Talk:Riverboat

Cleanup

I've just tagged the article for cleanup. It is generally unorganized, and mostly serves just a hook for too many images. The intro is ok, but the rest in incoherent, and much is missing. The history section is currently useless. --Stephan Schulz 15:09, 3 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I consider your characterization "incoherent" to be insulting to the contributing editors and contrary to good Wikipedia manners. If you don't the current stat of the article, quietly rewrite it. - Leonard G. 20:45, 5 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry. It's not meant to be an insult, but I could not make out any form of organization, either by type, by history, or by some other criterion. While I'm reasonable competent about boats and shipping, I'm not enough of an expert to exactly know what belongs under the term (ancient Egyptian reed boats? Coracles? Anything that floats on a river? Or is this a technical term, like keelboat restricted to certain types of vessel?). I'm willing to help, but someone with a coherent vision has to find the proper structure. --Stephan Schulz 20:59, 5 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A riverboat is in its broadest sense a vessel used for transport of persons or goods along a river, usually reflected in a specialised design for both the operating and economic environment and the nature of the goods transported. Many of the images in the article show one of these many types, and were in fact the inspiration for my initial creation of the article. I consider these images to be intrinsic to the article. The structure of the original article was organized about these types of craft and this structure has persisted through subsequent addtions. Other images and text at the bottom of the article were subsequently added by others. The recent image size problems came from unknown server-side changes, so I placed them in galleries as a temporary fix. I have no hint as to why a hydrofoil image was removed, since it is one of the unique types specific to this catagory. Please continue your comments so that we may improve the article. Best wishes, Leonard G. 15:46, 6 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I took it out because in my opinion there are too many images and not enough explanation. If we take your definition of riverboat, we need to make this into a summary article (following WP:SUMMARY), or else it will become much to long. Given the material that is there at the moment, maybe we should rather restrict it at the moment to powered vessels? Then we could start with a general description, then have a section on historical developments, and finally go to different modern types. And I think the Venice Vaporetto and maybe the Amsterdam boats have to go (no rivers involved). --Stephan Schulz 16:42, 6 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Images to galleries

There has been some server change which messed up side by side images (resizing is lost), so I moved the images to galleries for now - Leonard G. 15:24, 3 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

History section

Maybe the history section should be sectioned by country? At any rate, I'll see what I can do about expanding it. Obviously, riverboats have a much wider history than just Northern British Columbia, (although what I'll be adding will only be on the BC sternwheelers). Perhaps someone else can add sections on the history of riverboats in other countries. For the US, I would think we particularly need information on the Mississippi riverboats and maybe some from Oregon?CindyBo ^talk 21:23, 10 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oregon Steamboats

Riverboats alone is such a huge topic, probably the best you can do is break it down by country and areas within the country. Whole books for instance have been written about the Mississippi/Ohio/Missouri riverboats. My tiny little contribution is Steamboats of the Columbia River and that is proving to be a very big project indeed.Mtsmallwood (talk) 20:07, 9 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A riverboat is a vessel used on the Mississippi

I found this page and thought: Riverboat? strange... I also noted the page has almost no references. I then tried to look up the term riverboat on Google books. The results were surprising: searching for "river boat" books from the 19th century gives only about 200 results. "Riverboat" from the 19th century gives less than 50! These limited results center on vessels on the Mississippi River.

I then looked for "Riverboat" and 20th century and got more results, but now the picture was a bit different. The results were still mainly about the Mississippi delta, but now the focus is on the gambling industry. There were also some results for small boats on the Yukon river.

So, riverboat was originally a word for passenger and freight vessels on the Mississippi. Later is was appropriated for recreational vessels, primarily those used for gambling. This explains:

That the Cambridge Dictionary riverboat is 'a large passenger boat that travels up and down a river'.
That the American merriam-webster riverboat] is 'a boat for use on a river' (Note a boat, not a ship or a barge)

So, a riverboat is 'A large passenger boat for recreational use on the rivers of the Mississippi basin and some other American rivers. Historically it was used to designate freight vessels on these waters.'

Not convinced? Search Google images for 'riverboat'!Grieg2 (talk) 14:52, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This is a peculiar article and, as noted, hardly referenced at all. To my BrEng ears, "Riverboat" ≠ "River boat" - the former, as might be expected, is close to the Cambridge def above. The Mississippi-type is best known, but they exist on most large rivers (Amazon, Niger, Yangtze, Rhine etc etc) and often carry goods as well as passengers. "River boat" is really any kind of boat that is suitable for use on a river (and best not to infer any clear demarcation between boat/ship/barge as the boundaries and overlaps are somewhat fuzzy and inconsistent anyway). - Davidships (talk) 21:25, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]