Talk:Project 10510 icebreaker

Article name

I oppose renaming the article from Leader (icebreaker) to Project 10510 icebreaker on the basis that even the Russian maritime media (using PortNews as an example; it's fairly challenging to run a wider search for such a generic name) refers to the ship more often as "Leader" or "Лидер" than "Project 10510" or "проекта 10510" (and even then typically includes the name "Leader" as well). It should be noted that the same does not apply to Project 22220 icebreakers which are uniformly referred to using the project number (and only rarely as "LK-60Ya" and never as "Arktika class"; I presume the latter is to distinguish it from Project 10520). The same also applies to Project 21900 icebreakers and their derivatives.

For those not familiar with the various designations, "LK-110Ya" is an early 1990s "type size series" with no distinguishable design and practically shorthand for "nuclear-powered icebreaker with propulsion power of 110 megawatts". The Russian project numbers, on the other hand, are assigned to individual vessel designs so in theory there could be multiple competing LK-110Ya designs and only one of them would finally get built. Lately, the Russians have not named their ship classes after the lead ship.

As for "Leader" versus "Lider", the former comes from the original idea of a "leader-icebreaker" ("icebreaker that leads") whereas the latter is just a romanization of the Russian word; for example PortNews uses "Leader" in its English-language articles. While ship names are obviously not translated, for the time being this ship (class) is simply called "Leader" and there has been no indication about the actual name of the ship.

As I do not want to start an edit war (and lack the necessary privileges to move articles over redirect), I'll open the discussion here and ask comments from WP:SHIPS.

Also, the technical side of the article is still in work.

Tupsumato (talk) 17:51, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Just pinging BlackFlanker. As the editor who made the move, it would be useful to understand their reasons before reaching any conclusions. From Hill To Shore (talk) 18:48, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Name of the article should reflect that this will be a series of nuclear icebreakers therefore I don't find it appropriate to name the article simply as Leader (icebreaker), which might looks like the article refers to a certain vessel. While the Russian media may get to use "Leader" or "Лидер" (in Russian) terms, which in fact is the Russian codename for Project 10510 or for the whole programme, the offcial Russian Government documents signed on 15 January 2020 by then Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, which approve the construction of the lead vessel, refer to the icebreaker as "(Russian: атомный ледокол проекта 10510 "Лидер", lit. 'nuclear icebreaker of project 10510 "Lider"')".

For the "Lider" vs "Leader" thing, Russian ship codenames are not usually translated but just romanized when used in english Wikipedia articles. I don't see reason why this should be an exception. For example, the Russian news agency TASS in its english version, when referring to the Project 10510 also uses the "Lider" term as can be seen here. BlackFlanker (talk) 12:05, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

Rosatom seems to be using both ("Leader", "Lider"). The origin is of course "ледокола-лидера" which used to refer to a sub-type of icebreakers and was previously also used for an early version of LK-25; see here. Tupsumato (talk) 13:23, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

If you would still insist to use the term "Leader", due to the usage of that word in english part of the internet, I think a good compromise could be to start the article as follows "Project 10510 Lider also referred to it as Leader". What do you think? BlackFlanker (talk) 14:13, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

I made minor changes to the article to better emphasize this and removed some minor redundant elements. Tupsumato (talk) 14:55, 19 January 2020 (UTC)