Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Battleship
- The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.
The article was promoted 03:52, 21 April 2007.
Battleship edit
Self-nomination. A group of editors, myself included, have worked this article into a thorough, precise and informative account of one of the most important weapons of all time. The article has recently passed a thorough A-class review from WP:MILHIST, as well as detailed feedback from its Good Article nomination. It is a fairly long article with a prose length of 67k, but I think this is justifiable given that it covers hundreds of years of history and every major seafaring nation. The Land 08:52, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose
- Overwhelming ToC -- needs to be compacted
Pro western biased, modern-day biased -- battleships of the ancient world ignored/not mentioned- 67k not justified. Has immense scope for precis writing
- The article has already been split twice during the recent development, with a great deal of material moved to ship of the line and ironclad warship. The most recent discussion about further splitting was at the A-class review: you will see there is no consensus to further split the article (there is also no consensus to split aircraft carrier, an article where the same sort of considerations apply). Many sections are already precis. 67k is long, but the scope of the article justifies it. The Land 11:48, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- USA --> United States
- Parts of a battleship?
- Most other articles about types of ship don't go into details about their naval architecture. I think the article covers the important bits of battleship in the discussion of their development and I'm concerned that a 'parts of the battleship' section might be duplicative or, given the changes over time, confusing. The Land 11:48, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Types of battleships?The Falklands War, a major recent war seems to be missed- ancient and modern day naval powers missing
Why are the Iowa class ships given so much prominence?- Battleship strategies (subs vs aircraft carriers vs battleship) hardly mentioned.
=Nichalp «Talk»= 09:33, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- The Oxford English Dictionary says the word 'battleship' derives from 1794. What battleships of the ancient world are you thinking of? Furthermore, the use of battleships by Japan, Turkey and Russia is well covered and the A-class reviewers commented positively on the global outlook of the article.
- Types of battleship: the article goes into some detail about the evolution of battleships: pre-Dreadnought, Dreadnought, more modern types. We have covered most sub-descriptions of 'battleship', of which there are not many. What in particular do you mean?
- No battleships were involved in the Falklands War.
- I believe the article mentions every nation which has owned a battleship. Which do you think are missing?
- Iowa class ships were the only type of battleship in use for roughly 50 years. This inevitably means that they will crop up a fair amount.
- There is a section on strategy, and a continuous theme of the article is the tension between battleships and submarines and aircraft. Please be more specific. The Land 09:47, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Battleships are very large, heavily-armored warships with a main battery consisting of the largest caliber of guns. -- can this definition not be applied to the Turtle ships? which had cannons, were heavily amoured, and supposedly iron-clad?
- It would be OR to describe them as 'battleships'. This article is about ships which have been classified or described as battleships. Turtle ships never have been. The lead section does not describe every attribute of battleships - nor should it try to - but turtle ships are a) totally unrelated to battleships in terms of their evolution and b) markedly different in terms of their attributes, lacking iron/steel construction, engines, propellors. They have no place whatsoever in this article. Their place has extensively been discussed at Talk:Ironclad warship where there is currently something like a consensus. The Land 11:03, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- This opening definition is indeed misleading. Pre-dreadnought battleships were NOT larger than ocean cruisers of that time. Dreadnoughts were smaller than battlecruisers (within the same generation). BTW, the "15000-17000 tons" for pre-dreadnoughts needs more specification. Standard displacement of typical 1st class Brit is less than 15000 (Canopus 13200, Majestic 14600 etc). NVO 23:37, 18 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- The first sentence will necessarily be an abstraction. The first sentence claims battleships were 'very large' not 'the largest', and while one can find exceptions it is true to a first approximation. However, I take on board your point and will clear that up in the pre-Dreadnought section. The 15,000 to 17,000 figure is Stoll's and not mine - sadly he doesn't make it clear that it is laden displacement, though Sondhaus accords with your figures. Not sure what to do about that. The Land 17:52, 19 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- How would one differentiate a battleship from a cruiser/destroyer and other types of warships? Needs to be mentioned. For example this suggests that the INS '"Rajput is a battleship, but then again the WP article INS Rajput (D51) mentions it as a destroyer
