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Coordinates in ship infoboxes

Could you guys weigh in on this? I'm of the opinion that since coordinates are easily put at the top right corner of the article, above all article content, like on USS Arizona (BB-39), it's redundant to place coordinates in the infobox. TomTheHand 13:33, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

I have to agree with that. How many ships are there for which this would be relevant anyway? Only a very small proportion of the total number of ship articles we have here, that's for certain, so I think it makes far more sense to use the existing abilities. Martocticvs 17:32, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
I agree. I think it's good to have coordinates for shipwrecks or museum ships, but there's no need to clutter up the infobox with it when the coordinate template already supports putting the coordinates in the page header. TomTheHand 17:36, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
Someone's put the coordinates in the infobox on HMS Victory. I saw that before I saw this debate, and wasn't too happy with it. It's a snowball of information in those infoboxes anyway and adding the coordinates messes them up unnecessarily. Since the Wikipedia convention is that coordinates go in the header, I really can't see why on earth we'd want to start adding them to the ship infoboxes. Despite the fact he'd like to add them to the Empire State Building box, they simply aren't there. See Stonehenge, the Terracotta Army, the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, etc, etc, ad nauseum, ad infinitum. Why should ships be different? It's unnecessary, unappealing and against established Wikipedia practice. If no one objects, I'm going to remove it. Benea 20:35, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, the guy who added them to the infobox put them on HMS Victory as an example. At least he didn't go adding them to dozens of ships; I can't blame him for doing one as a proof of concept. I want to remove it from both HMS Victory and the infobox, but I wanted to hear from a couple of other people about it first. I'll go ahead and remove them. TomTheHand 20:41, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
Benea, could you please cite the assertion that "the Wikipedia convention is that coordinates go in the header"? Certainly I've seen them in the header (not to mention added a few), but I've also seen them in other infoboxes (e.g. {{Infobox bridge}}). ISTR there was a very contentious debate about putting anything up on the title bar when it first started. It seems to me that the coordinates go right along with the status/fate of the ship when it has ceased to move. We set the status to museum, sunk or wrecked, why not include the coords there? I hesitate to bring this up here, but it's probably a lot more useful than some of the things that are in our infobox to a casual reader. Obviously it would need to be hidden if not supplied. Either way we go, we should be using {{coord}} (note the d at the end), as that has the code that ties into Google maps and others.--J Clear 02:33, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm of the opinion that it works so well in the header that there's no reason to put it anywhere else. It's clean and presents information in a consistent way. I generally support infoboxes being as clean and simple as possible. If this were a discussion between putting coordinates in the infobox versus putting them in the main article text, I'd support the infobox solution, but given that {{coord}} already supports putting them in the article header, and that feature is already widely used around Wikipedia, I prefer sticking them there. TomTheHand 02:50, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm with Tom on this one. Perhaps I should have said 'conventional' rather than 'convention', as I'm not sure of any official ruling on the matter. You're right, bridge infoboxes sometimes do, as in Golden Gate Bridge and London Bridge, as well as a few others. But unless there are more I've missed, this seems more of an exception. For examples of other fixed locations, see the examples I've listed above, as well as Houses of Parliament, Moscow Kremlin, etc. Also, for articles without infoboxes, the co-ordinates are there in the header, as with White House, Panama Canal and Mount Snowdon, so this is where people would go for it. If there was no where else to put them, then fine, but I would agree they are fine in the header. The 'casual reader' can look there and see if there are any co-ordinates immediately on opening the page, without having to go through an infobox of varying length and detail, so see if they are there or not. Benea 18:09, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
Mount Snowdon is an interesting example. That infobox has a coordinate parameter which was ignored. Yet the non-universal Ordnance Survey grid was supplied in the infobox and a {{coor title d}} added near the bottom of the article. Personally I think the whole question cries out for a consensus at a much higher level than WP:SHIPS. It may have already been discussed over on pages associated with {{Coord}}, but my mental DB is reindexing after a few IPAs. --J Clear 23:48, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

(reset indent) May I suggest we put the coord parameter back as an infobox input parameter, but [for now] use {{Coord}}'s "display=title" to display it at the top. Then if we ever change our mind or the community at large changes it for us, we just edit the template to display it in the info box. Much like we've done ensign vs. jack.--J Clear 13:20, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Riverboat

I just found this recently and while I'll help clean it up, I have no idea where to start, or if it should be merged to something else. The article's rather scrambled up, but contains some good information. The history section mentions only the Skeena River and Terrace, British Columbia, which I (as a British Columbian) find amusing. However, I think the Mississippi (among other rivers) might also have something to contribute to the history of riverboats :).CindyBotalk 01:46, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

When spiffing up old articles, please check the www.navsource.org URL(s) that many have. Navsource was reorganized and all the old links end up, after a long delay, at the top page. Thanks. --J Clear 03:09, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing out the change. I have updated the article I look after (Landing Craft Support). --Lee Begg 04:20, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

"You can help!" page

Some time ago, I had mentioned that I'd like to create some sort of a page where we can advertise tasks and projects. I whipped something up here but I haven't linked it from the main page yet. Obviously it's pretty U.S.-centric because that's my area of interest, but we can add a variety of stuff. It's not pretty, and it's only got a handful of things on it, but I was thinking that it might be a helpful resource for new members and might also be a good way to get us all cooperating on tasks. What do you guys think? TomTheHand 18:56, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

TomStar81 nominated for Admin

A WP:SHIPS contributing editor, TomStar81(Talk, Contribs), has been nominated for adminship. If you wish to contribute to this process, there is a Guide.

I have attempted to remain withing the spirit of WP:CANVAS by keeping this to a single, non-disruptive, neutral announcement. I've also intentionally omitted a direct link to the nom, to encourage reading about the process. Please review WP:CANVAS before responding here or spreading the news further. --J Clear 13:23, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

  • My rfa has been withdrawn. For the full details you can check out this link. I appreciate the trust this project and the WP community have in me; however, this time around things just didn't work out. TomStar81 (Talk) 21:56, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Hullnumber.com

I just had a new user, User: Usnht, stumble over my watch list. They seem to be adding hullnumber.com links to DDG articles. I requested that the user not top list them, but I seem to find myself ambivalent about the worth of that www.hullnumber.com links to Wikipedia. I'm not quite against it, but neither do I feel like it's a big gain. Anybody else feel either way about it? --J Clear 17:23, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

I was going to drop a note here and remove it as linkspam. WP:EL seems split. Though interesting, crew lists don't seem encyclopedic. Though there doesn't seem to be any advertising attached to it, seems like a conflict of interest since the user is likely associated with the site. Under "Links normally to be avoided" these seem to apply to support removal.
1}Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a Featured article.
3)Links mainly intended to promote a website.
10) Links to social networking sites (such as MySpace), discussion forums or USENET.
My gut feeling is to remove them, unless someone can explain why they are needed / beneficial to this project / wikipedia. --Dual Freq 21:32, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
I don't necessarily have a problem if the user is from that site since the site appears to be incredibly non-commercial. I didn't see an ad anywhere. If it where, then it would seem like a blatant attempt to draw traffic using wikipedia. Now I didn't delve too far into the site, perhaps it puts a hook in you later if you try contact anyone or put your info up, then I'd weigh in more on getting rid of the links for WP:LINKSPAM. I'm still trying hard to hold on to WP:FAITH here. ;-) Anybody played with that site in more depth? --J Clear 23:26, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
I'd leave them in. Hullnumber isn't a social networking site in the same sense that the others are -- it specifically lists people who served aboard a specific ship. IMHO it wouldn't be good to say "there are some connections to people who served aboard this ship, but we aren't going to tell you about them because it's against our policy." Lou Sander 23:55, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
I'd remove them for the reasons Dual Freq lists. It's no MySpace, but it's not far off from some other social networking sites. TomTheHand 15:58, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
I just noticed a link to a similar site, navybuddies.com, on USS Bismarck Sea (CVE-95). Guess we should add them into the discussion. navybuddies does have ads, but also has some ship data and photos. I also see that at least hullnumber also has the registration part of
6) Links to sites that require payment or registration to view the relevant content.
weighing against it.
Given that people are coming by and adding these links, I wonder if it would be worthwhile to do what the WP:BOOKS folks did and create something like the Wikipedia:ISBN link. It is an accepted way of linking to sites that clearly violate the no commercial links and other parts of the WP:EL guidelines. Make it something like a crew resources page that has links to acceptable sites (e.g. how to get your service record) as well as those we are discussing, much like ISBN has libraries followed by commercial booksellers. Don't clobber me on the details yet, it's only a partially baked idea. ;-) --J Clear 02:11, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

The people most interested in most of these ships are the people who served on them. They probably also represent the largest number of people who might actually read the article on any given ship. It just seems whacky not to steer these folks to other sites that might specifically relate to their ship. Maybe a way can be found to do that without offending the "no commercial interest" people, the "no social networking" people, etc. Many ship reunion groups have their own web sites, which IMHO should definitely be included in the ship article if they are known. For things like hullnumber.com, military.com, etc. maybe there could be an article telling people of their existence, and referring them to the site in general (rather than to the specific part that applies to their ship). Something like J Clear suggests would be good, too.

The point is that there ought to be a way to guide folks to further resources about their ship, which resources can be researched, added, changed, etc. by any Wikipedia editor; and there needn't be a separate guide for each ship -- one generic one would do it. Lou Sander 02:28, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

To all, if there are multiple sites that provide the same social networking service, linking former shipmates, how can wikipedia favor one over the other? I don't think I'd object to linking a specific ships association like http://www.ussiowa.org for example, but adding a generic site just seems to be traffic building. Additionally, what if that site changes its internal links? http://www.hullnumber.com/commands1.php?ct=DD&st=DDG&hn=60&n1=USS&n2=PAUL&n3=HAMILTON&n4=&n5= doesn't seem like a long term stable web address. These also seem to focus only on US ships ignoring the other navies of the world.--Dual Freq 02:41, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree with the above: First, that web sites for specific ship organizations, like ussiowa.org, or for specific ship classes, like destroyerleaderassociation.org (which covers DL-1 through DL-5), are alright for inclusion, and second, that general-purpose ship networking sites should not be linked off of every ship article. It'd be like linking classmates.com from every high school article. I agree with Lou Sander, though, that if there were a shipmate reunion article, it wouldn't be a bad plan to link to some shipmate networking web sites. Class reunion lists a ton of classmate networking sites. TomTheHand 12:26, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm not proposing to move single ship specific external links to reliable and specific sources, just the generic multi-ship ones. Especially ones that might be WP:EL marginal but important to certain users. As to my ISBN example, maybe I should give an example. Go to "Hunt for Red October", and click on the ISBN link in the infobox. I propose we could have a page like that, which could be linked from ship articles. You will note that it has a mix of "free" library resources and "paid" booksellers. It also tries hard to give a very broad coverage of both kinds of sites, i.e. not favoring one bookseller over another. Another good example of this type of wikipedia resource is the maps page that you get clicking on 42°22′20.88″N 71°03′23.68″W / 42.3724667°N 71.0565778°W / 42.3724667; -71.0565778. While we might not be able to be as slick (how do you map a hull number to DANFS directory structure?), at least not right away, we should be able to have a page that gives folks a solid set of pointers in the right direction. Another feature of consolidating all the shipmate finders on one page is that, as noted above, if they changed their URL format, or like navsource, their directory structure, then only one page on wikipedia needs updating. --J Clear 23:36, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

HullNumber.com was founded eight years ago of the death on my best Navy Buddy in 1999-> http://www.hullnumber.com/about.htm

HullNumber.com is a one man operation. I have a full time job and have to work another 15 years to retire. Currently I host 8,700+ Ship, Sub and Air Squadron Rosters. HullNumber is linked to approximately 500 USN Command websites that are owned, for the most part, by reunion goups. That leaves the sailors of 8,200 commands no where to go but the “Pay to Communicate” sites, ie Military.com, Classmates.com, or the lesser sites that unindate the Sailor with Jiggling Banners, Popups, Spam and offer T-Shirts, Coffee Cups and Ball Caps for sale.

Earlier in this thread an Editor stated HullNumber.com is “incredably non-commercial”. Registration and communicating with shipmates is FREE and will be so FOREVER. If an Old Salt, reaching the end of his days discovers an old pal on HullNumber.com, he will not have $20 extorted by me so he can send an email. There is nothing for sale on HullNumber.com. Further, there are no banner ads and no popups. They add no value to the service I perform for my fellow US Navy Veterans ….

A Guided Missle Destroyer (DDG) Sailor goes to HullNumber.com and in two clicks is viewing a Roster of Shipmates. If posted, the Sailor can view reunion information, see his Reunion Group / Ship Assoc. website and email a shipmate securely. If there is a Shipmate they would like to hear from, a Sailor can "Remember A Shipmate". The Sailor enters what information he can recall of his Navy Buddy and that info is posted on the Roster with a tag of Remembered By .. the Sailor’s Last Name. This serves as a bulletin board to let a Shipmate know an old friend would like to hear from them. I don’t see my service as Social Networking. I see it as "Making Contact With An Old Friend" in the most direct and uncluttered manner possible.

The idea of establishing reciprocating links between Specific USN Ship/Sub pages on Wikipedia and HullNumber.com was to allow the HullNumber folks to help write the history of their ships and to allow the Wiki folks to see if their old friends were on HullNumber and to get in touch with them for free. The DDGs were to be used as a trial of about 6 months. The number of DDGs (100) and the age of their crews (average about 50), would provide a good trial of the idea without the investment of too much time, the lone webmaster’s most precious resource.

An example of my idea uses the Wikipedia and HullNumber.com pages of the USS Henry B. Wilson at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Henry_B._Wilson_(DDG-7) http://www.hullnumber.com/commands1.php?ct=DD&st=DDG&hn=7&n1=USS&n2=HENRY&n3=B.&n4=WILSON&n5=

I ask to continue this trial, using the 100 or so DDGs, for the following reasons: 1) The HullNumber.com folks directed to Wikipedia can read and potentially add to the history that they helped create. 2) The Wikipedia Folks can potentially find and make contact with a Shipmate for free. 3) HullNumber.com does not “require payment or registration to view the relavant content.” There is no commercial aspect such as banner ads, popups, spam or anything for sale.

HullNumber.com, like Wikipedia, is a non-commercial SERVICE to others.

I commend you all for your contribution to the Navy and Maritime communities. Usnht 02:20, 20 July 2007 (UTC)USNHT

Class naming conventions

I've been applying the ship class naming conventions to US Navy blimps (eg: B class blimp), but another user insists that these should be hyphenated as, for example B-class blimp. The example here about nominative and adjectival usage doesn't seem to be very helpful - the two examples look identical to me! Any guidance would be appreciated. --Rlandmann 08:14, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

  • Article names don't have the hyphen, so B class blimp.
  • Within an article,
    • the class name used as a noun phrase isn't hyphenated:
      "The blimps of the [[B class blimp|B class]] were the most humongous airships ever produced by the Navy."
    • But the class name used as adjectival phrase is hyphenated:
      "The [[B class blimp|B-class]] [[blimp]]s were the workhorses of WW2 ASW."
Does that help? —wwoods 19:25, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
Ah! Exactly what I was looking for - many thanks. Perhaps the example on the naming convention page could be expanded along similar lines? --Rlandmann 23:12, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Something I notice all too frequently is the misuse of italics in ship class names. The "Author's Guide" printed by the United States Naval Institute Press states that while individual ship names should ALWAYS be italicized, that same ship name when used to speak of class should NEVER be italicized. Example: The Casablanca is the lead ship in the Casablanca class escort carriers. xl_five_lx 16:38 30 July 2007

Please see the last topic on this page, New Addition - 'Class style', where we're discussing your change. The U.S. Navy italicizes class names, and so I believe we should continue to do so. TomTheHand 20:49, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Correct ensign for a replica ship

Which ensign would be best to place in an infobox of a replica ship? The ensign from the period the replica is active or the period when the ship the replica was based on was active? This question pertains to US Brig Niagara (replica). --​​​​D​​tbohrer​​​​talk•contribs 18:43, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

I took the liberty of changing it to the 1812 flag she flies. I cite USS Constitution as precedent, also recall something about using "most famous period". --J Clear 14:16, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm wondering about this flag: -- it is labeled as the Naval Ensign of Azerbaijan here on the 'pedia; however, according to Flags of the World it is nether an ensign, nor a jack, but a "ceremonial flag". Do you have more information or another source? Thanks, --Himasaram 12:09, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

New Addition - 'Class style'

A new user (User:Xl five lx) has added this to the project page:

"One of the most common flaws in articles regards the proper presentation of class and individual ship names. "Author's Guide", United States Naval Institute Press, states USS ship names are to be italicized when referencing the individual vessel, but never italicized when referring to class. Example: The Corregidor was the fourth ship of the Casablanca class."

This seems to contradict what our manual of style indicates, that where a class is named after the lead ship it should be italicised (e.g. Duke of Edinburgh class cruiser, and where it is not, it should not be italicised (e.g. Battle class destroyer or R class destroyer. For his example, the Casablanca class escort carrier, this would mean it would be rendered as the Casablanca class. I prefer the way we do it IMHO, it can lift it out of the page and fits with ship name style conventions. Also, his source refers to US ships. What about other nationalities? Can we come up with a standard? Benea 19:51, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Some Googling around navy.mil seems to support italicizing class names, too. TomTheHand 19:59, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
Nathan Miller's The US Navy: An Illustrated History italicizes class names as well. Auror 20:21, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

The fact remains were any of us to submit a manuscript to the US Naval Institute Press later today, all italicized class names would be edited to normal text. If a rational argument can be made that we, or any of us, know better than the organization created for, and dedicated to the advancement and preservation of all things U.S. Navy, then we have a more global problem to which this issue merely served to bring to light.

It is about professionalism and doing things properly. Wikipedia can be great, but only if those helping build it make paramount their task to dig deeper and beneath the mass of apocryphal that inundates the world wide web. If you consider 08:08, 18 May 2007 new, then yes, I am brand new here. But that hardly changes the fact the most prestigious organization to carry the naval torch claims - in writing - that the proper way is to never italicize a ship name when used to indicate class, while always italicizing ship name when used to refer to an individual ship.

As for book references that employ, or ignore, this practice: repeating another's mistakes and citing them as precedent for your act will never get you out of trouble. Just ask any 4 year old caught stealing candy after seeing his friend do it. It's about credibility. It's about getting the facts straight and removing the erroneous apocryphal that appear on so many websites. This is an encyclopedia, not anyone's soap box, nor outlet for how I, nor anyone, feels things should be - or could be better done. In our particular genre, the history of ships and naval history, it is of extreme import to make absolutely certain that the rehashed misinformation not be allowed to creep into nor corrupt an encyclopedia. You hear the word "encyclopedia" and you think truth. You think fact. But frankly, there is far too much misinformation being carried over from this or that website into these relatively new entries.

In summation, why not do things correctly? To the letter? Indeed that is the letter of that law. Casablanca class carriers, of which the Casablanca was the lead ship. Et Cetera. Et Cetera. Et Cetera. xl_five_lx 17:52 30 July 2007

I'm not really sure how to respond to this. I take issue with your rather POV claims, there are other navies in the world other than the US one. If one source does things one way and others do them another, then it is perhaps an oversimplification to claim one is full of mistakes and the other is gospel truth. And labelling other people's contributions as 'misinformation', and themselves as children ('Just ask any 4 year old') is rather uncivil. I'm sure other users could point you to appropriate policies if you asked. I'm going to leave it at that and see what other people think. I don't think I've climbed on my soapbox at any point. You may of course correct me if you feel otherwise. Et Cetera. Et Cetera. Et Cetera. I'll pop back at somepoint though. I have a manuscript to submit. Benea 22:00, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

This a tad absurd. The single source you deeply discount here is the United States Naval Institute Press who state the proper way to present ship class names in their published "Author's Guide". You talk as if I cited a passage from JohnnyV, the kid from down the block who aspires to become a rapper. By the way, USNIP also claims, in this very same publication, to adhere strictly to the Chicago Manual of Style - a staple reference for writers everywhere. xl_five_lx 18:12 (not the war of, the time) 30 July 2007

I'm terribly sorry to disparage your source which I'm sure is all good and proper, but again I reiterate that it is ONE source. A couple of other contributors have listed others. Interestingly the US Navy website appears to italicise class names. Perhaps by some terrible oversight they have not been informed of the United States Naval Institute Press' ground breaking decision? A regretable oversight to be sure. Incidentally, there are other navies around the world too, not covered by your source. What shall we do about them? Also kindly don't attempt to claim that the Chicago Manual of Style is the staple of everyone "everywhere". I'm sure the old boys at Oxford (England donchaknow?) would be heartbroken. Benea 22:20, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Not unlike Admiral Lutjens allowing the Prince of Wales to live to fight another day, I opt to no longer engage. It is pointless and not my primary objective - not to mention against standing orders (the wife).

Interestingly, I went to Navy.mil and indeed saw where they do in fact use italics for ship CLASS names in addition to individual ship names. Ergo, I just took full advantage of their 'Contact Us' messaging facility and made my case before the bureaucratic monster otherwise known as the USN. Thanks for bringing that to my attention, Tom. xl_five_lx 18:47 30 July 2007

I own three of Norman Friedman's Illustrated Design Histories (Battleships, Submarines to 1945, and Submarines since 1945), and they all italicize classes. In addition, Garzke and Dulin's Battleships: United States Battleships, 1935-1992 italicize classes. These four books were published by the US Naval Institute Press. TomTheHand 00:05, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
Norman Polmar's The Ships and Aircraft of the U.S. Fleet, published by the Naval Institute Press, capitalizes both individual ship names and class names, without italics, in all text, including the introductory essay on the state of the fleet. (I don't know if this format was used in this work when it was written by Fahey-- there are many editions.) There appears to be no one consistent style here, even among Naval Institute publications, and there is no one "correct" or "incorrect" style. Kablammo 00:51, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

I had hoped this horse was long dead by now, but I see that it is not. I concede your collective victory.

If, as you claim, there is no correct nor incorrect way of citing ship class names, then why is it permissable for Benea to have gone back and changed all my work on that Casablanca thread to suit his liking - after, repeat, after, this whole discourse had reached port?

If the final analysis is that it is suited to taste then I choose a clear distinction between a class name vs. an individual ship name. It is this precise distinction that USNIP is trying to impress upon the community of those who write on naval topics. You cannot have it both ways. First, fend off my assertion by producing a littany of exceptions to the proverbial rule in support of the view there is no right nor wrong way and then go back and change someone's work to suit your personal view! Right? Quite right.

If there indeed is no correct nor incorrect way to cite ship class names, as seems to be the consensus all yesterday afternoon into night, then there certainly can be no objection to restoring the way it was written and intended to be read by the writer - whomever that writer shall be. Right? Again, quite right.

In other words, how can any of us hereafter pass judgement on whether one italicizes ship class names or if one chooses not to if the consensus agreed it is a matter of choice?

