Talk:Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships

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It's not "POV" to state a bare fact - a number of DANFS entries do make anti-communist remarks, I've had to prune out dozens of those as part of importing into WP. I suppose I should quote an example. Stan 14:13, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Ok I changed it back until there is a better source/qualification for the info. I don't really doubt you here but I though it was important to back up claims of a source being slanted either communist/anti-communist. Nautical 20:11, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Stan's right. I've seen a lot of entries that say things like "as of 1969, USS Whatever is defending freedom from Communist agression in Southeast Asia". A quick look through the Haze Gray copy of DANFS turned up

• From there Higbee continued to cruise in the Pacific and along the China coast to strengthen American force in Asia and show her determination to protect democracy against the inroads of Communism.
• she operated with the mighty 6th Fleet, America's deterrent to Communist aggression in the Middle East.
• Two days later she sailed to Hong Kong and ended the year in Japan preparing for further action in the cause of peace and freedom.
• Into mid-1967 she continued to maintain the peak readiness of her crew and equipment for whatever task the defense of the Nation and the free world might demand.
• Operating with this mighty peacekeeping force, King helped to check Communist aggression in Southeast Asia.

It seems to be a product of that era. Plus, when writing articles about ships whose full story couldn't be told at the time, people felt the need to end with something less blah than "is still on active service."

—wwoods 22:14, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

It's not necessarily the role of DANFS to be a neutral source - after all, it's a product of an organization with a decidedly non-neutral mission - not unlike how present-day ships' webpages have to say "fighting the War on Terror" with a straight face even though many of the sailors and officers onboard think it's all partisan BS. Some day I'd like to dig more into the details of how DANFS was written; for instance, some writeups are sketchy, while others are quite detailed - was that differing amounts of source material, or differing amounts of initiative on the part of the writers? How much latitude were they given, and what kind of review process was there? Stan 22:43, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I didn't think stan was wrong, I thought it was important to back statements of a source being pro or anti communist. However, in those examples they are stating the ships function- such as to defend against communist aggression- but thats not really pov just information about a ships role. The same could be said of soviet ships, that they were there to "defend democratic aggression"- its just the ships role.Nautical 22:55, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Stan is right, and the comment needs to remain in the article. ➥the Epopt 23:24, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Its not a matter of stan being right or wrong, that sort of a statement needs to be backed up. It doesn't matter if its a consensus because even if it may be a fact, its also a pov which needs qualification. Nautical 23:41, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I added section about frequency of mention as well to further bolster the info, I think its pretty well qualified comment now. Which is good, because people will take it more seriously with the actual quotes there. Being the wikipedia people might be more doubtfull of un-referenced statements, but this way they can see for themselves. Nautical 00:43, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'm not so keen on your attempt at a numerical justification, because that sort of thing is highly variable, depending on when one tries the experiment, the exact wording searched for, etc. If you add all that data, you end up with original research on DANFS, which is another one of the WP no-nos. On POV, I think you may be confused on what Wikipedia:Neutral point of view says; it just says that we have to attribute POVs to their sources, and not misrepresent WP as having its own POV. In this article, we're describing a publication that is not itself neutral, and deliberately so. Just as a WP article on the US Democratic Party should say "the Dems believe that the Republican platform is bad for the country", not just "the Dems have an opinion about the Republicans". It's very important for readers to understand that DANFS is authoritative but not neutral; a single quote from DANFS that takes a pro-US stance would be sufficient as "proof". I don't think it's that useful to try to quantify how much there is; my purpose with the original comment was to clue readers into the sort of thing to watch out for, without trying to make a claim about the exact quantity, and in the absence of a standard way to measure bias in a text, numbers don't tell us if there is "a lot" or "not so much". Sometimes we have to choose our words carefully, so as to state only known facts without adding or implying anything we don't actually know. Stan 05:39, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

When I first read Gdr's heads-up on this point, in his advice on doing DANFS conversions, I was surprised, but there are a number of articles which display an overt pro-American, anti-Communist attitude. <voice=Seinfeld>Not that there's anything wrong with that.</voice>

I don't think this article has to dwell on the subject. Just mention it, and maybe give a couple of examples. Of the ones I listed, the last is probably the best, since it's got both the "mighty peacekeeping force" and the "Communist aggression". The search statistics seem too much inside baseball--useful for arguing the point here on the Talk page, but not really needed in the article itself.

—wwoods 09:42, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Ok these are some great point once again. One thing I will say is when that we really talking about two points of view- the first of course being the pov of source which is of of course ok to explain, the seconds was the interpretation of what that pov was. I agree though that it probably only needs a breif mention, ill trim out all but the last example and yes haha rather baseball like statistics. Nautical 21:57, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)