Wikipedia UK railway stations format

[railfan99]

Who designed the excellent Wiki UK railway stations format?

Wiki seems to have recently slightly altered its layout, compressing the text into less (horizontally) of the page, but the information for each UK railway station is typically excellent.

I especially like how there's a few years of passenger statistics, even if the ORR double-counts, as it includes inwards and outwards journeys.

Hats off to whoever standardised the layout.

The historical information is also an excellent feature, along with the colums showing 'next station' in each direction on extant and closed lines.

'Dr Beeching' sadly features a lot, but that's history for you.

Some poor (group of) individual(s) have to go through once a year and manually update the patronage figures, I assume.

These give me a very good idea of which rural stations are extremely well used and which are far quieter.

I don't believe other countries have station information showing the extent of patronage information the UK ones feature on Wiki.

 

[zwk500]

Some poor (group of) individual(s) have to go through once a year and manually update the patronage figures, I assume.

I suspect one individual runs the spreadsheet through an API. It's unlikely to be people manually typing in each figure.

I don't believe other countries have station information showing the extent of patronage information the UK ones feature on Wiki.

Do other countries publish this data? I've just checked Dutch wiki for a couple of stations and they have usage figures but only from 2018.

It's Wikipedia, btw.

 

[D821]

I suspect one individual runs the spreadsheet through an API. It's unlikely to be people manually typing in each figure.

No, it's all updated manually when the ORR figures come out in November. It's a case of downloading The CSV file from ORR and getting stuck in with the editing. They're usually all done within a week of the figures coming out. The guidelines are to keep the figures to the last 5 years only, to avoid clutter on the page.

There is a user group (with usernames I recognise from here, occasionally) that decided the template. I'm sure one of them will post here shortly and explain their work.

 

[railfan99]

They're usually all done within a week of the figures coming out.

That's an amazing achievement given there's more than 2500 National Rail/Network Rail stations, if I am correctly describing these.

 

[D821]

That's an amazing achievement given there's more than 2500 National Rail/Network Rail stations, if I am correctly describing these.

Yes, it's really surprising how quickly they get done. There is quite a dedicated group that do it, I've just done bits here and there each year. I managed a couple of hundred done one year but then the next year I forgot to round the figures correctly so someone had to go back and fix my mistakes. Not my finest moment!

 

[zwk500]

Yes, it's really surprising how quickly they get done. There is quite a dedicated group that do it, I've just done bits here and there each year. I managed a couple of hundred done one year but then the next year I forgot to round the figures correctly so someone had to go back and fix my mistakes. Not my finest moment!

This is quite astonishing, not least because surely one of the group would be able to do the API work and make it smoother and more accurate?

 

[PGAT]

I’m not sure what goes on in the Wikipedia community, but I always try and do my part by updating the figures of some of my local stations as well as any timetable changes.

 

[D821]

This is quite astonishing, not least because surely one of the group would be able to do the API work and make it smoother and more accurate?

I guess so, perhaps as it's a once in a year event and there's great potential for messing up a lot of things it puts people off. Differences in the naming of stations between the CSV and wiki might cause problems. Nothing insurmountable, but more hassle for a once a year task, I suppose

 

[GRALISTAIR]

I am one of those who edit Wikipedia and I use the same name as I do here.

 

[Lampshade]

I suspect one individual runs the spreadsheet through an API. It's unlikely to be people manually typing in each figure.

I have manually updated them before, did 50ish when the 18/19 stats came out.

 

[GRALISTAIR]

Bit by bit, bots are being written by some editors that take the tediousness out of some edits.

 

[XAM2175]

This is quite astonishing, not least because surely one of the group would be able to do the API work and make it smoother and more accurate?

I guess so, perhaps as it's a once in a year event and there's great potential for messing up a lot of things it puts people off. Differences in the naming of stations between the CSV and wiki might cause problems. Nothing insurmountable, but more hassle for a once a year task, I suppose

There's no API for it. Everything has to be inserted either by hand using the WYSIWYG editing interface, or as plain text in Wikipedia's markup language. The preparation of the markup text can of course be automated in a number of different ways, but ultimately somebody is still copying and pasting the finished markup into the articles.

Not me though; I spend enough time wrangling large datasets at my actual job.

 

[GRALISTAIR]

My focus on Wikipedia (apart from a large number of chemistry/materials science articles) is electrification articles.

 

[D821]

I'll tend to focus on local developments and infrastructure, though I'm helping with the backlog of linting fixes a lot, lately.