Talk:NOAAS Ka'imimoana (R 333)

Merger proposal

Feel free to state your position on the proposed merge by beginning a new line in this section with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~.

Support These two articles are the same ship. --JAYMEDINC (talk) 19:12, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Preference not to merge

Oppose - Yes, these two article are the same ship. I understand that that is important to many Wikipedians, who want just one article about the entire life of the ship because, after all, it is the same chunk of steel.

I prefer a different editorial policy, i.e., that when ships are significantly changed in terms of purpose, flag, nation, etc., the change be considered enough to merit separate articles. If you look at other publications which list and decsribe ships -- Jane's, Conway's, Combat Fleets, etc. -- it is common practice to do this; NOAA ships do not appear under "U.S. Navy" with their NOAA name and description, former U.S. Navy ships now in the Brazilian Navy do not appear under "U.S. Navy" with their Brazilian name and characteristics, and so forth, although there is cross-referencing between the two in such publications so that you know that the NOAA ship used to be a Navy ship or the Brazilian ship used to be a U.S. ship or whatever. And this makes sense, because few people who look up a ship will be terribly interested in that chunk of steel's history when it was a different kind of ship. Those researching NOAA don't want to wade through a lot of U.S. Navy informnation and vice versa, those researching the Brazilian Navy don't want to either and vice versa, and so on. In this case, other than being the same chunk of steel, the NOAA ship and U.S. Navy ship have nothing in common -- no common purpose, few common attributes, no common command orientation, no common designation, and no common name. And navies and other organizations offering histories of their fleets themselves follow this practice, listing the same ship under different entries when its name changes and not describing the later life of, say, a U.S. Navy ship as a NOAA ship or a Brazilian ship because that later life has nothing to do with its life as a U.S Navy ship.

The merged articles are what I have come to view as "Frankenstein" articles, essentially a collection of parts on different topics rather than a pithy description of the ship the reader is looking for. Wikipedia should be focusing the reader on what he or she was looking up, not on extraneous material, and a ship's very different purpose and history under a different name and organization or country definitely is extraneous to what the reader is looking for.

The merged articles also can lead to some sloppiness in navigation. Often the mergers result in category non-sequiturs, such as (in this case) USS Titan being listed as a NOAA ship, which it never was, or maybe NOAAS Ka'imimoana being listed as a U.S. Navy ship. Both listings are wrong. If people categorized redirects and kept unlike things separate when they, it would be better, but they often don't.

To me, the more elegant approach is to write a separate article about each incarnation of a ship -- in this case the U.S. Navy ship and the NOAA ship -- when they significanlt change in terms of name, flag, and characteristics -- and cross-reference them using links the "main article" template. That way categories are not so messy, and people researching a ship easily land on only nthe incarnation of the ship that they are looking for. If they really are interested in other aspects of the ship -- its use in a different country or a different organization or whatever -- they are easily linked to that information in this way. Notice that the Titan and Ka'imimoana article are interlinked in exactly this way; a reader looking for the one can find it easily need not bother with details about the other, but has easy access to the other if he or she desires.

I guess my question is, is merging article really a good idea? Other than being the same chunk of steel, are USNS Titan and NOAAS Ka'imimoana really the same ship in any other way? Are we gaining anything by merging or just gluing two articles about essentially different things together just because of something that they have in common which really is fairly unimportant ? Mdnavman (talk) 15:25, 5 November 2009 (UTC)mdnavman

Almost five years later, I have changed my views on merging articles about the same ship and now think it makes sense. Accordingly, I have gone ahead and merged this article with the USNS Titan (T-AGOS-15). It does not appear that the merger proposal or discussion in November 2009 prompted much interest anyway. Mdnavman (talk) 00:28, 2 August 2014 (UTC)mdnavman