Category talk:Individual sailing vessels

earlier comments
I feel that this category should be renamed.

Certainly a random inspection of the articles contained with it show that they are about the ships themselves and not especially about their names. This doesn't overly surprise me, as I suspect that the etymology of sailing ship names is a pretty specialised subject even for Wikipedia. The text of the category suggests that this is a case of a misleading category name, rather than a case of misuse of the category by the articles.

Also I've always been brought up to believe that it is a gross insult to describe a ship as a boat, and clearly most of the articles are about ships. However I'm not sure if this is a UK English/US English thing (I'm a Brit).

So my proposal would be to rename this to Sailing Ships if a consensus agrees with my second point, or to Sailboats if not. Comments please. Chris j wood 14:34, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Hi Chris, The intention is to have a category which contains articles relating to specific individual boats, ships, dinghies, yachts, Tall Ships, Clipper Ships, Barquentines, Wherries etc etc, (the list is endless!). The only criteria is that the prime motive power is by sail.

eg There is a famous racing yacht called Alinghi (included in the Sailboat Names Category) eg There is a very famous warship called Victory. eg There is a very famous small Olympic gold medal winning dinghy called Superdocious which will be included when someone writes an article.

In summary some are yachts, some are boats, some are war ships, some are classes of Olympic boat/yacht/keelbout etc. It is not sensible to sub categorize because as you quite rightly point there are differences of opinion between what is a ship versus a boat. Major disagreements occur on what ships or boats are called Clippers.

Hence Sailboat Names was seen as a compromise. I am new to wikipedia so let me know your thoughts.

Thanks Boatman 17:46, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

How about "sail-driven watercraft", if the word "boat" is no good as a general designator? Bryan 03:06, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * See this categories entry on Categories for deletion/unresolved for CFD discussion on the naming of this category, which is currently unresolved. RedWolf 18:19, Apr 17, 2005 (UTC)