=Nichalp «Talk»= 10:36, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Rajput is not a battleship because she lacks armour or large gun armament. I am not sure there is a better way of putting it. The distinction between battleship and cruiser/destroyer on this basis is very clear at any point in time. The Land 11:03, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- INS Rajput is clearly a guided missile destroyer. I think the problem here is a confusion with the terminology. Instead of 'warship', 'battleship' has been used. This was explained quite good in the trivia section that was removed earlier. Especially how media sometimes confuses terminology and how some sci-fi series has added to this confusion by claiming all ships being 'battleships'.--MoRsE 11:13, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Further comment
- Length: this can be summarised further: eg:The first example of the power of naval aviation was the British air attack on the Italian naval base at Taranto that took place on the night of November 11 — November 12, 1940. The Royal Navy launched the first all-aircraft naval attack in history, flying a small number of aircraft from an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean Sea and attacking the Italian fleet at Taranto. -- nothing to do with the core topic
- Wikify years - 24 May 1941
- Unlink low value blue links: ram, war etc
- Replace hyphens by the dash (–) where applicable
- Use a non-breaking space between a number and unit ( ) 10 in
- Metric equivalents needed
- With regards to units and metric equivalents, I am working on this but where a measurement repeats in a section might only give the full unit and equivalent measure the first time a value occurs. Where "12 in gun" occurs ever sentence, expanding it to "12 inch (305 millimetre gun" as MoS suggests woudl very much hinder readability! The Land 17:35, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- =Battleships in strategy and doctrine= -- no citations
- The USMC?
- USA --> United States; U.S. --> US: see Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Acronyms and abbreviations
- 2nd level sections needs to go. 4.2.x. 8.1 is also bad style.
- =Dreadnoughts in the rest of the world= -- rest of the world is POV suggest it be changed to "...other countries"
- Why is dreadnought in bold? so too Italy, Argentina and Chile?
- Dreadnought in bold where? Re the countries: I have just deleted section headings for most of these countries, which served to emphasise them, so I wanted another way to emphasise them. While italics are normal for emphasis this article has a lot of ship names, which are all italicised. Using italics to emphasise the country names would run the risk of confusing people who assume the countries are ships. The Land 16:36, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- =Dreadnoughts in the rest of the world= Spain, Brazil, Turkey... did any of these countries' battleships go into active service?
- Camden, N.J, Norfolk, Va. --> full name needed
- =The crucial Pacific battles= -- remove "the crucial"
- Re to Turtle ships: Turtle ships are not battleships, but the history section needs to mention how similar ships (by defination) were in existence. Just like Columbus 'discovered' America, it does not mean that America was uninhabited or undiscovered by humans at that time.
- Weasel terms: A far-sighted yet combative man, it is often held -- according to who?
- Am sure a source could be found but it's somewhat off-topic so I've snipped it... didn't like that paragraph anyway tbh. The Land 16:29, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
More review later. =Nichalp «Talk»= 14:38, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- A comment
- Maybe the intro could explicitly state that a battleship is not any ship used for battle. Zocky | picture popups 16:05, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Support I support this with qualification:
- its a staggeringly large topic and I am not sure that ship of the line shouldn't be a very short paragraph with the link to a expanded article as it is now. The ships of the line gave nothing but the concept of a large battleline to be transfered over to a battleship.
- Inline citation should be improved entire sections are devoid of such.
Other than that I find it a smooth read (something we overlook too often here) well thought out and binds well together into an overall subject. Tirronan 17:12, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Support I could do with a few more citations for the article, but overall it looks good and it read well. My only major gripe was the small picture size; having to zoom every picture up to see the guns and such is really annoying. On a more humous note, it would seem that battleship's FAC nom and my FARC request for Iowa class battleship were requested at almost the exact same time. Hows that for odd? TomStar81 (Talk) 21:08, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment some of the citations aren't properly formatted. You should use the cite web or cite news template instead of just listing a web address. I'm slowly going through the article, but it seems decent.-BillDeanCarter 21:48, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Thanks for that. I think they all now have author/publisher information and retrieval dates. The Land
- Comments as I go... whew this is obviously a long and complicated article.
- Is there any reason for using long dashes twice in the opening paragraphs? This seemed really awkward to me... wouldn't normal hyphens do, or no hyphens at all? Sorry if this has already been belabored over.
- Intro is excellent otherwise. Perhaps a model intro, even. This awkward first paragraph though... it took my attention away from the content and made me think about the style too much.
