Talk:List of museum ships/Archive 2

Latest comment: 1 year ago by Doncram in topic The ship problem
Archive 1Archive 2

former museum ships (2)

Aren't former museum ships like former designated historic sites, and once notable always notable? --Doncram (talk,contribs) 01:41, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

From the discussion above: "Hidden below this message is a list of "former" museum ships. The reason why I removed them is because I am wondering if these really should be included or if they go against WP:DIRECTORY. I mean... we aren't including a list of ships that used to formerly be breakwaters that don't exist anymore?" - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 01:44, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
In other words this is a loosely associated list within a list. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 01:44, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
@Doncram: If you really think we should include these ships let me ask something... are they most notable for being museums or for their active careers? If we do include them then I propose they be included with the "List of museum ships" with a color code (similar to List of missing aircraft). - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 01:48, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
Just a question; this article is already a hefty 203mb... do we really need to add another 18mb list of ships that are no longer relevant to this article? This page doesn't even include the List of submarine museums, vessels that are actually museums, one would think that if anything were to be added, that would make more sense (except that list is 44mb, so again... better it stay on its own, and better that these non-museum ships are not added to this "List of museum ships"). Perhaps we should be looking for ways to slim this page down some. - wolf 04:13, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
Comment - I'm seeing the start of an edit war here. Let's NOT go down that route please or I might have to bring the banhammer out. As for the length of this list and former museum ships, I would suggest this list is split by continent (Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America, South America), with a new "List of former museum ships" for those ships which were once preserved and are now lost. Mjroots (talk) 04:29, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
Imho, the page should remain at quo until something is decided here. Also, in line with Mjroots suggestion, it appears that there are ships listed here that are also on the List of museum ships of the United States military. Perhaps we should remove those entries from here as the duplication seems unnecessary. - wolf 05:56, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
I Reverted the longstanding large section which was recently Boldly deleted, again. IMHO it is obviously in the spirit of wp:BRD to term the large deletion as the bold radical move disrupting the status quo. And I am not reviewing the actual first and following deletions, but the first was possibly rude, too, possibly having appearance of being sneaky to delete good work done by others, without any notice or discussion. And yes, now we are here at the Discussion. --Doncram (talk,contribs) 06:23, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
Here is a problem: you aren't discussing the content, as in ways to improve it, you are just complaining about reverts. And on top of that, you've made yet another revert, and you did so after this discussion was started. That's not supposed to happen and I know you've been around long enough to know better, (and I'm actually somewhat surprised at this). I would suggest you self-revert, (the content will still be available in the history), and then perhaps start to discuss what to do with that content. - wolf 11:59, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
I reverted to status quo per WP:BRD, discussions are meant to CHANGE an existing consensus. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 23:36, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
A quick response here, without studying past history: IMHO the existing consensus for a longstanding article is the longstanding version, not a version where a big hunk was sneakily (without notice to Talk, and I haven't gone and looked who did it) removed. I did check Talk before my first restoration, after noticing the big deletion by Knowledgekid87. IMO there was no discussing and therefore no change of consensus. The substantially right thing is to say the status quo is the longstanding thing. I'd rather see further discussion about wikilawyering etc. at my Talk page in discussion opened there, say, than in this discussion. --Doncram (talk,contribs) 21:35, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
@Mjroots: I like this idea, I had originally planned to do so but got sidetracked with other things. Having separate smaller lists will make things easier to manage and give readers a more defined search. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 23:39, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
Offhand I too like suggestion of dividing by continents or other big geographic areas. It doesn't make sense though to put all the former ones in one world-wide list. The former ones in each geographic area should be included in small tables at the bottom of each. Readers interested in museum ships in Brazil, say, would be interested to see the former Brazilian museum ships there, which likely is very much related to which are the current Brazilian museum ships. E.g. a newly renovated, better example of a certain kind of ship has been put on display, ergo the similar but not as good one was scrapped. Carry on a sense of the history of museum ship presentations affecting public understanding of Brazilian maritime history, etc. There is no natural readership for a list of former museum ships worldwide, disconnected/disjointed from lists of the current ones. Keeping the former historic sites at the bottom of geographic pages of historic sites is the practice in Wikipedia for U.S. National Register of Historic Places, U.S. National Historic Landmarks, and I am sure I have seen it in coverage of some other historic registries. I know of no historic registry treatment done differently. --Doncram (talk,contribs) 21:35, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