I'm glad the issue is now finally settled. Thank you. xl_five_lx 00:28 31 July 2007

I think you'll find that the consensus was that Wikipedia naming conventions are not bound to follow the USNIP style manual that you cited. Nobody but you is claiming that there is a right way or wrong way to write class names. All stylistic and orthographic conventions (including Wikipedia's and the USNIP's) are arbitrary, and all have a common purpose to ensure similarity in usage across different works written by different authors (in Wikipedia's case, across hundreds of articles contributed to by hundreds of editors). The USNIP's style guide is enforced (or not!) by an editorial team rather than by a community consensus. If you're unhappy with the conventions here, then you should see if you can build consensus to revise them. --Rlandmann 05:39, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

There is absolutely no need to try and lobby nor garner support for something that already exists. If neither is right while neither is wrong, then one can choose as he/she sees fit. With such an existing state I have no desire to change the convention. /s/ Happy as a Clam, I am. xl_five_lx 02:30 31 July 2007

Neither is right and neither is wrong, but on Wikipedia, one is conventional, and one is not; just as for the USNIP one is conventional and one is not. Of course, you are free to contribute here in whatever form you prefer; but you must expect the community to edit your contributions to make them align with the conventions that we use, in precisely the same way that you would expect an editor at USNIP to edit a manuscript you submitted there to make it conform to their style. --Rlandmann 07:16, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
That's the point just there: the Wikipedia style guide is that class names should be italicised, except where the class name is not that of the lead ship. Most publications that I am personally familiar with seem to follow this methodology. The USNIP is only one publisher, and its style is no more right or wrong than any other. Martocticvs 17:25, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
That's the point I've been trying to make. I have not changed the style to what it was to "suit [my] liking - after, repeat, after, this whole discourse had reached port?" (I like your nautical analogy by the way). What we had agreed was that the USNIP was not as sancrosanct as you made out and there really is no globally accepted style, not even in the US, not even in the one publishing house. We wikipedians have therefore reached consensus as to which style we used, and if you use a different one, an editor will likely assume that the style you used was an oversight and will correct it, as I did with your Casablanca class.
I'm also a little concerned about you viewing this as some sort of a battle. If you go about with that sort of attitude it's likely that you'll get into a lot of arguments, in which case your choice of the Bismarck to represent your position was quite apt, you might find yourself blown out of the water. Read WP:CONS, and the other editing guidlines, and you'll be back on course, and happy sailing to you. Salutations from the Prince of Wales, Benea 18:11, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

lol. You're in shoal waters now, mister. I never once so much as mentioned the Bismarck. Speaking of her though, seems you've chosen to sail aboard a ship that didn't last much longer than she did! And this despite Lutjens' gracious generosity that gray day in company with Prinz Eugen. Bit of advice to you, my friend, stay out the Indian Ocean, wear a life preserver at all times (including when you sleep and visit the head), and put in for immediate transfer to a shore station. Does the RN maintain a sheepherder rating? If so, the Falklands are lovely this time of year. But if you can't score a shore billet, then at least move to a ship with a future. I have friends aboard the HMS Pedantic and HMS Neurotic who say they could really use a fella like you. Send along your transfer papers and I'll be sure to add my glowing endorsement! ))) Xl five lx 00:05, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Well quite so old boy, laughing out loud indeed. Forgive me, but I believe you started the reference to Bismarck with, and I quote with the degree of pedantry you so kindly attribute me with, "Not unlike Admiral Lutjens allowing the Prince of Wales to live to fight another day". And indeed the fate of Prince of Wales had also occured to me as I wrote it, but it seemed even more apt to me. None of us are invincible. If I violate guidelines, I too may be sunk. I had meant it as a friendly parting, as one ship to another. Perhaps, like the Prince of Wales, it missed its mark. I also try to wear a lifebelt at all times, and have been known to duck for cover when aeroplanes are spotted overhead. I am also unsurprised to find you have friends on those two fine ships. I believe they are missing their captain however. Perhaps you should rejoin them post haste!
In all seriousness, I don't mind a joke but I think your intention was to offend me rather than provide some friendly banter. I'm not sure how I've earned your emnity in this way. Perhaps because I was the one who was most vocal in trying to point out guidelines to you, and was the most nettled by your earlier comments. Please read WP:CIVIL. Implying I'm "Pedantic", "Neurotic" and a "sheepherder" may well be true, but still comes across as rather bad manners, as well as somewhat stretching the point about the nautical anology. Is it a veiled hint for me to bow out? But then again I might have the wrong end of the stick. We British are rather well known as a nation for our dry wit, which doesn't come over well without all the facial expressions/gestures/secret handshakes. Please feel free to clarify, or insult me slightly more explicitly. If anyone else feels they want to weigh in on this, then please feel free. Kind regards, etc, etc. Benea 00:44, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
  • "I am also unsurprised to find you have friends on those two fine ships. I believe they are missing their captain however."

Well, in hindsight, I'm now glad I wrote you back. After studying the manifests of your first few Atlantic crossings, I was becoming concerned that the infamous British dry wit had run ... well ... dry. But now it seems, after a few long journeys, your crew is coming around and your ship "smartening up". The proof lies above, in the quote you landed just before weighing anchor. Now THAT, was funny! (and I begrudgingly admit I laughed) But, whatever you do, do NOT tell anyone! Being seen as jovial could only serve to destroy all my hard work at being seen as the big bad battlewagon.

By the way. Frankly, neither one of us is all too clever. If we truly were, you'd have adopted HMS Leopard and I USS Chesapeake. Next time, perhaps. Xl five lx 01:05, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Indeed so. I had been missing being able to knock a bit of friendly banter about. Only thing is, on this sort of a pitch, it often doesn't come across as intended, and you Yanks end up on a sticky wicket, whilst us Limeys are sipping our tea and scones (I'm not sure what that means either, so don't worry). Oh well, no hard feelings and handshakes and cups of tea and warm beer all round! Perhaps HMS Prince of Wales and USS Augusta at the Atlantic Charter is where we want to be at. Kind regards, Benea 01:25, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Yes. That is better still. I'm actually looking forward to the communal singing of hymns on Prince of Wales' fantail. It might just make me a bit more civil. You just never know. Cheers! Xl five lx 01:30, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

All together now! (and that includes the wikiships contributors at the back!) "Eternal Father, strong to save..." And then "Jerusalem" to close - "and did those feet in ancient time..." Benea 01:35, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
This exchange of broadsides reminds one of this old wheeze:
USN Admiral to RN Admiral: How is the world's second largest navy?
RN Captain to USN Captain: Fine. How is the world's second best?
It is impressive how you fought your ships, if for no reason other than "pour encourager les autres." Kablammo 21:09, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
Un bon temps a ete eu par tout! Xl five lx 08:18, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps you can help me in a matter whose answer lies across the pond. If not, perhaps you can direct me to someone who can.

On a Monday, 23JUN42, a sub-committee of the joint (US-UK) committee known as Munitions Assignment Board met to discuss which CVEs, from which US builders, would actually go to the RN and which others retained by the USN. This sub committee was named "Munitions Assignment Committee(Navy)." Now, while the committee conducted their business here in the states (DC), the surviving records are spare and incomplete. When the Navy subcommittee met they decided to recommend to the full Board that Kaiser carriers previously earmarked for the RN be retained by the USN and in like numbers replaced by then also building CVEs from Seattle-tacoma, which had recently changed its name to Todd-Pacific. Two days later, Wednesday 25JUN42, the full Board met and approved the subcommittee's recommendation and the rest is proverbial history. Why? This is the eternal question that nags me and I am never satisfied with hearsay, conjecture, nor assumption. RN Admiral James Wilfred Sussex Dorling was your senior man over here for all materiel aquisitions and was actively involved in this process. Any thoughts on how I might obtain photocopies of relevant documents on this very specific affair extant in Royal Navy records? Naturally, I would be happy to pay for the expenses of reproduction and shipment. Xl five lx 01:54, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

My apologies. I just noticed that everything in the above is correct save the year. All dates should read 1943. Xl five lx 02:10, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

The place to go here is the The National Archives, at Kew. They were created to bring together a huge amount of files and old archives over a huge period of British history. Their website is at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk. There are other archives across the country, but this is the biggest, and the most likely to have what you're looking for, as it contains most of the colonial/foreign office/war department correspondance, notes, files, etc. The site is pretty usable as I recall, there's a small fee for downloading digitised archives. I'm not as sure about hard copies (a lot are still on paper), but I think most can be ordered. I hope this is of help. Benea 02:12, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Indeed, Thank you very much. Xl five lx 02:13, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Warrior

Hi all. I am working on expanding Wikipedia's coverage of the Black Hawk War of 1832. It seems during the Battle/Massacre at Bad Axe a steamship? gunboat was involved. It was called the Warrior, maybe the USS Warrior. Any help from ship gurus would be greatly appreciated as I would like to see this article created as part of my Black Hawk War project. Thanks. IvoShandor 17:59, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Dr. James Lewis, Professor Northern Illinois University wrote a piece on the Black Hawk War of 1832 in which you'll find:

"On August 1, Black Hawk's band of perhaps five hundred men, women, and children reached the eastern bank of the Mississippi, a few miles downriver from the Bad Axe. The leaders called a council meeting in which Black Hawk and the Winnebago prophet White Cloud suggested breaking into small groups, turning north, and hiding out in the Winnebago villages. But most of the Sauks and Foxes wanted to build rafts or canoes and cross the river as quickly as possible.

"Some got across the Mississippi that day. But the crossing was checked when the steamboat Warrior approached. Privately built and owned, the Warrior had been chartered by an army major a few days earlier to take a message to the Sioux. Armed with an artillery piece and guarded by twenty soldiers, the Warrior was returning from this mission when it came upon the Sauks and Foxes trying to escape to safety. With the Warrior armed and anchored just fifty yards from shore, the Sauks and Foxes abandoned their efforts to cross the river. Under a white flag, Black Hawk waded out into the river and tried, once again, to surrender. As at Stillman's Run and Wisconsin Heights, however, the soldiers could not understand him. After ten or fifteen minutes of failed communications, the soldiers on the Warrior opened fire on the unprepared Sauks and Foxes. A number of the warriors around Black Hawk died instantly; the rest found cover and opened fire. After a two hour fire-fight, the Warrior's fuel supply was nearly exhausted and it headed off downriver.

"The battle with the Warrior left nearly two dozen Sauk and Fox warriors dead."

Sounds interesting. Good luck from here. xl_five_lx 23:49 01AUG07

I appreciate it. I have actually come across that source in my work on the war and planned to include that information in Battle of Bad Axe. I am specifically looking for information on the ship and its history for the article on the ship. Thanks again though. IvoShandor 15:55, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
DANFS doesn't list a Warrior, so the ship was never commissioned in the Navy, so it's not "USS Warrior".
In addition to the above, I found
At Prairie du Chien, Captain Loomis charters the new steamboat Warrior. He orders Lieutenant and Quartermaster James W. Kinsbury to take charge of a detachment of fifteen soldiers and five volunteers, load a six pounder cannon and ammunition on board, and steam north on the Mississippi to the village of the Sioux chief Wa-ba-shaw. Kingsbury is to inform Wa-ba-shaw that the "Sacs and Foxes were flying before the Americans and were expected to cross the Mississippi into their Country, which we hoped to prevent." The goal is to enlist the influential Wa-ba-shaw to bring warriors south on the west side of the Mississippi to prevent the escape of Black Hawk's followers should they cross the river. Captain Joseph Throckmorton commands Warrior, which he pilots the 120 miles north on the Mississippi River to Wa-ba-shaw's village.
http://www.geocities.com/old_lead/bhwchron2.htm
and a book, The Sauks and the Black Hawk War:
Perry Armstrong wrote one of the first comprehensive histories of the Black Hawk War in 1886. Based on interviews with participants and witnesses, as well as visits to prominent battle sites, Perry presented a surprisingly balanced and sympathetic portrait of Black Hawk and his people. In this section, Armstrong describes the massacre of Sauks at the cruelly misnamed Battle of Bad Axe in August of 1832. Over 400 Indians were killed despite repeated attempts to surrender to American forces. Included in the text is a letter written by Captain Throckmorton, captain of the steamboat Warrior that fired on the Indians.
http://wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints/search.asp?id=1396
The letter is on pages 467–8. Armstrong took a dim view of Throckmorton:
"... most inhuman and dastardly action ... And by this letter Capt. Throckmorton wrote himself down in history as a second Nero or Calligula[sic] — as heartless as a stone, remorseless as the sea and cruel as death. ... Such a brute not only was a disgrace to the service but a slander upon the word man. ... To call him coward would be to admit that he had some of the attributes of manhood, which would be flattering the cold-blooded butcher."
No concerns about NPOV there!
—wwoods 17:16, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

On occasion, DANFS simply hasn't gotten around to adding certain minor vessels yet. So, to make certain, I called Bob Cressman, Naval Historical Center, Ship's History Branch, Director DANFS. There indeed was no Warrior commissioned in the US Navy at that time, however, there was a Warrior of much later vintage - a small mine craft. The Loomis and Kingsbury information I hadn't found, but I have been reading the second book cited above - the overly opinionated one - and all about Army Captain Throckmorton for the past few hours. It's interesting. Seems this Black Hawk was quite the tactician. Anayway, I think with what has been presented here so far, it would seem Dr. Lewis had it right in that the Army chartered a privately owned and built steamboat named the Warrior. It would have been nice to have found you characteristics of the ship beyond what can be gleaned by reading the online book, but there is much there if you look for it. Use the link wwoods posted or here:

link condensed for rendering purposes

This one will take you directly to all three sections involving Warrior. Good luck. xl_five_lx 13:47 02AUG07

Wow, thank you both so much for going so far above and beyond the call of duty, this is so awesome. I knew this project was pretty active but this is amazing. Thank you both so much. IvoShandor 17:42, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
I am not sure how I missed this stuff in the first place, thanks again. IvoShandor 17:43, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Lieutenant Zatsarenniy

Can someone write an article on the Russian destroyer Lieutenant Zatsarenniy, which blew up on a German mine in 1917? Its shipwreck was located a couple of days ago by Russian divers on the bottom of the Black Sea near the Snake Island. KNewman 18:16, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Dr. Paul G. Halpern's exhaustive tome "A Naval History of World War I", 1994, USNIP touches on the circumstances that caused the sinking of Russian destroyer Leitenant Zatzarenni, note correct Russian spelling. I don't feel it alone is enough to write a proper piece on the sinking, but it will make a very solid jumping off point for whomever is interested in taking this on.

According to Halpern, Leitenant Zatzarenni sank 30JUN17 on a mine sowed just days earlier by the Turco-German forces cruiser Breslau. In the early morning hours of 25JUN17, the Breslau had laid seventy (70) mines off the mouth of the Danube, followed by another ten (10) off Fidonisi Island, which to the Germans was then known as Schlangen Island.

It seems that both sides were running concurrent mining operations in areas not too distant from each other, as a covering force for a nearby Russian mining force chased Breslau all the way back to port in a running battle the day after she laid the eighty mines. Just four days later, the Leitenant Zatzarenni was sunk.

Dr. Halpern, Professor of History at Florida State University, is a source worth consulting. xl_five_lx 10:08 02AUG07

I created the page "Leytenant Zatsarenni", with the information I had at hand. However, I won't have access to any good sources until the next time I'm going to the military academy library, which will be in a couple of weeks time. --MoRsE 16:54, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Please see discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam#3rd opinion request Viv Hamilton 07:41, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

I have suggested to MaritimeQuest's owner that, moving forward, he could periodically compile and submit a list of 'new links' for review to be added as external links to specific ship pages. If we can review these and add them where appropriate, this would avoid the COI issue of him adding links to his own site. While I am willing to do quite a bit of the work, it wouldn't really seem collaborative in the wiki sense if I were to simply have him post it on my talk page or his own. I wouldn't want to overrun the WP:Ships page with lists of links to be reviewed, but it looks like we would only be talking about 10 ships per week or so. Input? Maralia 04:07, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

I think it sounds like a good use of talk space! If enough of us are willing to take a turn when we have time in reviewing the list and adding as appropriate links, the load on any one won't be too bad. The other advantage of this approach is that it will advertise there is source material for stub or missing articles to a wider range of editors. Viv Hamilton 09:28, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Ship types template

I've created a navbox template for ship types, following discussion on Talk:List of shipwrecks#List cleanup. I've included all the unique ship and boat types, I can find articles for - I would appreciate people taking a look and improving it Viv Hamilton 18:29, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Ship Design Histories

I have managed to find articles on individual naval vessels, classes, battles, a few officiers and even the rare Naval Architect, but where might there be an appropriate home for Ship Design Histories? Logic tells me much new information could be added to individual ship pages regarding design and construction, however, what about designs that were completed yet never actually built? There are many instances of such and they are terribly interesting.

Some WWII examples might be:

  • SuperShip - sometimes called the EverythingShip - that combined massive guns with on a par of battleship armor and full flight deck that would have displaced more than Shinano.
  • Other Hybrids, like the more common half cruiser-half carrier designs.
  • Montana class battleships, those four triple-gun turret monsters.
  • Gibbs & Cox designed carrier that was originally to be built instead of those built by Kaiser.
  • CVX(ASW) dedicated ASW carrier.
  • The pre-war all-aluminum 50+ knot destroyer that was actually under contract to be built until the exigencies immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor forced their cancellation to instead build more proven designs.
  • "Pineapple" carrier designed by Niedermayer, the same man to conceive the now famous inclined hull form and intricate pumping tanks for the LSTs. Four distinct launching areas along with two separate landing areas to speed the time necessary to get a mass of planes in the air to repel Kamikaze attacks. Picture an angled-deck carrier except with two angled-decks per side. A downview strongly resembled the fronds atop a pineapple.

There are many, many others as well - subs, auxiliaries, etc, etc, etc. Each was interesting because the very impetus for their design derived from a real, or imagined, tactical gap or need. Anyone into ships might surely find projects like these of great interest.

Is there a place here for the aforementioned and their ilk? Xl five lx 09:51, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

It sounds like you have enough to write an article perhaps Ship designs that were never completed - assuming you have the references, or perhaps there should be an article on Ship designs of World War II, which could link out to articles on the classes that were actually built as well as briefly describing those that weren't. Viv Hamilton 10:07, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
If you're going through with it and only include military ships, the article name should also reflect this. Just my two cents. -- Kjet 10:32, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
Good point, so that would be Military ship designs that were never completed or Military ship designs of World War II Viv Hamilton 13:27, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
Start articles and see how they look. There are a number of varations. Some unrealized concepts already rate separate articles (USS United States (CVA-58)); others can be included in exising articles (postwar refinements to the design of the Lion class battleships); others can be incorporated into articles on specific multi-vessel projects (Plan Z vessels); while still others may go in a more general article on unrealized naval vessels (the 1930s Gibbs design for a Soviet battleship-carrier hermaphrodite). Kablammo 13:46, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
Abortive warship projects, or whatever, is surely not a suitable subject for an article; it would have to be vast, and would be far too wide-ranging and diffuse. There must have been literally hundreds of such projects within the last 150 years alone. It should instead be a category. By this means, anyone who has an interest in the subject for its own sake need only view the category, and they will be able to see at a glance the whole gamut of Wikipedia articles on the subject. This meets what I take to be Xl five lx's concern, namely that if users don't know that a project ever existed, they may never get to read the article about it. In addition, individual articles could be appropriate for well-defined subsets on the category; I could envisage viable articles on, for example, Abortive aircraft carrier projects of the US Navy or Japanese experimental submarine programmes.
With regard to the examples quoted, I think most of them are worthy of individual articles, assuming that none already exists (for example, there is already an article on the Montana class battleship) and provided that there are credible sources on which to base it. I have to say that I doubt that any navy came close to actually initiating a "Supership" project. My advice, for what it is worth, would be to start with articles on concepts that had at least an element of operational and technological credibility. Hope this helps. Regards to all, John Moore 309 15:26, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
I wasn't sure if some of them would be notable to merit individual articles, but I agree that if such articles exist (or should exist) a category would be a good idea. The downside of a category is that there is no way to list the articles that don't, but should, exist, and even if you have a category, it is good style to have a main article for the category. Another possibility is a List of.... If you start the main article, to give an overview of the subject, you can start off with a little list in the article, and replace it as the specific articles get written and the category is populated. Viv Hamilton 17:12, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
  • "If you're going through with it and only include military ships, the article name should also reflect this. Just my two cents. -- Kjet 10:32, 7 August 2007 (UTC)"

Just to cover something that wasn't made obvious in the original post, there are likely just as many (more?) merchant, or non-military, designs that have never been built. The large passenger ship by the Maritime Commission comes to mind as one prime example - the P-4.

  • "I have to say that I doubt that any navy came close to actually initiating a "Supership" project. My advice, for what it is worth, would be to start with articles on concepts that had at least an element of operational and technological credibility. Hope this helps. Regards to all, John Moore 309 15:26, 7 August 2007 (UTC)"

This asks us to have more acute knowledge and understanding than the parties involved at the time. It's subjective, and therefore a dangerous course, in my opinion. let's use the very same example - the SuperShip - for instance. The same design was at different times ordered by the Navies of two separate nations. This proves what? Not much, other than the one Navy was obviously no more nutty than the other. Or, alternatively, the design was a serious consideration for both nations. Point being: What was enough interest then to make it plausible in our minds today? I don't feel anything historical should be saddled with such weighty decisions. Historical merit should have but one criteria. It either happened, or it didn't. These designs indeed happened. So, a great deal many people contemporarily took it very seriously and believed them feasible enough to pay for and complete their designs. That should be merit enough, in my opinion.

