To-day I became acquainted with the idea of a musical road. When you drive over a rough patch of road, you’ll feel a rumble. Some clever people found that you could cut grooves into the asphalt in such a way that they would produce vibrations at different pitches when driven over. A musical road is a section of road with strips laid in such a way as to produce a musical tune when you drive over it. There are several musical roads in different countries around the world.

Anyhow. The Wikipedia article for Musical road contains a passage which amuses me, concerning a musical road in France which was supposedly paved over:

As of 2022, if one looks at boulevard Laurent and Danielle Casanova near the intersection with Chem. du Pont des Marais via Google Maps’ street view, the rumble strips installed on the road which played the song can still be clearly seen, suggesting that the musical road is still functioning.

Why does this amuse me? In one unwieldy paragraph you can see one writer’s beautiful struggle with Wikipedia’s guidelines for encyclopaedic writing.

The writer probably saw the preceding paragraph, the one about the French musical road being paved over, and wanted to issue a correction: Actually, it’s still there! Perhaps she lived near it.

Wikipedia has a No Original Research policy. If the writer couldn’t justify that the musical road was still there using a reliable published source, her contribution would be mercilessly deleted. So she had to justify Actually, it looks like it’s still there with some sort of reliable published source.

One problem—she couldn’t find mention of the current state of the road in any reliable published source on the Internet, because it’s really that obscure.

Ah! Google Maps! Google Maps is reliable, is it not? If she could find it on Google Maps, then that would be justification enough, no? Find a good view on Google Maps. Further, further … stop! This view! It’ll do. Then she probably drafted something like

If you look at boulevard Laurent and Danielle Casanova near the intersection with Chem. du Pont des Marais via Google Maps’ street view, you can still see the rumble strips installed on the road which play the song.

There’s a well-researched sentence! But hmm. Doesn’t sound encyclopaedic enough. Better change the personal you to an impersonal one, and chuck in an As of 2022 in there for good measure.

As of 2022, if one looks at boulevard Laurent and Danielle Casanova near the intersection with Chem. du Pont des Marais via Google Maps’ street view, one can still see the rumble strips installed on the road which play the song.

Okay now there are too many ones and it sounds stilted and noncommittal. Cast it in the past tense to get rid of the second one. Add the clause “suggesting that the musical road is still functioning” so it doesn’t come on too strong.

And now the sentence, a palimpsest of discovery, looks like

As of 2022, if one looks at boulevard Laurent and Danielle Casanova near the intersection with Chem. du Pont des Marais via Google Maps’ street view, the rumble strips installed on the road which played the song can still be clearly seen, suggesting that the musical road is still functioning.

Which still doesn’t read like a Wikipedia entry, particularly with the remaining one in there, but whatever, it’s getting late, just edit the page and publish.