...annnd the former museum ships have been reverted back in again. For those who are so suddenly interested, the list of former ships was moved to the talk page months ago (see #Former museum ships just above, the section that nobody bothered to comment in). Meanwhile, these ships are listed in that section, they're also listed in the history, there is currently a discussion taking place regarding these ships, so even though someone insists on edit-warring to re-add these ships back for a 4th(?) time despite all these factors, it seems both pointless and disruptive. - wolf 23:07, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
See List of former museum ships. Is that a reasonable answer to all this? Toddst1 (talk) 23:37, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
No, it is not. Doncram (talk,contribs) 15:30, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
DONCRAMDONTLIKEIT but no rationale or any constructive input for why. Worse than WP:REHASH. Toddst1 (talk) 16:56, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
I agree with Mjroots that a broad geographical split is the best approach, but that, like Doncram, former museum ships should be appended to the regional lists where they are more useful to the reader. The question of separate US naval and civilian lists can be considered subsequently if necessary when the latter's content is clearer. Davidships (talk) 17:58, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
On that last note, we already have separate lists, the question is why do we need the duplication of having some of the military vessels listed on both? - wolf 00:50, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
No we don't we need less duplication. The problem with ships is that it seems everyone sees something notable about them that requires a list to be made. Pretty soon we are going to have List of ships by engine type. If we do have lists of museum ships by location then they should be accessed via a disambiguation page. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 13:50, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
I agree with your comments word for word... after the first sentence: "No we don't we need less duplication." Can you clarify that? My point was that we already have a List of museum ships of the United States military, so why have some of those ships listed again here? Why some and not others? This is needless duplication. The answer is to have none of them listed here because that's what that list there is for. (imho) - wolf 00:33, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
That list of museum ships of the United States military is sortable by state but presented first in alphabetical order. Offhand I think it should be presented in "by state" order. And it would be fine by me if it divided into tables in 53 or so sections, losing the functionality of being sortable nation-wide, which I don't think is needed.
For coverage of U.S. museum ships, which I think should mainly be presented in "by state" order, I think each state's section could have one table for those of the U.S. military and one table for all other current ones, and one table for former ones. (And as has been discussed on this page, "museum ships" should probably be defined to include Ships preserved in museums, and those should be merged into the two tables, or if someone thinks those are really different somehow then I'd leave it to editor discretion whether to make a fourth table or not.) The main thing is that all of a states' ships should be covered together in one comprehensive List of museum ships in STATE (or STATE section of a List of museum ships in the United States).
A technique used by User:BD2412 in covering notable Federal courthouses was to compose reusable tables in named sections, one for each state, and then use the magic of wp:Transclusion to place all those sections into one big nation-wide list, and also to present them in more bite-size separate lists for each state. E.g. the table in separate List of United States federal courthouses in Alabama is transcluded by {{:List of United States federal courthouses in Alabama}} to appear in nation-wide List of United States federal courthouses. Transclusion could be used to place the U.S. military ship museums that way, into a reorganized list-article of them all (by state), and into U.S. state sections of List of museum ships in the United States. Or, more simply, the list of U.S. military ship museums list could just be dropped, which its content appearing in the comprehensive by-state articles. Either way, info for each ship is edited in only one place.
First thing, for U.S. and non-U.S., is to divide this List of museum ships by big area, so probably a table for each nation, which can be regrouped by continent. This was discussed previously. User:Mjroots and others support that. Who wants to do that, or, enough talk, should I just do that myself, now? If I do that, can I have some peoples' support that they will help deal with section-deleter wannabes? --Doncram (talk,contribs) 02:28, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
Maybe go one step at a time; organize this article first. I would think that removing any US military vessels from this list would help with that endeavour. Then, if there are calls to address the list of military ships, we can deal with that then. (jmho) - wolf 04:02, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

(arbitrary break)

