Talk:List of naval battles

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This page is very long. I was going to remove some of the smaller fleet battles and reclassify them as single ship if they have fewer than 6 participating ships. Several famous "single ship" battles had up to 2 or 3 ships per side. Is this acceptable to everyone? It will make the page shorter, by spreading the entries out to the other single ship page also. currently that page is quite short. SpookyMulder 10:28, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

My suggestion is that as articles on significant battle are written that they be linked to from here. I think another long barren list like list of battles is undesirable. Might also do some Further Reading on naval fiction such as O'Brians books and the Horatio Hornblower series. User:Fredbauder

The list of battles, if not properly sorted, will eventually become increadibly lengthy and unreadable owing to countless battles have ever taken place in history. Instead of sorting the hugh list of battles, battles that can be grouped under a common nature (as Battle of Trafalgar under Napoleonic Wars) could be sorted on the subpages. Say Battle of Trafalgar, all pages of list of battles and Naval battles link to Napoleonic Wars which then links to the battle. Napoleonic Wars provides sorted lists by alphabetical and chronological order and nature of all battles belonging to it. user:Ktsquare

As an experiment, I've copied over entries from the main list more-or-less verbatim, but left most of the existing ones as-is. They can be made consistent once we decide which format we like better (the main list format is objectively more informative but verges on the verbose). Stan 15:26, 1 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I'm changing the format to be in sections so as to facilitate easier editing. DJ Clayworth 05:21, 5 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Battles versus other actions

Someone added this:

Battles are in bold; single-ship and other actions in plain

to the top of the list. I have three comments. (1) If this is going to be done at all then it should be done consistently. (2) The change broke a number of links; please restore them. (3) The distinction between battles and "other actions" seems bogus to me: it just creates needless trouble as we start arguing about which is which.

I will change the article back to the old scheme but I am willing to be persuaded that this is a good idea. Gdr 15:56, 2004 Aug 5 (UTC)

I don't care for it either - the annotations on list entries should be sufficient to make big vs small obvious. There aren't very many single-ship actions famous enough for anybody to bother listing them here, so the net effect would be bold almost everything, so it loses any value it might have had. Stan 17:52, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

It's true that this list might get extremely long. How about using a table, with 3 columns... 1-land battles, 2-naval fleet battles, 3-naval battles with fewer than 3 ships on either side.

Battles would be listed chronologically under the war in which they happened. Wars listed chronologically also, with a line betwene each for clarity. Each battle would have its own page, which would link to ships/forces involved, and back to the main battle list. I think a table would greatly reduce clutter. currently only part of the page is used.

so you'd have

first section of table:

War

(land battle 1) I (naval battle 1) I (single ship battle 1)

(land battle 2) I etc.

etc.

second section of table for next war:

I also might mention that the independence wars of Brazil, Argentina etc. are usually ignored in books on naval battles. There were several fleet battles involving frigates and battleships from 1821-29 in the River Plate area.

Someone asked about edit summaries. I don't usually write them because the edits are:

just typos and grammatical errors

occassional additional information

frequent, as if i take a long time on an edit, I sometimes find someone else has edited it in the meantime and I have to start over. It's a pain to write notes for each edit. Mostly they're minor. I also, generally, find linking every second word to be annoying. If you're not likely to want to link to say "Britain" in a particular page, why link it? I hope it cdoesn't get to the stage where every word is a link!

There are many single ship actions. You could also include lists of ships involved in things which weren't technically battles, such as "danish ships captured at Copenhagen, 1807" or "British ships destroyed in Finland to stop the Germans capturing them, 1918" or "Scapa Flow wrecks" or "French ships scuttle at Toulon 1942" or "ansons around the world fleet 1762" etc. they'd be plain text. Fleet battles would be the only bold ones. (Unsigned comment by User:SpookyMulder)

