Talk:USS Illinois (BB-65)

Pre-TFA check of old FA

G'day Parsecboy, I've done a cheeky c/e, but there are some details in the infobox that are different in the body, or just don't appear in the body. Some of the sourcing seems a bit low-brow too. Otherwise, this looks ok to run as TFA, and also satisfactory with respect to URFA. Cheers, Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 05:37, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Jargon alert ... this person has never encountered the term builder’s way and do not know what it is ... cannot find a link. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:16, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Looking for better sources/definitions, but search [1] for "ways". Terms: slipways, launching ways, ways, cradle. Edit: also, Oxford Handbooks, Illustrated Glossary of Ship and Boat Terms is probably a better ref. sbb (talk) 05:33, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Someone needs to write the stub and link it. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:54, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Slipway is the (somewhat) more common term - I've swapped that out. Parsecboy (talk) 12:09, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

@Peacemaker67: - I've more or less finished rewriting the article, do you want to have a look at it? Parsecboy (talk) 17:59, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

All ok, Parsecboy, except the difference between the barbette armor thickness 11.3 vs. 11.6? Not sure what is going on there, or which is right. Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 21:46, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Content question

I have significant doubts as to whether this material should be retained:

"Originally, the Montanas were designed to return to the U.S. Navy's traditional battleship philosophy of maximum firepower and armor.[3] Consideration was also given to countering the new Japanese battleships, eventually known to be the Yamato class, whose construction was shrouded by secrecy; furthermore, rumors of the Japanese ships' ability to carry guns of up to 18-inch (460 mm) were known at the time to the highest-ranking members of the U.S. Navy.[4] To achieve these goals, the U.S. Navy began designing a 45,000 ton "slow" battleship with a maximum speed of 27–28 knots and an intended main battery of twelve 16-inch (406 mm) guns, three more than the Iowa-class. This design took shape in the late 1930s and early 1940s and evolved into the 60,500-long-ton (61,500 t) Montana-class. It would also have had a more powerful secondary battery of 5-inch (127 mm)/54 caliber Mark 16 dual purpose mounts, and an increase in armor designed to enable her to withstand the effects of enemy guns comparable to her own.[5][6][7]

The increase in firepower and armor in the Montana-class came at the expense of their speed and ability to utilize the existing locks of the Panama Canal, but transit between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans without having to round South America would have been avoided through the construction of a third, much wider set of locks as part of the canal. As the situation in Europe deteriorated in the late-1930s, concern arose over the possibility of the canal being put out of action by enemy bombing. Nevertheless, in 1939, construction began on the wider locks.[5][b]

After the successes of aircraft carrier's achieving air supremacy in 1942 during the Battle of the Coral Sea, and, to a greater extent, the Battle of Midway,[8][9] the U.S. Navy was forced to shift its building focus from battleships to aircraft carriers. As a result, construction of the fleet of Essex-class aircraft carriers had been given highest priority.[10] In the process, the U.S. found the high speed of 33 knots of the Iowa-class valuable, because it allowed them to steam with the Essex-class while providing the carriers with maximum anti-aircraft protection.[8][11] "

It's not relevant (the Montana design was still very much in the early stages of development when Illinois was ordered as an Iowa-class ship), and more problematically, entirely anachronistic. The success of aircraft carriers in 1942 obviously cannot have informed decisions made in 1940. If this was not an FA scheduled to run in a month (and if the text didn't amount to a significant chunk of the article's prose), I'd just cut all of the text, but I thought under the circumstances, I should ask for other opinions first. Parsecboy (talk) 12:30, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

I don’t think a content decision of this scope should be constrained by TFA scheduling. If the issue is significant enough, TFA is far enough out that it can always be rescheduled. Is there a source that can be used for alternate content so we don’t end up with an extremely short article? When reviewing the articlehistory, I has a hard time understanding the multiple AFDs linked to different articles; I guess it is a related problem? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:17, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

This is a draft of what I'd do with the article. It still needs some work, but you get the idea. Parsecboy (talk) 15:50, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

That would not leave a need to reschedule, so I say you do what you gotta do, deferring of course to other knowledgeable ship editors. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:59, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

This is odd: I believe we should rename the article, and wonder where the support for this is?

• The ship was never commissioned by the U.S. Navy and therefore never actually received the "USS" prefix, but is still conventionally referred to as USS Illinois.

Is this a Wikipedia convention, or do we have broad sources to justify this? The USS name is only bestowed upon commissioned ships, it was never commissioned, and this just seems odd. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:59, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

In fact, there are plenty of ships, and plenty of articles that haven't run TFA: why don't we just ask for the date to be rescheduled? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:00, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

That's a good question - it does seem to be fairly common in sources like this and this. I also came across a US Navy publication that referred to the ship with the prefix. I don't have particularly strong feelings either way though.

On the scheduling issue, pushing it would be fine. We have another cancelled battleship article scheduled for the 25th, and that one passed FAC earlier this year and is in fine shape. Parsecboy (talk) 19:15, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

So, if both PM67 and you agree, I would be willing to ping in Jimfbleak to ask him to reschedule this one ... let me know, PM67 ... either way is fine with me. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:24, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

As I expressed earlier, scheduling such old FAs for TFA without a URFA check (now that we have such a thing) wasn't ideal and the coords should avoid it if at all possible, I certainly think it wouldn't hurt to vacate it and re-insert it later once things things are sorted, especially as a similar ship is scheduled for the 24th. I will still have another run through as Nate suggested, but the big para question makes a good point. This is one of the difficulties with these ships that didn't actually get completed. Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 20:32, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

OK, @Jimfbleak: all three of us (Parsecboy, Peacemaker67 and me) are having quite a time with this article, which is a very old FA and has needed a lot of work-- in the process now of being completely rewritten. There are still things being sorted. We are hoping you might consider putting something else in on its TFA date on January 15? We already have a good ship article at January 24, and I am also concerned about four military articles in five days (don't want you to get mainpage complainers), between January 11 and 15. Sorry for the trouble.