When I suggested splitting by continent, "North America" means Canada, Mexico, the United States and the other eighteen countries and eighteen non-dependent territories that make up the continent. Let's get the list split into six first before we start splitting off individual countries. Mjroots (talk) 06:17, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

There are other options, which may be more practical in this case, notably United Nations geoscheme for the Americas (combining subregions as convenient). Davidships (talk) 14:33, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
Mjroots, are you merely suggesting that it sounds harder to you to divide the list by country and then group by continent, than it does to divide by continent? In my view the first would be easier or the same amount of work, and would produce better results, i.e.. a Europe page nicely divided into U.K., Germany, France, Norway, etc. sections. Or are you saying that you actually oppose having the Europe list divided by country, so you would want the division to be undone, i.e. you would want it put back into an all-Europe page with ships just in alphabetical order? I hope not, because I think that would be unhelpful, IMO, but I want to understand what you mean. --Doncram (talk,contribs) 05:10, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
I don't see grouping the civilian ships by continent as a problem, especially if the table is sortable by country. If anything, it can be a benefit to the reader, as they only have to go to six tables (one per continent) rather numerous tables (dozens? more?), all varying widely in size when the ships are divided in tables per country. (jmho) - wolf 10:36, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
@Doncram: you seem to be going about it the wrong way round. I'm saying first split by continent. Then these lists can be split by country if it is justified by size. Take a look at the List of windmills and see how that is handled - it gets split down beyond country level where justified. Mjroots (talk) 07:13, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
I have no idea what you are trying to convey. The list of windmills is ordered by continent then by country then by state or province. broken out with separate tables for each country in Europe, etc. Numerous tables have just one or a few entries. The Australian sublist is broken out by state. In this museum ships list, I have _ordered_ the Australia section by state but not split that into separate tables. It makes sense to me to order the U.S. and Canada sections by state, i just did not do that yet. I thought it possible someone might complain about is having tables with relatively few entries, or about ordering by name of state but that is apparently your concern.
Also, it seemed to me you were possibly concerned about the difficulty of dividing by country within continent right away. That was no problem.
I do notice in the lists of windmills that the information has been split into too many pages, IMHO, and also that it lacks generally lacks coordinates. The main list is just 28,000 bytes, and the split-out U.S. list is 13,786 bytes, which are "tiny" nowadays... and it would be better to merge back in the subpages for several U.S. states. And also add coordinates. If both are done, then the linked OpenSourceMap is far more useful. It is better for readers to have all the U.S. information in one page, IMHO.
Please do explain what you mean by my "going about it the wrong way round". I did split by continent, and then split by country as justified by size (i.e., like in the windmills list, split out a country if it has one or more items). --Doncram (talk,contribs) 09:00, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
It appeared to me that you were intent on splitting by country, then grouping those countries by continent. The threshold for the windmills list is 20 individual entries justifies a stand-alone list. Not suggesting that should be a threshold here, but explaining the situation. Mjroots (talk) 09:23, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
Okay, no problem, those concerns are moot. At Talk:List of windmills in the United States there is now a merger proposal. Assuming that will be agreed upon, I copied over 3 tables already and now (after naming all coordinates and putting in GeoGroup),
Map of all U.S. windmills having coordinates shows them all (which conveys interesting clustering in Long Island, and further in east end of Long Island, where a) the Dutch were, and b) some windmills survived). The total page size for "List of windmills in the U.S." is 55,817 bytes, well below very old rule of thumb that 100,000 bytes (or was it 200,000 bytes?) justifies splitting. Allows for adding more coordinates and otherwise developing.
This "List of museum ships" size is currently 233,566 bytes, and will increase as coordinates are added. I am inclined to split out the U.S. list at some point (and, keeping that one page, subdivide it by state or territory into 53 or so tables). [Or maybe N. America as a whole should be split out, see below.]--Doncram (talk,contribs) 19:44, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
The US section will get smaller when all the naval ships are removed. Then the US, with it's civilian ships, can remain as a part of North America, which I think is important. - wolf 20:06, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the thought, but we have not agreed to remove U.S. naval ship museums. I think that they should definitely continue to appear in the list of U.S. ship museums, allowing readers to see all the ship museums in each state (or they will be able to see that after the U.S. section is sorted by state and/or divided by state). [I was going to say: "Again, that could be implemented using transclusions", but looking at the U.S. military ship list, now I think not. It is organized by branch of the military first, which looks good offhand, and will not be reorganized into "atoms" of each state, which would be necessary to transclude the "atoms" over to the list of U.S. museum ships.] I think that it is okay and good to have "duplication", i.e. ships appearing in both lists. Note the two lists have different fields and are good for conveying different sorts of information. Note the U.S. military museum ships list is not great for telling readers where there are ship museums they could visit, for example (at least without sorting, and it doesn't include coordinates and other location specifics). Note the world-wide list of ship museums does include military ships in all other(?) or most nations, and note no one has seen fit to add a field for branch of service or otherwise mention branch of service (besides how that is sometimes apparent in a ship's name). --Doncram (talk,contribs) 21:58, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
User:Thewolfchild, would eventually splitting out N.America as a whole, keeping Canada, U.S., Mexico, and Cuba together, instead of splitting out U.S., address part of your concern? I guess I think that would be better, anyhow. Everybody note, there are no ship museums in all the Caribbean nations AFAICT. Hmm, I put all Central American nations into S. America, maybe some should be switched to N. America. Also my definition of "Australia and New Zealand" should maybe be "Australia etc." and Indonesia and possibly others should go there. Also I deliberately put Israel in "Europe", which is consistent with how the United Nations' World Heritage Sites program handles it, though some may find that odd. Feel free, anyone, to move nations around! --Doncram (talk,contribs) 22:24, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes, US, Canada, Mexico, Central Americal and any Caribbean nations should all be grouped as 'North America". Australia and New Zealand should be "Oceana". I don't think there is enough images to warrant an "Images" column, eg: look at how few there are for the US, now imagine that as a single table with Canada, ect. with no images at all. Images can be found on the individual articles. As for naval museum ships, I still think keeping them here on the US table is redundant, espescially when there is already a specific article for those ships. Instead, they should be removed and a hat note put in place about the US military museum ships page. (jmho) - wolf 14:05, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