By the way, Kablammo raised the issue of the Gibbs & Cox designed Soviet hermaphrodite which essentially IS the SuperShip. The Soviets were first to order the design ( in three sizes - very very large - massive - and gargantuan ) and then the design was adopted and championed here in the states by no lesser than the Secretary of the Navy, Charles Edison, son of inventor Thomas Alva Edison. Edison convinced FDR, who in turn impressed the Chief of Naval Operations. These weren't a handful of basement inventors or quacks lacking credibility. In the end, only the fact that they couldn't control the depth of foreign ports, to accommodate the unusually deep draft of these vessels, killed off the notion of SuperShips actually being built. Returning to the point, nevermind. I fear I've belabored my point. Xl five lx 15:51, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Of course, if you are going to include civilian designs as well, so much for the better. I could even drop in and add stuff about some unrealised designs myself. My main reason to objecting was the fact you only used military examples, and many members of this project often seem to forget civilian ships even exist... -- Kjet 17:00, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Understood. Don't feel at all slighted. It merely reflects my area of knowledge, and lack thereof, respectively. I found your comment interesting because after poking around here the past few months, I was under the impression it was a pretty even mix of merchants vs. military types. So much so had I been under that impression that I recall that one night while posting on something or other I almost suggested splitting the two areas into their own entities. I never did end up mentioning it because on second thought there is so much in common that it's all of interest to both sets of fans, offers little to be gained, and more likely much more to be lost. Often times the crossover is literal, such as when liners become transports in times of war, etc. The only merchant design I could perhaps lend you a hand with is the P-4 mentioned above. While working on a research project in the late '90s I stumbled across all its original files from the Maritime Commission. At that time the records were still in the hands of the Department of Transportation, MARAD. Since then, these records have been transferred to the National Archives and hence more readily available to the public. Xl five lx 06:30, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

The pre-war all-aluminum 50+ knot destroyer that was actually under contract to be built until the exigencies immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor forced their cancellation to instead build more proven designs.
I'd be fascinated to hear more about this. The Royal Navy undertook several studies in the late 50s / early 60s for a high-speed frigate (Type 19) capabale of making a 40kt+ run to the East, using the latest gas-turbine and propellor technology (the RN invested considerable effort into propellor design around this time for frigates), and most of these seem to have come to the conclusion that such a vessel would require multiple propeller changes on the run from the UK to Singapore due to the extreme stresses incurred. How the desingers intended to generate the requisite power for a 50kt+ destroyer and more importantly how they intended to transmit that power would be interesting reading indeed. Emoscopes Talk 07:47, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

This is exactly what motivated me to write the original post. The RN project you summarized would make a superb article and be of supreme interest to anyone remotely interested in ship design. In fact, these types of pieces crossover for both Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering enthusiasts - two separate disciplines that have to work in harmony for any design to be a success. Perhaps you could find the time to bring the RN story to fruition. I am now extremely curious whether the RN Frigate was also constructed of aluminum throughout, was it?. Regarding the USN project, it came from outside the Navy. It was championed by Newell, of Bath Iron Works. The concept languished for a time where Newell failed to garner any interest within BuShips until he took on a partner in the project, Henry J. Kaiser, who added the political clout required to force BuShips to sign a contract to build a prototype. I will try and locate the source material for the propulsion details, but seem to recollect that the governing factor that permitted such a high design speed was the exclusive use of light metals, as opposed to any form, or combination, of revolutionary props or propulsion. Xl five lx 16:46, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

All I know of consists of a few paragraphs in a D K Brown book - can't see anyone letting that one through as notable! :) Emoscopes Talk 05:56, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

New member

Hello! I am a new member, drawn in by association from WP:Shipwrecks. I've received helpful advice on the first few ship articles I've written, especially from User:TomTheHand and User:J_Clear. I still feel like a bit of a rookie when it comes to WP:SHIPS conventions though, so I present to you my latest: USCGC Icarus (WPC-110). If anyone could take the time to tell me how it might be improved, I would appreciate it. Maralia 02:04, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Content, detail and accuracy are perfect. Anything wiki related I wouldn't know good from bad but these other guys do. Excellent piece. Well done. Xl five lx 05:17, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

request for membership

Can our article, List of world's largest wooden ships be part of your project and get a rating etc?--Filll 22:34, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

Absolutely! I've rated it "B" class and "High" importance; if anyone disagrees, please feel free to modify. TomTheHand 18:34, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

abbreviation for knot

I am aware of three abbreviations in common use for the knot. In alphabetical order these are kn, kt and kts. Are there any others? Thunderbird2 18:09, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Knot (speed) is the link I think you meant! Emoscopes Talk 18:19, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Oh dear! Yes you're right. Thanx Thunderbird2 18:27, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

nm/h (although I think I just made that one up! Emoscopes Talk 18:29, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
Haha, good one. I personally prefer kt, and dislike kts... if you saw someone use "kms" for kilometers, you'd replace it on sight. "kt" seems to be used most often by navies, as far as I know. TomTheHand 18:32, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
I agree 100%. Like my old physics teacher used to say; "there are no secs in physics". (if you don't get it, the answer is only "s") Emoscopes Talk 01:31, 18 August 2007 (UTC)
"kn" is specified in the US Chart 1 (1972) and in Canada's Chart 1 (1996) - those are the copies I have on hand. The Canadian one also lists "kns" for plural (ugh!). BIPM shows kn on its web site but states "There is no internationally agreed symbol, but the symbol kn is commonly used." Too bad, I kinda like kt too. Michael Daly 06:59, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
Hmmm. If "knot" is sometimes (inappropriately by landlubbers) used as a measure of distance, can "square knot" be similarly used as a measure of area? Would the abbreviation be sqkn? Lou Sander 13:57, 5 September 2007 (UTC) ;-)

The IEEE guidelines for authors define the knot as 1 nmi/h and recommend use of the abbreviation kn. A similar statement is made by the American Institute of Physics. I think we need a very good reason to depart from these guidelines. Thunderbird2 16:19, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Template colour

In Template:Infobox Class etc., there is a problem with #000080 as the choice of background colour. That is, when there is a wikilink on this colour, it is nearly impossible to read, as it uses a similar shade of dark blue. This clearly violates Wikipedia:Accessibility#Color, regarding contrast. I checked at Wikipedia:Infobox colours, but this seems to be dead for the time being. I would suggest that we either lighten up the shade of blue, or, what I find more appealing, is choose a shade of dark grey for our infoboxes etc. For me, grey is the colour of navies and warships, and would be instantly recognizable. The current choice's only relation is only that the colour is called navy!

As these templates are included on hundreds, if not 1000+ pages, I wanted to start a discussion here before I made any changes that would be so obvious. Emoscopes Talk 23:48, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Why would there be any wikilinked text on the colored portion of that infobox? Maralia 00:39, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

The parent country appears next to the flag, in a navy-coloured area. Emoscopes Talk 00:45, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
Wasn't there a conversion to using the MILHIST color scheme at one point? Or was that only for individual ship infoboxes, and not for class ones? Kirill 00:47, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Seeing as nobody seemed very bothered by this, I've changed it over to the MILHIST scheme using their templates. This is both easier on the eye (imho), but more importantly in terms of project collaboration, it means that we can stack the various MILHIST-style ship imfobox templates atop eachother without a formatting clash. Emoscopes Talk 12:30, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Userbox

Does this project have a userbox? I looked but could not find one. --Thefrood 05:19, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Template:User ships Emoscopes Talk 12:32, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

List of battleships of the Royal Navy

Bit of a debate going on at this article's talk page over what to do with it. Some users are pointing out ships they don't think should be on there, etc. I've been meaning to look at this since in my opinion it's a very long list for the casual reader. My hope would be to have the information divided up and parcelled out into smaller articles:

  • A list of Frigates, sloops, etc that carried fewer than 58 guns.
  • A list of ships of the line that carried more than this number.
  • A list of what are considered to be battleships (at this page), with necessary overlap, i.e. for those that would consider HMS Warrior (1860) and her ilk a battleship.
  • Potentially another list for the section currently titled "Great ships, carracks and galleons (–1640)"

This to me would have the advantage of being more concise in each case, more acurately label ships, and help the reader, if his interest is in Napoleonic era ships of the line rather than World War II battleships, go to where they want to be, as well as preventing loss of information, if as some want, we end up taking the frigates/sloops/etc out. Some people are disagreeing, saying that the current way is better than this proposal, so I thought I'd open it up really and see what people thought. I remember a while back we debated what defined a battleship and what made a ship of the line, and settled for the development of turret warfare as a defining feature. Are people still happy with this? Any further suggestions about how to move forward with this? Kind regards, Benea 07:56, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm all for this, I see little merit including "modern" steam battleships in with galleons or 5th rate ships. What I would suggest is that we make the current page something of an index / disambiguation page for RN battleships, with each of the separate pages a child of that. Emoscopes Talk 12:38, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Request Help with Template for Navy Ensigns

I'm new to templates, and have discovered some of the following useful templates for Navy Ensigns:

There appears to be a template for the Kriegsmarine but not for the Kaiserlische Marine. How do we create such a template? How does one get an authoritative list of all the possible existing "navy" templates?

Thanks in advance!

Carl Gusler 14:11, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Here is Kaiserlische: Kaiserliche Marine Jack
You can find all the ensigns here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Ships/Ensigns. Maralia 15:25, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Maralia. However, what you have provided is an image. What I am looking for is a template. (Please edit this page to see the difference.)

How can I tell whether there is already an existing entry in the "navy" template? If not, how can I create a new entryin the "navy" template? For example, for the page full of ensigns that you provided, how do we tell which ones already have corresponding entries in the "navy" template. The US Navy and the Royal Navy do, but I suspect that the Ghanian Navy does not.

Thanks again, Carl Gusler 17:10, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Oh - you didn't link them as templates, so I read right past your real question. {{tl|navy|German Empire}} produces it via the conventions of the template {{navy}}, which uses Category:Country data templates. The navy template doesn't require 'entries' per se - it looks in that Category for a country of that name, then checks that country's page (Template:Country data Ghana, to use your example) for a flag variant listed with the label 'navy'. I don't know of a comprehensive list; seems like you would have to go to a country data page to check for a naval flag. As far as adding a missing one: to continue with the same example, you would upload said image, then edit Template:Country data Ghana and, in the list of flags at the top, add as such:
| flag alias-naval = Naval Ensign of Ghana.svg.
I suppose we could modify Wikipedia:WikiProject Ships/Ensigns to actually reference the templates, where they exist, for naval ensigns. I don't know how valuable this would be, though, when it would necessarily require upkeep, and we can check the actual Country data page almost as easily. Maralia 18:36, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Article Request - Sovetskaya Latviya

Could some knowledgeable person(s) please see if there's enough information out there to create an article for the Soviet MV Sovetskaya Latviya (see Soviet Latvia for the details I know). Many thanks! — Zalktis 16:23, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

I've now created a rather amateurish article for MV Sovetskaya Latviya. Please improve upon it! — Zalktis 07:55, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Article names for ships that were cancelled before commissioning

Ok, so let's say that a ship was cancelled before commissioning. Do we name the article "USS So-and-so" for consistency, even though the "USS" prefix isn't quite proper, or do we just call the article "So-and-so"? For example, wwoods created USS Seaman (DD-791) last September, and then renamed it to Seaman (DD-791) because she was never actually commissioned. 71Demon moved it back in January, but Pmgpgm just notified him that technically that isn't really the correct name.

In my personal opinion, if a ship is probably going to be commissioned, like USS George H. W. Bush (CVN-77), it should reside at the "USS" name. No need to create an article with a name that will need to change in a couple of years. On the other hand, I'm less sure of how to deal with ships that were cancelled. Should articles like USS Wolffish (SS-434) really be called Wolffish (SS-434), with redirects from the USS names, or is that just being pedantic? TomTheHand 15:03, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

As the subject is about something that never really transpired, you could perhaps get around this in the introductory sentence, eg.;
USS Homer Simpson (BB-76) would have been the name of a cancelled Donut-class battleship had it been commissioned.
Or is that too cumbersome?
Emoscopes Talk 15:24, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
I think it should still carry the prefix, e.g. as at HMS Thor and HMS Tiara, as if these ships had actually been commissioned they'd have borne those names and that prefix. With Emoscope's suggestion, the article makes it clear that we are referring to something that didn't actually happen. It's no lie to say that it would have been HMS so and so or USS such and such, otherwise we obscure which navy these ships actually would have belonged to. (Gosh, I've got opinions on everything today!) ttfn! --Benea 16:13, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
Yes, it's a much more convenient way to name the article than Cancelled British submarine Thor etc. Emoscopes Talk 14:24, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Concur USS/HMS, as examples should remain with warships - commissioned or not. What's wrong with the simplest solution? The title would read:

USS Iwasalmostinthenavy (Never Commissioned)

This entirely obviates the scenario where a reader might not ever make it to the first line of body text for an explanation of an unusual or clunky looking title. In this manner, the explanation stays with the ship name at all times - most importantly in a search where just titles appear without the benefit of any body text at all - even that first line as suggested.Xl five lx 09:13, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

The problem that this holds is that it does not really disambiguate the ship in question specifically enough; there is always going to be the chance that we will get a ship name that has been cancelled twice. By sticking with the naming consensus that is already in existence, it allows full disambiguation by date, pennant or hull number. Emoscopes Talk 11:44, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

One should note that our de facto standard (at least with the USN) appears to be giving the ship the name it would have received had it been completed. Examples I can think of off the top of my head include USS United States (CVA-58), USS Montana (BB-67), USS Constitution (CC-5), and USS Hawaii (CB-3). --Kralizec! (talk) 17:46, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Proposal for project improvement

I would like to see this project cranked up a notch. We have a fascinating topic and some really dedicated, extremely knowledgeable people here. I think you're all doing great work, and I really feel the project could benefit even more from some focus on project coordination, as well as a bigger pool of contributors.

My wish list:

  • Update the Project main page to make it more user-friendly and current. Remove some outdated stuff and populate the list of FAs. Add a navigation box and a list of all WP:Ships subpages. Add a todo list for open projects (i.e. category issues that need resolution, long articles that need extensive attention).
  • Revamp the Participants page with the goal of making it a resource to other participants. Move extremely inactive people to an Inactive list on the same page. Encourage more expansive information about each participant - it would be valuable to be able to look up someone with expertise or resources in a specific area.
  • Create a template for inviting people to join WP:Ships, and start applying it to talk pages of users that show a particular interest in ship articles.
  • Create a template for welcoming new WP:Ships participants. This should give them a reference point on their own talk page with links to established standards, templates, important categories, etc.

and then the big one:

  • Revisit the goal of the project. The consensus seems to be that the focus should be on better articles, rather than more articles - but Assessment and Review seem to have fallen by the wayside. I would love to see both of these resuscitated; seeing 'your' articles progress through assessment and review can be a big motivating factor to contributors, and we certainly have the material for many more GAs and FAs.

I know I'm awfully new; I'm certainly no expert on ships or the project itself, and this is by no means a criticism of what you all have accomplished so far. I just see the potential for much more. Your comments, please. Maralia 04:20, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Fow what it's worth, I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything you've said. Especially about the last point; assesment and review aren't used nearly enough - I think this is partially due to there not being clear enough guidelines to these, at least none that I have been able to find.
Personally (I know I have complained about this before) I think that in addition to the changes you've suggested, the project main page should be made more welcoming and more useful for people who aren't here mainly to contribute to articles related to military ships. For instance, the only reference mentioned in the main page is the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, and all the material on the Sources is exclusively related to military ships. Similarly most ship infoboxes on offer are more or less biased towards military ships and not very easily usable for civilian ships. And the Guidelines sub-page only uses military ships as examples, which cannot be direclty used as examples on how to write a good article on civilian ships. If this project is really going to (like it claims to) be project about all ships and not just military ships, this subject definately should be adressed. (Of course I'm willing to do my share in making this happen).
And finally, speaking of infobox templates and templates in general, it would be nice to have all the various ship-related templates listed somewhere in an easily accessible place. Right now they seem to be all over the place.
So, my few cents. I hope no-one was offended by my ravings... -- Kjet 07:20, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
I agree with Maralia's points. Some time ago, I tried to clean up the project front page, and last month J Clear extensively revised it, but there's definitely more room for improvement. I think a navigation box would be especially useful.
I also tried to make a sort of "You can help!" page where project participants could list things that bored people could help out with. I wasn't able to maintain my motivation, but maybe that could be a start.
One point I would like to make to Kjet is that the reason WP:SHIPS isn't very merchant-ship-friendly is that nobody who's interested in merchant ships has made it so. You have the opportunity here, as the WP:SHIPS member most interested in civilian ships, to shape the guidelines yourself. I'm sure you'll find that everyone else will chip in their $0.02 when you need an opinion. However, nobody who's primarily interested in military ships is going to be able to make the project main page more useful for you. You've got the perspective and the interest, so you can write your own guidelines, add useful references, and improve the infoboxes in ways that are most useful to you. If you need help with, for example, actually editing the infoboxes, please ask. TomTheHand 13:06, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Revamp the Participants page with the goal of making it a resource to other participants. Move extremely inactive people to an Inactive list on the same page. Encourage more expansive information about each participant - it would be valuable to be able to look up someone with expertise or resources in a specific area.

Brilliant in all regards.

On this point let's take Kjet, for example. If the above plan were fully taken in hand, Kjet would no longer feel he were the proverbial man in the wilderness regarding his love for merchant ships. Instead, he would simply pore over the new incredibly detailed participant resumes to easily identify those that share his passion.

More than likely, this would then cause an explosion of productivity among Kjet and his new confederates resulting in more detailed and complete articles on merchant ships with a greater level of accuracy.

I doubt very seriously that Kjet enjoys pleading for fair and ample representation for merchant ships as frequently as the current situation forces. If for no other reason, this revamp would be an extremely valuable contribution and indispensable tool to the vast area of merchant ships alone. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Xl five lx (talk • contribs) 10:18, August 24, 2007 (UTC)

Create a template for inviting people to join WP:Ships, and start applying it to talk pages of users that show a particular interest in ship articles.

The Wikiilliterate asks: Why not tag this on the bottom of every ship article? Is this too Wikioffensive? If not, it would sure prove the method to attract the MOST participants. After all, nothing will ever beat a little good old fashioned marketing. Using the softest of soft sells, perhaps it won't breach the pillars of even the most staunch Wiki type. Something light, such as:

If you enjoyed this article and found it in common with interests of your own, perhaps you would like to participate in the Ships Project here at Wikipedia.

Short. Sweet. Followed by a link to the project sign-up page. Xl five lx 09:41, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Per Wikipedia:Avoid self-references, a section of the manual of style, we should avoid making references to WP:SHIPS within ship articles. Templates and categories which are only useful to Wikipedia editors, and which are intended to be used on articles, are regularly deleted. We're going to need to stick to the talk page banner. TomTheHand 13:06, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Infobox improvements

Yes I strongly support the improvement suggestions. The ship infobox is biased towards military ships, but as a lot of the parameters only display if you enter them, it could serve both civil and military. RMS Titanic uses it already. I am aware of several civil ship articles with handcrafted infotables R.P. Resor (ship), Globe Star (ship), M/S Herald of Free Enterprise, RMS Lusitania, RMS Mauretania from which we can see which extra parameters are needed by civil ships i.e.

  • ship owner
  • port of registry
  • maiden voyage
  • ship captain
  • passenger capacity
  • cargo capacity
  • speed (service speed/top speed)
  • construction
  • number of funnels
  • number of masts
  • and possibly, regular route

Note that RMS Titanic uses ship class as its (merchant) type e.g. could be RORO ferry, tanker etc (not listed in the table for the example articles but is in the top of the text in each case) - see Template:Ship types for examples. RMS Titanic list the passenger types (first class, second class etc), as well as crew under complement.

The ship template is way too advanced for me, perhaps TomTheHand would amend it for us? However, if anyone wants something simple and non-parameterised, like the military have the class footer templates, and like Template:Ship types, I can do those! Viv Hamilton 14:23, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

A couple of points I'd like to make on the above suggestions:
  1. We already have a "capacity" field; is there a need for separate "passenger capacity" and "cargo capacity" fields, or could the capacity field be used to say "1000 passengers, 100 tons of cargo", possibly on separate lines?
  2. We already have a "speed" field.
  3. What is the "construction" field intended to be used for?
  4. Is "number of funnels" and "number of masts" necessary? It seems that if they are relevant and appropriate to include in an infobox, that information might be better placed in the "propulsion" box.
I would be happy to make any changes to the ship infobox for which there is consensus. I'd like to wait a short while for others to voice objections or suggestions before making changes. TomTheHand 14:54, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
See Template:Infobox_Commercial_Ship and its talk page Template_talk:Infobox_Commercial_Ship. (On the latter, look especially at the comments of User:Jmvolc, an editor who is also a naval architect.) The naval vessel template does not work, as it calls for displacement, and does not allow for substitution of tonnage, which is the relevant measure. It also calls for launch, an increasingly-irrelevant field as passenger vessels are no longer launched, but floated out of drydocks. Use of the naval template perpetuates the common misunderstanding of tonnage as displacement. It similarly leads to editors treating the delivery, naming ceremony, or service entry date as the launch date, which they clearly are not (and in many cases the ship was never actually "launched"). Kablammo 16:34, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
The new multi-template infobox, described at {{Infobox Ship Example}}, has no required fields, so if we could add fields to that I see no reason it couldn't be used for all purposes. It would better deal with multiple owners and stuff; you could repeat the Career box as many times as you want for Seawise Giant/Happy Giant/Jahre Viking/Knock Nevis, for example. TomTheHand 17:20, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Viv (and Kjet), I just want to make it clear that I will make any additions you want to the ship infobox, I just like to play devil's advocate for any change to keep the infobox from getting too bloated. TomTheHand 17:23, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

::See Template:Infobox_Commercial_Ship and its talk page Template_talk:Infobox_Commercial_Ship. (On the latter, look especially at the comments of User:Jmvolc, an editor who is also a naval architect.) The naval vessel template does not work, as it calls for displacement, and does not allow for substitution of tonnage, which is the relevant measure.

Perhaps you misunderstood your Naval Architect friend regarding how weights are calculated and what each type of measure means along with their unique relevance.

Displacement: What is oft referred to simply as Displacement actually means Displacement Tonnage Light. What Displacement Tonnage Light means is the actual weight of the vessel itself before loading cargo, fuel, or stores. Displacement Tonnage Light is often abbreviated to Displacement Light and at others times shortened still to just Light.

Deadweight: Deadweight Tonnage is the weight of the cargo that a ship can safely carry without overloading. Deadweight Tonnage is most often abbreviated as DW, or DWT.

  • NOTE: Both of the above measures of weight based on the long ton of 2,240 pounds.

Total Displacement: The term Total Displacement is simply the weights arrived at once the above two definitions are combined. Displacement + Deadweight = Total. Or, weight of cargo plus weight of vessel light. All this reflects is the weight of the water displaced by the ship when fully loaded.

Gross Tonnage: Gross Tonnage, in stark contrast to Total Displacement, is the measure of the carrying capacity of a vessel. It is the total volume of the closed-in space on the ship measured in cubic feet, using the rule 100 cubic feet to the ton.

Example: A Cargo ship.

Displacement: 4,000 tons.
Deadweight: 10,000 tons.
Gross: 6,000.

All the above measurements are for a single ship. All are correct and useful in that they each convey different information.

A passenger ship, by contrast to the freighter, has enormous Gross compared to Displacement or Deadweight.

In summation, the above four distinct definitions are often bandied about as meaning the very same thing, which they clearly are not. No one measure is more relevant than the next. They simply relate different information. Any template should most certainly take this into account in the design phase to permit any, or all, of these types of measures. Xl five lx 18:07, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

The difference in these measures is understood and has been the subject of numerous corrections made necessary by the application a naval template (which calls for displacement) to merchant vessels. As the relevant measure differs by vessel type, a template cannot be "one size fits all". There must either be separate templates for tankers, container vessels, passenger vessels, etc., or a flexible master template with clear instructions on how to adapt it for different vessels (which may be more work than simply having separate templates).
We also need to decide on which template will be used and how that decision will be arrived at, or (by default) allow a multiplicity of templates and discussion on them at a variety of locations, which appears to be the status quo. Kablammo 18:15, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
The template description at {{Infobox Ship Example}} has several sets of copy-and-paste code for different situations, but all use the same underlying set of templates. You just paste in whatever's relevant to your article. Additional fields could be added to {{Infobox Ship Career}} or {{Infobox Ship Characteristics}} which would only be added to the "civilian ship" copy-and-paste code. People writing about civilian ships don't have to deal with "armor" fields and people writing about military ships don't have to deal with "tonnage", but a single template supports both. TomTheHand 18:23, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Tom, would you then supercede the commercial ship infobox (which really is an adaption of the naval template to passenger vessels)? Kablammo 18:32, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Call me lazy, but wouldn't a nice and easy approach to laboring through template designs be easily solved simply by denoting which type of tonnage is indicated on the single existing line? 10,800 DWT, or GT, ie - etc etc etc. Xl five lx 18:20, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

I support this. I personally think that supporting "displacement" and "tonnage" is enough. In a single "displacement" box you can include light, standard, and/or full load displacements, while in a "tonnage" box you can have DWT and DT. TomTheHand 18:23, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Yes. But if displacement were to be combined with tonnage you likely would meet with resistance.Talk:Tonnage#More_on_Tonnage Separate fields would be better, as suggested by TomTheHand. Kablammo 18:28, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
A lot has been said since my last comment, I'll try to adress everything in a more or less clear order.
Infoboxes: I've been using a self-made infobox (based it on something or other that I've forgotten). The one MS Christian IV is a good example as it has pretty much all the fields I have had need for. I realise this type of infobox is a bit problematic, there's a lot of information crammed there and not nescessarily in the most informative order. However, I think this arrangement is better than having several different infoboxes for different incarnations of the ship on the same page, as some ships (M/S Wasa Queen, another article of mine as a good example) have had had a dozen names and served for even a larger number of companies. In the Wasa Queen article for instance having seven different infoboxes (or actually eight as the Cruise Ferries Wasa Queen is quite different from the Silja Line Wasa Queen) is not a very informative option.
Personally I think it would be simpler to have separate infoboxes for different ship types (Infobox:Cruise ship, Infobox:Ferry) instead of having a generic Infobox:Ship that would have a horde of fields not needed for certain types of ship. But this is obviously only my opinion and if others feel differently that is no problem for me.
Finally, regarding tonnage, we should not forget the distinction between Gross Tonnage and Gross Register Tonnage which (contrary to the popular belief) are not the same thing. Although Gross Register Tonnage is officially not in use any more, measurements are only avaialble in GRT for almost all civilian ships built before (or even during) the 90s. Xl five lx's idea above is very good imo. -- Kjet 18:32, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Well, I feel like there's no reason to have a bunch of different infoboxes when we could just have a bunch of sets of copy-and-paste code. Again, please check out the different options at {{Infobox Ship Example}}. A special set of copy-and-paste code could be set up just for oil tankers, and a different one for cruise ships. Since they all rely on the same templates, formatting could be consistent among all of them. As far as having several different infoboxes on a single article goes, it's unnecessary; it's entirely possible to just repeat fields in the same infobox. See USS Entemedor (SS-340), which served with two different navies. TomTheHand 18:43, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

That's fine. Just explain to me why.

