Category talk:Ships

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This should be the category of individual ships, with a separate "ship types" category for classes, thus "Vehicles" is perhaps not quite right as a supercategory, since it's more about types of vehicles. Stan 05:22, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Breaking into microscopic subcategories has rendered this category useless - how am I supposed to use this to find something if I don't know it's a "barque" or a "clipper"? Plus having "categories" with 1-2 members is really lame. Stan 21:08, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The small categories are due to the fact that there are lots of ships that haven't been added yet. That will change. As for the subcategories, if you know of a better way to do it, please do share. Or put all the ships in the main category, realizing that at some point it will have tens of thousands of articles. - Jonel 22:38, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It's better to create subcategories as needed, rather than preemptively, in the possibly-mistaken expectation that a category will become large. It's highly unlikely that WP will ever have more than a few clipper ship articles for instance (feel free to prove me wrong, but they're appearing at the rate of about one per year); for most clippers that ever existed, there is little more data than dimensions and launch date - not promising material for articles in the first place. It's also a good idea to discuss first - we would have worked out estimates of likely near-term category size, which would maximize usefulness. The "use" and "type" subcat are also not well-defined; I certainly have no idea how to use them. Stan 00:48, 3 Jul 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Boat category?

Can I humbly suggest that boats and submarines becomes subcategories of ships? To date there are 0 articles in boats, and as ship makes clear the distinction is very blurred, and varies from country to country. In many cases the same "vehicle" can be called a ship or a boat depending on the context, an example being cross-English Channel ferries which are very large boats. Again, to many people a ship does not have to be sea-going: there are vessels on inland waters large enough to be generally called a ship. Also, submarines are always boats, but many were effectively large surface vessels with the capability of submerging. At the moment vessels are accumulating in the ships category, which is convenient for browsing the list, but technically some could be argued. At the very least a linkage to see them all together would be desirable - perhaps re-titling the category (ships and boats?) with ships as a subcategory would be more logical.- dave souza 12:21, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

We already have Category:Submarines (under "ships by type"). It's hard to imagine there are ever going to be very many articles on individual non-ship boats, since by nature they are usually insignificant. (My working definition - if you can't haul it out of the water onto a trailer or a deck, it's not really a boat.) You could create Category:Boats under Category:Vehicles, and/or introduce a Category:Water vessels under vehicles, that being a standard term to encompass large and small equally. "Ships and boats" seems a little tortured for a category that will have 10,000 ship articles (counting subcats) before it has 10 boat articles. Stan 17:33, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

This came up when I was getting into the development of steamers - someone kindly added a ships category to the Charlotte Dundas and the SS Sir Walter Scott. The former is historically important, but at 56 ft long and confined to a canal thinks it's a boat, while the latter Loch Steamer is surely a ship, but dwarfed by Mississippi riverboats. They both fit nicely in the ships category list. You may note that the history appears under Steamboat: Steamship redirects to the same page. I like your definition, but the steamboat page used to give the impression that a ship had to be ocean-going. I don't really understand the submarine category, but it looked completely separate from the ships category. Bit confusing, eh? Category:Water vessels under vehicles sound an excellent idea, I'm new to this and too timid to change it myself, but if someone dd that would be nice- dave souza 19:31, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Don't get me started on steamboat vs steamship. :-) "Ocean-going" is not a good criterion, because a 300-meter Great Lakes freighter is not a boat in anyone's lexicon! Go ahead and create Category:Water vessels, once it exists and is connected up no one will be bold enough to delete it again... :-) Stan 00:26, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

OK, I've had a go and at least it seems to have found an article on ferries that didn't fit into boats or ships. Right enough subs and tugs were under list of ships - so they're now also under boats for folks who think that way, as well as water vessels. Can a category be used to show all the articles in all the sub-categories? If not, guess it's up to those categorising a page to add as many categories as it might fit into. Agreed about the ocean-going: the PS Waverley had been allocated the title Waverley (boat) which really annoyed me so, after looking for all sorts of reasons she's a ship, redirected the page, and so on... - dave souza 08:23, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Since you've confirmed my opinion that ships don't have to be seagoing, I've amended the explanation line to suit. D'you think I came down the Clyde in a banana boat? (inscrutable local saying, probably translates as "d'you think I'm daft?") - dave souza 17:42, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

That's good - far more than most categories get. I don't think there's a way to list all the articles under a category and all its subcats recursively, but it's certainly on the wishlist. What I think we should do is act as if it were going to be available, and not list parent categories in addition to the category; that confuses things a bit, will be unclear to random copyeditors if the redundancy is intentional or not. Also, to be ontologically sanitary :-), articles on types of vessels should be in Category:Ship types or Category:Boat types. The exception is that the type of a category of individuals of the type is added to the category of the individuals, in addition to any other appropriate categories. (IMHO, it should instead be in the text describing the category, but I seem to be running against the tide on that.) Stan 20:11, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the encouragement - as an irritable amateur I'm blundering about a bit, will leave things a week and then tidy up (dial-up pay as you go connection). Thinking as someone who isn't familiar with the categories it's good to see all the article links, then use subcategories to filter down. Having to click through sub-sub-categories to see if there are any articles is a bit of a pest, so that's on my wishlist. It is a bit confusing when some articles are in the overall category and others are tucked away under sub-categories, so I take the point that they should all get tucked away, though this makes browsing more tricky. Asides: The point about subs being boats is that some people will look for them under that heading. One oddity you may have noted is that the corvette category was under boats (now ships as well) - this may be a Royal Navy thing from WW II of calling them boats. - dave souza 22:20, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Article titles

Just wondering - are many of these articles named correctly? I was looking at the article for Japanese warship Kasuga (1862), and it occurs to me that the title should perhaps be Kasuga (Japanese warship). I've noticed this for numerous naval ships, and suppose that someone more closely involved with articles in this area might want to consider this, and make any necessary changes. MisfitToys 20:12, May 18, 2005 (UTC)

Check out this website: it defines a boat versus a ship: http://www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/conWebDoc.17930 The information there is concurrent with what I found in the US Navy's Bluejacket's Manual.