 
Isn't this pic of the Arthur Foss nice? Just added.
Hey, I made big effort to get Africa, Australia, started with pics from Wikipedia articles or general searching over at Commons already, but I am not far along in the U.S. section, and only just started a photos column in the Canada section just now. Most rows will get photos eventually, but it takes a while! Others are welcome to add photos too. --Doncram (talk,contribs) 00:01, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
@Doncram: it's easy to just sit and post suggestions and counter-suggestions, but I would like to say that all the effort and good work that you've been putting into the article hasn't gone un-noticed, so good on you, and thanks. Cheers - wolf 13:30, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Division by continent (of museum ships and windmills)

Following up on comments of User talk:Thewolfchild: For this list-article and others like List of windmills, dividing by Oceania vs. Africa, Europe, Asia, N. America, S. America, Arctic seems to be a good thing to try.

 
this map showing divisions between continental plates of Oceania vs. Asia

Per Boundaries between the continents of Earth:

In this article "List of museum ships" in Egypt there is just Khufu ship at Giza, on the Nile, which is west of the Suez Canal and clearly in Africa.
In List of windmills there are no windmills in Egypt.
  • Indonesia is split, with two eastern provinces including its half of the island of New Guinea being in Oceania, and the rest of it being in Asia.
In this article "List of museum ships" in Indonesia there are museum ships at Bintan, just off the tip of the Malay Peninsula and hence in Asia, and at Jakarta, on the west end of Java and also in Asia. So without further explanation in the article, "Indonesia" should just be included in Asia, as it is now.
In List of windmills there are no windmills in Indonesia, which is surprising to me because of the historic Dutch presence. User:Mjroots, is it it possible that some windmills were built but did not survive? I am not immediately finding examples in extremely quick Google search.
  • Malaysia may be all in Asia?; there are no Wikipedia-listed museum ships or Wikipedia-listed windmills in Malaysia however.
  • The United States is split between Oceania and N. America: in Oceania, one may distinguish between "Near Oceania" vs. "Far Oceania", with the latter including Hawaii.
The section on List of museum ships in the United States has two in Hawaii, none in Guam or other territories and insular areas. I think having a separate section on "United States in Oceania" within "Oceania" to include those is not merited, and the Hawaiian ones should continue to be listed in the United States in N. America. But the Oceania section could have a note in its lede or at its bottom that Oceania defined broadly would include the two in Hawaii. I will put such a note into this list-article.
List of windmills in the United States has none in Hawaii and for insular areas and territories there are just some in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, clearly in N. America.