TONNAGE: 10,800 DWT

Or better yet:

TONNAGE: 10,000 DWT; 6,000 GT; 4,000 DTL.

That single line now indicates all three calculations from my original cargo ship example. Why break down such similar items. I suspect the hang-up is the word displacement when in the end all you're ever really talking about is a single other word - tonnage. Xl five lx 18:35, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

I suspect we're in violent agreement. One field for displacement (not mandatory, as it is often unavailable) and one for tonnage, with the precise type of measure of each in the entry? Kablammo 18:41, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Which is exactly what we've already got :-) TomTheHand 18:45, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

lol, I'm not disagreeing with you at all. I'm just trying to help. All I'm trying to say is this: Displacement ---IS--- tonnage! "Displacement Tonnage Light" is the full and proper term for what we all call displacement. That's tonnage. So, again, I ask: Why two separate boxes where one would amply suffice for all (five including the old GRT) types of "tonnage?" Know what I mean? I feel we are getting stuck on a convention of semantics while we can call the tonnage kettle black and be done with it. Xl five lx 18:46, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

I appreciate we are all working toward the same goal. Some people feel that displacement is not "tonnage" in the technical sense of that term. I have no strong feelings but others may. Perhaps more to the point, there are some ships where both values are known. SS America/West Point is one, I believe; and data for both measurements exist for some other passenger vessels which were never naval vessels or army transports. Kablammo 18:52, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Yes. You can calculate multiple tonnage measurements for ANY vessel. Aircraft Carriers have unusual stats because of their larger closed-in space, etc. That's exactly my point. A cell labled TONNAGE would allow you, the editor, to enter as many TYPES of tonnage calculations as is available from bonafide sources. Displacement just being but one of those five types of tonnage measurements. It makes no more sense to isoalte and devote a separate box for GRT than it does for displacement when up to all five types can easily be indicated on that single line saving both time and space - not to mention the mass of energy otherwise expended on all new templates. Maybe an analogy might help us see through the semantics of this partular issue. If I have five children and I want to brag about their great looks they got from their dad on my myspace page - would I list four of their names after the label marked CHILDREN and the fifth kid under his/her own separate label marked MY FAVORITE KID? As ridiculous as that may sound, and it does, that's what we are doing by breaking out displacement as this holier than thou statistic. It is a measure of tonnage. One of five means. Anything that can be expressed five different ways doesn't deserve it's own stage, IMHO. Xl five lx 19:05, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

My final thought on this (promise). How anyone can read the definition below and walk away with the idea that displacement is NOT tonnage, is just beyond me. It is the weight of the ship expressed in TONS.

Displacement: What is oft referred to simply as Displacement actually means Displacement Tonnage Light. What Displacement Tonnage Light means is the actual weight of the vessel itself before loading cargo, fuel, or stores. Displacement Tonnage Light is often abbreviated to Displacement Light and at others times shortened still to just Light. Xl five lx 19:12, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

That is not the be-all end-all definition of displacement, and many people feel that displacement is a separate topic; therefore, we have separate cells for displacement and tonnage. TomTheHand 19:23, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Says who, Tom? The definition is not my own. It happens to be the definition given by the United States Maritime Commission in their official history Ships for Victory. I never, repeat never, would have even attempted to define any technical term using only my memory of when I took four years of architecture. I went and got the book and related it here as they do there. Try pages 4 through 6. "That is not the be-all end-all definition of displacement" is the most absurd comment I've read here to date. You're in charge here, right? I would think that the man at the helm would have the background to keep us off the rocks. Xl five lx 19:30, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm not in charge here; I'm just relatively loud ;-) When someone today simply discusses "tonnage" they are generally referring to cargo capacity; people do not usually expect to see the displacement of a ship (especially a warship) called "tonnage". Yes, they were originally synonymous before it was practical to actually figure out what a ship weighs, and yes, "Displacement Tonnage Light" can be considered a subtype of tonnage. However, it's confusing to refer to measures of volume and mass with the same term, and so a distinction is usually made for clarity. I think everyone but you feels it would be best to continue to have separate fields. I don't feel the WikiProject is in any danger of running aground if I refuse to remove the "displacement" field from our infoboxes.
I did not think for a moment that you had just made up the definition. However, this is the second time you've posted a source and said "See? We need to do it like this from now on." There's more to this issue than pulling a book down and saying "This argument is over!" I did phrase things badly when I implied that your definition was incorrect; I apologize for that. However, we have separate fields because "displacement" and "tonnage" are usually used to describe different things, and so we need to make the distinction. TomTheHand 21:14, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

I think everyone but you feels it would be best to continue to have separate fields.

Let's wait and see what everyone thinks. It's presumptuous for anyone to think they know how everyone else feels about anything.

I did not think for a moment that you had just made up the definition.

I flat out question your veracity, Tom. If you didn't question the definition, you would have never posted this: That is not the be-all end-all definition of displacement.

Yes, they were originally synonymous before it was practical to actually figure out what a ship weighs, and yes, "Displacement Tonnage Light" can be considered a subtype of tonnage. However, it's confusing to refer to measures of volume and mass with the same term, and so a distinction is usually made for clarity.

What??? Frankly, you have no idea what you are talking about. Try to make a distinction for clarity between your stuff and your shinola because the shinola is clearly transparent and shows how little you actually know about the technicalities of ship design.

However, this is the second time you've posted a source and said "See? We need to do it like this from now on."

Deeper and deeper your pile clogs the bilges. I never once said any such thing, however, you did say such a thing speaking for all without their input, and I quote: therefore, we have separate cells for displacement and tonnage.

The bottom line is you're obviously too young and too inexperienced to given any authority. The proof is this display of trying to prematurely end a discourse on a topic with your definitive end-all "ruling".

Why don't you be man enough to tell these people why you felt compelled to stomp all over the exchange I was having with Kablammo to begin with? Why don't you tell them that the last time you went off on your power trip you were harrassing me via email for three days threatening me with "if you say one more word, I will block you". I never initiated any email to you. Nor did I ever invite you to email me. You even continued to email threats after I asked you to stop emailing me at all. You're a real pro, but I suppose that's what comes from your years and years of hands-on experience with shipbuilding in upper management roles.

Get off your horse, Tom. And while off it, use that time to read up on the very topics you so desperately wish to rule over.

Unlike the last time you came after me, we will do this exchange in public - for all to see. So spare me the emails this time round.

You can go ahead and block me. But know this. No one is going to take to some guy half their age who has never actually done anything in this field beside (maybe, and even this is just a maybe) carry his lunchpail to and fro school.

If you were duly elected to this position that permits you to threaten people with banishment, then perhaps it's time to reconsider the choice. Perhaps it's also time YOU reconsider whether you are ready to oversee an organization that relies upon free exchange of ideas to solve problems and make improvements when these ideas at times will certainly vary from your own opinions. When is the next scheduled mutiny, I mean election anyway? Xl five lx 21:46, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but you should really take a look through WP:CIVIL before making a post like that again... Martocticvs 22:11, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

No, I'm sorry - was it more civil of Tom to harrass me for three days outside the bounds of Wikipedia where he thought it would escape the bounds of their policies?? Think on that a while. Then get back to me. Xl five lx 22:14, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm not going to pass judgement on something I didn't see. The fact remains that your previous post was extremely uncivil. Martocticvs 22:20, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Yet that's precisely what you did - pass judgement after seeing just half the movie. Xl five lx 22:23, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Choices of infobox

Just to summarize were we were. We currently have Template:Infobox Ship which is widely used but biased towards military vessels. We also have Template:Infobox_Commercial_Ship, Template:Infobox Ferry and Template:WAFerry (the latter has a merge tag on it). None of the last 3 are advertised on WP:Ships. Commercial ships is used for 4 articles, Ferry for 19 and WAFerry 29. I didn't accurately count the links to Template:Infobox Ship, but it looks like ~2,500. I suspect there are minor field differences which have caused people to want their own template in the commercial ships! Personally I would favour a single template if we can agree on main fields but allow flexibility, especially because as an archaeologist I have odd needs that the rest of you probably don't care about - like construction (for things like clinker built, hybrid hull, copper/muntz clad), and I don't want to have to come up with extra templates to fit different special needs throughout history. Masts and funnels are good for me because that's what you spot on old drawings (or even photos), but funnels could be included in propulsion and perhaps we should have (optional) sailplan which would encompass masts (or perhaps it could default to propulsion, unless sailplan was entered?). I think I agree with you Tom that just speed is Ok - one can enter top and service in it, and capacity can be used for different things, like cargo, passengers, vehicles. Commercial ships has homeport and Ferry has Port of registry - I know homeport works for military ships but for civil ships, shouldn't it be port of registry, so could it default to homeport unless you specify registry? In the case of the above debate about tonnage and displacement, since the military people prefer displacement and the civil people need to have tonnage, can we have a field that defaults to one, unless the other is entered? I leave it to the experts to decide which way - or perhaps pragmatically it will have to default to displacement, simply because ~2,500 military ship articles already use it and assume it will say displacement. Viv Hamilton 14:24, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

I favor clearly-defined separate templates for different ship types, even if they are no more than modification of the same basic template. They would be easier to use and more accessible to new users. Ship articles are among the first articles worked on by some users (often youthful fans) and they should have clear direction on what template to use. A lengthy, "one size fits all" template with a myriad of choices would be confusing and lead to errors. (I have made over a hundred corrections of errors on "displacement" vs. "tonnage" (volume) so the problem is real; if there is a default to displacement those errors will continue.) The interest of most of the members of this project appears to be naval vessels, but there are other users, less organized and experienced, whose interests lie elsewhere. And perhaps Wikipedia will eventually have users committed to creating articles on tankers, other bulk carriers, containers ships, and other types of merchant vessels. Let's make it easy for them to do so. Kablammo 14:42, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
I don't see why the three-part Template:Infobox Ship Begin, Template:Infobox Ship Career and Template:Infobox Ship Characteristics can't simply be expanded to include the fields that are wanted for the ship types mentioned, and then the appropriate fields listed out in a new section of Template:Infobox Ship Example so the full list isn't unnecessarily copied each time... Making entirely new templates with minimal differences doesn't seem to me to be the logical solution, at any rate. Martocticvs 15:17, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
There already is a template adapted for passenger vessels at Template:Infobox Commercial Ship. Notice was posted on this project talk page asking for comments on that proposal before the template was finalized.[1] I am glad that interest is now being shown in templates for merchant ships, and if there is a better solution than the commercial vessel template already in place, I'm not opposed to it. But I prefer the commercial ship template as it uses terminology and criteria better suited to modern passenger vessels (crew vice complement, tonnage instead of displacement; laid down and completed dates), without the military slant of the general template. This slant leads to confusion; for example, ship articles using a general template which add the passenger capacity to the complement field as the latter term is not generally understood. (See RMS Titanic, RMS Queen Mary, and MS Freedom of the Seas for a few examples of this misunderstanding.) There also are passenger ship pages where the infobox ship template used does not allow for a tonnage field. (See SS Canberra and try to modify displacement to tonnage.) Kablammo 16:18, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
Ah yes, but fields that you require can easily be added, that was my point. The way those templates are set up is such that no field is compulsory, so you can pick out the relevant ones for the type of ship in question. The benefit of making it all call from one (well, three, but one if you see what I mean) template of course is that any changes regarding style need only be made once, and it ensures that there is consistency across all ship articles. Martocticvs 16:23, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
I understand, but why make each user make those selections? If for example a new user wants to create an article on a new cruise ship, why not provide that user with a ready-made template for such a vessel, where the field selections have already been made? The commercial vessel template is just that. Is there any substantive difference between those articles which use the new commercial vessel template, and how that article would look if a general template was used with appropriate field selections? Kablammo 16:34, 25 August 2007 (UTC) At Template talk:Infobox Commercial Ship I had suggested one common template for merchant ships; another user disagreed (and on balance I think he was right). Please review that discussion in connection with this one. Kablammo 16:59, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
I do agree that it is probably easier for users if they have a specific template for their type of vessel - but presumably templates can themselves be built out of templates to maintain commonality? I missed Template:Infobox Ship Begin, Template:Infobox Ship Career and Template:Infobox Ship Characteristics when listing templates - why don't we list these on the tools and resources page? Please also see my previous comment, that if the templates are specific, the minority interests aren't necessarily served Viv Hamilton 17:35, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
If you'll visit {{Infobox Ship Example}}, which explains how to use the Begin/Image/Career/Characteristics set of templates, you'll see that it lists different sets of copy-and-paste code for different types of ships. A cruise-ship-specific set of code can be created, and a tanker-specific set, and so on, and they would all use the same underlying set of templates. There's no need for each user to think hard about which fields should go on this specific ship. Someone needs to come up with a list of fields just once and add it to the list. From then on, you just go to Infobox Ship Example, click on the type of ship you're dealing with, copy, and paste. You've got exactly the fields you need. TomTheHand 20:55, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
One major thing that bugs me about the three-part ship infobox is that it currently places a lot of emphasis in the nationality of the ship, which is of neglible importance for a civilian ship these days. Plus it's possible (even common) for a ship to have several careers under different companies but the same flag (or several flags during career for one company). It would be very nice to have a civilian-adapted infobox where instead of the country appearing as the header of the career box, it would be the company displayed there. It would be really nice if next to it the flag of the shipping company in question could be displayed, but making the flags for all companies needed would of course be a huge job. -- Kjet 07:38, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
And some more thoughts... even if the operating company would be displayed in place of the nation, the infobox should still have a separate field for owner as that is not always the same thing as the operator visible to the public (chartered ships, marketing corporations). Additionally a civilian ship infobox would need fields not only for passenger capacity but also passenger berths, number of cabins, car capacity and freight capacity. And ice class. -- Kjet 08:04, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Funnels & sails

Sorry to be a pedant, but for me, funnels don't form part of the machinery / propulsion, particularly when we often find funnels added for cosmetic reasons as a way to hide unsightly exhaust piping. That's not that I'm against putting it in there, somewhere, I don't see why there shouldn't be a line for funnels. For older ships, funnels were often used as an identifying feature, and the Royal Navy was in the habit of grouping its classes of early torpedo boats and destroyers by simply counting up the funnels. If someone is dead against this in their article, they simply needn't fill in that line in their infobox.

As for sailplan, that to me is another interesting addition. What would be really good, is if we could agree on a set of thumbnails, and if you put, say "square rig" into the infobox, a nice little thumbnail silhouette would come up and would automatically link into the square rig page. I think the sailplan is particularly pertinent as it was the "engines" of sailing ships and determined the vessels' performance Emoscopes Talk 14:45, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

I'd forgotten about funnels being added for cosmetic reasons. Sail plan performance is more than propulsion of course, it determines navigation capable too - how close to the wind you can sail - as for sail plan thumbnails, a set of images already exist - see Sail plan. I don't know how feasible it would be to get them to automatically add. Viv Hamilton 17:35, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
Technically it would be very easy possible. At least, I know it can be done! I would be happy to do the drawing if I was given the right technical advice, and I'm sure there's enough template knowledge in this project to get the coding done. Emoscopes Talk 01:41, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
Can you draw me a gun so I can shoot myself in the head before I get any more bright ideas? :) Maralia 04:32, 26 August 2007 (UTC)


Suggestions

1) Would it possible to index the various discussions by topic. There seems to be a lot of text that covers multiple subjects making it difficult to agree with one topic and not another. Jmvolc 02:29, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

2) Nomenclature : There are excellent references available that could be used instead of battling things out. May I suggest "Principles of Naval Architecture" by SNAME and "The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea" edited by Kemp. Jmvolc 02:29, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

3) Particularization : Different types of vessels use different measures (ex: Offshore Supply Vessel vs. Cruise Ship) so why not have a catalog of standard templates that an individual can use to guide them on the correct terms to use? This should keep people from entering values under the wrong terminology. Something to consider here is that the terminology has changed considerably with time so logically historical vessels should use historical terms and modern vessels should use modern terms. Jmvolc 02:29, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Something to consider here is that the terminology has changed considerably with time so logically historical vessels should use historical terms and modern vessels should use modern terms. Jmvolc 02:29, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
Excellent point. Applying modern terms, and even modern understanding of technologies these terms define, is often wholly inappropriate when applied to ships of any prior era. I concur that only contemporary terms, and their definitions, should be married to ships from that same precise period. five 02:59, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
It seems that significant progress has been made. If base templates can be adapted for use by merchant ships then suggested standard templates specific to vessel types can be provided. Words like "capacity" and "tonnage" do allow for flexibility; "complement" apparently is confusing and should be replaced with "crew", at least for merchant ships. Other changes may also be appropriate. Is someone willing to work on some standard templates? Should the current infobox commericial ship template be replaced (for passenger vessels) by a modification of the base templates mentioned above? Kablammo 13:15, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
Is this a consensus for basing everything on {{infobox Ship}} and using Template:Infobox Ship Example to create particular examples for each type of ship? If so would it be appropriate to move the discussion on particular templates to the Template:Infobox Ship Example talk page, and debate fields that are missing from the 'full code' (e.g. sailplan), and alternative field names e.g. port of registry, on {{infobox Ship}}? Viv Hamilton 14:47, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
  • If someone is willing to make the selections and modifications necessary on the base template to provide a set template for a ship type (e.g, passenger vessel) of equal or greater utility than an existing template (infobox commercial ship), with terminology appropriate to the vessel type, I support it. But if such a passenger ship template uses words like complement instead of crew and launch instead of completion date for modern passenger ships, we are better off with what we have. Kablammo 21:27, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
Hey guys. I was on vacation last week, and then it took a few days for me to settle in enough to get back on Wikipedia. Let's go ahead and add any necessary fields to the general purpose ship infobox, and let's have that discussion on Template talk:Infobox Ship Example. I'll put together some notes there to kick off the discussion. TomTheHand 13:38, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Categorized Comments

- Abbreviation for ship's speed in knots : Officially it is Vk but this will not be understood outside of a small technical circle. In all other references (Including SNAME & RINA) that I have checked it is not abbreviated. I would suggest doing the same as of course "knot" is short for "nautical mile per hour". The potential for confusion is high and we are talking about saving 2 letters. Jmvolc 02:29, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

- Abbreviation for Nautical Mile : Industry tends towards nm although SNAME has used nmi in the past. I personally have never seen this used outside of their publications. I have seen NM, NMi and a variety of other combinations used but never in publications by any of the primary authorities (SNAME & RINA). I know that the USN has a catalog of approved abbreviations but I had to give mine back after my last Navy job so this is an opportunity for someone to dig out that dusty binder and see what it says. I would use nm as this is the standard adopted by RINA and is recognized in the industry. Jmvolc 02:29, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

- Displacement vs. Tonnage : This has been beaten to death in the Tonnage Talk page. This one is simple, Tonnage is volume, Displacement is weight or more correctly, mass. Lightship is the term used for commercial (and many Naval) vessels for the mass of the vessel excluding all consumable, stores, cargo, crew, spares, etc. It is not an easy number to get for modern vessels. Actually any Displacement number is tricky. Deadweight is the term used for everything that isn't Lightship. A further definition is Cargo Deadweight which is obviously a subset of Total Deadweight. I would suggest including all three terms with clear instructions to define what Tonnage, Displacement and Deadweight is being reported. Jmvolc 02:29, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Style Guide?

Is there a style guide for ship articles? See Talk:Christopher Columbus (whaleback) where the she/it question has been raised (I wrote it as "she" but there has been some attempt to change it to "it") ++Lar: t/c 18:24, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

This is... a pretty hot topic. See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive (ships as "she"). I think most WP:SHIPS members probably favor "she" (I hope I'm not making an offensive generalization here). I would regard this issue as being similar to issues of British English vs. American English, or BC/AD vs. BCE/CE. I would say that it should be dealt with in a similar fashion to those above issues. If there is a compelling reason to use she or it in a particular context, then use she or it as appropriate. If there is no reason why in this specific case one is better than the other, the article should follow the style of the first person who contributed substantially to it. That is, as you took the time to write this article, and you used "she", nobody should change it to "it". TomTheHand 18:36, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
For posterity's sake, I present a previous discussion within WP:Ships - referring to ships as feminine - that was neither inflated with invented offenses against womankind nor derailed by the ridiculous assertion that npov precludes assigning gender to an inanimate object. Maralia 06:05, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Petroleum Tankers page

Hi guys, I've merged the Supertankers page into the Petroleum tankers page and given it a pretty thorough kicking adding in history and so on. Please visit and give it s further kicking. Cheers - Jimmec 14:55, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Project improvement

I've been busily working away at drafting project improvement stuff per my post above, and just realized I haven't actually posted anything here since my big wishlist. So, first of all - thanks for all the responses; it's encouraging to see so much interest. I am in the process of creating templates for a navigational sidebar, a todo list, an invitation to join the project, and a welcome to new participants. I'll have bits and pieces to show soon. Maralia 22:27, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Proposed deletions (WP:PROD)

I have replaced the prod with a merge from double-hulled tanker to petroleum tanker. Maralia 04:27, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Dinghies and AYRS

Is the link to this project from the 420 (dinghy) discussion page correct? Other important dinghies e.g. 49er (dinghy) are not so linked. Is there (or should there be) a more apropriate Wiki Project for sailing related articles? I and some members of the AYRS Yahoo news group are interested in organising contributions based on AYRS archives. GilesW 14:21, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Yes, that article does fall within WP:SHIPS, as would 49er (dinghy); the project covers all water vessels. Feel free to add {{WikiProject Ships}} to the discussion page of any articles that are related to ships, to 'bring them in' to the project. We would love to have your assistance, and that of your fellow yacht enthusiasts, in improving related articles. You're welcome to join at our participants page. You might want to read our project guidelines and the Wikipedia page on Copyrights to get started. Maralia 15:12, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, I will copy this to the AYRS Yahoo group. Probably more of a winter project, most of us are sailing or doing pre-winter DIY tasks just now. GilesW 16:13, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
Good timing; our documentation of standards, templates available, etc is undergoing a revamp just now, so it should be in better shape by then. Looking forward to having you folks aboard. Maralia 16:48, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
Take the exact language of the project documentation with a grain of salt; it tends to reflect what current participants are most familiar with, and is by no means meant to exclude everything else. You are of course free to operate within or outside this project, but none of the 'differences' you've listed here feels like a dealbreaker to me in terms of relevance - some of them are simply issues that no one has brought up before.
I don't speak for everyone, but I think a template and subset of guidelines specific to dinghy articles would be welcome and considered within scope. As a group, you folks might also benefit from participation in an existing project, with built-in experience in template creation, article structure, article review processes, and other wiki esoterica. Just my thoughts. Maralia 01:24, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Any experts on Ottoman navy?