- "the first screw battleship ever" What is a screw battleship? Important in context but unfamiliar to many readers, should have a very brief definition, especially as there's no article to read to easily find out what the term means. "capital ship" is another term used several times in important context but never defined. But the meaning is more obvious with that one.
- Thanks for that. That section has recently been trimmed and the context was, in the previous version, clear. I've removed the screw point because we're now not dealing with that particular subtelty in this article. (If you're interested, the relevant material is now at ship of the line and ironclad warship.). The Land 17:54, 18 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- "out to be one of the most unusual, if not outright bad, designs ever built" I assume the source means "bad battleship designs", not just bad designs in general? Should be clarified though.
- Again with the hyphens and dashes... why is it "all-big-gun" one paragraph and 'all–big–gun" the next? Then it becomes "'ll–big–gun concept" a paragraph later.
- "if no negotiated solution could be found" kind of comes out of the blue, showing a lack of political context in this article with respect to the pre-WW1 arms race. Thus far the article had successfully avoided having to cover any of the political conflicts that lead to the development of battleships, but the language here kind of begs the question of what is meant by a "negotiated solution" and what conflict was it in response to anyway? Is there any easy way to address this? Even a mention of the applicable article on the early 1900s arms race would be good. There's something about covering the arms race in such detail without even hinting at why there was one rubs me the wrong way. Granted this is an article on battleships, but they were built for reasons much more intricate than countries wanting big ships, and these reasons are important to mention. This is a complicated request, I'm not asking people to bend over backwards here... just wondering what people think. It eventually does cover this a bit better, so I suspect only a moderate tweak is needed earlier on, such as a sentence that begins, "An arms race began because of..." The rest of the article does what looks to be a fine job of covering political concerns without lingering on them.
- The Land reverted my addition of the years for the Age of Sail, but I just copied the years given in the WP article. Some years for this time frame should be given in the battleship article.
- I was pondering this. I can see why you added the years, but the age of sail] article gives little support to them and they're basically arbitrary; furthermore the ship-of-the-line wasn't the dominant ship for the whole period specified (line of battle not invented until 1640s). So arguably we shouldn't use 'age of sail' at all. I was just stuck for an alternative. The Land 17:45, 18 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Isn't "Jeune Ecole school of thought" redundant? Ecole is french for school.
- The last two paragraphs under "Value for Money" are almost totally uncited. These are important, interpretative paragraphs, and I don't doubt they're backed up by sources though.
- I will probably give a weak support if my above concerns are addressed or at least replied to. My main concern after them is that there are too many short, 2-3 sentence paragraphs, particularly early on... giving the body of this article a choppy feel to it. E.g. sections like "The Pre-Dreadnought" Some sections are brilliant, but the article as a whole is still a bit uneven. --W.marsh 17:28, 18 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment the photos of Jackie Fisher and Vittorio Cuniberti are far too large. — BillC talk 01:20, 19 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- There is no size defined for them (any more): this accords with the Manual of Style, but does mean that if you have your image width preference set to 300px or so that portrait photos display very large. Can't see a way round it, as redefining them with fixed width would violate the MoS (and result in other people complaining ;-) ). The Land 10:01, 19 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Article looks better now, except the lack of citations under the second half of "Value for Money". It would be nice to know where these arguments are from, for further reading if nothing else. It's pedantic though, so count me as a support. --W.marsh 01:13, 20 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment. I'll be glad to support this concise and well-balanced presentation of a huge amount of information, once some details have been taken care of:
- Please don't leave the delimitation of the subject uncertain. Above, Nichalp quotes the opening sentence: "Battleships are very large, heavily-armored warships with a main battery consisting of the largest caliber of guns," and proposes that the Turtle ships fit it. It seems to me a lapse of logic to protest that yes, they may fit it, but the article is about "ships which have been classified or described as battleships". See, that wasn't clear from reading the article. If that's the definition of the subject, then the reader should be told so, immediately, rather than be confusingly told that the definition of the subject is a matter of size, armor, and guns.
