Category talk:Naval ships of England in art

This has the markings of being a very lonely category. There are no Naval ships of England in Commons or in Wikipedia. The tendency is to treat English ships as "ships of the Royal Navy" or "ships of the United Kingdom", and to live with the fact that the United Kingdom is a later creation. Please consider renaming it. --Rsteen (talk) 14:22, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

This isn't intended to "compete" with the United Kingdom category. There was no Royal Navy in the 16th century for one thing. It's considered to have come into existence around 1660s if I'm not mistaken. These ships fought in battles against Scottish navies. Would those belong in the UK cat as well? There's categories like Category:Naval ships of the Soviet Union, and Category:Ships of the Prussian Navy. How is this any different?

Peter ^Isotalo 15:38, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

You are right, there are many interesting categories, but that does not change the fact that there are no Naval ships of England in Commons or in Wikipedia. This is just a friendly suggestion to avoid having categories that fly off at a tangent. --Rsteen (talk) 23:04, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

Rsteen, what do you mean by "there are no 'Naval ships of England'"? I just added the entire Anthony Roll to it. There are other depictions by Anthony Anthony from around the same period, and certainly plenty of paintings of the navy under Elizabeth I.

If the previous categorizing has been according to the argument "oh, it all became the UK anyway", it's extremely simplified. Any ship up to, say, 1650 would qualify as belonging to the English, not British navy. Especially the republican navy of the Commonwealth of England couldn't possibly qualify as the UK. There are tons of quite specific categories and sub-categories on Wikimedia projects. Like the ones on Soviet or Prussian ships. So why are you cautioning me about this one being a "tangent"? How would this be problematic to you or anyone else?

Peter ^Isotalo 04:50, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Please read carefully: There are no Naval ships of England in Commons or in Wikipedia. You just made a Commons category called "Ships of England". That is your right, but Wikipedia works by consensus, and the consensus is to treat early English naval ships as Ships of the Royal Navy. If you make a bundle of new categories, then the tangent problem will go away - but will Wikipedia and Commons be any better for it? If you think it will, then by all means continue. I have no personal interest in this matter, but I am just one of those anonymous workers who try to make some sort of system out of the chaotic number of illustrations that arrive on Commons. --Rsteen (talk) 08:22, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

You're not being very clear here. Do you feel we need a separate Category:Naval ships of England? I did create Category:Naval ships of England in art. If you want to help make a system, though, then why not actually help make a system. What, if anything, is actually needed to make it work? If there is community consensus about this, then when and where was it decided to backdate the UK to before it even existed?

Peter ^Isotalo 20:41, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Please excuse my lack of clarity. No - as you ask me - we do not need a Naval ships of England and we do not need a Naval ships of England in art. The consensus is, that we should label them Royal Navy ships. The authority on the definition of Royal Navy ships is the J.J.Colledge book Ships of the Royal Navy, which by the way includes the ships of the Anthony Roll. What you are doing here is to fork the categories according to a system which has historical merit, but just happens to be outside the scope of consensus. There was a discussion on Commons Royal Navy ships two years ago (still archived there). Although the differences between ships of the Royal Navy and naval ships of the United Kingdom was pointed out, the present system was kept. Now you want to change it, and nobody can stop you from doing that. --Rsteen (talk) 21:47, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Uhm, "nobody can stop you" seems a bit drastict. I'm hoping to achieve working solution that is both historically correct and workable. So are you referring to this discussion?

Peter ^Isotalo 16:04, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes, that was the one. As you can see, the consensus is to refer to Ships of the Royal Navy. The important thing here is that en:Wikipedia does the same thing, and I hope you can agree on the benefits of having categories that can connect seamlessly via Wikidata. All I have been trying to say is that Naval ships of England fits badly into this pattern. Your arguments may have merit, but you are going against consensus, and I believe the proper way on Wikipedia (and Commons) is to work on consensus first. Have a nice evening. --Rsteen (talk) 18:01, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

That discussion about splitting navy ships from UK ships. There is no consideration of the UK/England/Scotland question, or any backdating of the Royal Navy to before it existed. Going against inertia is not the same as going against consensus. Explicit discussion should be how we determine consensus for specific issues.

