Talk:Largest naval battle in history

Deleting most candidates

The ones I'm keeping are:

• Salamis, which appears to have the most ships involved if one takes the high-end estimate of Persian ships involved (371 + 900 = 1271).
• Yamen, which at 1000 ships is larger than the low-end estimate of ships involved at Salamis
• Lake Poyang, at 850,000 personnel
• Jutland, since it has the largest displacement
• Philippine Sea, since "the US Fifth Fleet's Fast Carrier Task Force (TF 58) is the largest single naval formation ever to give battle"
• Leyte Gulf, since it has "the largest in terms of displacement of ships in the combined orders of battle"

I am deleting everything else, unless someone can give a metric for why that battle should be considered the biggest (in which case I would recommend adding that metric to the text, as is currently the case for Jutland/Philippine Sea/Leyte Gulf. Banedon (talk) 02:47, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

I re-added Cape Ecnomus, since that is a Featured Article and backs its claim (largest number of combatants) with multiple sources. Lake Poyang claims significantly more, but I don't actually see a source for the numbers in that article. the wub "?!" 01:26, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

I returned Actium, since it's in the Pemsel's list. I believe that Aegates, La Hogue and Trafalgar should be represented as well, at least with few short phrases. Ain92 (talk) 12:59, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

I'm removing Actium again because although it's in Pemsel's list, Pemsel rates it at 2nd largest. Banedon (talk) 01:03, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

If we rename the article into "largest naval battles" in plural, would you still against the inclusion of any naval battle that is considered second largest in a RS? Because in my opinion it's absolutely, without any doubt worth inclusion. Ain92 (talk) 23:02, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

We could rename the article to "largest naval battles", but then where would you draw the line between what is 'large' and what is not? If 40,000 soldiers being involved is large, what about a battle with 30,000? If that is also large, what about a battle with 20,000? Banedon (talk) 02:03, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Largest naval battle.

The largest naval battle was not the Battle of Leyte Gulf but rather it was the Battle of the Atlantic which raged all over the Atlantic Ocean. Especially on the approaches to Britain and was fought from 1939 to 1945 86.139.111.23 (talk) 04:58, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

The 'Battle' of the Atlantic wasn't one battle, it's just a name for six years of naval warfare in the Atlantic. A battle is one event, the Atlantic was a theatre of a war ReidMoffat (talk) 21:22, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

Yes, that's just like saying the War in the Pacific was the largest naval battle. It wasn't. Instead, it was a theater where many battles took place over several years. - wolf 22:58, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Page name, etc

Why not just call this page the "Largest naval battles in history? (with or without a "List of..." preceding?) - wolf 22:58, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Because it's a slippery slope to the bottom. As I wrote above: We could rename the article to "largest naval battles", but then where would you draw the line between what is 'large' and what is not? If 40,000 soldiers being involved is large, what about a battle with 30,000? If that is also large, what about a battle with 20,000? Banedon (talk) 23:43, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Meh... it's not all that treacherous a suggestion. We could simply have limits, such as found on many other pages, for example... top 10 largest naval battles (hard cap or soft cap), or just find a significant gap in numbers between two battles and make that the cut off. Can we really do any better or worse than we have been, with multitudes of battles seemingly added, and removed, at random? - wolf 01:51, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

At "top 10 largest", we'd just have the same issue as right now but with a lot more battles - if we can't unambiguously define which is the largest, then there's even less hope of unambiguously defining the top 10 largest. I also doubt finding a "significant gap" is possible, because there will be more smaller battles. It's similar to how if you move from the tails of the distribution into the middle, you get more results, and there are no significant gaps. Banedon (talk) 05:35, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

This isn't the first time we've encountered this type of situation with an article, so I'm sure it can be worked out. Perhaps if we had more editors contributing, there would be more ideas, and more likely a solution, supported by consensus. Maybe we should post notices on the related wiki-project pages? - wolf 15:36, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

You could, I suppose. Few people would ever object to attempts to build consensus. Banedon (talk) 14:19, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

Notices have been posted. - wolf 04:16, 10 September 2022 (UTC)