- I think this is quite a difficult point. A moon is like a planet, but isn't. There is a clear definition of what a planet is laid down by an authoritative body. By contrast there is no clear definition of what a battleship is. One cannot list all the planets in existence because we have no knowledge of many places that there might be planets. By contrast, one can list all the battleships that have ever been in existence, as defined (for instance) by the attitudes of particular navies or authoritative reference works. It is these ships that the article is about.
- We cannot include the turtle ship because calling it a 'battleship' is OR. There is an argument, though not a settled one, that in a coincidental but nonetheless important manner it shared characteristics of the ironclad warship, so it may deserve a mention in that article.
- Given the vast range of vessels which the term describes according to its OED definition, it is very difficult to pick a succint one-line definition (or, far more accurately, description). As NVO points out above, anyone who relies on the first sentence as a comprehensive definition of a battleship will find it includes battlecruisers (from 1907 to the 1940s) and first-class armoured cruisers (in the late 19h century). Read in a technical sense it also excludes all ships-of-the-line (no armour), broadside ironclad frigates (no main battery), and indeed previous generations of modern battleships (if a battleship has 16in guns and someone builds one with 18in guns it no longer carries 'the largest calibre'). To incorporate all of this subtlety into one short sentence is asking too much of the English language.
- Exactly how we resolve this I don't know. Once one regards the opening sentence as a description not a definition, and reads it in conjunction with the following paragraph, the problem goes away. Surely that is enough? The Land 19:17, 21 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- There are far too many very short paragraphs and also short sections. Or there were, I've done a merge operation, but please check if you think it appropriate. You may want to do it differently, or at least want to re-cast some "topic sentences" (=first sentence of a paragraph), as some of them now no longer refer to all of the content of the paragraph. I do think a good deal of merging was necessary, but I was too ignorant to fix the consequences in some cases. (In other words, The Land, please fix the mess I've made... sorry.) Also I had to give up on simply merging pargraphs in the "dreadnoughts in other countries" section; it needs som more radical reconstructuring to make shorter 'graphs possible, I think.
- POV alert: the narrative comes from a certain point of view in the World War II section. This is sometimes subtle—a general impression that the narrator is speaking from British or American soil—but sometimes obvious, as in the use of praisewords like "gamely" or "brave". (Guess which nationalities are capable of such qualities and attitudes? The Japanese? Wrong.) Finns seem like nicer people than Germans, too.
- I've rephrased the most egregious paragraph here- am just about to have a read for subtle pro-English bias. Bit surprised that no-one has pointed out that the page plays Rule Britannia if you read it for long enough ;) The Land 20:57, 22 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Minor detail: I've done some copyediting and proofreading (and restored many hyphens...) but I wasn't able to supply the missing Japanese ship here: "including HMS Victory, Warrior, the Japanese the Swedish Vasa..." What ship was this? Bishonen | talk 17:53, 21 March 2007 (UTC).[reply]
- Support - Well-written, it has lots of citations and references.--Bryson 03:48, 22 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment The article states, "There were also several old ships of the line still used as housing ships or storage depots. Of these, all but HMS Victory were sunk or scrapped by 1957." What about USS Constitution? Does she figure into the mold of a ship of the line? TomStar81 (Talk) 22:21, 22 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- I would say no as the USS Constitution is a frigate, i.e. neither a ship-of-the-line, nor a battleship.--MoRsE 08:09, 23 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Support although my views can be considered somewhat biased due to my involvement in the rewriting of the article I must say that I am very pleased with the current version. Most of the concerns that have been raised above have been addressed and it feels like that it is mostly the fine-tuning (minor spelling errors, minor rewording etc) that is left. I personally took care of the two last red links that I found there. --MoRsE 07:53, 23 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Oppose 60KB of readable prose surpasses WP:LENGTH; summary style should be employed to bring the prose to within guidelines. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:09, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Back for a second look; continued oppose, mostly 1c, uncited, and 2—new list:
- Multiple instances of failure to conform with WP:MSH—pls fix section headings.
- Mystified by this. Where do the headings not conform with the MOS? The Land 18:13, 8 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Did you read WP:MSH? Use of "The" and repeated words in headings? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:30, 15 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Hm, ok, I can see seven extraneous uses of 'the' - thanks for pointing that out, thought I don't see why it would have hurt to have made it clear the first time. Regarding repeated words in headings - all I can see in the MoS is 'Avoid repeating section titles', and I don't see that happening anywhere in the article... The Land 21:07, 15 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Did you read WP:MSH? Use of "The" and repeated words in headings? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:30, 15 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Mystified by this. Where do the headings not conform with the MOS? The Land 18:13, 8 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Extensive uncited text; in the absence of citations, sections like "Value for money" and "Tactics" appear as opinion or original research.