Ertuğrul is an article both on the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, and a 19th-century vessel named for him centuries after his death. Is there anyone who can split this into two articles and add to the meager text on the ship? Kablammo 01:30, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Done. Stubbed: Turkish frigate Ertuğrul. —wwoods 07:23, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Revamp

I have revised the main project page. The prime improvement is the new sidebar, which contains links to all project documentation, a new task list, and our article assessment statistics. In light of the sidebar's functionality - and also in the hopes of making the project page less daunting to a new user - I have seriously cut down the amount of text on the main page.

The sidebar template is located at {{Ships sidebar}}. It can be transcluded on your User page, but don't subst it, or it won't update. A quick summary of the sidebar (with entirely new items/pages in bold text):

  • "Things you can do" is a new task list that is (manually) populated off the page Wikipedia:WikiProject Ships/Tasks. You can also reach the tasks page by clicking the 'edit' button on the sidebar. The task list is a central place for us to 'advertise' tasks we have come across, so that anyone can complete them. One aspect of the tasks is completely new: I have created a bot feed of new ship-related articles that is updated daily at Wikipedia:WikiProject Ships/New articles.
  • Article statistics is just a transclusion of our assessment statistics.

Please share your comments. I'd like to get a feel for what you all think before I tear into the documentation pages themselves (guidelines, sources, etc). Maralia 05:17, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Nice work! The new main page looks great, and I love the well organized sidebar! My only concern would be with the Consolidate item on the sidebar. Wikipedia's category structure is -on its best days- rather like an M. C. Escher drawing, and for WikiProject Ships it is often nigh-incomprehensible. "Fixing" Category:Patrol vessels, Category:Patrol craft, and Category:Patrol boats is a very complicated and oft mind-numbing issue. This particular case with three different patrol boat categories is, at its core, most likely an outgrowth of our "Ship of country" vs. "Ship of navy" category mess. TomTheHand (talk · contribs), Emoscopes (talk · contribs), myself, and a few others have been trying -with varying degrees of success- to get this straightened out for years. However rather than re-hash it all here, you may wish to go back in the talk archives and read our discussions on the topic. The most recent conversation on the issue was: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ships/Archive04#Further discussion on categorization of Category:Ships by country. --Kralizec! (talk) 15:53, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for your comments. The language of that particular item is a mistake; I meant to list it as 'review for consolidation', like the item directly below it. However, this particular case seems to be just a difference in terminology - vessel vs craft vs boat - which should not be controversial. Maralia 16:12, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Anyone else have comments? No one but me appears to be using the new tasks page, new articles list, etc so I'm starting to feel like I spent days codifying a group-oriented system that could have been handled just by my own damn local Wordpad file. Grumblemumblegripe. Is the real issue here that everyone is focused on new articles and I'm the only one willing to do much in the way of cleanup/maintenance of articles? Maralia 03:22, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Cleanup? Maintenance? You mean we do those sorts of things?!? Someone once said that trying to organize Wikipedians is like trying to herd cats ...  :-) --Kralizec! (talk) 04:33, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
Sorry no time to actually do anything at the moment, but when I do have time, I'll be able to go straight to your nice new tasks list, so I'm sure it will be more productive. The main page is a big improvement Viv Hamilton 12:56, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks to User:MarVelo for completing an item off the Tasks page! Maybe there is some hope for you jerks yet :) Maralia 22:32, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

I see we have a pair of smart-asses on our hands ;) The merge for Naval ram/Ram (ship)/Ramming is done too. Who knew Christmas came twice a year? Parsecboy 23:35, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Comments on a suggested new Parent Project?

I am interested in many maritime and boating issues that seem to be outside the real scope of this project or the Wikiproject Maritime Trades. For example, small pleasure-craft and sailing topics (other than sailing during the Age of Sail) don't really belong under either, at least not intuitively. Also articles about authors who have written about the nautical topics, other than a few like Nathaniel Bowditch, don't belong or wouldn't seem to very important to either project. It seems that there is a part of WikiProject Transport and Wikiproject Ships, there is an area which has to do with the sea and boats which falls through the cracks. I've made a suggestion at Portal:Nautical that there may be need for a Nautical Project to pick up everything that this project and Maritime Trades don't cover. Intention is not to step on any toes here, only to short of do some housekeeping in the areas that the two major projects in the area aren't interested much in - but plenty of other people are. Please make any comments at Portal:Nautical to keep them together. I haven't formally proposed the project yet, I wanted to gauge the opinions of other parties first and hopefully find some with interest before posting the proposal.--Doug.(talk • contribs) 20:58, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

An odd disambiguation

Has anyone got an opinion on this? I came across HMS Decoy (H75) (later HMCS Kootenay), which is a form of disambiguation that I've not seen before, and I'm fairly sure it doesn't fit wih our manual of style. I think the convention is to use the most notable version. And I'd lean towards having it as [[HMS Decoy (H75)]], and a redirect from [[HMCS Kootenay (H75)]], as it spent most time with the Royal Navy, and had a particularly notable career with them. It did serve with the Canadians for a short while, and had some notable exploits with them too though, so its not quite clearcut. Or is the title better as it is? Letters on a postcard please, kind regards...--Benea 01:34, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

I'd suggest splitting it. It wouldn't be the first ship to have two separate pages due to sale or transfer. Maralia 02:09, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
I know what you mean, but I'm not sure that'd be too helpful in this case. There isn't a huge amount of information for the Canadian ship, and I think in this case the information is better off kept together for the sake of clarity. The others in the class have the history in one article and redirects from the other ship names, i.e HMCS Margaree (H49) with a redirect from HMS Diana (H49). I think this would be the way to go. Benea 02:15, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
Hm seems like we've seen opposite precedents, as the USN articles seem to favor splitting if the second career is notable beyond 'sold to x country and renamed y'. If the others in the class are handled that way, of course I can see why you would do choose that method. Decoy does seem the more notable name for the article, as it was in service as such for 10 years, with only 1.5 years as Kootenay. Maralia 02:27, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
(edit conflict)As per our naming conventions, the article should be HMS Decoy (H75) with a redirect placed at HMCS Kootenay (H75) until such time as Kootenay has enough information to merit a fork to its own article. See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ships)#Ships that changed name or nationality for more details on this, and other aspects of article naming. --Kralizec! (talk) 02:34, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
I'll shift it and create the redirect, as per Kralizec!. ttfn. Benea 02:39, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Does this logic apply with women? Have one article for their maiden name, and a different article for their married name. Or do you recognise that they are the same person, even though they had a change of name?

Surely a history of a ship should be one article? With married women, there is a convention: Mrs Margaret Thatcher (nee Roberts). With ships, if both names are about equally notable, why not quote both in the title?

By the way, it seems very sneaky to have the discussion about changing the article name on this page, instead of having it on the discussion page of the article. This had the effect of excluding people who had the original page on their watch list, and then presenting them with afait accompli.

b.t.w. I will copy this discussion into the discussion page for HMS Decoy (H75) (later HMCS Kootenay). It is what should have been done in the first place--Toddy1 06:42, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Sneaky is my middle name. No wait, its Lionel. But enough about me. I apologise for not posting it to the talk page, but in a number of cases things can get posted to talkpages and are never seen again by anyone else. This was the quickest and easiest way to get some opinions. But thank you for covering the gap. And it was really quite a simple call to make. No the logic doesn't apply to women, yes it does apply to ships, as per Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ships)#Ships that changed name or nationality which is quite clear on the matter. So it is not in keeping with current manual of style. It would perhaps have been best to have discussed any proposed changes to that convention here, rather than sneakily changing it as you did. It is what should have been done in the first place. No, I don't really mean that but you see how things can be interpreted as sneaky that really weren't meant as such. Lots of love, Benea 14:54, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
With married women, there is a convention: Mrs Margaret Thatcher (nee Roberts).
Despite the 'real life' convention, you will notice that Margaret Thatcher's article is named Margaret Thatcher, not Margaret Thatcher (nee Roberts).
Women, unlike ships, are presumably not sold into other service. Maralia 15:21, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
Women, unlike ships, don't usually get married 10 times in their life. Personally I think the convention of splitting an article in two (or more) based on a change nationality or name is a bit odd. Taking for instance M/S Wasa Queen, which which I wrote an article without knowing about the naming convention about a year ago. During it's career the ship has sailed under seven different names (plus one trade name) for ten different companies. Three or four of it's incarnations could be considered "notable" to smaller or larger degree. So if we were to follow the naming convention to the letter, that article should be split into at least three different articles, each of them covering one "notable" owner (& name) and a bunch of less notable owners (& names). Which, in my opinion, would make absolutely no sense.
And just to avoid misunderstandings, I don't support quoting several names in the article name. The first/best known (which admittedly can be debatable) should suffice. But personally I don't see the point in splitting an article into several smaller ones if they're all actually about the same ship. -- Kjet 15:43, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
I agree in this case. After her transfer the ship was the same vessel (i.e. no modifictions), in the same role, on the same side and operating against the same enemies. The only tangible differences were her name and flag. Another article could be written for her Canadian role, but I think it would end up repeating so much information as to be a bit pointless. I think you have to make a judgement in each individual case. Sometimes it's helpful to split, other times it isn't. And if it is to be kept as the one article, then we should definitely follow the manual of style for the name, and not try and cram in all the variations. Or as you say, your M/S Wasa Queen could be M/S Wasa Queen (formerly M/S Bore Star, M/S Silja Star, M/S Orient Express, M/S Club Sea, M/S Eurosun and M/S Orient Sun) Benea 15:55, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
How is following WikiPedia's naming conventions being either "sneaky" or presenting a "fait accompli"? To be honest, I suspect that most of the long-time WikiProject Ships editors probably would not post any talk messages on a pretty straightforward situation like this, because they would just be bold and fix it. --Kralizec! (talk) 17:06, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Ship decommissioning

Can anyone help flesh out Ship decommissioning with info on how it is handled in countries other than the US? Maralia 04:46, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Linking the first use of common units

I have taken the liberty of moving this general discussion about unit links to wp:mosnum. There are many interested people there. Lightmouse 16:27, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Category:Magnanime class ships of the line nominated for deletion

As per discussion with User:Rif Winfield, User:TomTheHand and the author, User:Martocticvs, I have nominated Category:Magnanime class ships of the line for deletion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2007 September 7. Thoughts and feelings welcome on this at the link! ta ta for now. Benea 18:01, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

I added the db-author tag and it has since been deleted. Martocticvs 10:27, 9 September 2007 (UTC)


Abbreviation for nautical miles

I usually abbreviate nautical miles as nm, because I feel that it most accurately reflects real usage. For example, navy.mil has 10,700 hits for nm and 1030 for nmi. I acknowledge that nm is the SI symbol for nanometre, but I consider it essentially impossible for someone to be confused because of the massive difference in scale. Thunderbird2 is currently working through articles fixing up units, and one of this fixes is replacing nm with nmi. I was wondering what you guys thought about this, and also wondering if our project should have an official abbreviation for nautical mile that we should strive to use in all articles. TomTheHand 19:53, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Well there seems not to be an internationally agreed standard for it, though whilst nmi is used, I would say that nm is far more common. To avoid any possibility of confusion, we could make sure all instances are correctly linked, ie nm. Martocticvs 20:43, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
Yes, I usually strive to link the first usage of nm in an article. I think that's a really good idea. TomTheHand 21:03, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

I posted the below comment on Thunderbird2's talk page, but I'd like to continue the discussion here on WP:SHIPS so that others can participate.

Hi! I noticed that you're changing the nm abbreviation for nautical miles to nmi whenever you see it. I asked WP:SHIPS what they thought about it here, but didn't get much of a response. I'd like to ask if you'd be willing to stop making this change, because nm is by far the most common abbreviation for nautical miles. It is essentially impossible to read a range in nautical miles and confuse it for nanometers, because they differ by a dozen orders of magnitude. In addition, I always link my first use of nm to the article for nautical mile and I provide metric conversions following all nautical mile figures. TomTheHand 14:36, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Hi Tom. Thanks for your interest, and for pointing out the brief project discussion in the Ship Project. I was wondering when someone would notice. There are a number of reasons why I disagree with you on this.
1. I don't accept that nm is the most common abbreviation. If you tell me it is common in the USA I believe you. But I live and work in Europe and it is not common here, or at least not in my field of work (sonar).
2. While it may be difficult to confuse a nautical mile with a nanometre, that does not make it impossible. Just the very fact of using the same symbol for two different units is by its nature confusing. I once witnessed a demonstration of radar software that showed detection ranges in units of "nm" and asked (tongue firmly in cheek!) why it was the ranges were so short :-) The response came back straight away "Oh, that's a typo. The nm should read km". To this day I am unsure whether his screen was actually in miles or kilometres. And perhaps the demonstrator is as well.
3. I'm sure you're aware that the nautical mile is accepted for use alongside the SI system, and also that there is no internationally accepted abbreviation for the nautical mile. I believe that one day a symbol will be chosen, and when this day comes, I am certain that symbol will not be nm, because that would never be accepted by SI.
So, where does that leave us? My suggestion is that we both temporarily refrain from changes in either direction and try to find a rational solution to our difference. I know WP is keen on consensus, and you have tried that path already, with little success. Personally I prefer to find a solution that you and I are both comfortable with, as no one else seems to even care. Can we agree on that? Thunderbird2 15:24, 9 August 2007 (UTC)
I definitely won't try to revert your changes; you've got nothing to worry about in that respect. You bring up some good points that I'd like to respond to.
I'm not sure how we can really achieve consensus on which usage is most common. I usually do some Googling to figure this sort of stuff out, but it's difficult to be sure about that method, especially when you're dealing with a symbol that is used for several different units. Google shows 836,000 hits for pages that use both nm and knots, and 96,400 hits for nmi and knots. Similar searches restricted to Navy.mil return 1020 hits and 163 hits, respectively. Searches of mod.uk give 54 results and 0 results, respectively. Searching gov.au gives 940 and 17 hits. Gc.ca shows 2510 hits and 88 hits.
I do still think it's impossible to confuse nautical miles and nanometers. In your example, the person who responded to you didn't think for an instant that the display was showing nanometers, and if he didn't know that nm is a nautical mile then he probably would've been just as confused by nmi. Moreover, as I said, I always link to nautical mile and provide metric conversions; I think doing this eliminates the possibility of confusion.
You bring up a good point about an eventual internationally accepted abbreviation of nautical mile, but even if a standard abbreviation is chosen, it will not necessarily be the most common, and I believe we should use the abbreviation that is most used by the people who use the unit.
I think the biggest issue we need to discuss is which abbreviation is most commonly used. I acknowledge that nm has some problems, but I think that if it's by far the most common abbreviation then it doesn't matter that you could confuse it with nanometers. On the other hand, if it isn't clear that it's used far more often then it would be best to use a less ambiguous abbreviation. Do you think the Google searches above are valid? They seem to show that the largest English-speaking navies use nm far more than nmi. I didn't attempt to check usage among non-English-speaking organizations, as I don't think their usage is relevant to English Wikipedia. TomTheHand 18:06, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I've never seen mi used as an abbreviation for miles. In the UK m is used for miles as well as for meters. nm is intutive for nautical miles - nmi isn't logical as an abbreviation and would make me reach for the book of 3 letter acronyms. Viv Hamilton 18:25, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I would tend to agree. We get by here with dealing with m being used for both miles and meters, and are used to inferring which is appropriate from the context. And that is with two measures of distance that are much more likely to be confused than nautical miles and nanometers. Furthermore, the context is in most cases going to be clear, and nanometers aren't as well known as meters is to miles. Benea 18:30, 9 August 2007 (UTC)
The symbol used for the mile by the United States Department of Commerce National Institute of Standards and Technology is mi. So fortunately there is no ambiguity there with the metre. Returning to the nautical mile, Tom is right in saying that whatever abbreviation is adopted, it should be linked to the nautical mile page on first use. I agree also that only English language usage is relevant. When I am in doubt myself about the correct definition of a unit, or the correct abbreviation for it, I always turn for guidance to Rowlett's Dictionary of Units, an excellent and unbiased repository for all things unitary. Rowlett lists 4 abbreviations: nmi, naut mi, n mile and NM. I also did some googling myself and discovered that the two most popular choices seem to be NM and (despite Rowlett) nm. On balance, my vote goes to NM. Thunderbird2 19:03, 9 August 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure if it's possible to Google based on capitalization; I don't think so, which is too bad. I guess we just have to rely on actually looking at search hits. Surfing through the results of the searches listed above, I do see some use of NM, but the majority of those uses seem to be pages which are in all caps, like this one. Lowercase nm seems to be way more common than uppercase NM. TomTheHand 21:36, 9 August 2007 (UTC)
Well, here are some upper case ones USAF Intelligence Targeting Guide Forsythe et al 2004 Barhydt et al 2002. I don't think you can discount these, and I'm sure I'd find more if I kept looking. More importantly than that, I trust Rowlett on this more than I trust Google. Thunderbird2 22:04, 9 August 2007 (UTC)
I won't deny that some sources use NM, but the majority use nm. How many uses of "nm" did you pass by to find those? I don't actually feel like we can trust Rowlett here, as it doesn't list nm in spite of it being an undeniably common abbreviation. If your list of abbreviations doesn't include nm, it's simply incomplete; it's used very often. Moreover, we're not "trusting Google" - we're trusting the largest English-speaking navies in the world, and Google's just giving us a list of all the spots those navies have used nm/NM on their web pages. If you really need me to, I can go through two or three pages of Google hits (or more if necessary) and tally up how many capitalize the abbreviation, but I feel like the difference is evident already; do you need me to do the tally? TomTheHand 22:31, 9 August 2007 (UTC)
The ratio was about 2 to 1 in favour of nm, including (to my surprise) some European documents (mainly from Norway, but written in English). There's no need to "do the tally", because even if I were to be convinced that nm was in majority use (and I admit it's getting that way), I feel unable to support the use of a symbol that so flagrantly conflicts with SI. The clash would be less important if they were used in separate units systems (eg if one were exclusively metric and the other exclusively imperial). It is precisely because the nautical mile is used alongside SI that it needs a new symbol. I expect you will tell me our job is to reflect the current usage of the word, but is that always the case? What about the widespread (almost universal) use of "calorie" to mean kilocalorie? That is a case when majority use is not given precedence. Instead the conflict is spelt out explicitly, with clear guidelines for when such use might be acceptable (and also when it is not). Does that point at a possible way out for us? Thunderbird2 23:16, 9 August 2007 (UTC)
Just for the record, I checked the details. There were 7 hits for nm [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7], [8], the 3 already mentioned for NM, one for N mi [9], one for nmile [10] and one :-( for my pre-race favourite nmi [11]
I see your point, but I want to explain the reason I can sleep at night using "kcals" yet I protest against using anything but "nm". It's not just a matter of taking the majority usage. As you've said, "calorie" is an ambiguous unit: do they actually mean calories, or did they forget the capital C and they actually mean "kilocalories?" We're an educational resource, so we don't want to just follow average man-on-the-street's opinion here. We can take a step up from the common usage and use a scientific abbreviation to remove all ambiguity.
The thing is, there's no "step up" for nautical miles. The highest possible authorities (in my opinion) on the "right" way to abbreviate nautical miles (the navies which use them) use the ambiguous abbreviation "nm." If we abbreviate it another way, we're saying "We don't approve of how the primary users abbreviate it, so we'll arbitrarily select a different, less ambiguous abbreviation." I don't feel good about doing that.
What I'd really like at this point is a second round of input from folks like Martocticvs, Viv Hamilton, and Benea, as well as input from people who haven't spoken up yet. I don't think we're going to change each others' minds alone, so we need more opinions so that we can follow the consensus that develops. TomTheHand 19:13, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
Well, I'm still going to give it one more try (not to change your mind, but to get you doubting a little). Firstly, there is an alternative "step-up" to the navies, and that is the scientific community. The scientific literature uses nmi (or minor variants thereof) - hence my original preference for that abbreviation. Secondly, imagine someone writes an article about an optical sensor fitted to a navy frigate. The optical sensor has a wavelength of 800 nm and a range of 20 nm. This page contains a relevant real life email exchange. Think about it :-) Thunderbird2 20:06, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
Are there sources that I could look at to convince myself that the scientific community which deals with nautical issues uses the abbreviation nmi? I understand that you work with sonar in real life, but we would need to cite sources that anyone could verify. TomTheHand 20:15, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
Here are a few. If you click on "back to search query" you can edit the search criteria to see what else you can find. All from the same (acoustics journal) though - there will be some variation between publications. From a historical perspective, I found some uses of nm as well, but all pre 1965. Thunderbird2 21:11, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
This one defines a standard nomenclature for fisheries. Thunderbird2 21:43, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
I see, I see. In the first link, it was difficult to search for "nm" because most of the references were to nanometers; on the first page of search results, I saw one use of "NM" in an abstract but no uses of "nm" (to refer to nautical miles). I can definitely see what you're saying about nmi being perhaps the most common abbreviation in scientific journals.
WP:SHIPS, what do the rest of you think? TomTheHand 17:30, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

OK, I've done a bit of research offline - sorry can't give references - this is from asking around and looking at tech manuals. nm is used on radar displays, because the constraint is that you don't want to clutter the screen and NM would 'shout', and since you know from the context what it is, all you really need is to distinguish between nm and km. Since the displays say, nm, that's what they record in the logs. In articles, they always explain the abbreviation on first use anyway, so not a problem, but, if they don't use nm (i.e. what the radar displays say), they use NMi - NMi is more intuitive in that it is obviously an abbreviation of 2 words, not three. Viv Hamilton 07:27, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

From a personal point of view, I would be content with NMi - after all, there is on recognised standard format so I suppose really we should settle on whatever will cause the reader the least confusion (although it would be really quite an achievement to confuse nanometres with nautical miles, but even so...) Martocticvs 14:57, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
I admit to not having seen the NMi used, but I can see its benefits. Can either Martocticvs or Viv come up with a source for this abbreviation? By the way, do you seriously not find the following sentence confusing: "the new optical sensor has a wavelength of 800 nm and a range of 10 nm" Yes, you can work out the meaning from the context, but why make it so hard on the reader? Thunderbird2 15:24, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
I've also never seen NMi (that particular capitalization) and I would be more comfortable with nmi, which I definitely have seen. It looks like consensus may be developing that the less ambiguous abbreviation is the way to go. I'll definitely follow that if it's what we decide. TomTheHand 15:35, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
I found this discussion, listing M, mi., Mi, n. m., NM, n. mi and NMI as possibilities. The list seems endless! Thunderbird2 16:39, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
Yes I forgot to mention I have seen it listed as M before now - although the only place I have seen it like that is in a unit converter application, so it isn't really authoritative in any way. I think n.m. looks clunky, any form of nm/NM is open to ambiguity... re-reading Nautical mile, it seems actually that M is indeed the symbol preferred by the BIPM - but I think that is even more open to ambiguity. I have to admit that nmi/NMi is the least ambiguous of the options available. Martocticvs 17:05, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
I'd like to make a NPOV summary of what we have learnt so far:
1. in popular use, the most common abbreviation is nm, followed by NM
2. in scientific use, the most common abbreviation is nmi, followed by NM
3. an objection is made to nm on the grounds that that symbol is reserved by SI for the nanometre. No such objection applies to NM or nmi (The objection also does not apply to nm when used outside SI)
Is that a fair summary?
I also think we should examine our objective here, which so far has not been stated explicitly. I see 3 possible objectives:
A. Agree on wording for the nautical mile article
B. Agree on standard usage for the SHIPS project
C. Agree on standard usage outside the SHIPS project
By the way, have you heard of that new missile, with a yield of 10 kt? It's designed to be launched at a speed of up to 10 kt :-) Thunderbird2 18:23, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
I recently learnt that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a respected international body of scientists and engineers, has come off the fence on this. In their most recent guidelines they quote nmi as the (only) recommended abbreviation. (If the link doesn’t work, go to [12] and select IEEE “Information for authors” kit). Thunderbird2 10:23, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
I'm reminded of Wikipedia's use of the International Phonetic Alphabet to express the pronunciation of words. IPA is a wonderful thing, with wide acceptance among experts in pronunciation. Its drawback is that it is useless/unintelligible/annoying to readers who haven't learned it (which is most of mankind). IMHO, the best abbreviation is nm. NM is OK, too. Anybody who wants to use anything else should be required also to provide IPA pronunciation guides for all potentially unfamiliar words in the article in which he/she uses it. ;-) 11:19, 20 August 2007 (UTC) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Lou Sander (talk • contribs).

