Talk:List of sailors

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This list mania has the potential to get out of hand. Next perhaps we will be having a List of molecules? Maybe the present List of sailors would seem less silly if the text said something about notable sailors; the same goes for the intro text of many other lists. The casual reader, always invited to jump in and write & edit, might be temped to add his personal favorite to, for example, the List of Catholic priests. I am. ;Bear 00:06, 2004 Oct 29 (UTC)

"Notable" is generally assumed for this sort of thing, because there are few or no articles about non-notable people. Feel free to expand on the intro text of course. Stan 02:36, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Isn't this totally pointless?

Why does this page exist? It's practically guaranteed to be out of date; as opposed to Category:Sailors, which is guaranteed to contain all appropriate articles. — Johantheghost 14:07, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

The category isn't annotated. Stan 14:29, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Sure, and I accept the value of an annotated list — like a Who's Who of sailing. But as far as I can see, right now the list is a very small and totally random subset of the sailors on WP! For example, no Vito Dumas? No Krystyna Chojnowska-Liskiewicz? No Kay Cottee? Alfred "Centennial" Johnson? Bernard Moitessier????!!!! And that's just from a quick scan — and I only know single-handers!

OK, if someone wants to put in the effort to scour through Category:Sailors, pick out the ones they think are genuinely "prominent" (which should be all of them), and annotate the list, and then put in the effort to keep it up to date, fine. Otherwise, the list to me looks like an exercise in POV. Saying, for example, that Russ Chauvenet is a more prominent sailor than Bernard Moitessier is — from my POV — utterly assinine. — Johantheghost 15:47, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Careful about who you're making POV accusations against. Not only does the list predate the category system, but the heading even describes its planned role; enumerating notable seagoing personnel not in the lists of officer types. If people aren't being listed, it's the fault of article creators, I no longer have the time or interest to scan the deluge of new articles. Stan 18:53, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Sorry if I was misunderstood — I was not intending to make POV accusations against anyone, but against the concept of a list based on people sticking in entries as they fancy or have time. If I come across a sailor and think "he's cool, I'll add him to the list", that's not intentionally POV, but the resulting list is hardly going to be a glowing example of balance.

And I understand where the list came from; but that doesn't mean it can't be replaced with something better — something that doesn't rely on someone having "the time or interest to scan the deluge of new articles". And how are article creators supposed to even know that the list exists? I didn't until recently. — Johan the Ghost _seance 19:10, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I've put up a proposal which I think would make categories more useful as a list alternative; see: Annotated categories instead of lists. — Johantheghost 23:12, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

See also bug #1775, which duplicates my proposal; also bug #2725, which would help a lot. — Johan the Ghost _seance 12:43, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

And as you can see from the ensuing discussion, lists vs categories remains an unsettled issue. Stan 18:53, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, indeed — however, I think those enhancements would make a big difference to that. Anyhow, the fact remains that is it stands, this article is seriously wonting, and I'm not volunteering to fix it. I actually started on it twice, and both times just got hugely disspirited by the effort of manually trawling through all the sub-cats. — Johan the Ghost _seance 19:00, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Archived feature proposal discussion