These differences are due to the templates used. Northeast, Northwest, Plains, South Atlantic and Territories use RC/CommonRegion. Great Lakes, Mid Atlantic and New England use USA/CommonState. Southeast and South Central use neither.

With CommonState, local content can be interspersed among the default content by editing the transcluded subpages through the talk page. Otherwise, local content is just added directly to the region page, where it is displayed underneath the CommonRegion stuff, if that is used. It's easier to add localized guidance on a page that doesn't use CommonState, but CommonState may make the guidance display nicely, if one is willing to fill out the other necessary transcluded elements like the area manager table, community links and whatnot.

I'm not really sure which method better supports region-wide guidance. Seems sort of subjective. If a RC wanted to convert their guidance into CommonState, I wouldn't mind helping them to do that, though.

DwarfLord wrote:But what if I went to the SWR forum, offered the proposal, and it succeeded? What then?

Would I then have to put the different guidance in every single state page in the SWR?

There's got to be a better way.

You could put the guidance in the state pages or in the region page, or both. Different regions and states handle this differently. Whether a region page uses CommonState or CommonRegion makes no difference regarding this. Regional CommonState sections are not automatically transcluded in the pages of the states that make up the region, so if you want regional stuff to show on each state page, you have to add it individually. For example, GLR has special guidance on when to do certain things with URs. This guidance has been manually pasted into (not always the same) sections of the GLR pages and the pages of OH, WI, IN and IL (but not MI for some reason ). If you want to have a single source of regional guidance that can be updated for everyone, you can make a page anywhere and transclude it in all those pages, like {{:USA/Southwest/Special_guidance}}.

kentsmith9 wrote:DL, what states are you proposing get combined? What guidance is needing to be synced or is currently out of sync?

First, I want to stress that I speak only for California, and even in that there is a chance I may be mistaken about something. I feel I have a sense of what some regional coordinators think, but I cannot and do not speak for them.

Regarding what states I propose combining, I mean only the states that are already combined, i.e. our Waze regions. SWR, NWR, MAR, etc. That's what I meant by "region-wide"; I do NOT propose creating any new confederations of states beyond the ones we already have.

As to what guidance needs to be synced...not sure what you mean. I'll see if I can explain the situation better.

At present, the CommonRegion template does not make it easy for entire regions to set region-wide guidance. Instead, it is done at the level of CommonState. This means that, when national guidance is adopted with which entire regions may disagree, those regions must pursue a laborious and awkward process of confirming and inserting the departure in each state's CommonState template.

For example, it is currently national guidance that every location where planes land and take off often enough to be recognizable as an airstrip from aerial imagery, even if it is just two ruts hidden behind a row of private homes in a fly-in community — invisible and off-limits to the driving public — be categorized as an "Airport" for all Wazers to see in searches for same, and be mapped with an Area Place and a complete descriptive name for all Wazers to see on their displays. California disagrees, and has adopted different guidance.

I understand that the SWR RC and ARC support this change for California, and I strongly suspect other states in the SWR might support it as well. But what if I went to the SWR forum, offered the proposal, and it succeeded? What then?

Would I then have to put the different guidance in every single state page in the SWR?

There's got to be a better way.

Kartografer wrote:Different regions and states handle this differently. Whether a region page uses CommonState or CommonRegion makes no difference regarding this. Regional CommonState sections are not automatically transcluded in the pages of the states that make up the region, so if you want regional stuff to show on each state page, you have to add it individually.

Is it correct to say, then, that the US community has no unified convention for adding region-wide guidance, but that some regions have done so on an ad hoc basis that differs from region to region?

Next question is, should the US community establish a unified convention for handling region-wide guidance? Or, should each region continue to come up with their own approach separately and as necessary?

What he said!

DL, what states are you proposing get combined?

What guidance is needing to be synced or is currently out of sync?