Right. this category is definately a mess at the moment, with little structure in subcategories.

I think there need to be several classification schemes, which need to be adhered to rigidly:

  • Tanks sorted by nationality (German, US, USSR/Russian, UK etc)
  • Tanks sorted by weight (Light, Medium, Heavy and Main Battle tanks)

with the last category being used ONLY for post-World War II tanks, as this name was not used during WWII or before.

  • Tanks sorted by period

This can be done in two ways: by decade or by sorting them into World War I, "between wars", World War II and "post-war" groups. by decade has as advantage that knowing the date of origin, you can always easily find the tank you need, but the groupings itself will not be logical perse, e.g. splitting the German tanks that served during World War II into a group 1930-39 and a group 1940-49.

Sorting them the second way will lead to some confusion (e.g. Centurion: world War II or post-war tanks) and will lead to bigger groups, but will also lead to more "human logical" groupings.

I have created a new subcategory Category:Tanks by nationality and hung the various country subcategories under it. I have also created a subcategory Category:Tanks by classification under which the subcategories on medium, light, etc, tanks have been hung. --Martin Wisse 19:42, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Tanks by period

edit

I would agree that tanks by period are much better than tanks by decade. The decade creates confusion for the casual user, creates way too many undersized categories. Right now there are hundreds of empty categories. Sortior 04:41, Dec 19, 2004 (UTC)