Talk:Pocket knife

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[edit] Removed images

When I first saw this page, it had only a Swiss army knife, which I consider very boring. Everyone has already seen one. There is almost no art in it. It was not in a context of other army knives but only as it usually appears to consumers. The purpose of Wikipedia is to find out what the advertising industry does not tell one. I tried to show the diversity and some history. The detailed pictures show the materials and mechanisms. In particular, the recent edit deleted my French knife that refutes the statement that older knives were not lock blades.

Until my recent edits, lock-blades were discussed but with no pictures. Has anyone else offered to provide the pictures needed to make this an interesting article? If so, let us delete mine as others appear, not solely because they are mine. If it was wasting space, let us delete it entirely, not make it dull again. David R. Ingham 06:09, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

The article had been swamped by no fewer than ten new images, too many even to fit physically in the space. I've reduced them to two (plus the existing one), which seems a more reasonable number to me. I'm sure it's true your motive in putting them up was not vanity, but it would certainly look like that to anyone visiting the page.

You don't say why you find the article boring, but the difference between boring and interesting is not a gallery of images, mostly unenlightening and frankly of no great technical or aesthetic quality. The pictures should be there to illustrate and clarify points made in the text, not just as eye-candy, but the deleted ones did neither of those things. I've left in the two that seemed to me the most informative and visually presentable, so that locknives and slipjoint knives now do have an illustration, one of which offers some scale and a variety of blade shapes. I really can't see what more is offered, at least to this particular article, by any of the other images. Incidentally one of them is almost identical to an image already available on Wikimedia (See Opinel knife).

I don't see how a picture of a modern Opinel knife refutes the point about early knives not being locknives, especially since in the case of Opinel knives, which go back about a century, the locking mechanism dates only from the 1950s.

"Pocket knife" is really quite a general subject. Perhaps there could be scope for some of these images and very specific technical points in articles on more specialist subjects such as "US Army knife". Flapdragon 12:19, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

I notice that Flapdragon is not a major contributor to this page. David R. Ingham 06:31, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

You don't say what your point is here. I'm sure you don't mean to imply that having made more edits gives you extra rights over the article, which is of course not the case. Flapdragon 12:19, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes I think having spent time gives my opinion more weight, until there is a consensus, on his page, that I failed to contribute significantly. Of course it is not the edit count that shows the time. Of the pictures I posted, only the Böker is ostentatious, and I don't think it is unusual to show high quality products in Wikipedia. (The bone handled pen knife may be of comparable quality, but its simplicity made it cheaper.) In fact I think it is unusual and valuable to show less expensive, and worn, items. We are a counterculture. We must show whatever popular advertising misses, too expensive or too cheap. If you knew there was a picture of an Opinel, why didn't you add a link to it before?

I first noticed Wikipedia by noticing that my searches for high resolution images often found it, perhaps because it has grown so much since many people have had broadband access. I did add to the descriptions of traditional blade shapes. Materials, of corse, are explained elsewhere. The fact that bone has so may different appearances was surprising to me at one time. I did not include any of my Pakistani knives, not because they are cheap (I tried to take a picture that showed a defect clearly.), but because, even though they have much more artistic value than do red plastic handles, I was not able to say how their styles fit into the general picture. David R. Ingham 04:53, 27 April 2006 (UTC)