Ok, how do we resolve this? It looks like Lou Sanders and I favor nm in spite of the ambiguity, while Viv Hamilton and Thunderbird2 favor nmi/NMi. Martocticvs seemed to be in favor of nm initially, but came around to the nmi side. If we went ahead and said "let's use nmi" I wouldn't be strongly opposed any more. I do not like NMi, as I've never seen it used. Can we say "let's use nmi"? Lou, are you very strongly opposed? It's definitely in use in scientific literature, and it's even sometimes used by the big English-spreaking navies, though less often than nm. Viv, would you be alright with nmi instead of NMi? TomTheHand 14:53, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Well if the consensus is for nmi, I'll go along with that, but as this is not a standard SI abbreviation, we should ensure that it is spelled out on first use in each article. Viv Hamilton 07:39, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I usually link to the nautical mile article on the first use; I consider that to be an adequate substitute to spelling out and it fits better in infoboxes. TomTheHand 12:39, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
I also generally use the spelled out and linked nautical mile. --Kralizec! (talk) 17:26, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, to clarify, that isn't what I do. Rather, I use nm, and link it to the article, like so: nm. TomTheHand 17:39, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

At the start of this debate I was in favour of nmi, but willing to back NM as a compromise. As a consequence of a discussion on the knot talk page my position has shifted. The reason is that maritime authorities of both Canada and USA favour M over competing abbreviations. My view now is that nmi and M are both acceptable and preferred over all other abbreviations I've seen so far. Thunderbird2 12:11, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Gentlemen & Ladies: we have spent a couple of months discussing this and I think we have heard all the arguments. I have taken the liberty of transferring the main conclusions into the nautical mile article. See you if you agree with me. Thunderbird2 21:34, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't hear anyone complaining loudly. Can I take that as provisional agreement for the nautical mile article? If so, the next step is to form consensus on which abbreviation to use with SHIPS project articles. I prefer not to make a proposal myself, as I have already made my views known. Instead I invite someone else to do so :) Thunderbird2 15:14, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

'Ship of the line' and 'line of battle ship'

Hi all, hope everyone is well. I've been chatting with User:Toddy1, and I wondered if anyone had any thoughts about the terms 'Ship of the line' and 'line of battle ship', especially with regard to titling articles? We had a debate a while back about battleships and ships of the line and worked out some rough guidelines about when to use one or the other. Toddy1 has suggested that steam powered ships like HMS Bulwark of the Bulwark Class Battleship (1859) are in fact called 'line-of-battle ships'. So should the article be Bulwark class ship of the line (1859) or Bulwark class line of battle ship (1859)? And should we:

  • use 'ship-of-the-line' and 'line-of-battle ship' interchangebly?
  • establish one as the preferred use for articles?
  • or use one for a particular type of ship (i.e. steam powered ships that carried their main armament in their hulls) and retitle class and ship articles accordingly?

Sorry to keep asking for opinions on everything I can think of! Pip pip! Benea 22:27, 9 September 2007 (UTC).

You should remember that we are dealing with an era of transition, and that transition affected the terminology as much as the design and construction itself. I think it is a mistake to try and use the term 'battleship' for any of the wooden-hulled warships; the term was simply not used officially (yes, there are references to the term in some contemporary literature, but these were essentially shorthand ways of writing "line-of-battle ship" and had no official status). Just to add confusion, remember that the official classification of the 'Warrior' and her immediate descendents was "frigate", and this remained the case for a number of years after 1860; in fact, the screw-driven line-of-battle ship (or ship-of-the-line, which I think should remain the term for the wooden-hulled two-deckers and three-deckers, the steam-assisted screw vessels as well as the pure sailers) did not evolve into the iron or steel battleship; the battleship evolved instead out of the frigate, because it carried its main battery on one deck. Rif Winfield 23:08, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree that we should avoid using 'battleship' for wooden-hulled ships of the line - and am often frustrated that modern sources add to the confusion by using the term ahistorically. I might take issue with your description of the development of the first ironclads (yes they were single-decked, but in the French navy at least ironclads were designed to fill the tactical niche of the line of battle, but all of this is by the by...). The Land 12:51, 10 September 2007 (UTC)


The term "the steam-assisted screw vessels" is unhelpful. In 1848 steam could be regarded as an auxiliary, but the steam line-of-battle ships of the 1850s were steam ships. Of course they still had sails.--Toddy1 22:23, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

In the original place this discussion started (which I have copied into Talk:Bulwark class battleship (1859)), Benea says that "the convention is not to use dashes in the article titles".

  • I could not find this convention.
  • Most US battleship articles have names with a hyphen, e.g. USS Mississippi (BB-23), as do some RN articles like CVA-01. And articles about geographical features such as the Mason-Dixon line quite correctly have a hyphen.
  • The correct contemporary usage for steam line-of-battle ships from the 1850s to the 1870s was line-of-battle ship, not "line of battle ship". (Though many terms were also used, including: two-decker, three-decker, liner, or steam liner for the unarmoured ships, and ironclad, iron clad, armourclad, armour clad, ironclad frigate, etc. for the armoured ships.)

--Toddy1 22:23, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Incidentally Monarch and Devastation were line-of-battle ships. Whether a ship had a broadside armament, a central battery with recessed sides, or had its main armament in turrets did not affect its being a line-of-battle ship.--Toddy1 22:29, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

It's just the articles as it stands, don't use hyphens. See Ardent class ship of the line, Intrepid class ship of the line, Worcester class ship of the line, Inflexible class ship of the line and indeed the article Ship of the line. But the main question discussed here are the terms 'line-of-battle ships', or 'ships-of-the-line', (with or without hyphens, it's up to you). It seems that ships of the line is in fact the correct usage. But that is something we're trying to find consensus for. Benea 22:32, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
What I'm getting at here, is that I didn't mean that no article on wikipedia use hyphens in the title, but that our articles specifically to refer to ships of the line, (examples above) do not conventionally use hyphens. I'm sorry if you misunderstood me. But that's by the by really. What I want to know is how we should use the terms 'ship of the line' and 'line of battle ship' (hyphenate as you see fit, I really don't mind). Further to this, Lavery's book is even called 'The Ship of the line'. Ship of the line in google produces 138,000 hits, whilst line of battle ship produces 24,000, the first few of which seem to be either us, or are online encyclopedias which say 'see ship of the line'. Google even asks if you were really looking for 'line of battleship.' It just seems to me that 'ship of the line' is not only the more commonly used, but is the correct term as well, right up until 'battleship' appears in official terminology. 'line of battle ship' is a synonym that is not as widely used, not even in the official scholarly works. So my proposal is that we establish a preference for 'ship of the line' in general usage and titling of articles. How you hyphenate it or not is another matter for another debate. Benea 02:36, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
Ship of the line seems to be by far the most commonly used term, both online and in published works, so to me it makes the most sense to stick with that terminology throughout. Martocticvs 19:59, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
Do you have any evidence for the use of the term Ship of the line for the steam ships of the 1850s?--Toddy1 22:27, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
No, that's outside my area of particular interest. Martocticvs 22:31, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
Try here. A review by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D. Note the references to "screw-powered ships of the line". Benea 22:44, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
And here for French ships, called such things as "Fast screw ship of the line (1st class)", etc —Preceding unsigned comment added by Benea (talk • contribs) 22:47, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
And another here - "In early June of 1855, the Allied naval commanders brought more than 100 ships to Kronstadt, including twenty screw-driven ships of the line and four screw frigates." The same site, at a different page here also explains rather well how 'ship of the line' and 'line of battle ship' came about, and what they refer to.

In the age of sail, after the development of the line of battle tactic in the mid 17th century, and up to the mid 19th century, a ship of the line (of battle) was a warship powerful enough to take a place in the battle line. Another term, a "line of battle" ship, later shortened to become a "battleship".

So 'line of battle ship' is a synonym for 'ship of the line'. The whole thing taken together reads 'ship of the line of battle', of which 'ship of the line' is the most common usage. I can find no evidence that 'line of battle ship' was used to specifically refer to steam powered vessels, any occurances where they do, seem to be the author's choice over which synonym to use and he or she has plumped for one over the other. Benea 23:26, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1860-1905, which I have here, lists 'Screw Ships-of-the-line' and 'Sailing Ships-of-the-line' - no use of the term 'line-of-battle-ship' that a cursory glance through can detect. Martocticvs 16:35, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

a plea

Nearly half of the articles marked for WP:SHIPS have never been assessed or assigned importance. I'm not talking about review for B class or better - nearly 3,000 ship articles have never been assessed at all. Embarrassing when it's something core to the project like, say, brigantine.

First-level assessment is EASY. You don't even have to actually read the article.

  1. Click here and pick an article.
  2. Importance:
    • top - ship type articles such as carrack, galleon.
    • high - ship class articles such as Glorious class aircraft carrier.
    • mid - most every article about an individual ship goes here.
    • low - rarely used; for low notability ships, particularly private vessels or ships that had very short careers.
  3. Class:
    • B - only if WP:MILHIST has assessed it as such.
    • start - decent breadth of information.
    • stub - has a stub template and/or very little info.

That's all there is to it. If everyone could assess 5 or 10 articles a day in the process of their other work here, it would help us identify our most important articles, so we can focus improvement where it is most needed. It would take 5 minutes out of your day. Maralia 02:30, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

I've done a few this morning, and probably will do a few more throughout the day. Parsecboy 12:07, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
Gosh, I have been working on this for months ... and kind of feared I would still be working on it when I turned 90 in a mere 56 years. --Kralizec! (talk) 17:12, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
I've jumped onboard and I'm doing a few.-MBK004 21:36, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
That few ended up being over 50 (I'm leaning more towards 75) before I logged off to have dinner.-MBK004 23:37, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
I just did another 50 or so.-MBK004 01:44, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
And used quite the apropos nautical term to do so ;) Parsecboy 21:41, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
Good work, MBK. I've done about 30 so far today, and may end up doing more now. Parsecboy 23:42, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
Thanks guys. Something I should've mentioned: if an individual ship is so notable that it's very likely people access the article all the time (i.e. Titanic, Dreadnought, Arizona, Valdez, Lusitania), I usually bump it up to high or top importance. Maralia 21:51, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
When we originally discussed importance, we said that an importance rating two or more levels different from the guideline required discussion, but I think considering how much work we have ahead of us we should suspend that for now. I do think that we should be careful about assigning importance ratings two or more levels from the guideline; as Maralia says, Titanic, Dreadnought, Arizona, Valdez, and Lusitania are extremely important and merit "Top" importance ratings but for the most part a one-level difference should be adequate. TomTheHand 21:57, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

The bot that tallies our assessment statistics hasn't been auto-updating lately; I've been able to run it manually a few times over the last week, but tonight, of course, it is fizzling out altogether :/ I've left a note for the bot-operator to take a look at it. Annoying, but a slight delay will make the change to the unassessed article count that much more impressive, right? Maralia 03:04, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

I have been through a load today... I shall try and remember to pick of a few each day now. Martocticvs 19:58, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

The ships in Category: Fletcher class destroyers, almost all 177 of them, were not even marked for WP:SHIPS at all. I'm sure there are loads of instances like this, but such a large class, UGH. They're done now though, just sharing my pain. Maralia 16:12, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm sure the list of articles like that is disturbingly long... how often does the bot run to automatically tag articles? Martocticvs 16:15, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Per WP:MILHIST, if you are assessing a military ship article and they haven't also tagged it, please tag it with {{WPMILHIST}} and a class assessment (they don't use importance). This is a little extra work, but they are also on a big assessment drive and tagging/assessing articles for us too, so please make the effort where you can. Thanks. Maralia 02:55, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Category:Sailing

Re the above questions concerning dinghies and AYRS, is the "Ships" project related to "Category:Sailing"? GilesW 11:41, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Plagiarism?

I realize this is probably beating a dead horse, since nobody else on WP seems to give a damn, as far as I can tell. I've gotten mesaged about replacing the {{DANFS}} tag as with a warning about plagiarism as "POV". POV? How about "ethical"? Or doesn't ethics enter into it? Since plagiarism constitutes copying verbatim, attribution or not, public domain or not, I stand by it. Public domain means "no payment to publisher or writer required", not "I can reproduce this under any name I want". Maybe you ought to investigate the use of plagiarised material. And I'm concerned somebody citing WP may get nailed for unwitting plagiarism, too. Or doesn't anybody here care about that, either? (I'll bet Britannica wouldn't let it go. Of course, as everybody's always saying, this isn't Britannica. That's for sure.) Trekphiler 21:41, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

There is a problem with people who create apparently good articles by the simple expedient of copying article from another website. it is wrong. If people act unethically, then something needs to be done. To let it pass, is to encourage it. However limited quotations with attribution are permitted. Note that facts are not generally copyrightable - the websites that hoover up publicly available statistics and then try some kind of ownership of them are not in a good position to enforce their claims.

(Incidentally, there are companies that hoover up photos from the internet and illegally sell access to the stolen photos.) --Toddy1 22:13, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Concern about citing WP and being accused of plagarism is correct. The automated turn-it-in drop-box that most professors at my university use, tag even 3 words together as plagarism. Wikipedia has gotten a few of my friends into hot water and even one of them kicked-out of school.-MBK004 22:16, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
I don't want to get into the argument about what constitues plagiarism, but being the one who warned Trekphiler about replacing a {{DANFS}} template (which produces: "This article includes text from the public domain Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships.") with "This article contains material plagiarized from the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships", I'd suggest someone from this project needs to either rewrite the text of the template or nominate for deletion, if its usage indeed constitues plagiarism. Katr67 23:43, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
If attribution is given showing the source of the text, and the text therefore is not claimed to be the editor's own, how is that plagiarism? [13] Kablammo 00:00, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
In regards to this and other comments made by you ("Since plagiarism constitutes copying verbatim, attribution or not, public domain or not, I stand by it."), I encourage you to read the definition of plagiarism:

Plagiarism (from the Latin plagiare, "to kidnap") is the practice of claiming, or implying, original authorship of (or incorporating material from) someone else's written or creative work, in whole or in part, into one's own without adequate acknowledgement.

The CSS Oregon article that you edited was not plagiarism until you removed the cited acknowledgement. Maralia 00:05, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
Maralia is correct; it's only plagiarism if you claim another's work as your own. That's why one is allowed to make direct, cited, quotations, and it does not constitute plagiarism. Parsecboy 00:26, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm concerned soembody who doesn't go to DANFS & cites a tagged page may get nailed for plagiarism, without ever knowing why."

Someone who copies a wikipedia page and cites it is not guilty of plagarism because he or she has cited it. Someone who copies a wikipedia page and does not cite it is guilty of plagarism whether it was from DANFS or the complete original work of another author(s). If someone wants to be unethical as you point out and copy it as their own work without citation, than there's nothing we can do, except delete wikipedia to remove the temptation. But that's really their lookout. 'Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain'. So using a work in the public domain, and citing it cannot be plagarism and I suggest you stop trying to label it as such. Benea 01:12, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
For the official policy, see here - Wikipedia:Copyright problems#Plagiarism that doesn't infringe copyright. In particular this bit seems relevent (emphasis is mine):

Even when material isn't protected by copyright, it is still important to give appropriate credit to its authors and creators when we include that material in Wikipedia. Failure to do so is plagiarism: falsely claiming original authorship of the work. Plagiarising material harms the work's real authors by denying them deserved credit for their work, and it harms Wikipedia by making it more difficult for editors and readers to refer to the material's source. It may also violate the terms of Wikipedia's license: the GFDL.

Material which is plagiarised but which does not violate copyright doesn't need to be removed from Wikipedia if it can be properly sourced. Add appropriate source information to the article wherever possible, or move unsourced material to an article's talk page until sources can be found.

So what it's saying is that copying material without "[giving] appropriate credit to its authors and creators" is plagiarism. What we should do is therefore "add appropriate source information to the article". Which is what the DANFS tag does. It provides "appropriate source information", and therefore the work is no longer 'plagiarised', but 'properly cited'. Removing those tags makes the work effectively 'plagiarised', because there is no citation. So you can't refer to it as plagiarism because it isn't. And you can't remove those tags because you are then creating that problem yourself. As to the ethical dilemma over whether wikipedia should have articles with some parts (quite legally) quoted verbatim, I think you need to take that to higher powers, such as God, or his representative here on earth, Jimbo. Benea 08:36, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Continued infobox discussion

I'd like to continue the infobox discussion here, as only Kjet followed it over to Template talk:Infobox Ship Example. I've added operator, completion date, height, and crew to the new ship infobox; see {{Infobox Ship Example}}. It now supports everything that {{Infobox Commercial Ship}} supported and should be able to replace that template. I would be happy to answer any questions on how to use the templates or how to put together your own set of fields for a particular kind of ship. Please ask either here or on my talk page.

What other fields need to be added? Kjet has suggested the following:

  1. Passenger capacity
  2. Car-carrying capacity - often listed separately from gargo capacity
  3. Cargo capacity
  4. Number of passenger beds - can be a different number from passenger capacity
  5. Number of cabins
  6. Ice class
  7. Sister ships - very often there is no officially named class, the ship just has one or two similar sister ships, and no class page exists

I would really rather not add a ton of different types of capacity; see here for my opinion on that subject. I'd be happy to add Ice class, as I can't really imagine any existing field that could hold that information. I'm a little iffy on sister ships, as I think that information would be best contained in a footer.

In addition, there was a discussion above about adding "Number of funnels" and "Sail plan". I'm still a little iffy on a "Funnels" field, so I haven't added it yet; do you really, really want it? ;-) I found the discussion about possibly showing thumbnails of different sail plans to be very interesting. I'd like to add a sail plan field, and pictures of different sail plans are already on the sail plan article.

Anyway, I'd like to hear from more people, primarily about the capacity issue. Having many kinds of capacity seems to be a big break from how we've traditionally tried to do things, with general-purpose fields. If we have more than one kind of capacity, I'd like to keep the number to an absolute minimum. Four seems like way too many to me; some information could definitely be consolidated there. TomTheHand 14:25, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Infoboxes should be terse not expansive in my opinion. The aircraft specifications template which is used inthe body of an article uses the single field "capacity" which can then be filled out in a multitude of ways eg "40 passengers" or "5 stretcher cases" or "2 Europallets". Very flexible, simpler to code.GraemeLeggett 15:01, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
For the record, I have personally been converted to the one capacity field idea... but I feel obliged to point out that in my experience of Wikipedia, a lot of editors use customised infoboxes that have separate fields of different capacities. Regarding funnels (& sails)... if a funnel field is added, we need to reach some kind of a consensus of what a funnel is. In civilian ships there have been a lot of ships with dummy funnels, which later developed into observation lounges quite different in appearance from the actual funnel(s), and especially during the 1960s many ships were built in which it's quite difficult to say if the construction on the top of the ship is a dummy funnel or an observation lounge.
As for the sister ships, I think they should be there, even if there is a footer (a footer of course would be trés chic). The ship class is there, and the sister ships essentially fill the same function in case there is no officially designated class. -- Kjet 15:16, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
RE capacity: I am of the minimalist persuasion and prefer a single capacity box.
RE funnels: Perhaps an article actually on this topic is in order?
RE sister ships: I prefer them in a footer vs in the infobox; sister ships are not technically information about the ship, and it seems neater and consistent with the military articles style, as a bonus. Examples might convince me otherwise, though. Maralia 16:27, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
One thing worth mentioning: it would be easy to set up a campaignbox-like template for the sister ships using {{military navigation}}. Kirill 17:09, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
Regarding funnels, we used to have a Funnel (ship) stub article, but it was merged into Chimney a couple of years ago. As to sister ships, I agree with Maralia that I prefer to see them in a separate footer template. However that said, if the article is on a ship class, I like having all the ships in listed both in the infobox and the footer template. --Kralizec! (talk) 17:48, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, I saw a little info in that article earlier - but nothing cohesive, and not a word about 'dummy' funnels. Other info could include how they were used for identification, perceived as indications of the safety of the ship, etc. Maralia 18:27, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
Regarding the usage of footers for sister ships (I'm starting to get converted to this idea as well)... the big problem is, how to name the footer if no official name exists for the "class"? For instance, if a footer is created for M/S Amorella, M/S Isabella, M/S Gabriella and M/S Crown of Scandinavia, what should it be called? I have never come across an official class name for these ships, yet the footer certainly needs one.
Relatedly, what about classes owned by several companies that have different names depending on the company? For instance, the ships called the R-class by Renaissance Cruises are now called the Regatta-class by Oceania Cruises, Explorer-class by Princess Cruises (who also include the unrelated Regal Princess in the same class) and operated without a class name by Azamara Cruises. -- Kjet 15:13, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
Why not just a generic 'sister ships' footer? It wouldn't be pre-filled, so it wouldn't save a lot of typing like {{Auk class minesweeper}} does, but presumably most merchant ships don't have that many sister ships, either. Maralia 15:48, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
Why not create a generic one 'sister ships' footer, but obviously editors are also free to create a specific pre-populated one. As for what specific sister-ship footers should be called, surely the convention is that the first of the series names the class (as is the case with nuclear submarines)? On other fields - yes please for sail-plan. When I next have some time for editing I will try to add a template to a historic ship or wreck and report back how well it fits Viv Hamilton 16:27, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
I like the idea of a generic sister ships footer (I didn't actually know it was possible to make something like that). As you say, most civilian ships (at least ones notable enough to have an article about them in the first place) don't have that my sisters to start with so typing isn't really a problem. Plus putting them in the infobox as per my original suggestion would have meant the same amount of typing anyway.
Re: class naming conventions, in my experience if a civilian ship class has an actual class name it often isn't the name of the first ship in class (sometimes it isn't the name of any ship in class). Case points: Vista class (no ship in the class is named Vista), Spirit class (first in class was Costa Atlantica), Star class (by convention should be Finnstar class), Vision Class (first in class was Legend of the Seas - although technically this isn't a single class but three separate classes. But none of them would be called Vision class according to the convention). With this in mind I personally at least wouldn't dare to start assigning names to classes without official class designations... that would be dangerously close to WP:OR if you ask me. -- Kjet 20:04, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
My thoughts:
  • One capacity field. We can fill in, for example, that SS Canberra had a capacity of x passengers and y cubic feet/meters of cargo space; that a container ship has a TEU of z, etc.
  • One field for installed power and one for propulsion.
  • Sisterships-- however you want to handle it. Most cruise ships are members of a class; there were dozens or hundreds of tankers and freighters build to standard designs.
  • How do we handle ships which are not launched? Float out was once a significant day for ships built in graving docks, but now means little. We have completion dates, delivery dates, naming ceremony dates, maiden voyage dates, etc. Do we need a multiplicity of fields or is there one we can use for civilian ships (service entry date)?
  • When in doubt, Keep It Simple, Shiplovers. We're not a technical resource and don't need infoboxes longer that the articles. Kablammo 20:15, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
There are "In service" and "Out of service" fields which can be used when that's all that's known. TomTheHand 20:35, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
I had thought those were status fields (i.e., a ship is either in, or out of service). Should the date be inserted? On a number of existing articles I changed "launched" to "service entry", as typically the latter, or some approximation of it, is known. "Commissioned" seems to be a military term. Kablammo 21:22, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
Well, they're just text fields like the others. I use them for dates when my source is vague. TomTheHand 21:37, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