Your fellow editors appreciate the edit summaries, because then we know whether a change is minor (grammar fix) or major (a sweeping change to the format, as you've done in several cases). People who make major changes without edit summaries, notes on talk pages, or anything, are generally not considered good team players, the consequence being that other editors have less compunction about undoing their changes. So think of edit summaries and talk pages as an insurance policy to ensure that your time isn't going to waste.
As for this list, I think it should limit itself to named battles, and a very small number of well-known single-ship actions, or maybe not have them at all. Multi-column is highly undesirable, because list entries should be annotated, so a non-expert knows that "battle of the Kentish Knock" involved English and Dutch without having to click on the link, and on a machine with a smaller screen, tables get scrambled or require horizontal viewing. A list like this can't be all things to all people; its primary value is as a quick way for readers to find articles when they don't know the name accurately enough for a keyword search to work ("I know it's sometime around the turn of the century, and near Korea, and Russians or Soviets were involved I think"). A list recording every time a ship was in combat would be a different (and very long) list; we can have multiple lists here, although I wouldn't work on such a list because it would be impossible to complete, and inherently-incomplete lists are not that useful (did you not find something because it doesn't exist, or because the list is unfinished?).
In any case, let's come to an agreement on scope and content, so that we're standing on each other's shoulders instead of each other's toes. Stan 16:19, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

There are many issues raised here;

  1. Include events other than battles? No. Wikipedia would benefit from a detailed history of naval warfare, but not in this list.
  2. Include land battles? No. There are the lists of battles for that.
  3. Subdivide by wars? Maybe for the most recent few centuries. But in some cases it's not so clear. (Eighty Years War or Thirty Years War? Fourth Anglo-Dutch War or American Revolutionary War? etc)
  4. Format as table? No. The value of this list, compared to Category:Naval battles is in the short annotations. The table proposal would also waste a lot more space than the list.
  5. South American Wars of Independence? Yes, please write articles on those wars, then list them here.
  6. Edit summaries? Please add them. They are very useful when reviewing the history of an article to see who has done what. If you're just correcting typos etc, write "typo" or "copyedit" in the edit summary.
  7. Too many links? Links are what makes Wikipedia better than a paper encyclopedia.

I'm still minded to remove the bold formatting for the reasons I gave above. Gdr 23:12, 2004 Aug 6 (UTC)

Yes, OK, one list for fleet battles and a second page listing single-ship actions and other naval events. I will have to look for my stuff on the 1820s wars i mentioned before I can really attempt anything on those.

I know there were a lot of wars. Grouping them sounds like a good plan, specially since a lot of land wars didn't have much/any naval component anyway. The Anglo-dutch wars could be grouped, with perhaps subheadings just in italics for the individual wars, such as

[edit] Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652-73)

First - 1652-54:
(Date) Kentish Knock (Details)
(Date) ... (Details)
Second - 1665-67:
etc.

Is there any way to remove the line after "Anglo-Dutch Wars" above?

I'll try to remember to include edit comments! :)

SpookyMulder 07:56, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

It's better if the battle names themselves are in bold. Put all single-ship actions on a separate page, linked to at the top of this page. The bold helps distinguish the name of the battle from other linked words "Nelson" etc. in the descritpion. - is better than : after names, too. It's not a list of items, it's a description of the battle, so requires a hyphen :) SpookyMulder 11:26, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

While you might personally prefer the bolding, others don't, and it's nonstandard; uniformity across the encyclopedia is important. It's quick and easy to remove (with editor macros) what takes you a bunch of time to add, and every editor will do just that, so you might as well go along. :-) Stan 22:41, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

How about we divide this list up more into wars? for instance "Anglo-Dutch Wars" could all go together, "cretan wars" "swedish danish wars" etc. several wars overlapped, so it's probably better to not intermingle all the battles. we could then ignore "century" devisions altogether (this would save much space) and just have war headings, or just a space after each war to divide it from "non war" battles. ? SpookyMulder 07:32, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

as I understand, calibre refers to the length of the gun barrel in terms of bore widths. 12-inch 30 calibre would mean the gun is 12 x 30 inches long. Is that right?

[edit] NAVAL BATTLE OF GENOA (1747).

On June 21, 1747 , in front of Genoa, 4 Genoese galleys (under Francesco Doria) attacked 6 British vessels.

[edit] THE NAVAL BATTLE IN THE CHANNEL OF SICILY (1800).

In September 1800 the Neapolitan vessel "Archimede" (Cap. Bartolomeo Forteguerri) rejected the attack of 2 Algerian frigates supported by 5 small ships.

[edit] Other forgotten naval battles.

1435: battle near Ponza (the Genoese defeated the Aragonese). 1684: battle in front of Genoa; the Genoese admiral Ippolito Centurione defended the town by 5 galleys against the French Navy (admiral Duquesne)(14 vessels, 3 frigates, 20 galleys). 1912: battle of Kunfuda Bay (Red Sea); 1 Italian cruiser ("Piemonte"), with 2 destroyers, sunk 7 Turkish gunboats.

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