedia’s core principles and values with the practical demands of present circumstances.

Before diving into the nuances of the Wiki-policies, it’s worth pointing out a distinction among the Wiki-people. There are railfans—train enthusiasts whose (at times) obsessive interest has been highlighted in TV shows and documentaries. On Wikipedia these railfans tend to improve the site’s articles on freight and high-speed rail lines, or public transportation options like the subway. But there is another subspecies: so-called roadgeeks. Ben (who uses they/them pronouns and requested that their surname not be published) pointed out that these two types of users have somewhat different motivations. Roadgeeks are drawn toward the immediacy of the subject matter—since many users drive on roads every day—while railfans gravitate toward the historical aspect, since locomotives aren’t nearly as common as they once were. Then again, what’s true in the United States does not necessarily hold true for countries where rail travel is more prevalent. Ben suspected that many European and U.K. Wikipedians who are railfans would likely be more drawn to roads if they lived in the U.S., suggesting that the railfan-roadgeek spectrum is in part a function of culture.