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Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Battleship

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The following discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this page.

Battleship

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This article has recently become a Good Article after a two-month improvement drive. During this time, a lot of historical material was moved to ship of the line and ironclad warship - and far more material was added! The result is IMV a remarkably comprehensive treatment of the development and use of one of the most important weapons of all time. However, I might be a bit biased ;) - you can see the development of the article on the talk page and in particular the thorough review from the user who gave it GA status. Your feedback for A-class status is eagerly anticipated. The Land 19:46, 12 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • I think this article goes into to much detail on individual battleships when, IMHO, only critical battleships should be explicitly named. I also think it should be trimmed down by not going into so much detail for each nation on the sections such as The Dreadnought era and the World Wars; if anything, those should be separate articles (something like Battleship usage in World War II etc.). Oberiko 16:10, 13 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • In general, very well done! My main criticism of the current article is the fact that the section on "super-dreadnoughts" comes well after the first use of the term. Also, the article does a very nice job of detailing the origins of the term, but you loose track of the usage after that until you hit the pre-dreadnoughts. You should probably talk about any actual use of the term 'battleship' through the 19th century. After that, you need to be clearer about the terminology of the time. I don't think a reader new to the subject would come away understanding that right before WWI there 'battleships', 'dreadnoughts', and 'super-dreadnoughts', with the latter two eventually taking over the 'battleship' designation, and the old battleships being re-labeled 'pre-dreadnoughts'. --Rindis 18:21, 13 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Fixed the issue with the Super-Dreadnoughts and also added the terminology to the top of the article. Pinning down the use of the word 'battleship' in the 19th-C is really difficult and most sources I have hedge their bets about it. It doesn't help that lots and lots of people use the term battleship retrospectively - did anyone refer to Napoleon as a 'battleship' when she was launched? Probably not, yet Conways uses the term quite happily. Did anyone refer to Warrior in that way? No, definitely not, but the Royal Navy rated her as such after twenty years of service just before scrapping her... The Land 18:41, 14 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
What? You're not an all-knowledgeable expert who can answer these questions that I've never seen addressed (or considered) by the usual authors on the subject? Darn. ^_^ Trust me, I understand the problem - and was kind of hoping you might know more since you'd already gotten a bit deeper into it than I've ever managed. Though it shows that the study of naval history is still quite primitive in some ways, it's hard to understand what people were doing when you don't even study what they were calling it. --Rindis 18:52, 14 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Just looked at the article again. The new intro looks good. I was thinking in terms of rearranging the article near the super-dreadnought section, but your intro of dreadnoughts will certainly will do the job. I support A-Class, and think we're seeing some very good comments on what can make it an FA. --Rindis 19:11, 14 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Overall, a fantastic job. I'd like to echo the thoughts made by Oberiko and Rindis - perhaps too much attention to a narrative of individual countries and wars, not quite enough attention to the concept of the battleship and how it came to be, how it changed, etc. I'm no expert on the subject, but I was under the impression that certain battles of the Pacific War (and perhaps the Battle of the Atlantic as well) really decisively changed attitudes about the importance and relevance of the battleship relative to air power, and yet this isn't discussed at any length in the article. I think it's great that you discuss Japanese developments alongside Western ones - the significance of the Satsuma, the battle of Tsushima, various elements of pre-WWII naval attitudes in Japan and regarding Japan - and to some extent I would argue those should stay. But again, I think, overall, trimming the sections that focus on wars, battles, and countries and placing more attention on the concept of the battleship, its role within a navy, and its decline in importance relative to airpower and other factors, would be most useful. (Still, even as it is now, I support a promotion to A-class.) LordAmeth 09:53, 14 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I can see the point you're making. The Dreadnought arms race material can certainly be split off to a new article. I think part of the problem is that there are relatively few battleship engagements and many of them are of some significant to the broader narrative of the battleship. For instance Did the battleship have a big influence on the Spanish Civil War? No, not really; but it was the first time a battleship was knocked out of action by air attack. Then the fact that a large proportion of engagements are significant makes it tempting to include virtually all of them... The Land 11:23, 14 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, yes yes. I understand. Hmmm. What to do, then? LordAmeth 12:56, 14 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I've re-ordered the World War II section so it's more chronological; which also happily makes it more thematic, because between November 1940 and December 1941 four different navies had significant battleship losses, most of which were down to naval aviation. What d'you think? The Land 19:15, 14 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Combine your common citations please. For example, citations number 6 and 7 go to the same source, as do numbers 41 and 43. Also, the last two battleships that had been in the mothball fleet have since been removed from that fleet, so I updated the intro to reflect that change in status. Overall though, it looks good. TomStar81 (Talk) 09:57, 14 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • The article is generally well-written and pithy, and not disproportionately long for a subject that spans four centuries and involves every major maritime nation. This is not to say it cannot be trimmed and tidied up; for example, much of the Iowa-class material could be move across to Iowa class battleship. However I agree with LordAmeth that the article is relatively weak in its treatment of the concept of the battleship, Why did nations feel obliged to build such costly ships? What role were they expected to perform? How did they relate to other elements of the fleet? What alternative forms of naval power were available, and why were they so often rejected? What were the drivers for their design? What made a "good" or "bad" design? As I pointed out in reviewing the article for GA status, the Battleships in strategy and doctrine section is little more than a stub. I would hesitate to support a move up to A-class status until the article is strengthened in this area.
On the other hand, I am generally happy with the historical narrative, and oppose the idea of breaking it up. This risks losing the very cross-cultural and historical perspective that LordAmeth rightly praises. My own experience suggests that stripping out information and putting it in satellite articles, such as the proposed article on the "Dreadnought race", are inconvenient to the user, who is constantly chasing backwards and forwards for the information that he or she is looking for. An even worse problem is the workload involved in generating and maintaining the articles. The proliferation of articles surrounding the Bismarck exemplifies the problem of maintaining quality control over a cluster of closely-related articles. Every hour spent proliferating new articles is an hour lost to the task of bringing our backlog of existing half-baked articles (naming no names) up to scratch.
In summary, the article is (except for the weakness of the Battleships in strategy and doctrine section) an excellent "one-stop shop" for a user new to the subject. Let's keep it that way. Regards to all, John Moore 309 14:27, 14 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I think so. I have taken the liberty of reworking your edits a little, and giving the last sub-section a slightly more dignified heading. Regards, John Moore 309 01:14, 15 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support I'm perfectly happy to support this article for A-Class as it stands now, but I would certainly expect some (most?) of the concerns raised by other editors to be addressed prior to an FA nomination. Carom 17:18, 14 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - A very well-written and comprehensive article. Only suggestion I might make is changing "Battleships" in the LEAD paragraphs to "The Battleship", etc. Might just be me but I think it sounds a bit more scholarly. Great Job, definitely A-Class material on the way to FA Status! Mike Searson 14:13, 16 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page, such as the current discussion page. No further edits should be made to this page.
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