Separately, WP:Unreviewed featured articles/2020 has now gotten to a stage where it may be useful to you in assessing where older FAs that haven't run TFA stand.

(I will also post to Jim's talk in case he doesn't get the ping.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:56, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

SandyGeorgia, thanks, I'll pull it for now Jimfbleak - talk to me? 15:00, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

OCLCs are not redundant with ISBNs

@Parsecboy:, first thank you for your cleanup efforts on this article to maintain its FA. Regarding OCLC data, it is not redundant with ISBNs. OCLC links take the reader directly to Worldcat's page to find local resources and libraries for the book/reference. Maintaining ISBNs, OCLCs, OLs, etc., within {{cite}} templates helps provide better metadata for resources like Wikidata, amongst others.

I undid your edit removing them. I know you are moving fast, but your immediate reversion of my revert is the beginning of an edit war that I'm sure neither of us are interested in participating in. sbb (talk) 19:41, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Please respond to the point I made on your talk page. Parsecboy (talk) 19:46, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

@Parsecboy: I did respond, above, because I moved the discussion here. Yes, ISBNs go to a big meta-search page. I know that. But that doesn't mean ISBNs and OCLCs are redundant, because, as I said, it's valuable metadata. For instance, if the display of extra resource identifiers is undesirable, one could conceivably modify {{refbegin}} to conditionally set display: none to the <span> tags generated by the {{cite}}'s OCLC or OL fields. But the metadata itself is not redundant.

I moved the conversation here because it's about an edit to the article, and I do hope other chime in (even if they disagree with me, that's fine, I will calibrate my opinions about including OCLC in {{cite}}s). sbb (talk) 19:57, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

I read your comment; your assertion that OCLC links take the reader directly to Worldcat is not a refutation to my assertion that a direct link is redundant to the Special:Book sources page. From a reader's point of view, the two are entirely redundant, as the OCLC provides no functionality that is not available through the special page. Parsecboy (talk) 20:20, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

I commented below to SandyGeorgia's comment, but my reply applies equally here. If you are only talking about human readers, and if you don't mind requiring them to perform their own sub-searching or manual down-selecting of data, then I will grant that a reader can get to the same information. But it's not user-friendly (precisely because you are forcing them to search Worldcat by ISBN, which doesn't always produce unique results because there is not a 1:1 mapping between ISBNs and OCLCs). And from a metadata (i.e., non-human reader) standpoint, it is broken. sbb (talk) 21:12, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

One wonders why we're bothering to keep direct links to a site that can't accurately track ISBNs. Parsecboy (talk) 21:26, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

cs1|2 does not wrap named identifiers in <span>...</span> tags. Where did you get the idea that it does?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 20:11, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Honestly, I was going off my (obviously misremembered-) memory. Disregarding my boneheaded mistake, my point stands that it would be possible to set display:none; to the anchor tags with title="OCLC (identifier)" and their next-sibling anchor tags. sbb (talk) 21:01, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

My long-standing position in similar discussions about the articles I most edit (medical) is that I hate, detest, despise (is that strong enough :) this tendency to add so much clutter to citation templates, and this one seems to be in the same vein as the redundant identifiers being added to medical articles. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:13, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

This is my perspective as well. Parsecboy (talk) 20:20, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

But one person's clutter is another person's useful metadata. This still seems like a presentation/display issue, rather than an include/disinclude issue. For instance, the ISBN link for the first {{cite}} on this page, when following the "Find this book at Worldcat" link, takes the reader to a Worldcat page with at least two actually different books (not including non-English catalog entries). This is because the Worldcat search is by ISBN. But ISBN is not the canonical or primary search key in Worldcat's database (obviously). Instead, the (currently removed) OCLC link goes directly to a useful list of nearby libraries that have the book. This is not redundant information. This is information that aids the reader in finding or verifying the claims made in the article, or for further research. But again, and more importantly, it's metadata that aids non-human aggregation and indexing of data. The link to search everywhere else by ISBN simply cannot perform that function. sbb (talk) 21:01, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

No, it is also an editing issue, because the amount of crap we have to work around now when trying to improve text is just disruptive. And, I have practically given up on my medical watchlist, because every article I watch is so often clobbered by bots adding in unnecessary parameters, that it becomes hard to catch actual content changes. These bots hitting my watchlist have made it too much work to have to click back to see if there was an edit in the interim that I may have missed. With a DOI, PMID, PMC, we don't also need an SC2ID and whatever else they will come up with next. Do we have any indication readers even use these tools? Because WhatamIdoing tells us that the WMF has data that indicates that readers almost never view citations. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:24, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

sigh Ok, after going through the "Find this this book at Worldcat" links from every ISBN cited in this article, for all of them except the first one (that I cited previously, and I swear, I didn't do it selectively, it was just the first one), ... yes, the OCLC link is effectively redundant. All of the ISBN→Worldcat links go to a single title (maybe multiple Worldcat entries, but they are the same title). I still think the OCLC should remain for the first entry, but I concede the point on the rest of the entries, and will abide. sbb (talk) 21:34, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Much appreciated, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:59, 14 December 2020 (UTC)