User:Rlandmann/Aircraft specifications

An alternative title to this essay might have been "The Dimensions of the Beech Bonanza's Baggage Door". For any aircraft type, there's a plethora of specifications that we could supply. Manufacturers' sales brochures, pilot's manuals, and Jane's All the World's Aircraft can furnish us with dozens or even hundreds of figures that could be used; all of them reliable and verifiable, as policy requires. Yet the specifications templates in common use: {{aircraft specifications}} and (increasingly) {{aerospecs}} only allow for around twenty. Why?

Consistency

As Wikipedia's Manual of Style puts it, "One way of presenting information is often just as good as another, but consistency promotes professionalism, simplicity and greater cohesion". While that document's primary focus is on consistency within articles, the same can be said of groups of related topics. Indeed, standardising the layout of articles is one of the most fundamental activities carried out by most topic-based WikiProjects; the first thing that WikiProject Aircraft says about itself on its project page is that it "aims primarily to suggest how aircraft-related articles can be put in to Wikipedia in an extensible and coherent manner."

[1]

Points to cover:

• background

• audience

• purpose - this type and comparability

• reductio ad absurdum

• good ideas and bad ideas

Oh - and the dimensions of that baggage door? 1 ft 6½ in (0.47 m) high × 1 ft 10½ in (0.57 m) wide on the on the V35B Bonanza.