Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Road junction lists - Wikipedia

This style guide provides the foundation for creating, editing and maintaining road junction lists across Wikipedia articles. Most road articles should use a table to indicate junctions. There are cases, such as a major transcontinental highway with parent and section-detail articles, where only a partial junction list, in a list form, is appropriate.

As road design, jurisdiction and construction techniques vary significantly around the world, so do junctions and signing standards. While this document has been developed to provide a basis for a uniform presentation of road junction information, not all information is applicable to all roads in all regions. Thus, certain provisions of this guideline are noted as being for optional use. In some cases, this Manual of Style page presents different methods of expressing the same thing. When creating or editing junction lists for a particular country or state, check with an appropriate road-related WikiProject for that region. The various projects may have adopted practices or preferences regarding some of the optional provisions presented below.

These should be formatted as a hierarchical list consisting of the shields and names of intersecting highways and locations.

Generally, the following columns should appear from left to right in the following order:

• Geographic columns should be used to orient the location of a junction along the path of the roadway. These will vary based on the country that the highway is in, and may not be applicable in all countries. These should be formatted so one cell expands across the rows for all junctions within a geographic entity. If the roadway only passes through one geographic location, the column(s) should be omitted and a note placed above the top of the column. These columns may be omitted entirely if there is not consensus on what subdivisions to use. The locations should be wikilinked. Examples of these column types are:
  • State subdivision: The subdivision of the country, state or province within which the junction lies. Title the column with an appropriate term—region, county, district, prefecture, parish (as in Louisiana), borough (as in Alaska), or equivalent.
  • Location: The municipality or equivalent within which the junction lies, whether it be a town, city, or village. If the location is indeterminable, or if the junction lies in unincorporated territory, this should be left blank. If the route passes through an independent city or a consolidated city-county, do not repeat the location in both columns, instead have an entry which spans both columns.
• mi or km: The measured location of the junction. If no source is available, and the road uses a distance-based exit numbering system, then this column may be left out in favor of the exit number column. For lists in some geographic areas, other terminology may be used in accordance with alternate distance-measuring systems. The preferred practice is to use both columns with one measurement system as the primary distance, but some situations may require only one column.
• Exit or Junction: This column is for use on grade-separated roadways that have numbered interchanges. The column lists the number of the exit/junction. If old and new numbers exist, these should be presented as two columns, "Old" and "New".
• Interchange name: This column should follow the exit/junction column for highway systems which have named interchanges. Use only if the interchange names are in common usage in the region and are not purely ceremonial names.
• Destinations: Locations and roads as presented on guide signs for the junction. Other locations should not be listed unless that location is extremely notable and well known; an entry in the notes column such as "Serves Missouri State University" can be used. Routes not indicated on the guide signs may be included in parentheses.
• Notes: Any additional notes about the interchange or terminus, such as the design of an interchange, special circumstances such as missing ramps, concurrency termini, opening date, or additional locations that do not merit inclusion in "Destinations".

To comply with MOS:DTT, and promote accessibility on the part of our readers who use assistive technology like screen readers, tables or the templates used to create tables shall use: !scope="col"|<column name> (or the HTML equivalent) as the code to create column headers. Furthermore, each row of the table shall use !scope="row" style="text-align: right;"|<table data> (or the HTML equivalent) for the primary distance number. To keep the cells right-aligned, use class="wikitable plainrowheaders" (or the HTML equivalent) in the header coding.

The use of colored backgrounds in the table is optional. If a list includes backgrounds, a key below the table must be included. Color should not be the only method to impart the information. For the benefit of colorblind readers or persons using screen readers, the Notes column must include the information. The following table lists the standardized colors with standardized meanings. Additional colors may be used to supplement the standard colors below. These colors must be compliant with this guideline and WP:COLOR, and they must be included in the key below the table. The template keys listed below are built into {{Jctbtm}}.

A standardized table footer template has been implemented with {{jctbtm}}. The necessary color keys can be individually specified using the |keys= parameter as described in the template documentation. Both templates close the wikitable syntax and generate a conversion key. This conversion key is required on all tables unless both miles and kilometers are listed on the table. Samples of this key are used in the examples section below.

• Example 1, no colors:

1.000 mi = 1.609 km; 1.000 km = 0.621 mi

• Example 2, all colors:

• Example 3, some colors:

The following items should be included or excluded in tables on grade-separated highways.

Include

• All grade-separated interchanges, without exception
• Concurrencies
• Toll barriers, major water bodies, major bridges and tunnels; if possible, wikilink to the article on the bridge or tunnel concerned. These should be represented with a multi-column row. Ideally this should span the Exit/Junction, Destinations and Notes columns, allowing the distance where the barrier is located to appear to the left.
• Service areas; if multiple exist, limit those displayed to those of historical or other significance or notability. These should span the Exit/Junction, Destinations and Notes columns as above.

Exclude

• Crossings with other highways where no interchange between the highways exists
• Proposed or future interchanges that have not reached the construction phase. Do not add future exit numbers without a reliable source such as signing plans.