I've added ice class and sail plan. I added them next to each other, not out of laziness, but because I felt like ice class went well with the hull dimensions directly above while sail plan went with propulsion directly below. I can move the fields if needed. If anyone wants to come up with new sets of copy-and-paste code, please go ahead, and ask me if there are any questions... or describe to me what you want and I'll do it. TomTheHand 13:47, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Tom, it's looking good. I like how you've grouped the metrics. A couple of minor suggestions:
  • Start with measurements together (as you have) including hull items, then power items (including sail plan, speed, etc.), then capacity and crew. (Or put capacity and crew before the power items.) Putting crew right after capacity would be helpful for passenger ships.
  • Put tonnage before displacement, so that the former is the first of the two fields an editor will come to. Better yet, eliminate displacement entirely. It's really not a relevant field for merchant ships, and it could be added manually for those who have data.
  • Our naval architect has suggested differentiating power from propulsion. See RMS Queen Mary 2 for an example.
Thanks for taking on this task-- it should help reduce errors. Kablammo 14:18, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
A few comments and issues with your suggestions:
  • The fields are already arranged in the way you've suggested. "Capacity" was misplaced in the template instructions only, but appears right before complement/crew when actually used in an article; I've fixed the instructions.
  • I'll swap displacement and tonnage shortly unless anyone has any objections.
  • I don't see why power, an attribute of propulsion, should be listed in a separate field. The Queen Mary 2 article uses the "propulsion" field only to describe the way the power gets to the water; that'd be like using USS Enterprise (CVN-65)'s propulsion field to say "4 propellors". It's supposed to be more than that. The field is intended to describe every attribute of the ship's propulsion plant: "8 x A2W reactor, 4 x steam turbine, 4 shafts, 280,000 shp (210 MW)". TomTheHand 14:35, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. I'll post a message to Jmvolc on the propulsion/power issue. I suspect the reason to differentiate them is to avoid confusion on total power of the prime mover as opposed to power available for propulsion, which is different. One other item: Is range needed for merchant ships? Is it available? For some ships it is (much was made of the range of SS United States) but for most it may not be. Kablammo 14:55, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Ok, I moved tonnage above displacement. I hope this doesn't mess up warship newbies, who might fill in tonnage when they should fill in displacement! We can cross that bridge when we come to it, though. The warship copy-and-paste code leaves off tonnage, so that should remove that temptation. TomTheHand 14:49, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
I'm also thinking it might be best to just remove displacement from the "civilian ships" copy-and-paste code. You're much more experienced in this area than me; when was the last time you had displacement figures for a merchant ship? TomTheHand 15:32, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
You edit-conflicted my comments to the same effect. Here they are: You could keep both in the master template in whatever order you want, and just remove displacement entirely from the merchant copy-and-paste template. (It's hard to imagine an article on a newer vessel being created which would use displacement, and there likely are very few older ships for which it is available.) Then the naval template would have only displacement, the merchant only tonnage, and someone who wanted both fields would have to go to the master template. Is that right? Kablammo 15:41, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
Here's a comment of our naval architect posted at Template_talk:Infobox_Commercial_Ship#Fields_for_passenger_vessels:
Displacement will be VERY difficult to come by for all modern vessels. GRT is the common measure of a passenger ship's size.
So tonnage alone should work for most ships.
And here was his comment on the power/propulsion question:
I like the idea of separating propulsion and total installed power. Both of these numbers are fairly easy to get and are fairly easy to understand. For example in the case of a diesel electric vessel : Propulsion would equal the power of the electric motors while Total Installed Power would be the power of all of the generating units combined.
He had some other comments about fields; I have invited him to comment here. Kablammo 16:06, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
I still think they belong in the same field for the same reasons as different kinds of capacity should be combined. The differences between total installed power and power available for propulsion should be described in the text. The infobox should be concise, using a minimum number of fields, and related information (power and propulsion) should be described in one field. What do other members think? TomTheHand 16:12, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
Personally it does not matter to me, but we should weigh the views of an expert. I'm not sure the difference between the power of the power plant (whether reciprocating steam, turbines, or diesels) and the power delivered to the screws is understood, or for that matter, necessary in a general resource such as this. But there is a difference; as to whether that should be addressed in one field or two, let's hear from others. Otherwise I think the templates look good. Kablammo 16:20, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
Is this something that is relevant to ships whose role is other than just transport e.g. cable laying, crane, dredge, trawlers etc? Viv Hamilton 16:35, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
Anything that abstracts power from the power plant, including house power. The power of the prime mover in turbine-electric or diesel-electric installations, or of the generators/alternators driven by them, does not give you power available for propulsion unless there is a separate power source for the other electrical systems on the vessel. For different reasons, one cannot compare indicated horsepower of reciprocating steam to shaft horsepower. It just points out the fact that if a rating is given, one has to be precise on what measure is used-- not all power goes to propulsion. Kablammo 16:52, 7 September 2007 (UTC)


Power:-
The issue is not the difference in the power delivered to the props (Ps) as compared to the power produced (Pb) but rather the difference in vessels such as cruise ships where the hotel services use as much or more power than the propulsion systems. There are other vessels that have an enormous amount of generating power used for everything from cargo pumps to to fire fighting monitors to side thrusters. Within the marine industry, this is always combined with the propulsion power and noted as "Total Installed Power". Propulsion power is exclusively the power dedicated to moving the ship forward under transit conditions. Note that some semi-submersible drill rigs have a multitude of Z-drive thrusters that they use for transit. On top of this they have multiple levels of redundancy for the generators supplying power to these units (DP1 & DP2) and to the drill floor. Total Installed Power and Propulsion Power are 2 very different numbers.Jmvolc 02:13, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
I've made my case above; what do other members think about this issue? My big concern here is how this change would affect warships. As I said, I don't want to run into a situation where the Enterprise article says "Installed Power: 8 nuclear reactors, 4 steam turbines, 280,000 shp" and "Propulsion: 4 screws". Using the "Propulsion" field solely to describe how the power gets to the water seems like it could work really badly in a lot of cases. TomTheHand 13:15, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
I believe that I now understand your concern. Using your example, the fields should be filled out as follows : Installed Power: (th e total of the Propulsion steam turbines, auxiliary steam turbines and diesel generator sets), Propulsion : 4 x 70,000 SHP. The point is that there are at lot more prime movers than just to make the ship move forward.Jmvolc 22:13, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
I've thought about this about, and I have a lot of conflicting feelings. On the one hand, it would be nice to have a field to contain all "prime movers" on a warship, not just those for propulsion. On the other hand, the "Installed Power / Propulsion" format is something I'm not comfortable applying to warships. It's not terminology that I'm used to hearing and my sources never list things that way. What I'd like to do is add an "Installed power" field, because you've made it apparent that it will be very important and useful for commercial vessels, but I'll only add it to the commercial vessel copy-and-paste code and continue to use the "Propulsion" field in the same way for warships, at least for now. If there are no objections, I'll do this tomorrow morning. TomTheHand 16:51, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
Jeez, sorry, it's been a busy week for me off-Wiki and I totally forgot to do this. I added a "Ship power" argument to the Characteristics section, which produces a row labelled "Installed power:". TomTheHand 15:05, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
Size/Capacity:-
Tonnage works for a lot of ships - specifically those that do not carry cargo in bulk. These vessels are all categorized by DWT (Deadweight) which is the weight of everything it carries. Your template should be capable of handling either value as Tankers do not use Tonnage and Cruise Ships do not use DWT but of course if you look hard enough, values exist for each. Jmvolc 02:13, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
DWT seems like the sort of thing that can go well in "Capacity"... "Capacity: 10,000 dwt" or "Capacity: 10,000 dwt of oil". "DWT: 10,000" reads awkwardly to me, and "DWT: 10,000 dwt" looks redundant. TomTheHand 13:15, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Ice Class:-
An excellent addition. Please keep in mind that there are many standards used (ABS, Lloyd's, CASPPR, DNV, etc.) and you should report the standard (ex: 1A Super) and the Classification Society (LR, DNV, GL, ABS, etc.) The Classification Society the vessel was designed and built under is another important field. It will be tricky because with the IACS efforts, it is now fairly easy to move from one society to another so it can be a moving target.Jmvolc 02:13, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Ok, so "Classification society" is a totally separate concept from "Ice class" and it needs to be included as a separate field? Where in the infobox should it be listed? I want to be clear before I add something. TomTheHand 13:15, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
If I understand this correctly, the classification society can assing an ice class, but at least in the Baltic Sea the ice class is assigned by the local authorities and not the classification society. Additionally the duties of the classification society are not limited solely to the ice classes, for instance the GTS Finnjet has (had) four different certificates issued by Det Norske Veritas (see here), only one of which is related to the ice class as far as I understand. So there definately should be a separate field for the classification society. -- Kjet 19:47, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
Range:-
Almost useless for anything other than warships. Obviously, the slower you go the farther you go, and some tankers can burn cargo oil so it is irrelevant for commercial vessels. DDS-200 gives very clear guidelines on how to calculate range for surface combatants so that is a good number.Jmvolc 02:13, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Removed. In reference to "the slower you go the farther you go", range figures are given with a speed: "10,000 nm at 10 knots," so it's not exactly a silly figure. TomTheHand 13:15, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Passengers:-
Normally referred to as PAX within the ferry and cruise ship industry. It might not be a bad idea to introduce this term. Ships are described in terms of PAX capacity which is the legal number of passengers usually limited by the number of life saving appliance (remember Titanic?) ... next by berths which is the total number of beds available ... then by cabins. Keep in mind that a cabin can easily have 4 berths and many passenger vessels have only seating.Jmvolc 02:13, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
We've discussed this a bit above, and consensus seems to be that all types of capacity should be listed under "Capacity". TomTheHand 13:15, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Class:-
Many commercial vessels are 'Branded' for marketing purposes ... R-Class or Millennium. This is not the name of the class, it is the name the class is marketed under. In conventional marine parlance, the class is always referred to by the name of the first of class ex: Oliver Hazard Perry Class. Therfore, the name of the class field is redundant if you include the names of all of the sisterships noting which one was first.Jmvolc 02:19, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
We don't want to include a "sister ships" field; we'd strongly prefer to include sister ships in a footer. A sister ships field could be very long, and using footers for that purpose has worked very well on thousands of articles so far. If a ship isn't a member of a true "class", then the class field should be left blank. TomTheHand 13:15, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Not sure if we are on the same page here. Every ship is part of a class, some have others in the class, some don't. How would you fill in the Class field for the new LPD18?Jmvolc 22:13, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Even single ships with no related vessels? Surely this is subject as to one's personal opinion as to what defines a class. Personally, it irks we when, for instance, we get references to a "Vanguard class battleship", when there was only ever an HMS Vanguard. Emoscopes Talk 22:56, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Emoscopes outlines my concern well. I'd fill in LPD-18's class field with "San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock", but I'd leave HMS Vanguard's field blank.
Classes are not always named after the first ship. For example, the Tribal and Battle class destroyers are named after the "theme" used to name their members. Therefore, if a group of ships were "branded" under the name R-class, I'd consider R-class to be a valid thing to put in their "Class" box... assuming they're actually sister ships. If they're not, and the class is just a bit of marketing, I'd hesitate and feel weird about it. Luckily as a military ship fan I don't have to deal with such tough decisions ;-) My general point is that I don't always feel obligated to fill in the "Class" box. TomTheHand 01:35, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
In addition to what TomTheHand said, when we're talking about commercial ships, people are much more likely to know the "branded" class name, and will look under that when coming to Wiki. In all likeliness the person will not even know what the class name would be according to the official convention, but if s/he reads about the Vision Class in a brochure or website, that is the name s/he will look for in here (even if in this case the class is not what we'd consider a class). -- Kjet 11:12, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Two points, with particular relevence to sailing era ships. Firstly remember that the word "class" used to have a different meaning. Modern usage uses the word to distinguish vessels built to a common design (i.e. using the same plans, or copies of the same plans). But up until the start of the 19th century the term was used to denote what we would now called a "type", so that for example we would talk about the 44-gun class of warship. Secondly, the further back one goes, the less likely one is to find vessels built to a common design, so that each vessel was built by a shipwright to his own individual design. It therefore is increasingly rare to find true "sister-ships". Incidentally, there is a tendency to quote for vessels (certainly for sailing warships) the designed dimensions rather than the actual dimensions. Remember that all wooden-hulled ships, by the nature of wooden construction, tended to depart from the exact dimensions drawn on the designs, even if by only a few inches (or sometimes even less). Ships were usually measured upon launch, and those principal dimensions were recorded as her "as-built" dimensions. I feel we should quote these actual measurements wherever available, rather than the design (i.e. planned) dimensions. Rif Winfield 23:25, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Draught / Draft:-
These 2 terms are exactly the same. Draught is used by the British and Draft is used by pretty much everyone else. Jmvolc 02:28, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Yes. The template supports alternate spellings for British and American English. It also supports armor and armour and honors and honours. After pasting the code, you can remove one field or the other as appropriateTomTheHand 13:15, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
The Canadian Maritime Command and Royal Australian Navy also seem to use "draught", on their websites at least. You aren't hurting anyone by leaving the 2-language option in, Jmvolc's opposition to the term "draught" seems to be unfounded. British ships have a draught, American ships have a draft. Others may pick and choose :) Emoscopes Talk 11:25, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
Sailplan:-
Is this intended to indicated the type of ship it was? This might be confusing because you can have a "ship" rigged "frigate". I would suggest you need both fields. Keep in mind that there are many interesting variants like knockabout schooners and snow rigged brigs. Jmvolc 02:28, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
I don't know enough about this issue to answer; anyone else? TomTheHand 13:15, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Well, ship and frigate are mutually exclusive terms. When we're talking vessels in the age of sail, it is wrong to apply the term 'ship' to anything other than a vessel that is ship rigged. If a vessel is brig rigged, then she is a brig, not a ship. Similarly for a barque, or a snow, or a ketch, &c &c. It might be nice though to include a field for this in the infobox - but rather than 'sailplan' I would term it 'Type of rig'. Martocticvs 10:25, 9 September 2007 (UTC).

Sadly, 'ship' and 'frigate' are NOT mutually exclusive terms. You are of course correct in saying that it is wrong to apply the term 'ship' to anything other than a vessel that is ship rigged. And fully correct in saying that if a vessel is brig rigged, then she is a brig, not a ship. But in fact sailing era frigates were ship rigged, and thus classed as ships. Rif Winfield 23:41, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Civilian Ship???:-
Nobody but 'Fish-heads' call them that ... and yes, I will immediately apologize to all of the Naval personnel - you know who you are ;). You are referring to Commercial Vessels. This is the term used internationally. Of course if you ask submariners, everything on the surface is referred to as a target. TRUE! I would think you need a LOT more resolution in the template to capture the differences between the myriad of different types of vessels as is being discussed. Consider Classification notations as well (ex: UMS, FIFI, DP, etc.). Jmvolc 02:37, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Changed. Now, I agree that we'd benefit from more resolution, but the problem is that different sets of copy-and-paste code can only be made by people with an interest in the topic. So get to work, guys! If you find that tankers use a specific subset of fields, grab the "Full code", chop out the fields you don't feel you'll need, and call that the "Tanker code." If you need help listing it on that page, I'd be happy to do that. TomTheHand 13:15, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
You guys (girls?) are doing a great job here! Marine terminology is steeped in tradition and as such has a lot of nasty curves and dead-ends. You are navigating them in fine form. My compliments. Jmvolc 02:13, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Guys, I don't know if it is possible, but surely the obvious solution is a "custom" box or 2 - that way for special cases we can insert the custom parameter and its value, covering all and any possiilities, keeping everyone happy and stopping the infobox becoming bloated with rarely used, specialist fields. Just a thought... Emoscopes Talk 08:28, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

The biggest issue with this idea is that while it's technically possible to have a custom field where you define the parameter and its value, it's not possible to define where that field appears. You could stick it at the end, or the beginning, or in between "draft" and "draught" (kidding), but no matter where you put it it'll be suboptimal for some cases. On the other hand, see here for how to manually add custom fields with wiki table syntax. I think it's most desirable to avoid custom fields, because infoboxes should be standardized, but the capability exists. TomTheHand 12:24, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

A slightly off-topic comment this, but I was just thinking about the current field 'tons burthen'... would it perhaps be worthwhile linking that in the template to Builder's Old Measurement, as I am concerned it is a little mysterious to the casual reader at present. Martocticvs 22:23, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Curious new categories

There's a new ship class grouping category springing up, part of Category:Ship classes by country which project members may want to look at. It strikes me as rather self contradictory, as although it has called itself "by country", it's subcategories are by individual navy. Am I right in thinking that this category duplicates existing ones? And if so, should we CFD it? Emoscopes Talk 12:25, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it sort of duplicates existing categories. We put country categories onto ship class categories, so for example Category:Iowa class battleships is a member of Category:Battleships of the United States. I see no need to have yet another structure when we already make information accessible this way. I think we should CFD it. TomTheHand 13:13, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
The parent class Category:Ship classes includes commercial ships, as opposed to our categorisation by Navy/Army, so it could serve a purpose (outside my expertise) in categorising commercial ships, if particular countries use/don't use certain classes. However, as you point out, the sub-categories are all military, so as it stands, it doesn't add any value at all. Viv Hamilton 13:21, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
We primarily categorize by country, with some incomplete categorization by Navy/Army, so our current scheme works just as well for commercial ships. I would categorize Category:Party-time class cruise ships under Category:Cruise ships of the United States and not Category:Cruise ship classes of the United States; the structure should be deleted as redundant to the Category:Ships by country structure. TomTheHand 13:33, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
During the course of our assessment drive, I have rated several cruise ship class articles, however I believe they were all in Category:Cruise ship classes, which is itself a subcategory of Category:Ship classes. --Kralizec! (talk) 17:14, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
Yes, classes and articles are also browseable through the Category:Ship classes structure; see Category:Battleship classes and so on. However, it's unnecessary and redundant to come up with this new structure to browse classes by country when they can already be accessed that way through Category:Ships by country.
I've created a CFD for these new categories, and it can be found here. TomTheHand 17:21, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Using {{Ship infobox request}}

In the course of this assessment drive, I'd be grateful if people could put a {{Ship infobox request}} template onto the talk pages of articles which lack infoboxes. That'll make it easy to see what needs an infobox added and take care of it. Thanks, all! TomTheHand 17:09, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

What about articles using old versions of infoboxes? eg as used in HMS Indomitable (92) - is it worth flagging those up for replacement/standardisation? Martocticvs 17:12, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
Well, tomorrow I may create a "this article uses an obsolete infobox" template, but for now I think it's most important to put this template on articles that have no infoboxes whatsoever. There's so many boxless articles that I feel like it's more important to focus on them than to mark everything with a suboptimal infobox setup. Unless the infobox on the article is truly godawful... in which case, template it ;-) Please template ship class articles that lack an infobox as well (using Ship infobox request; no need to create separate ship and class templates). TomTheHand 01:51, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Big favor to ask

Seeing as how ya'll are in the middle of a big tagging and assessment drive I was curious I have could ask you guys to tag any ship article you find using bullet points in the body with {{cleanup laundry}}? In this manner we can locate articles like USS Intrepid (CV-11), which need to be rewritten to undo the bullet pointing. TomStar81 (Talk) 00:36, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

can anyone tell me

Does this make any sense to you?

The USS Pueblo, an electronic spy ship, was seized by North Korean forces in 1968. The USS Pueblo (that was seized) was the third U.S. naval ship to bear that name. The first USS Pueblo, came into being when "Pueblo" was chosen to be the name of the former USS Colorado. This small undistinguished, cruiser was the second US ship to carry that name. In 1916, the US Navy wanted the name Colorado for a much bigger and more important ship, so it renamed the old third rate cruiser after the small Colorado town of Pueblo.
But the renamed USS Colorado, (USS Pueblo) was the second U.S. warship to bear that state's name. The first USS Colorado was the flag ship of the five ship squadron, whose Marines invaded Kanghwa Island, Korea, in 1871.

It originally ended with this additional sentence:

Koreans, being a people who appreciate genealogy, might chuckle at the long-term "revenge" exacted in 1968, by the North Koreans, for the various doings of the US navy, way back in 1871. The names of the vessels involved just happen to be linked in this round about way.

. . .which almost made it make sense, but then my brain exploded. Can anyone make this comprehensible? Maralia 02:12, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Merge infoboxes

Hi.

I've propsed that we merge Template:Infobox Class into Template:Infobox Ship Class. There seems very little difference between the 2. The former has a few extra parameters in the class overview that I find appealing, and I'd like to simply add them in with the latter. The title bars and the placing of the images are slightly difference, but apart from thatI really don't see why we need them both.

Have your say here.

Emoscopes Talk 02:42, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Tagging for multiple projects?

Maralia (talk · contribs)'s post above about marking articles for {{WPMILHIST}} got me wondering ... Does anyone else tag articles for multiple projects? Granted that most of us here are also members of WikiProject Military history and/or its Maritime warfare task force, but I mean tagging articles for all relevant projects. When it comes to our current assessment drive, I for one am not a very speedy worker because I always feel want to add a helping hand to other projects (I like to think that I am being efficient or a completest, but my wife says I am a textbook example of anal retentive).

One example would be my recent assessment of Russian battleship Petropavlovsk (1914). Rather than just do a quick 30 second evaluation for WP:SHIPS, I also marked it for the Russian and Soviet, maritime warfare, World War I, and World War II task forces of {{WPMILHIST}} as well as {{WikiProject Russia}}, {{WikiProject Russian History}}, {{WikiProject Soviet Union}}, and {{ShipwrecksWikiProject}}.