--Doncram (talk,contribs) 08:31, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Let's just be totally clear here. By "windmill" we mean a traditional windmill, not iron windpumps or wind turbines. It is possible that there were windmills in the Netherlands East Indies, but it is equally possible that there weren't. Watermills are a simpler technology and were used pretty much worldwide. Any entry on the List of windmills (and sublists thereof) needs to meet WP:V by WP:RS. Let's not get stressed because any particular location does not have an entry.Mjroots (talk) 06:56, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
It turns out there were four windmills during 1665 to 1800, among about 25 Dutch-designed mills, in Batavia, Dutch East Indies. I started a section on Indonesia which is a bit long now but may be reduced down by me to just 2 or 3 sentences with a historic engraving image. --Doncram (talk,contribs) 04:17, 11 March 2023 (UTC)
Shall we stick to ships - and ignore tectonics? Museums are in countries and most people will have an good idea in which continent a country is commonly considered to be located. For the vv few transcontinental states, it is not difficult to make a commonsense choice (as has been made with re Turkey and Russia). There is actually some useful geopolitical stuff in Boundaries between the continents of Earth, but one thing that is not there is any suggestion that Europe encompasses even one square inch of Egypt, or Israel. Davidships (talk) 00:37, 11 March 2023 (UTC)
Oops, thanks for the catch and dry humor(?). I see my misstatement about Egypt, struck out and corrected above. And yeah it is hard to argue that Israel is anywhere but in Asia, and I will move it if no one else has already. But it is a fact that the United Nations' World Heritage Committee puts it in Europe! Or maybe in the United States! It is part of the "Europe and North America" UNESCO region, and Wikipedia's partition of World Heritage Sites followed that. I suspect that so much boggled some Wikipedia editor's mind that they shifted it over to List of World Heritage Sites in Western Asia and modified that so that now Wikipedia makes false explicit statements. (Possibly Arab-Israel tensions were deemed sufficiently reduced, or Israel's history was deemed more related to Arabian than to Europian civilisation, and the diplomats did shift Israel, but I doubt it. I think it is more likely that moronic(? please don't anyone take offense or have a cow, but how is one supposed to refer to ppl who just believe what they believe because they believe it, ignoring facts and history and science etc., and choose to insert that into Wikipedia ?) editors just had their way, which happens. Fireworks will erupt if/when I revisit that and fix the related list-articles to state the unexpected but true. But this isn't a list of World Heritage Sites, so yes i agree where to place Israel tectonics-wise. :) --Doncram (talk,contribs) 04:17, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

The ship problem

I am nearing the end of broadening this list to a basic format before potentially splitting it up. I know full well what the options are.... so thinking out loud here is what I have:

  • Option A - Create lists of ships by museum locations. Simple enough... most of the ships included here come from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada though. Table headings in my opinion would focus on "Ship" -> "type -> "year constructed" -> Museum location -> Museum. This would focus more on the ship's current status as a museum and where its now located rather than give technical details about the ship itself.
  • Option B - Create lists of ships by age in museums. This would run into List of oldest surviving ships which already highlights the ships which are not preserved as museums. We could create an article called List of oldest active ships with a similar green color coding table which shows "Active museum ships". Doing this would help the oldest surviving ship article by shifting its focus to strictly museum ships (static display only) by age. Of course this wouldn't be all on one list and would be split along set periods of time.

