Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Trucks

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Welcome to the talk page of the temporary project page of WikiProject Trucks.

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[edit] Light trucks

Should the project include light trucks? To me, it looks like pickup trucks are already covered by Project Automobiles, but on the other hand there are a lot of other types of light trucks that won't fit under automobiles. Rotten Stone 15:47, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

In Denmark (and most of Europe, I assume) anything legally exceeding 3500 kg total weight is a truck, but maybe it should be a job only getting attention when those over ?? 6 tonnes ?? 7,5 tonnes ?? are looking like a real systematic setup? Some degree of crosslinking might be OK to begin with, like "for XX models, please see XXautomobile article" or something? G®iffen 17:08, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
I don't think we need to be too rigid. The project is going to be a support resource to editors. Sometimes people ask questions at Project Autos and are told "sorry we can't help". This doesn't do any harm. If similar questions are asked here, we'll either be able to help, or not. I suspect the 3500kg point will in practice be pretty useful, but there are some anomalies out there (very light weight box vans or very heavy 4x4 off-roaders) and we'll have some vehicles whose ranges overlap. Perhaps "is it based on a car?" is a more useful test. – Kieran T (talk) 17:31, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Note: The Iveco Turbo Daily comes in a 3,5 and a 4,6? Tonne version. The difference, I was told, is one extra layer of suspension springs.
Yeah, a lot of trucks have a basic chassis which supports lots of weights. 2.5 to 4.5 tonnes is not unusual, and I'd certainly want to support the lighter ones if they were true commercial vehicles. The debatable one for me are those which are just people-carriers or Land Rovers with the back windows blanked out. (Though I'd still tend to want to support those, on balance.) – Kieran T (talk) 18:37, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
OK. Generally speaking light trucks are in, but we focus on commercial vehicles? Rotten Stone 21:00, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
I'd say so; I think it's how most people understand the term. – Kieran T (talk) 21:39, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Superheavy trucks

How much attention should supersized, superheavy off-the-roads trucks have to begin with? G®iffen 17:08, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Layout and structure

I think it would be a good thing if we could write down some guidelines about what a decent article about a truck model or a truck manufacturer should look like. I'm just talking about some simple suggestions about what kind of information an article should include and how that information should be presented. Rotten Stone 19:52, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Infobox

In my opinion template:Infobox Company should be used at company articles. Template:Infobox Automobile is not good enough for trucks, since fuel capacity, and measures vary from one vehicle to another. The box should also have a line for submodels, like Volvo FH has FH12 and FH16. G®iffen 14:16, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Sounds OK to me. Infobox Company is good. But as you say, Infobox Automobile have to be modified. I think we also should add things like; type of cab, drivetrain, axles, brakes and so on. Rotten Stone 21:12, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Should suspension be at its own line? Or does it go with axles? G®iffen 16:21, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
Does there have to be such things as drivetrain, suspension etc. on the in truck infobox? I'd say that they are in more appropriate place in the article covering that model as there is such vast amount of different chassis configurations for example that infobox would grow quite huge. It would also be very difficult to make it complete. In article Scania 4-series for example there would be at least 9 different cab options alone which sound way too much for an infobox. Tepoo 18:43, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
I agree with idea of giving some clue about different submodels like FH12 and FH16 on infoboxes, what about different revisions all sharing same name? I mean that as there in practice is three different series all carrying name Volvo FH should they be all be covered in same infobox or in three separate box in same article. Personally I'd prefer the latter. Tepoo 18:43, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Truck manufacturer

Here are my thoughts:

  • Short presentation
    (Name, Country, Owner, Size, Types of products, Fate)
  • History
    (Founded where and when by whom)
    (General development with merges and splits)
    (Milestone innovations and products)
  • Present models
    (List of models or families of models)
  • Historical models
    (List of models or families of models, decade by decade)
  • Subsidiaries
    (List of major subsidiaries including type of products)
  • Main production facilities
    (Location, Size, Type of products)

Comments? Rotten Stone 19:52, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Just to be sure: "present models" I assume to be models still on sale from the factory?
"Subsidiaries" might be "Subsidiaries and joint ventures"? Like the former MAN AG / Volkswagen joint venture in Europe and the existing Scania / Hino in Asia. I think it fits beter here than under "Production facilities" G®iffen 10:33, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
Agree! Rotten Stone 21:16, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Truck model

How about this?

