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Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (ships)

Shouldn't a page be created, listing the standard prefixes? Or at least a listing in an abbreviations page. - Olivier

adjectives precede nouns so we should state that such and such is a Big Ship Class rather than a Big Class Ship Lir 01:01 Oct 30, 2002 (UTC)

You're misparsing; try (((Los Angeles) class) submarine). --Brion 01:17 Oct 30, 2002 (UTC)

How about Los Angeles (submarine class)Lir 22:26 Oct 30, 2002 (UTC)

How about we use the standard that has been in effect for hundreds of years? --the Epopt, who served for many years on Ohio-class submarines

What is the proper punctuation for a ship's name? Is it HMS something or HMS something? -- Zoe

Should be HMS something, though too often people don't bother. See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ships) -- Someone else 03:16 Nov 11, 2002 (UTC)

Since we have an article titled RMS Titanic, should I punctuate it RMS Titanic? -- Zoe

I think properly it would be RMS Titanic or RMS Titanic: i.e., [[RMS Titanic|RMS <i>Titanic</i>]] or [[RMS Titanic|RMS ''Titanic'']] . --- Someone else 03:28 Nov 11, 2002 (UTC)

Someone else is right: "HMS" or "USS" or whatever prefix is not part of the name of the ship, it simply indicates ownership. The name should be italicized, the prefix left in roman type. Calling something "Royal Mail Ship Titanic ("RMS Titanic" for short) is exactly analogous to calling something "Homer's Odyssey" and should be typeset the same way. --the Epopt

A truly minor issue about ship naming -- Is there a technical reason for a hyphen between the hull type and hull number for US naval ships -- that is not standard US naval usage as shown in the US naval register http://www.nvr.navy.mil ClaudeMuncey

(moved from Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions

While updating USS Maine I noticed that several US ships called Maine were on the same page. This isn't that big of a deal right now but in the future these ships need to be disambiguated from each other. So the question is, how do we disambiguate? I would suggest the most natural way to disambiguate would be to use hull numbers in page titles for those ships and have USS Maine be a disambiguation page. Of course all the links to that page would also have to be corrected. Alternatively, USS Maine can be where the most famous ship by that name resides and a disambiguation block can be at top. I know this wouldn't work for all ship's for all nations, or even all US ships, but it would be a natural way to disambiguate most US Navy ships and others that have hull numbers. What does everyone else think? --mav

Why do you think that "in the future these ships need to be disambiguated from each other"? What's wrong with the page as it is today? --the Epopt

As I said there is nothing wrong with the page yet. But as more and more text is placed in the article it is going to become increasingly difficult for people to find the ship they really want if that ship isn't the first one presented. These are all different ships meaning that each is it's own subject and should at some time in the future each have their own pages. USS Enterprise is probably a much better candidate for breaking up sooner rather than later. My only question was whether or not we should use hull numbers in the form [USS {ship name} ({hull#)]] for the names of the new pages. For example: USS Enterprise (CV-6). --mav

Hull classification symbols would work fine where they are used, but most countries and all early USSs don't use them. How would you disambiguate, e.g., the second and third Enterprise schooners? And for a real disambiguation treat, take a look at HMS Enterprise -- or HMS Antelope. --the Epopt

There's always the ugly trick used for battles, namely to add a date in parens. As far as I know, there are no ships of the same country and the same name launched in the same year. For ships with uncertain dates, a "(1550s)" or even "(1400s)" will suffice to identify uniquely.

Those nice detailed multi-ship-generation articles will need to come apart too - disconcerting to link from Jutland and see a description of a 17th-century ship come up on the screen, I'm sure an unsuspecting reader will be mystified. Also, you'd have to read all the dates for the ships to figure out which one must have been meant. Stan Shebs 19:13 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

Well, never let it be said that I'm an arrogant, inflexible pedant. (Of course it's true. I just don't want it said.) Adding the dates is ugly, but it would work, and until the developers decide to allow markup inside links, we need to pipe-alias every ship link anyway. Writing [[HMS Enterprise (1705)|HMS ''Enterprise'', 24]] is not significantly worse than what we're doing now. However, take a look at the third HMS Enterprise, 8 (1743) and the sixth USS Enterprise (WWI). As soon as we split the big articles up, someone is going to want to know why those little stubs can't be combined into a regular-sized article. --the Epopt

That's easy: They are different subjects. --mav 21:19 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

In practice, I would just separate out the biggest articles as needed (usually modern ships, since we always seem to have more factoids about them :-) ). There seems to be little reader advantage in having n 2-sentence articles for obscure ships when you're going to need the "HMS Foo" article anyway for disambiguation. This also has the advantage of being the lowest-energy approach. :-) Stan Shebs 22:01 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

It was horribly traumatic ;->, but I split the second-largest ship article, USS Thresher, into two unequal parts. Please review and comment, noting that SS-200[?] still gets the 30k warning. Also please take a look at HMS Astute and related pages -- they are my first attempt to write new articles under the proposed system.