- Knowledgekid87 (talk) 05:27, 27 December 2022 (UTC) Not to ignore:

  • Option D - Retain current alphabetical arrangememnt, splitting as needed. NB - I have not yet thought through a preference, but trying to consider what will readers come to the page for, which leads me towards:
  • Option X - Any of the above for default listing, but not split. At present it's not ridiculously big, it is in an attractive table format, and is sortable, enabling a wider variety of needs to be easily met. (As an aside, "Origin" needs defining. To me the word is synonymous with country of build, but there are a good few entries where that is not the case, eg CSS Acadia, BAE Abdón Calderón.) Davidships (talk) 10:59, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
@Davidships: Yeah we could by default leave these tables alone except that they don't tell much. The problem there is that ships have multiple careers, and you have to see what career is most notable to figure out why its now in x country (British built famous Chilean Navy ship will have its origin in the UK). Another issue is that there are museum ships listed at List of oldest surviving ships which are not even included here. According to this list not including submarines which are on their own separate list, there are apparently 547 notable museum ships around the world. Its too broad of a topic to leave it as is which is why we have categories for museum ships as it is. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 16:40, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
@Davidships: If nobody seriously objects, my plan is to make this into a disambiguation page with links to different lists. In my experience here having lists that are more narrow and defined in scope are easier to manage and edit. It would be sort of like List of museums in the United States which as you notice has List of museum ships there as a link because it narrows down the topic. 500+ entries may not seem like a-lot, but try putting that on new tables which took me at least 4 days to do. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 21:08, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
best to reorganize by location IMHO -- Doncram
Museum ships, like preserved locomotives and other moveable things that are listed on historic registers, are basically fixed in location. Organizing by location makes sense, so divide into List of museum ships in Canada, List of museum ships in the United States (organized by state), etc. Organizing by location works for persons interested in these kind of things, who might visit the ones in a given area.
Note that location nation is likely to correlate pretty well with the nation of greatest association to a given ship. If an old ship long-associated with the U.S. state of Louisiana, say, has gone on to be operated in Chile, say, and is being retired, then no one in Chile would make a museum out of it, but someone in Mississippi might (and pay for bringing it back). In some cases the current location may not be known; it should continue to be listed at its last-known location.
Further, the "List of museum ships in Chile" can still mention it, perhaps in a section of former ones. Note the big system of lists of 90,000+ "places" on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, divided mostly into separate lists by county, and the smaller system of about 3000? U.S. National Historic Landmarks work fine that way. The list of NHLs for Maine, for example, includes the ship Roseway which was declared an NHL while located in Maine, but it was later moved to Boston, Massachusetts. It properly appears in a "Listings formerly in Maine" section of the Maine NHL list, and it properly appears in List of National Historic Landmarks in Boston (and it also properly appears in National Register of Historic Places listings in northern Boston). IMHO it is feasible and perhaps "nice" to include mentions of historic/museum ships at their former locations, but it doesn't matter if this is not done perfectly. What is objective and clear and makes sense to readers is to be reporting ships at their current locations.
I think historic ships which have actually become museum ships are pretty well fixed in their location, as it would be rare for a state/city/museum to invest in making a historic ship exhibitable is going to let it go away permanently to some other place. Of course, for a ship like the Roseway which is mainly in Boston but goes for trips to St. Croix, it should certainly be included where it is mainly located. It could also be mentioned in a St. Croix list (but IMHO doesn't have to be).
Alphabetical by name (by which one of a ship's multiple names through its history?), is not helpful IMHO and I also don't think it is necessary to keep an alphabetical list labelled as a disambiguation page or otherwise. Organization by year of being completed as a ship, or year of being remade over into its current form of ship, or by year of becoming a museum ship is not natural, either, IMHO, including because those year dates may be unknown or uncertain for some ships. Organizing by "type" sounds difficult to do and to explain to readers: you would have to start by finding or creating a MECE (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive) categorization of all museum ships, and then explain that. Type by class of ship? Type by function? And I honestly think it is of greatest interest to readers to see that they can visit the Kon-tiki, the Fram, and three awesome Viking ships in three museums side-by-side in Oslo. Categories such as Category:Arctic exploration vessels can attempt to help readers navigate to different examples by "types" of different kinds, rather than having multiple awkward worldwide list-systems organized by different types of types. There is only one current location, and it is very clear.
