Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ships)

It is extremely common for many ships to share a name, and and even more common for a ship to use a name that has non-ship usages. Therefore disambiguation needs special attention.

Ships

For any ship name, there should be an index page with brief identifications of every ship to bear that name (the eight USS Enterprises, for example), and including links to individual pages on each physical ship -- USS Enterprise (CV-6), USS Enterprise (CVN-65), etc. If you know the specific ship, you should link to it directly, but you can also link to the index article and hope that some nice person will come along and make the link more specific.

Articles about ships that have standard prefixes should include them in both index and main article titles; for example, HMS Ark Royal, USS Enterprise. Later references to the same ship in the article (which should not be links) can just use Ark Royal or Enterprise. If more than one prefix was used, choose the most well-known and create a redirect from the other; for example, SS Titanic, RMS Titanic. Articles about ships that do not have standard prefixes should be titled as (Nationality) (type) (Name); for example, Soviet aircraft carrier Kuznetsov or German battleship Bismarck. If the ship changed nationalities without changing names (as did Kuznetsov), use the first nationality. If the name was changed with the ownership, create two articles with one ending at the transfer and the other beginning then; for example, the Italian battleship Giulio Cesare, which became the Soviet battleship Novorossiisk.

For a list of some of the prefixes used by the world's mariners, see ship prefix. Treat the prefixes as acronyms rather than abbreviations, and don't use periods after each letter.

Do not use ship types as prefixes; for example, HSK Kormoran and CVN Nimitz are wrong. Do not use English abbreviations for the ship's nationality as prefixes; for example, USSRS Kirov and IJN Yamato are wrong. (Presumably, "IJN" is a parochial attempt to abbreviate Nihon Teikoku Kaigun.) Yes, you can find examples of both these mistakes on the Net of a Million Lies -- er, the Web. They are still wrong. Use the prefix that the ship's crew used while the ship was in operation.

Some types of ship are known only by a hull number -- American PT boats, German U-boats. In these cases, spell out the ship type -- Patrol Torpedo Boat 109[?], Unterseeboot 238 -- for the main article, and create a redirect or a disambiguation page at the short form -- PT-109[?] can probably be a automatic redirect, U-238 must be a disambiguation page.

Use ships' hull numbers (hull classification symbols for the USN, and pennant numbers[?] for the Royal Navy and many European navies) for disambiguation; if none is available, use the ship's year of launching if known - like human birthdays, every ship has one - otherwise some other appropriate initial date, such as commissioning. It should be noted that European navies reuse pennant numbers, so ships of the same name may have the same pennant numbers; the second and third Sir Galahads, for example.

Ship names are italicized when possible, prefixes and hull numbers are not.

Ship classes

Articles about a ship class should be named (Lead ship name) "class" (type); for example, Ohio class submarine. Do not be overly specific in the type; for example, use "aircraft carrier", not "light escort fleet assault carrier". Use the singular form of the ship type; for example, "submarine", not "submarines".

Uses of the class as a noun are not hyphenated, while adjectival references are hyphenated, as in Ohio-class submarine. Note the separation of submarine as a separate link; this is not required, but does allow the reader to look up the general term directly instead of being plunged into the technical discussion of a ship class.