  • Short presentation
    (Type, Segment, Year of introduction)
  • History
    (Development, Designed to meet what demand, Introduction)
  • Engine and powertrain
  • Usage
    (Who used it, How was it used)
  • Production
    (When, Where, How many)

Rotten Stone 19:52, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Comments:

Much of the presentation could/would probably be included in an infobox in the side. My thoughts are that an intro should not be much more than XX47 was built by XX-Thai from 1967-1971 to meet the demands for medium weight trucks in Thailand. I hope this measurement is similar to yours?
I'm not good at creating infoboxes, but would anyone like to give a suggestion?
As Rotten and I discussed at my talk page#Trucks, I like the setup of Morris Motor Company and Morris Minor and would like to set those as what I call "basic minimum" for the design of the articles for producers and models. I agree that some headlines must be changed and extra added, but personally I'd say "it's not finished before it meets at least this standard". So far I haven't searched the truck models to see if any are described in a similar way to serve as better examples. G®iffen 10:51, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Trailers and construction for different transport types

At different takls of trailers, semi's, dollys etc. there are ongoing discussions about where to write what and how to redirect and so on. Would this also be included in this project? I assume most trailers are pulled by trucks or buses anyway... Also, trailers are built mostly the same way as trucks, so for a project branch about "how to build a truck", trucks and trailers would probably be similar. G®iffen 10:58, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

As far as I can see, we should be able to squeeze trailers, semi-trailers and such into the project. Rotten Stone 21:26, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Article test / test article

I've created Scania 4-series to see how right or wrong I am compared to your ideas. Since there is not yet an infobox for models, I didn't put any in the article. It's still a stub due to my lack of knowledge, but I thought maybe we should set this up as the "example to follow"? Let me hera your opinions... --G®iffen 17:20, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I made few additions to that article and as comments were asked I'll put some points here which I think should be covered in lorry articles.
  • There should be year of introduction and for consistency also year when production stopped unless still in production.
  • I'd think predecessor and successor should be mentioned somewhere in article definition until we see what will be on infoboxes.
  • Some kind of "What's new" section could be nice although not under that name. In this particular article some valid points would be totally renewed exterior cab design and bringing high cab (Topline) into production when comparing to 3-series.
  • Some basic info about different choices available. In engines and cabs for example there could be mentions about engine development, like increasing displacement volume of V8-engine by two litres, and three different basic cab types (P, R and T cabs).
I think that it's also important to prevent article from becoming just an list where every different engine choice is only mentioned without any smooth connection to other text in article. Example of this kind of article could be Volvo where are long listings of achievements and models but there's very little text keeping it all together. Tepoo 19:33, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Steam vehicles?

Greetings from 'nearly-project: Steam technology' (well, it's just me, really, at the moment. Most self-respecting steam-buffs are far too busy with the real stuff to spend time editing here!)

I notice that the content of Category:Steam road vehicles has been added to your project. Whilst I welcome any assistance with these articles, I cannot see how the bulk of them relate to your project. I leave it to you to decide whether any should be removed again!

On a related matter, any information regarding the history of steam wagons (steam lorries) in the US, and elsewhere outside the UK, would be useful, as my references are essentially British in scope. Currently such information is gathering in a section under traction engine, although I am hoping to expand it into an article in its own right later this year.

Cheers! EdJogg (talk) 14:49, 4 January 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Truck as moving art

Hi to every one out here.Today I stopped when i looked this [1]on Community portal.I got an idea.In Pakistan and India ,I had seen the outer lay out of trucks which were aesthethically designed by some artists.Those trucks are considered as moving art there. I wanna write on that issue.But what the use of it on this project.cheers,-- Mike robert,

Before doing anything else, make sure there's not already an article on WP about such trucks. After that, try to find some sources that relate to the phenomenon - searching for something like "art trucks" or similar on Google or your favorite search engine is step one. Making sure those sources are of good quality is step two. Writing the article - even if it's just a rough draft or a stub (as we call it) - is step three. If you have photos, be sure to upload them to Wikimedia Commons for use in the article if they're good quality. Other than that, good luck and let us know if there's anything else we can help out with. Duncan1800 (talk) 12:37, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the response. Here is the article Trucks in Pakistan. It was a little effort rather a pinch of enjoyment , editing it. If I've done something really wrong , please do tell me. Any suggestions or comments will be welcomed.--Mike robert (talk) 17:40, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Australian equpment etc.