- Multiple instances of failure to conform with WP:MSH—pls fix section headings.
- Back for a second look; continued oppose, mostly 1c, uncited, and 2—new list:
- Yep, some paragraphs lack inline citation, largely because they draw together material that has already been presented and where the same or a very similar statement has already been cited. The uncited paragraph in tactics basically repeats material from the section on WWI. I can whack in a few more 'ref = Kennedy' and 'ref = Keegan' if you want but not for a while. The Land 18:13, 8 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Category in See also ? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:48, 8 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- How is it that the featured article B movie gets a pass on this criteria? B movie comes in at 95 kilobytes long and Battleship comes in at a not that much smaller 86 kilobytes long. What are the strategies for fixing the Battleship article without losing the information? Obviously move the information to other articles, but how do you organize those other articles so that the information on battleships is at your fingertips?-BillDeanCarter 00:25, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Well, it certainly didn't get a pass from me, nor quite a few others. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:30, 15 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Saying 60k 'surpasses' WP:LENGTH is untrue. The precise words are: "> 60 KB Probably should be divided (although the scope of a topic can sometimes justify the added reading time)". I think this is such a broad topic. The guideline also says: "Discuss the overall topic structure with other editors. Determine whether the topic should be treated as several shorter articles and, if so, how best to organize them. Sometimes an article simply needs to be big to give the subject adequate coverage; certainly, size is no reason to remove valid and useful information.". This article has already twice forked material away (to ship of the line and ironclad warship and there is no consensus for further splits. Regards, The Land 09:03, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Remember that a large part of this comes from the extensive notes and references section (almost 10 kilobytes)--MoRsE 09:54, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- B Movie recently underwent Featured article review due to its size, and Sandy said 60KB of readable prose (not including references). M3tal H3ad 11:22, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Indeed. However, B Movie remains an FA at 67k of readable prose.Indo-Greek Kingdom is 91k of readable prose and is featured. There is no guideline that says "an article cannot be featured if it is above X length" and there is no problem giving large subjects large articles. The Land 12:02, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Reading the B Movie FA Review is actually quite instructive. It's clear that SandyGeorgia has a fairly narrow interpretation of the article length guideline, but it's equally clear that the consensus is not to prevent something being an FA on this basis alone. The Land 07:05, 27 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- B Movie recently underwent Featured article review due to its size, and Sandy said 60KB of readable prose (not including references). M3tal H3ad 11:22, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Remember that a large part of this comes from the extensive notes and references section (almost 10 kilobytes)--MoRsE 09:54, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Oppose. I think, in the light of Sandy's comment, that the size should be reduced - probably by at least 10 Kb. This should be done by weeding out redundant wording and by rationalising larger portions of text. In particular, there are problems in the prose. Here are random examples from the lead that indicate the need for a thorough run-through by a copy-editor who's relatively unfamiliar with the text. Don't just fix these examples.
- "better-armed and better-armored than cruisers and destroyers" - make it "better armed and armored than cruisers and destroyers".
- "Battleships have evolved a great deal over time" - spot the two redundant words.
- "to describe a developed type of ironclad warship" - Unsure why "developed" is included.
- "and by the 1890s design had become relatively standard on what is now known as the pre–Dreadnought battleship." Clumsy clause; I'd be expecting something like "and by the 1890s, the design of ... had been standardised ...".
- "In 1905 HMS Dreadnought heralded a revolution in battleship design, and for many years modern battleships were referred to as dreadnoughts." You need to add "since that time,".
- "In 1905 HMS Dreadnought heralded a revolution in battleship design, and for many years modern battleships were referred to as dreadnoughts." But they no longer do? This brings up a larger problem in the lead: it appears to be a potted history, whereas many readers will expect more prominent reference to battleships as they are now.
- "The global arms race in battleship construction in the early 1900s was a significant factor in the origins of the First World War, which saw a clash of huge battlefleets at the Battle of Jutland." Only in the origins of the war, and not its conduct/outcome?
- The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.