So for disambiguation purposes (when needed) have we standarized on using hull classification symbols when available and launch dates when not available? --mav

Well, Stan and I seem to have agreed on that, together with an index page at "just the ship name."

Good. That was my choice as well. :) --mav

User:MyRedDice contradicted the rule I proposed about parenthetical disambiguation -- I favor using German battleship Bismarck, while he favors Bismarck (battleship). Given our diametrically opposite viewpoints, I've deleted both versions of the "rule," so that we can discuss it here before we get dogmatic on in the article itself.

I like the natural phraseology. It's easy to write "The German battleship Bismarck was sunk" -- any newbie can do it. Using parentheses requires knowledge of esoteric Wikisyntax, to wit, the "pipe trick."

--the Epopt

I'm not saying that German battleship Bismarck is better or worse - just that the arguments you gave for it didn't (to me) make sense, because of the pipe trick. Or, equally, if you're going to mention the disadvantage, you should also mention the workaround and link to how to edit a page. Question is, is this the best place to debate natural versus bracketed disambiguation? Martin

By the way, can we make an exception for Japanese ships? The title like Japanese aircraft carrier Akagi seems silly because there is no Akagi but AC. -- Taku 01:26 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

You mean to say that all the names are synthetic, and have no other possible meaning? For European and American ships, nearly every ship name has some other possible meaning, either as a name or regular word - off the top of my head, I can only think of "Sovereign of the Seas" as a ship name that doesn't have a non-ship interpretation. Stan 02:26 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

Some are but some not. As usual in ordinary wikipedia article, if there is ambiguousness then do disambiguous. -- Taku 02:47 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

And, there is no need to not have articles like Japanese aircarrier Akagi, which redirect to more common name Akagi. -- Taku 02:49 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

My opinion, for what it's worth, is: it depends. Akagi may be unique to the carrier, but others, such as Japanese battleship Yamato, will need to be disambiguated from Yamato, the ancient Japanese nation[?]. And we will need Japanese aircraft carrier Akagi to redirect to Akagi, simply because ignorant gaijin like me will assume we need it -- I wouldn't have known that "Akagi" was unique if you hadn't made me look. ;-> --the Epopt

Note to ship buffs: I've found a great apparently public domain resource that we could use to create starter articles for US Navy ships. I've already adapted some of that free text and images to make USS Langley. Check out the source http://www.history.navy.mil/index . --mav

Indeed, the material you're seeing is from the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, which is a great source. It's not entirely online, and doesn't list recent ships, so you do have to watch out for silent omissions. Stan 15:32 Feb 28, 2003 (UTC)

I thought we were disambiguating only when necessary, not when there is only one subject for a title in the first place. That one wants to add the USS or HMS or something like that, I can understand, that could be considered using the full name, but this "countryname shiptype name" thing goes straight against the usage at the rest of Wikipedia, not to mention that it's cumbersome and not rarely undecidable or ridiculous. I might decide to write an article about the Nansen's ship Fram (also served under Amundsen and Sverdrup) - should that be Norwegian exploration ship Fram[?], Norwegian icebreaker Fram[?], Norwegian ship-of-a-unique construction Fram[?], Norwegian museum ship Fram[?] or simply Norwegian ship Fram[?]? To me, Fram[?] sounds much better, or Fram (ship)[?] if someone comes up with some other Fram to deal with. Thus, I completely agree with Takuya Murata here. Andre Engels 14:08 Mar 21, 2003 (UTC)

It's extraordinarily common for a ship name to be re-used, more so than most people realize - some countries have even passed laws to the effect that their navy will always have a ship with name X, which virtually guarantees a half-dozen or dozen wildly different ships all with the same name. So we really want to be on top of this problem and pre-disambiguate, just as we do for Quartz Hill, California, even though there seem not to be any other Quartz Hills in the world. If you are knowledgeable enough to say that there is only one Fram[?] and that it won't the pollute the encyclopedia with hundreds of ambiguous references that will need to be cleaned up some day, then I'm OK with that, but we'll get a better product if non-experts adopt the habit of using pre-disambiguated references. Stan 17:56 Mar 21, 2003 (UTC)

Pre-emptive disambiguation makes sense for US cities/places because the great majority of US city/place names are used in more than one state and since "someplace, somestate" is very often used for city/place names regardless of whether or not the city/place name is unique or otherwise unambiguous. So unless ship names have a similarly bad global ambiguity problem and are often pre-emptively disambiguated regardless of uniqueness, then I say we should only disambiguate when a real ambiguity exists (which is the default disambiguation convention which has a great deal of support - I should know since I tried to extend US-type pre-emptive disambiguation to all cities of the world. Needless to say I failed after about a month of trying). --mav

How about ships that are now wrecks? The SS Yongala is now under Yongala Historic Shipwreck witch I feel is a somewhat wrong title. Anyone with a better suggestion?