• Text in the tables must comply with other provisions of the MoS, specifically regarding boldface, italics and all-caps. Junctions shall be formatted in the following general pattern: "(route marker) (number of intersecting road, name of intersecting road, or both) (direction)".
• If route marker graphics are used, generally, they should have a height of 20–25px.
  • Route marker graphics should always appear at the beginning of the line, per the principle behind Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Icons#Do not use icons in general article prose: "Icons should not be used in the article body...This breaks up the continuity of the text, distracting the reader."
  • Use of marker images should be limited to the Destinations column(s) only.
  • Any highway designation represented by the graphic shall be represented in text as part of the name or number listed for the roadway.
• The highway designation, any applicable names or both shall be linked as appropriate to an article on the intersecting roadway.
  • List the predominant name or number first followed by any alternate names in parentheses. In the United States, the primary identification for a road is any highway designation given and signed by the state departments of transportation or a county agency, so they should be listed as SR 1 (Pacific Coast Highway) not Pacific Coast Highway (SR 1). The reverse is true in Australia, so those references should be formatted Reid Highway (State Route 3) not State Route 3 (Reid Highway). This variation shall be determined on a regional basis for consistency across a set of articles for a jurisdiction such as a single country or major subnational subdivision.
  • If the agency responsible for the highway system of a road appearing in the junction list abbreviates the name of that type of highway in its official documents, use that abbreviation (e.g. I-59, not Interstate 59). If no official abbreviation exists, an abbreviation commonly used by the general public can be substituted instead. If there is no abbreviation in use by either the road agency or the public, use the full name with no abbreviation. Such abbreviations shall also be introduced in the prose of the article for reader clarity.
  • Any disambiguation or other alteration to the article title for Wikipedia administration purposes should be dropped; use A1 or I-40, not A1 road (Great Britain) or Interstate 40 in Arkansas.
  • Where names appear in the junction list, type designators such as "Street", "Road", or "Highway" should be spelled out in full, not abbreviated. Use First Street or Maple Road, not First St. or Maple Rd. as not all abbreviations for such are universally used or widely known.
• Cardinal directions designating the direction of travel a highway follows must be entirely lowercase per Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Capital letters#Compass points: "Directions such as north are not proper nouns and do not take capitals." These directions shall not be abbreviated. Example: M-28 east not M-28 East or M-28 E. Directions may be expanded to read as northbound instead of north as needed.
  • Directional prefixes or suffixes that are not part of the road's actual name may be abbreviated according to common usage (e.g. both Southeast 44th Street or SE 44th Street are acceptable). Any abbreviations should be applied consistently, on at least a city-wide level. Such prefixes and suffixes take capitals, as they are part of the street's full title.
  • Street names that contain cardinal directions that are not a directional prefix or suffix shall not be abbreviated (e.g. North Star Road, not N. Star Road, assuming the road is named after the North Star; Southwest Boulevard, not SW Boulevard).
  • Colloquialisms for road names shall not be used (e.g. in a Utah-style street numbering grid, use 800 West, not 8th West).
• If there are two exits in an interchange, one for each direction of the crossing road, they should generally be combined into one row, unless this would complicate matters.
  • If the two exits have different numbers, that should be noted in the notes column, for example "signed as exits 1A (north) and 1B (south) eastbound", in a case where only the eastbound freeway has the split.
  • If two interchanges with different roads have the same number with different lettered suffixes, they generally should not be combined.
• There is no preference for how to denote the endpoints of concurrencies in the notes column (e.g. Eastern terminus of SR 1 concurrency or East end of SR 1 overlap); however, only one style should be used in an article's junction list.
  • Cardinal directions are adjectives here, so north or northern may be used, but not both.
  • End and terminus are interchangeable, as are concurrency and overlap, but only one of each term should appear.

Below are eight examples of junction lists designed according to the above standards. Depicted are a section of the Interstate 75 summary article, a portion of Interstate 275 (Michigan), the lists for Ontario Highway 402, M5 motorway, and Oklahoma State Highway 88, and portions of A20 motorway (Netherlands), the Tomei Expressway, and Kwinana Freeway respectively.

Florida

  I-595 in Davie, Florida

  I-275 near Parrish, Florida

  SR 60 near Brandon, Florida

rows omitted

Georgia

   US 84 / US 221 in Valdosta

  US 41 northwest of Valdosta. The highways travel concurrently to Hahira.

  US 82 in Tifton

rows omitted

Tennessee

   US 41 / US 76 in East Ridge

  I-24 on the East Ridge–Chattanooga city line

   US 11 / US 64 in Chattanooga. The highways travel concurrently to north of Collegedale.

rows omitted

The following table lists the major junctions along Highway 402, as noted by the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario. 

Note: A few junctions in this example have been geotagged; however, there is no consensus on how to implement geotagging on roads articles. If including geographical coordinates, use {{Coord}} for each set; and one instance of {{GeoGroup}} per page. See WP:COORD for more information.

Coordinate list

The entire route is in Rogers County.

The entire route is in South Holland.