BTW I have in progress Draft:Preserved locomotives in the United States and Draft:Preserved locomotives in Canada as part of making sense out of List of locomotives (an unwieldy collection that was nominated for deletion... it was argued that it is impossible to develop or maintain it, or that it had to be organized by manufacturer or by "type" (which is infeasible to define and explain) or by other ways. But to me and at least some others at the AFD, it makes perfect sense to divide out the preserved ones and to organize them by current location (with many being listed at each big heritage railway or big railway/museum).
Hope you don't mind my commenting, and I am glad youse people are working to make sense for readers out of this topic area, keep up the good work! --Doncram (talk,contribs) 22:03, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
Hmm, I hadn't gone to see List of museums in the United States before commenting... yes, certainly having a top-level "disambiguation page" like that is needed and good. Actually I would informally term it a "list of lists of museum ships", although I personally dislike it when editors come in and move lists to names like List of lists of ... or List of lists of lists of ....
But, my main belief to express is: in addition to having the top-level "disambiguation" or "list of lists" type page, dividing the present alphabetical list of individual museum ships by location (or term it by geography or by spatial arrangement), i.e. creating a system of lists by nation and subdivisions thereof, is I think highly beneficial, is needed in fact I would say. I would say the alphabetical list must be kept at least until the geographic organized version is created, although bearing a big banner saying reorganization by location needs to be done... it would be awful to lose sight of the current list. I would maybe volunteer, but I have too many other list-y things to do.
I have myself organized a number world-wide lists of things, like List of Presbyterian churches and List of fire stations. But currently I notice that top-level "lists of lists" seem not to be properly in place for some of them... like List of churches should exist pointing to lists of individual cathedrals, churches by region as well as lists by denomination, and it should link to but not redirect to List of Christian denominations. "Church" has different meanings, all types of them should be covered in a top-level list of lists. And there are numerous lists of churches by location, e.g. List of churches in Budapest, List of churches in London, which need to be under a worldwide list of churches by location. Yikes. --Doncram (talk,contribs) 22:52, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
@Doncram: This is going to take me a bit to read through when I have the time, thanks for your response though! I didn't want to do any changes until I see some opinions from those involved in these types of things. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 03:54, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
@Doncram: Again, need a bit of time to work through this. But as you have clearly thought quite a bit about it at a generic level, do you think that "Categories" functions can be of specific help, bearing in mind that they can only ever list just the names of the articles themselves (or a redirect), without explanation? Davidships (talk) 08:58, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
@Davidships: In a nutshell they are saying they support lists of ships by place of best-known importance. I would opt to do it by continent (Africa can be grouped with Europe if needed) as a majority of the ships here are based in the United States. This just gives a better WP:WORLDVIEW on the subject. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:58, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
Sure, in nutshell, yes. Actually now I don't think this is a very huge task, to regroup the table rows into new groups/tables by area, having been involved in other reorganizations of tabled data in the past. (E.g. with other NRHP editors, to split out the 652 NRHP places in Washington DC, into 5 big neighborhood tables/pages.) How about see visually where the places (or most of them) are located (see "adding coordinates" discussion section below), first? It will then be easier to assess what are reasonable partitions to slice up the world. --Doncram (talk,contribs) 21:13, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Now, after the "List of museums ships' has been organized by continent by country and developed quite a bit, I have gone and seen List of surviving ancient ships, which I guess are all in museums. Nice that it includes photos already. Currently the "List of museum ships" overlaps, by duplicating Khufu ship in Egypt at least. I'm inclined to drop it from this list and state in the intro that for ancient ships, see that other list. I am not sure this list can be characterized as "active museum ships" (Knowledgekid87, I'm not exactly sure what was intended with that phrase?) as opposed to surviving ancient ones. Relatedly, perhaps, this list currently includes two or more ships that are not intact, are not complete, are perhaps arguably not "surviving": these include a bow of a ship in Italy and a portions of a ship in S. Korea (which was sunk in 2010 almost surely by N. Korea, and pieces of it were salvaged). --Doncram (talk,contribs) 08:34, 14 March 2023 (UTC)