Talk:Maryland Route 769

Map was broken

Map was broken until 2026-01-26 when it was removed. Can a non-broken version be created?.Naraht (talk) 15:09, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

It isn't removed, it's just commented out, as you can see if you open the page in the source editor and view the infobox. The problem is that the map is generated by the template {{maplink-road}} as the "map" parameter in the infobox, but whoever put it there didn't include critical parameters, like zoom, latitude, longitude. Without those, the map is useless.

I just did some hunting on Google Maps. In the infobox I put in zoom 13, lat 38.9394, long -76.9353, and the infobox now shows a map that includes 769B and 769C, but you can't tell from the map. MD-769B is the nearest yellow road starting from the top of the "n" of Bladensburg (nearest to the Tilden Road label), oriented roughly 45°. MD-769C is the north-south yellow road directly beneath the lowercase "b" of Bladensburg. ~Anachronist (who / me) (talk) 22:01, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

I have reverted back to the map used prior to the 12 November 2022 edit, which was made using JWB. I have no idea what JWB was supposed to be doing, but I note that the primary effect of my revert is that the map we have shows the details of the Route 769 segments. Fabrickator (talk) 00:51, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Ah, good, that one is better. I wasn't aware that there was an older better version of the map. I think someone must have come along and tried to "standardize" the infoboxes. ~Anachronist (who / me) (talk) 01:31, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Yes, that's probably what happened. In November 2022 BMACS1002 used some sort of automated tool and didn't check that it failed to include required parameters, resulting in the map being broken for the past 3 years. ~Anachronist (who / me) (talk) 01:35, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

If you know how the maplink-road template works, you'll know its parameter defaults will link to whatever data in OpenStreetMap is tagged with the article's Wikidata ID, so that just putting in {{maplink-road}} will generate the correct map by default with the zoom and location automatically calculated, which saves the trouble of having to redraw the bitmap image every time a route changes.. trouble is, the system is notorious for not storing this data at times, and at other times trashing the data it already has, so oftentimes a map can show properly one year, and the next year any trace of it working gets erased. So beyond the band-aid fixes of reverting to the bitmap, y'all are left with 3 options for long-term solutions: remove that link between OSM and Wikimedia's servers, advocate for its fixing, or join the rest of the roadgeek community in telling Wikipedia to get bent and joining the AARoads Wiki, whose maps are much nicer than Wikipedia's anyways (I suggest the latter). BMACS1002 01:46, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

IIRC, there were about 900 articles that had been proessed by JWB, but it seems like it's a small fractionof them that might be affected by this problem. I don't know whether there's a better way to check for this. Fabrickator (talk) 09:56, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Other examples without a working map are Maryland Route 850, Maryland Route 854, Maryland Route 858, and Maryland Route 908. Fabrickator (talk) 02:28, 3 February 2026 (UTC)