I feel that perhaps some page devoted to the nuances of trucking in australia should be created. I work in the Australian trucking industry currently, and the only place even close to here that I know of is South Africa. I work at a Western Star delaership and we sell a lot more models than those listed currently etc. Whitfan (talk) 00:09, 12 March 2008 (UTC)


[edit] WikiProject Trucks: Articles of unclear notability

Hello,

there are currently 55 articles in the scope of this project which are tagged with notability concerns. I have listed them here. (Note: this listing is based on a database snapshot of 12 March 2008 and may be slightly outdated.)

I would encourage members of this project to have a look at these articles, and see whether independent sources can be added, whether the articles can be merged into an article of larger scope, or possibly be deleted. Any help in cleaning up this backlog is appreciated. For further information, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Notability.

If you have any questions, please leave a message on the Notability project page or on my personal talk page. (I'm not watching this page however.) Thanks! --B. Wolterding (talk) 15:38, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Traction engine assessment

While I think that the link between Traction engines and the Trucks wikiproject is a little tenuous, I have no problem with this project tagging the article. However, someone has attempted to add some assessment comments to the Trucks project box on the article's talk page, and has got something wrong: the link displayed is inaccessible. The comment is as follows:

"This is a great article, but there are lots of spelling mistakes! This should go under trucks like proposed, because the traction engine probably were the first ancestors of big rigs!"

I was not aware of any spelling mistakes, although there may be some UK/US spelling differences (not the same thing!), and I do not understand what "This should go under trucks like proposed" is supposed to mean!

Could someone who understands such things please check the project banner and work out what's gone wrong please?

[Update] - I think it's a problem with the banner encoding. Other pages in Category:Trucks articles with comments have similar problems.

[Update 2] - Definitely an issue with the banner template - it cannot handle titles with spaces, and hence it is obviously not parsing article names into URLs correctly. This is evident from the fact that the comments section on Talk:Isuzu (mostly) works. With the assistance of that page and 'what links here' for Traction Engine, I have been able to apply a temporary link to the comments box until your banner issues are resolved. Incidentally, it might be good to include a 'hide' facility, because if users add lots of comments, the talk page will grow excessively long. Over to you! Cheers.

EdJogg (talk) 17:49, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Problem resolved, the link to the comments page works now... spaces and all. I will see what I can do about adding a "hide" function. I dunno what you did to the Traction Engine talk page but you can undo it now because it should work. Thanks! --ErgoSum88 (talk) 09:55, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
'what I did' was simply to modify Talk:Traction engine/Comments to include an 'edit' link at the top. I've left it there for the moment...
The banner is certainly improved, it now shows the links 'edit - history - watch - refresh' correctly. However, the links themselves are still not working. I am seeing an error icon in the bottom left of my browser screen (IE7). Closer inspection of the generated URL shown in the 'tooltip' suggests that the URL is omitting '/wiki/' from the middle, and hence cannot be parsed correctly. The same problem exists on the Isuzu page. (Can't remember whether it actually worked before you did this most recent change, sorry.) I had a quick look at the template, but I do not use the template parser functions often enough to see what's wrong. Good luck!
EdJogg (talk) 13:45, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
Whew, ok... NOW it works. I got a little ahead of myself last time I "fixed" it and didn't really check everything. This time, I checked the links and they should all work. Now if I can just figure out how to hide the comments. I'm actually learning this stuff as I go along, but it really isn't that complicated. Let me know if you find any more problems! --ErgoSum88 (talk) 23:11, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
Update: Now the comments will be hidden inside a collapsible table whenever comments are added to articles so they wont take up half the page. Everything should be in working order, and as always.... if I screwed something up, let me know. --ErgoSum88 (talk) 02:29, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
All working now, and the 'hide' functionality is v. useful. Only comment: 'refresh' is not recognised by WP in the URL (ie that link does not work properly, however, the others do now.) - EdJogg (talk) 15:39, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
Yeah "refresh" should have been "purge", it seems whoever created this template wasn't very thorough... or, things have changed since it was created. Either way, its fixed now, and thanks to these errors I know a lot more about parser functions. --ErgoSum88 (talk) 19:03, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New Featured Article

If I may take a moment to brag, Project Trucks has its second featured article, Hours of service. Also Trucking industry in the United States and Federal Bridge Gross Weight Formula recently passed GA review and I will be submitting them for FA review at a later time. So please, stop by and let me know what you think and point out any mistakes that might've slipped past all other editors. I am running out of subjects, so if anyone wants help with truck-related articles (preferably US-based but I'm willing to do what I can for world-wide topics) just let me know. Happy editing! --ErgoSum88 (talk) 03:13, 21 May 2008 (UTC)