I'm skeptical to your referring to Collidge as "the authority" on a subject as vast as the naval history of Britain. Colledge is certainly valuable, but is a fairly simplified list of ships and isn't flawless. Note how it applies gun ratings (a very inconsistent system historically speaking) to 16th century vessels where it is quite irrelevant. I don't feel it's the final argument on how we should organize British ship categories.

There are more recent books, like N.A.M. Rodgers three-volume Naval History of Britain or Rif Winfield's works British Warships in the Age of Sail (active on English Wikipedia as under his own name). Rodgers has a pretty detailed account on the organizational history of British navies and certainly doesn't assume that the Royal Navy includes anything English afloat from the Late Middle Ages onwards. Winfield's series begins in 1603, so at the very least there's a cut-off point after the Tudor dynasty (and it's not called "United Kingdom Warships in the Age of Sail"). Jan Glete's Navies and Nations is as far as I know considered quite authoritative. It has joint tables with the heading "England/Great Britain", but that's because he deal with the development of navies of political entities over time, not specific countries, naval organizations or individual ships. And, again, no "United Kingdom".

Peter ^Isotalo 20:03, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Nice bibliography. This has been a long talk, and all the time I feel that I have been writing about structure, and you have been writing about Naval ships of England. It is nice of you to take time to elaborate on that subject, but I think it would have been more beneficial to the talk, if you had commented on the structural problems across Wikipedia and Wikidata. As I wrote, the problem would start to go away, if the structure was also changed on the Wikipedia side. You have not commented on that either, but I can see from your Wikipedia edits, that this is in fact what you have done.

There are many reasons for working on Commons and Wikipedia. For me, a big part of it is helping to make order out of chaos. Ships in art may be a small corner, but as I recall it had more than five hundred files at the start, and now they are getting sorted one by one. Usually it is possible to see something about the type of ship or the nationality or era, and then to categorize it in a more meaningful way. Projects like Google Art sometimes contain gems, where you find out that a certain ship (or other item) has actually been recorded for posterity. I am sure that other users could do the work more competently - but at least the work is being done. Happy editing. --Rsteen (talk) 06:49, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

I have tried some, yes. I'm just not that familiar with parallel work with categories on several projects. I just assumed that what we do on Commons is mostly based on discussion in this project. That's how it usually works on Wikipedia. But there seems to be some kind of acknowledgement of the 1660 cut-off date at list of ships of the line of the Royal Navy. My experience of working with articles on early modern naval history is that interest is limited. People mostly rely on catalog-like works like Collidge's, which is great for building basic articles. But the assumption is always that facts about the 19th century are as solid and fixed as those about the 16th century.

Btw, do you feel it would be better if this was mostly limited to Category:Ships of England? Is "in art" an unnecessary qualifier?

Peter ^Isotalo 14:34, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

I do believe that working across Wikipedia and Commons via Wikidata is essential to the project. That is why I put great emphasis on the need to have consensus on how you categorize and define items on both sides, because otherwise users may mix up information and as editor you can be in a situation where there are relevant illustrations for your articles, but they are just labelled in a completely different way, so you cannot find them. I do not know if there is a forum for this coordination - there probably is - and as a common user I only react when I see categorizations that carry a risk of introducing ambiguity. In this case, it was solved, so the the problem has gone away.

On the "art" question, I think that many uploading users are more interested in the "art" part than in the "history" or general "fact" part. So I take the trouble of refining and expanding their categories without ditching the "art" connection. For the system to work correctly, the "art" category must in fact connect to a category without the "art" qualifier, and those categories are usually in place already. I am well aware that for categories before ca. 1850 almost every illustration is "art", but there may be exceptions like models of ships or lists and texts from old books. Specifically for the Anthony Roll, that whole category is defined as "art", so therefore there is no need for individual illustrations to be categorized as "art" one more time. So I remove that redundant information.

Writing all this I have to say that I do have a real life and I do write proper articles on Danish Wikipedia. This is just a way of helping out. --Rsteen (talk) 20:47, 9 January 2015 (UTC)