While I do not generally do anything fancy like try to assess an article's importance for other projects ... it certainly takes a bit of time to identify any applicable WikiProjects, locate their banners, and track down the specific banner syntax used by each project. Even if all I do is copy-and-paste their banner tags to a talk page and fill in the class field, at least then they will give the article an assessment for their particular project on the next assessment drive.

Does anyone else do this? --Kralizec! (talk) 04:09, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

No wonder you thought you'd still be working on it when you're 90! Really, though, I try to do that too normally, but with this assessment project I'm not going out of my way - if I know another project's banner syntax or can guess it in one try I'll add it, otherwise I'm just moving on. Maralia 05:03, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Adding Historic Naval Ships Association Web Site

I am new to Wiki and was adding links to the appropriate ship pages for members of the Historic Naval Ships Association when I was warned that this might be inappropriate Wiki behavior. It was suggested that I join this group (I have) and request consideration of http://www.hnsa.org as a resource for information on historical ships.

HNSA is a non-profit member organization. 115 Naval Ship Museums with over 175 ships are members. All of the ships that people can visit have their own page on the site. Their page has photos, location, contact information, link to the museum's own web site if they have one, and a short narrative. In many cases the photos are first publication on the web. Since this is a membership organization the content is reviewed by the owner of the ship and is normally very accurate. I encourage you to take a look.

I think it would be of value to have a link from each of the 177 member ships to their HNSA web page for Wiki readers. Pekelney 04:58, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm glad you got my message and thanks for following up here. I'll take a more thorough look at the site after I get some sleep. Maralia 05:10, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
Its an interesting site, although some of the material looks a little dated (for example: according to our data, the heavy cruiser USS Des Moines is currently being scrapped, yet the introduction for visitors page states that three cities are still petitioning for the ship), otherwise I think it could be a useful link. The information seems accurate too, when I glanced through the specs for the Iowas they seemed on par and up to date. TomStar81 (Talk) 09:32, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
Someone is working on the introduction, it has some other errors as well. The history of HNSA page also needs some update. However, the ship pages, which is what I was linking to are generally very accurate. Although I was not suggesting links from Wiki to them, we also have some incredible historic documents and sounds.Pekelney 14:35, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
About that: When I first went to click on the HNSA external link on the page New Jersey it took me to a 404 error page. It may be an isolated incident, but it warrants checking to make sure that other links are not getting the same result. This is especially true of the links on the FA, GA, and A-class articles we have since they answer to a higher calling. TomStar81 (Talk) 20:08, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
That's strange. I just opened it fine. It must be an isolated incident. Parsecboy 20:14, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
After reviewing more of the HNSA site, I think that links will have to be evaluated on an individual basis. If a link to the actual museum's website is already in place, an HNSA link probably doesn't add value, since HNSA appears to be essentially a directory compiled from the museum sites. I do think there are some cases where we should link to HNSA pages though:
  • our article Museum ships is a very appropriate place for a link;
  • any article for a museum ship that does not have a museum link could benefit from an HNSA link;
  • any article for a museum ship where HNSA has information not otherwise readily available, like
I think some links like these would be great additions, but they need to be evaluated individually; New Jersey is an example of an article that does not benefit from an HNSA link in my opinion, as the article already links to the museum site. Anyone else had a chance to review the site? Maralia 21:41, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
I agree that the links to the HNSA site are most valuable when there is not already a link to the ship's own site. In most cases the ship's own web site can be found on the HNSA page and then added to the Wiki page. Amazingly, some of the ships still do not have their own websites in which case the HNSA site will likely be their primary web presence. One of the HNSA web site's goals is to act as a portal to the museum's own web sites. However, I would still ask you to consider adding the link to the HNSA individual ship page in addition to the ship's own page for most if not all of the ships. Some reasons: 1) The HNSA links do not change as the ship's own links change. To keep the links to the 177 ships working I repair 2-3 links a month that have been changed by the museum without automated forwarding. 2) The museum's own pages vary very widely in quality. For example, the HNSA page may have better photos than the ship's own web site. HNSA most often uses photos provided by the ships, but in many cases we have gotten permission to use photos from third parties. Sometimes where the ship is part of a large museum there is very little information on the ship on the site. Sadly, sometimes our information is more accurate. 3) The HNSA page includes Lat/Lon and links to directions that are not often on the museum's own pages.
Having said this, if you think it would be best for Wiki users that we limit the HNSA ship page links only to ships without their own link, of course this would still be of service to the users. Note that evaluating the quality of the ship's own site can be time consuming. Also, would you count links to veterans or volunteer groups as a link to the ship? Sometimes these are great sources of information, but often they have very little value added beyond their own members. Whatever you decide I will be willing to attempt implementing it on the Wiki pages for the 175 ships if the criteria is clear.Pekelney 03:00, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
And as to NJ link, oops, I had a mistake in the link I added that has been corrected. Note that I was adding links to the individual ship pages not to the HNSA home page to make the links most valuable to Wiki readersPekelney 03:11, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
Seeing as how this discussion appear to involve both the Military history Wikiproject and the Military memorials and cemeteries task force might I suggest we leave messages on their related talk pages? It may be worth having the other groups weigh in the matter. TomStar81 (Talk) 03:29, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
I can see where there are materials that will be of interest in several areas for the Military History project. There are already some links in there. Although these ships are both museums and memorials, the Military Memorials group seems mostly involved in land based memorials and cemeteries and particularly from WW I. It will be interesting to see if they want to expand to these ships. Whether or not these groups decide to add links to the hnsa.org resources, I think there would be value to having links from the ship pages. I see no conflict in linking from all three areas where the content is interesting to the readers.Pekelney 19:34, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

Help wanted to expand Fenis and St. Joseph

This is a 1792 open sailing vessel which crossed the Pacific (westward) as part of the Vancouver Expedition. It is probably also an early example of the use of "flags of convenience". Any help from 18th century fans or Canadian historians would be greatly appreciated.Pustelnik 02:09, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Bollard pull

An editor has written a new article on Bollard Pull that starts out by defining it as "a value that allows to compare the power of tugboats." While I imagine it's most useful for tugboats, I've seen bollard pull figures reported for a wide variety of ships, and I suspect the article may need to address a wider scope of use. It also needs to be renamed lower case, have references added, etc. - anyone care to take a crack at it? Maralia 23:08, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Fixed the title and added a few categories and templates. Still needs more work though. Emoscopes Talk 23:42, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Task list question...

On the 'tasks' box is the item "Fix sort order & naming in [[Category:Tank landing ships]]" Was there a discussion/consensus as to what direction needed to be taken? If not, should the ships be listed completely numerically regardless of name (if any), or what? — Bellhalla 15:08, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Good question. Unfortunately I do not have an answer. --Kralizec! (talk) 17:48, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

A different bollard question

I've tentatively identified this (and two related images) as a large mooring bollard, but I'm not sure I've got that right, especially given the location of a fence in the picture. Does anyone know more about this? If so, could you please confirm or correct the captions on this image and the two linked from it; also, it would be greatly appreciated if someone would ping my user talk page either here or on Commons when this is covered. Thanks in advance! - Jmabel | Talk 16:55, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

I wouldn't like to say either way, but to my eyes it looks more like a capstan, as it has pawls around the base and holes in the head for the bars... Martocticvs 17:59, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
I agree; it looks like a Capstan, rather than a Bollard.
—wwoods 18:41, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll change the file name accordingly (to Commons:Image:Chittenden Locks capstan 01.jpg, if someone wants to see the image in question once it is moved). - Jmabel | Talk 23:47, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
fixed the image tag to the right MarVelo 13:36, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

A must read

The most amusing article picked up in the new articles feed: Benea's Tirpitz (pig). Maralia 02:39, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Why on earth hasn't this been made into a film? It's a tale of heroism, daring, a pig triumphing over adversity, with elements of tragedy and heartbreak. Plus it has explosions, exciting naval battles, high drama, comedy and a pig! Might I recommend someone like Hugh Grant to play the role of the dedicated wikipedian, who decades later brings the forgotten Tirpitz to the attention of the world, and who subsquently becomes a millionaire? And shame on User: Kralizec!! This is clearly a TOP priority for the project! It's what Tirpitz would have wanted. Benea 14:59, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
Is there a Wikipedia tongue-sticking-out emoticon? --Kralizec! (talk) 15:05, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
To be honest, I thought long and hard about tagging it for the project, but I thought I'd get laughed off the project for tagging an article about a pig alongside the likes of the Victory, Bismarck or Arizona, or any serious ship article. But hurrah, Tirpitz the pig has finally arrived in the world of wikipedia! Now about that film, and my percentage...  ;) Benea 15:09, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
Don't forget another important plot element: BACON. Perhaps our POTD-winning animator Emoscopes will take up the challenge! Maralia 15:15, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

A class dilemma

I'm sure this has been addressed before, but I couldn't find previous mention: what should we do about modern ships that don't appear to have an official class? I'm specifically faced with a slew of WWII coastal minesweepers that were converted fishing trawlers and have no apparent class designation in DANFS (see USS Puffin (AMc-29), USS Road Runner (AMc-35) as examples). Should we just describe them as coastal minesweepers and skip mention of a class for these ships altogether? Maralia 14:29, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

I would do exactly as you suggest. I don't think any class should be mentioned when the ship is a unique conversion of a fishing trawler. TomTheHand 14:38, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
Right, I agree. IF there wasn't an actual class, then we don't need to mention it. I'd just call it a unique coastal minesweeper. Parsecboy 14:39, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Could someone give this the once-over?

I updated the infobox for USS Cambria (APA-36), but I'm a bit fuzzy on how some of the fields from the old format map into the new format. If anyone has more experience than me on this sort of matter, could I ask that they have a look at it? grendel|khan 00:32, 21 September 2007 (UTC)


Adding a YouTube link to USS Franklin - permissible?

I was asked

Ahoy. This video of U.S. wartime news flicks features a film of the holy-crap variety about the bombing of the USS Franklin, from 2:35 onwards. The talk page was far too inactive to make a question and expect a reply in reasonable time, but since you probably know more about this matter than me, i.e. anything, is there any particular reason not to add a link to the article?
YouTube videos are disliked because of their tendency to have copyright issues. Note, though, that the article is illustrated with stills of the same events, which are template'd as public domain for being taken by a U.S. Navy employee during his duties, which would also be the case with this footage. --Kizor 01:06, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't know; does anybody? The original footage was recorded by U.S. Navy sailors, but it's presented in a Castle Films newsreel.
—wwoods 02:53, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

Category confusion

Hi, I was looking at Category:Destroyer classes and looking for the best way to split up the huge number of sub-cats into something more manageable when I stumbled across something rather odd. When I tried to divide the articles up into nationality I found two cats which did exactly the same thing Category:Royal Navy destroyers and Category:Destroyers of the United Kingdom. This appears to be an issue for all classes of Royal Navy warship. Can anybody explain why and what should be done about it?--Jackyd101 01:41, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Based on what the categories state, the destroyers of the UK category is for all destroyers operated by the UK, while the RN category is only for those specifically commissioned into the RN. I could be wrong, but I would assume that, for example, the destroyers given to the UK in Lend-Lease would fit the first, but not the second category. Regardless, I think that such distinction is unneccesary, and we could safely lose the RN category. Parsecboy 01:55, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
I understand your point, but I don't believe that any destroyers have ever been operated in the UK outside the aegis of the Royal Navy (lend-lease destroyers were all commissioned into the RN and are univesally classed with ships commissioned and built in Britain). I agree that one of the categories has to go.--Jackyd101 02:21, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
The country vs. navy categorization discussion is long-running and contentious, and any attempts to merge one into the other end with a "no consensus." They each have advantages and disadvantages, and while Destroyers of the United Kingdom and Royal Navy destroyers describe the exact same group of ships, that's not the case for all ship types or all countries. TomTheHand 02:28, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
Rather than give my own long winded explanation, I will just ditto what TomTheHand said, but add a double-helping of the "contentious" and "long-running" parts.  :-( (and add a frowny face) --Kralizec! (talk) 02:59, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
Haha, well-put. If it makes the navy vs. country categorization more acceptable, we now try to put the navy or country category on the class category where possible, and remove it on individual ship articles. That makes it a little cleaner. For example, Category:Submarines of the United States should go on Category:Balao class submarines, and not on the individual ships that make up the class. However, if a ship was sold to another country, that country's cat should go on the ship article. For example, USS Entemedor (SS-340) is a Balao-class submarine, and so the article doesn't need a "Submarines of the United States" category because the parent category has it. However, she was sold to Turkey, so it does need Category:Submarines of Turkey. TomTheHand 12:26, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Renaming Japanese aircraft carrier articles

Pogo935 (talk · contribs) has renamed the articles for various Japanese aircraft carriers from Japanese aircraft carrier {name} to {name} (aircraft carrier). Does anyone know anything about this? It seems to contradict Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ships) and the way we do things in general. TomTheHand 17:08, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Ugh. This is going to take a ton of work to fix. Do we have an admin on project who can just rollback the moves? --Kralizec! (talk) 17:20, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
I'm an admin. I just didn't want to start rolling back without asking anyone. TomTheHand 17:24, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I agree it's a deviation. Someone raised it with me over German weather ship Lauenburg, his justification was that it took too long to read German weather ship before you got to Lauenburg, which seemed rather weak to me. It also goes against all the naming conventions that I can think of. HMS is Her Majesty's Ship, USS is United States Ship. We don't do Victory (Her Majesty's Ship), or Arizona (United States Ship). So doing it for the aircraft carriers splits that convention. I can sort of see why he might do that, but I think we should keep it to title first, name second. Benea 17:26, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
It looks like what happened is Pogo created a carrier article, with naming that matched our conventions, and someone on new page patrol renamed it to {name} (aircraft carrier) while he was working on it, so he got the impression that that's how articles are supposed to be named. TomTheHand 17:29, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
Are we agreed that the current convention should stand? If so, can we warn both of them about the right way of doing it then start changing it back? Benea 17:31, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
I'm fully agreed over the current convention. While {name} (aircraft carrier) works, {name} (aircraft carrier) (1943) certainly does not. The existing convention is logical and works in pretty much all cases just fine. Martocticvs 17:33, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
I've started moving the articles back. These aren't obstructed moves, so everyone can help. Make sure to fix double redirects. TomTheHand 17:35, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
(edit conflict)To my mind, the current naming convention looks good and works great (yes, I even maintain that in spite of the current brouhaha at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/Maritime warfare task force). However since the person who started this by renaming Pogo935`s article was an admin, I think we should leave a friendly note rather than a warning. --Kralizec! (talk) 17:40, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
It occurred to me that the original cause of this mistake might have been the difference between naming conventions for commercial ships (which follow (name) (type)). Not that it would be of any particular consequence, but I can see how it could be confusing to a newbie. -- Kjet 21:13, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I had just noticed that today too. Irritating. Clearly a mature, productive member (and sorry, no AGF from me today, I've assessed 8 kazillion articles this morning and my kid won't take a freaking nap for the umpteenth day in a row). Maralia 17:37, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
Wait-wait. Pogo935 vandalized my user page?!? z0mg! Please do AGF here, though. He wrote this perfectly good stub. Maybe multiple people share the computer. TomTheHand 17:48, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
In an heroic attempt to AGF, I have decided that zombies must have made him do it. Maralia 17:58, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

All fixed, from Akagi to Zuikaku! TomTheHand 18:13, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

P.S. When I said warning, I meant warning as in 'arrrgh run! the volcano is erupting' rather than 'desist, or I shall challenge you to fisticuffs!' Curses upon the subtlties of the English language and Zombies in general. pip pip! Benea 18:29, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

new templates

User:Peachey88 has been making some changes to ship class templates right across the board. I can't seem to find anywhere where this was discussed, he just seems to have gone out and done it.

Templates which used to look like this:

Now look like this:

Or this:

One thing is that he doesn't seem to be aware of our naming conventions. Another is that in some cases he has broken links by not quite understanding what the aim of the template was. The other thing is though the new templates are easier to edit, which is a definite plus for new editors, I can't help but feel some look inferior. I don't mind the bottom example too much, but I do prefer the old town template here:

Town-class cruiser
Southampton sub class

Birmingham | Glasgow | Newcastle | Sheffield | Southampton

Gloucester sub class

Gloucester | Liverpool | Manchester

Edinburgh sub class

Belfast | Edinburgh

List of cruisers of the Royal Navy

over the new one above. Since these templates are largely static once they've been created, and are only occasionally tweaked, often by more experienced editors, I don't really understand the reason for all these changes. But what do I know, and I'm aware that I can't at the moment come up with any better reasons for feeling uneasy. Opinions on a postcard please. Benea 18:34, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. Well, I prefer the new Devonshire box to the old style, but I also prefer the old Town class to the new. I think that in general, standardizing the appearance of nav boxes across Wikipedia is probably a good thing, and I imagine that's the reason this is being done. However, if it hurts the appearance of the box then I can't agree with it. Let's see if we can play with the new-style box to get it to look decent for multiple subclasses, and if we can't, we'll go from there. TomTheHand 19:06, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I've left a message for the user, asking him/her to come here for discussion. Personally I prefer the navbox template appearance anyway, but aside from that, a brief review of the user's template changes has me especially concerned that s/he is dropping italics off nearly everything. Maralia 19:08, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Personally I think the "new style" looks better and more informative, at least in the case of the Town-class example. However the italics should definately be there. -- Kjet 19:12, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I tweaked {{Town class cruiser 1936}}; please head over to the template page and look at the history to compare different versions. The tweak makes it look more like the old template, but it seems to go against the intent of the developers of {{Navbox}}. What do you folks think? TomTheHand 19:16, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I'm all for Tom's change. Aesthetically more appealing, I think, just as informative, but a better lay out than the version User:Peachey88 created. Benea 19:21, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Kjet, Maralia, what do you think? For comparison's sake, here's Peachey88's version, but with italics: TomTheHand 19:29, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I also think the spirit here is also different from what the developers were aiming at. They use it for discrete, demonstrably different items catagorised under one heading. In this case the subgroups in a class are the same sort of ship, role, whatever criteria you prefer, etc, merely seperated out to show the different groups. Benea 19:31, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
{{military navigation}} may be of some interest here. ;-) Kirill 19:34, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
(edit conflict)I can answer some of the questions on this. Somewhere (maybe WikiProject Templates?) there is a project to convert all the template navigation boxes (both our old, original style and the "navbox collapsible") to the new "Navbox"-style. One of the features of the navbox-based templates is that after the first one, all subsequent navigational templates auto-shrink down to a single line. Of the 26 ship templates I have created, thirteen have been transitioned over to the new format, most without any mistakes. --Kralizec! (talk) 19:40, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I don't mind the new infoboxes, but I'm just not keen at all on the style when we have subgroups that appear in the changes by Peachey88. Tom's changes look fine, and I wouldn't mind seeing our templates replaced with a style like that. Benea 19:48, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I use a widescreen monitor, and am thus hopelessly biased towards utilizing horizontal space before resorting to vertical, so I strongly prefer the new style template. That's just personal preference though; I really think either style is fine, as long as we don't lose formatting in the conversion process. Maralia 19:58, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
If we are talking about the 'visual appeal' of the new navigational templates, I have to say the results are almost always better when a WP:SHIPS member does the update rather than a WP:WPT member. As an example, I think this one looks terrible:

However these two look pretty good:

As always, YMMV. --Kralizec! (talk) 20:16, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Just noticed this ... is it just me, or are the naval ensigns in my second and third examples 'compressed' down to just a two-pixel wide gray line? Using popups the image preview works fine if I hover my mouse over the line, but I do nto see the images in the templates. --Kralizec! (talk) 20:27, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
They work fine for me. And personally I prefer the "Peachy" boxes as edited by Tom. -- Kjet 21:09, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I was changing them so they all matched, some of them were already like that and some wernt, I didn't include the italics because some templates had it and some didn't. And I also didn't change any of the links, i used the coding that was already there in the page. Peachey88 21:56, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

You broke a link at the template at HMS Shannon (1875), but I can understand why that particular case was confusing. All ship names should be italicised, as should class names where the class was named after a specific ship. Again, not your fault for not knowing., but you might find Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ships) useful. As to what they look like, I agree that Tom's edited ones are the best in my opinion, where the information is centred, rather than held to the left. This is the case for most of the templates, so no problem. I do think though that it should be extended to the cases where they are occasionally divided by subclass or nationality. Again, just my opinion. Benea 22:17, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

If your talking about the link on the shannon templete how it turns up black, wikipedia automatically does that when it links to the page it's displayed on. Also the infomation is centered on ones that don't have a group (eg: Template:Abercrombie_class_monitor) but on templates that have groups (eg: Template:Grimsby_class_sloop) it automatically left aligns them. Peachey88 08:23, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
No I understand that. You thought that Shannon was part of a Shannon class so linked to that in the template. Shannon is in fact a unique ship with all the relevent information included in the ship page itself, so there has been no need to create an article called 'Shannon class cruiser'. I've linked it back to the ship page itself, but again it was a simple mistake, please don't think I'm criticising you for it. Yes I see how the left/centre alignment works, but I think aesthetically the centre alignment is better, especially in the case of subgroups/nationalities of ships. As far as I can tell, that use of the template was set up to include all areas that were related to a larger subject, even if the article was only tangentially related, such as a template for a certain place would have a tourism section that would include a list of articles about particular tourist sites. For ships though, they are ultimately the same class of ship, or indeed the same ship with a different navy, and I think we should use Tom's style rather than the left alignments. I'm all for standardising the templates though. Benea 10:05, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
Also i just noticed i forgot the autocollapse state bit in the template but i do play on going though and fixing that when i have some free time (most likely tonight). Peachey88 22:36, 27 September 2007 (UTC)


Personally I prefer the older versions, they are simple navboxes to sister ships and the sparser look is better. That said I'm not about to revert any. There are cases where only a couple of ships are in the class, eg the Nelsons where a template is hardly needed at all and the nav can be rendered in code on the page but I digress. what is important is that the alternate line colouring is not present as it tends to set the ships apart , as in Devonshire above, and doesn't aid readability at all (contrast too low). This is

simply solved by using "br" within the list= rather than using list1, list2 without a title2. I've "fixed" the Devonshire to show this. GraemeLeggett 10:50, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Opinion on disambig

A user has been creating shipindex disambig pages using a style where s/he actually numbers the ships listed (albeit with roman numerals). Examples are HMCS Gatineau, HMCS Assiniboine. The numbering is just another way of saying 'first, second' etc, but I find it confusing to have yet another numeral assigned to ships that are already disambiguated by hull/pennant/year - and I'm further confused by why we would hide those actual disambig parameters on, well, a disambig page. Am I being dense? Maralia 03:04, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Another unusual type is where the ship links are all the same (so the hull/pennant numbers are suppressed), but each line is individually numbered in text ("the first Foo", "the second Foo", etc.). Examples include HMS Warspite, HMS Royal Oak, etc. A quick glance at WP:MOSDAB leads me to believe that neither style (Roman numbers or text numbers) meets the guideline, specifically Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)#Individual entries which indicates "entries should not be pipe linked — refer to the article name in full" and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)#Piping which explicitly states an exception for when piping is used "to format or quote a portion of an article whose name consists of both a title and a clarifier ... for instance USS Adder (SS-3)." --Kralizec! (talk) 03:29, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
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