Talk:NZR RM class (Silver Fern)

Individual car length?

It's currently listed, somewhat ludicrously, as "(?)". Might I be so bold as to suggest it's probably about 23.7m? Surely there must be some kind of source we can find for this? 46.208.118.226 (talk) 00:05, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

Unfortunately NZ Railfan's rolling stock register of 2011 doesn't list the individual carriage length, only the length of the entire unit. Surely something to add in the next version. pcuser42 (talk) 05:41, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

Hatnote disambiguation

@Johnragla @Shhhnotsoloud: Regarding the removal and revert of the hatnote, while yes I do agree that it says it’s up to the editors concerned whether a hatnote is necessary. However, the actual Silver Fern tree fern, Silver Fern netball team, and the Silver Fern flag have absolutely nothing to do with a Silver Fern train/railcar and an article name which is completely and utterly unambiguous - it simply just is not possible to be confused when typing “NZR” to think that that could refer to anything but the New Zealand Railways in this context.

I would propose removing the hatnote once again.

John: per your understanding that it can go either way, the sentence after that at WP:NAMB states that an example of this is the 20 or so articles named ‘Treaty of Paris’, even though they are all individually disambiguated by the year that they were signed. There aren’t any NZR Silver Fern railcars that would be considered different to the others, that they would deserve a separate Wikipedia article.

I’ve removed hatnotes for this reason for articles such as for Broadmeadows railway station, Melbourne and Broadmeadows railway station, Adelaide, I cannot see how one could be confused by that. If you want to hatnote everything, then surely you must hatnote the article Picton, New Zealand, since someone might just confuse it with the one in New South Wales? Probably not. Fork99 (talk) 19:37, 25 June 2023 (UTC)

The hatnote has been there for over a decade and thus seen by many editors, who've seen no reason to change it. Now editors who've made no substantive changes to this article propose changing it. The guidance does say it's not prescriptive and Silver Fern does have many better known uses, unlike Picton. Johnragla (talk) 20:03, 25 June 2023 (UTC)

@Johnragla: With all due respect, the page statistics say otherwise. Most of the top editors are gone. I’ve noticed that the New Zealand rail Wikipedia editor community is extremely inactive, there used to be a lot of outdated wikilinks to defunct brand names like ONTRACK and Tranz Metro at railway station articles as recently as 2020, even though the link should be the current name. An example (not exact, but you get the gist) would have been “ONTRACK owns X railway station and Tranz Metro runs services on the X line at this station.”

I can’t speak for everybody who edits Wikipedia, but when I watch an article such as this one, I don’t usually read the entire article when there is a change that I want to review, I only read what has been changed. While yes the hatnote has been there for years, that does not mean that everyone who has edited this article implicitly agrees it should be there.

Generally, the human attention span is very low, do you really think that everyone who’s read this article has had even a minute to spare to think about the hatnote? Fork99 (talk) 20:17, 25 June 2023 (UTC)

Also, your mention of “editors who’ve made no substantive changes”, sorry, but I’m interested in improving Wikipedia as a whole, I don’t think anyone here owns articles (WP:OWNERSHIP). Also, see WP:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle. Fork99 (talk) 20:25, 25 June 2023 (UTC)

Potential compromise: what if the hatnote link to the Silver fern (disambiguation) page was at the bottom of the page, as a sorta ‘see also’ kinda thing? Fork99 (talk) 21:41, 25 June 2023 (UTC)

I reverted again before seeing this talk discussion - my bad. Agree though that the hatnote is not necessary as the title is clearly unambigious. pcuser42 (talk) 00:46, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure the hatnote is a legacy from when the title was simply Silver Fern (railcar) --LJ Holden 09:43, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

In which case it's definitely not needed now. pcuser42 (talk) 00:38, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

For sure, no need to have it there. --LJ Holden 08:23, 28 June 2023 (UTC)