Category talk:Ships by year of manufacture

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Does this category mean "ships by year built" or "ships by year of commissioning" etc. ? Takabeg (talk) 03:46, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

Ships categorising is difficult, as worldwide Wikipedia's differ in the date of start. Some Wikipedia's use the date of launching of ships, some the date of completion of ships. Have a look at the difference in e.g. French, German, English and Dutch Wikipedia. Have a look at the en:Category:HMS Dreadnought (1875) and de:Category:HMS Dreadnought (1879), same ship. On Commons, as it is a worldwide working database, it is important and accepted to use just one system for any item. One has to make a choice. The date of completion can be found on the certificates of the ships, on contracts and publications in the media, even for old ships, not described in full on the internet. In that case the date of completion is the best choice if we want to find start dates. For naval ships the first date of commissioning. Unfortunately naval ship lovers here on Commons want to continue the system of their local Wikipedia for their naval ships. As the content of USS/HMS naval ships is the biggest of naval ships on Commons, you'll find the English Wikipedia system here on a lot of naval ships. Here on Commons we have more than 15.000 ships in Category:Ships by name, in just one system. Realise that Commons is just a database to find ships images, not a Wikipedia. --Stunteltje (talk) 09:08, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

This is so wrong its just not funny. Time has moved on, and the project is now enormous and needs a more sophisticated, yet simple approach. We should be following Wikipedia's lead and policies on the naming of ships. Realise that Commons is the database for Wikipedia. We should be compatible with Wikipedia as it now represents the commonplace easy goto site for identifying a ship, and it would simplify the link between the two projects which is Wikidata.

Regarding launch dates, in a more general sense, they are preferred in Wikipedia because, again, there is only one launch date for a ship, the ship is named on that date, it is afloat (the equivalent of born), whereas there are several dates that are arguably build dates. The thing to emphasize here is that launch is a naming date, and a ship is a ship when it floats. The great majority of ships share the same year of launch and build (whatever that's supposed to mean). Also, it has to be said the various build dates available tend to be poorly documented in the public domain.

I have defended our use of ship in titles here before. However, I would argue that in the case of yachts in particular that they need to be disambiguated. There are just too many yachts out there not to. As it is, the policy talks about general format. It does not say that we cant be sensible and employ yacht. There are certain types that are way out there on their own, one is yacht, (and by extension, even, steam yacht?) the others are tugboat and submarine. We should only default to ship in cases where its some problem to differentiate between ship and boat. I don't get it, why have tugboat and submarine and not yacht or barge. Quite rightly all of the above need to be filed under Ships by name

I also note the comments made here about Category:Ships by name, the justification in large part for the way we do things. However, it has been made useless since being made into a hidden cat (against consensus), called Ships by name (flat list). Flat list, by the way, is a made up term also inappropriate to the use of that cat. Broichmore (talk) 15:42, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

We can name categories of ships in many ways, and there are traditions along the lines of using the launch year in some countries. But the year of manufacture is defined here as the year when the ship was completed. In the days of sail, those years often were equal - masts and so were fitted at launch - but especially for naval ships, the arrival of still more complicated weapons systems meant that vessels could be completed long after their launch. As a matter of fact, some never were. So if you want to know which ships were available at a given year, launch dates since the 1860s are generally irrelevant. We use the year of manufacture across Commons for things like Category:Buildings by year of completion and this user sees no reason to change the current policy. So please do not change the year in the "ships built in xxxx" category to fit whichever category name is used for the vessel. Always use the completion year. Cheers --Rsteen (talk) 18:00, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

Two "Ships built in xxxx" category definition templates?

We seem to have two templates used to create "Ships built in xxxx" categories: Template:Category definition: ships by year built and Template:ShipsBuilt. Both created in 2011, used in 63 and 234 categories respectively. Shouldn't we use just one? MKFI (talk) 21:58, 10 July 2012 (UTC)