Talk:Roadstead

Dubious
I've checked the list of examples here; not all of them would be described as roadsteads, I think. Scapa Flow (for example) is a natural harbour, not a roadstead (it's shallower and more sheltered) The same goes for some of the others. On some of the examples I've added a link to where they are described as roadsteads; the others I've requested citations for. If none are forthcoming they should be deleted. Xyl 54 (talk) 14:30, 27 June 2012 (UTC) PS And I've added a few that I've found. I'm sure there are more... Xyl 54 (talk) 14:34, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Shouldn't lakes be omitted here? Only the very largest ones, and those connected to the oceans by canal or navigable river are relevant when it comes to having sheltered harbors. Lake Geneva should certainly be omitted? OlavN (talk) 06:21, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Wiktionary link as a sister project in left side bar under 'In other projects'?
Anybody know if it is possible to get wiktionary links appearing in the left side bar under 'In other projects'? eg Government has other project links to Commons and Wikiquote? I can see that the roadstead wikidata item does have a link to the English Wikipedia. The wikidata page does not list Wiktionary explicitly as a sister project, and I have tried to put wiktionary into the 'Other sites' thing, bottom right of the page, but it doesn't seem to bite.

The reverse does happen, ie roadstead lists wikipedia under 'In other projects'. Batternut (talk) 09:39, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Definition of 'Roadstead'
I think the article in its current form misses a few points: besides waiting for their turn to enter a port of call, ships at roadstead can do a number of other things as well, even without entering the port at all. The Swedish Wikipedia article of sv:Redd is only one sentence long but tells it all very well: Redd är ett vattenområde utanför en hamn där fartyg kan ankra för att lasta, lossa, ta ombord förråd, bunkra eller vänta på kajplats  translated by Google as  Redd is a water area outside a port where ships can anchor to load, unload, take on board storage, bunkering or wait for berth  Google seems to have missed the word 'Redd' but otherwise the translation appears quite acceptable..--Sivullinen (talk) 19:06, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Agreed, and there is nothing in the references quoted to justify the limitation to ships waiting to enter port. Will prune first sentence, and contemplate adding explanation of possible purposes later. Rjccumbria (talk) 21:53, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Yet one use of roadstead, I think even quite common one, is storage of ships that have been 'laid up', i.e. taken out of active service.--Sivullinen (talk) 23:05, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes; actually well aware of that as a use of roadsteads, from family history (an ancestor was for some time in the 1930's a watchkeeping officer on a ship laid up in one of the remoter bits of the Clyde estuary (which sounds bad, but times were hard, and he was lucky to get that ...)) but (after some thought) came to the view that that is more to do with 'anchorage' than 'roadstead' : any safe anchorage will do for laying up a ship.Rjccumbria (talk) 02:09, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Also, the claim that a roads can protect ships from spring tides is specious, and without any supporting reference. 174.196.194.173 (talk) 14:33, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

Ready to remove leadtoolong tag
The lead paragraph looks fine in relation to the length of the article to me. I propose removing the tag. Newystats (talk) 21:42, 18 July 2019 (UTC)
 * No, the lead is way too long. It's basically half the article. The lead shouldn't be the only place in the article that contains prose, unless the article is a list.&thinsp;&mdash; Mr. Guye (talk) (contribs)&thinsp; 03:42, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

Roadstead or Road?
It is not obvious to me why this article is titled 'roadstead' rather than 'road' given that all the examples quoted bar one (and even that one in the original French is simply 'rade') are named as 'roads'. All examples in Britain (and named on OS maps) are, so far as I'm aware named as 'roads' rather than roadsteads. The assertion that roads is simply the older term is difficult to follow up - one the surface it looks like the term most commonly in use. cheers Geopersona (talk) 04:06, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

The brief mention that "roads" is the older term is without any supporting reference. "Roads" is the common noun describing such anchorages; "roadstead" is more obscure. 174.196.194.173 (talk) 14:31, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

roadstead
a search for roads (maritime) food not cross-reference to Roadstead. How do we mitigate this omission? 2001:8003:14C0:B800:990D:22AE:78BD:39B (talk) 05:44, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

Road/Roads
6 of one, half dozen the other to me but if you really want to keep the plural form (see comments above with the singular as well as the OED as well as the ngram for why that's unnecessary) then you'll need to rephrase the lead sentence more grammatically. It's never "a roads". Probably you'll need to have a second sentence to introduce the synonym instead of trying to fit it parallel to roadstead in the 1st.

In any case, check out the ngram. The singular is a lot more common than you think it is and it certainly isn't wrong, vandalism, or a "hypercorrection". — Llywelyn II   18:07, 24 February 2024 (UTC)


 * In the edit summary of your recent re-revert, you defensively posited «rv means reverting vandalism, which this wasn't».
 * Judging by the number of your contributions, you are a very seasoned editor. It is not credible that you wouldn't know rv is generally understood to stand for revert. It is rvv which stands for revert vandalism. Your accusation that I accused you of vandalism in the first instance is false, and you should know that. My use of a perfectly cromulent well-known abbreviation was non-disruptive. However, falsely accusing another of levelling a false accusation is itself disruptive. I'm still not saying that's vandalism now, but it is disruptive in a way someone who presents like you, with a very high edit count and a proudly exhibited collection of barnstars should not be.
 * I can also see1 that you reverted my revert minutes before you tried the talk page. That's also not a great look for someone with your level of experience, and who's chosen to present like you do.
 * I can likewise see, ibid., that you tried to ping me. That's good, and I am here now, but I do want to note that it wasn't your ping that got me here. Your ping never reached me. I've encountered issues with notifications right from account creation, and while I did get some help then, ultimately these problems were never (re)solved. So maybe (some) pings just don't work for me.
 * Your ngram link also doesn't quite work for me, in that the graphs don't display, but I do seem to be able to observe from pointer-hovering in various places that the roads form of your chosen phrase is consistently dominant over time, though I have no doubt hypercorrective landlubber editors have long tried to impose their Dunning-Kruger preferences upon the obstinately if not obstreperously unyielding jargon of actual salts. Jokes aside, while I probably can't see the ngram link right, I am at any rate not sure what it's meant to prove; if anything, this seems like grist to my mill.
 * That OED would categorise the marine term under road is unsurprising given the shared etymology – which latter is more or less the OED's original raison d'être. And yes, in actual marine use2, it is definitely not «never "a roads"». If there were an actual Académie Anglaise, you might have been able to blag your way in there, stars and all, and impose your grammatical preferences upon the language of "a mongrel lot" that won't talk as it's told – but in this timeline, English grammar is descriptive, as is its orthography, ultimately, pace Doctor Johnson and the Colonies' latter-day Noah and their heirs. That descriptiveness might even be an argument for working in some reference to your non-nautical grammatical sensibilities too, but other than that, your repeated edit has little to recommend it, and you've re-reverted the article to "the wrong version" for all the wrong reasons. Best case, mayhaps you know as much about the meaning of rv as you know about roads(teads). Jokes aside once more, I don't really want to engage with you on this any further after that display of at best dubiously good faith, but I would invite level-headed third parties to pick up the baton. If a (barn)star-struck majority prefers the article the way you left it, that's on them. I don't respect how it got to this point3 , but I can live with it4 , and decline to volunteer any more effort to an edit war–adjacent interaction that's already devolved, and would no doubt devolve further, perhaps even through no fault of my own. —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 04:03, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

1: from the edit history of the article and talk page 2: as opposed to hypercorrections by persons unfamiliar with the subject matter 3: When the medals starts to mettle, it's not uncalled-for to question the brass. 4: There is a long history of people and outright three-letter agencies being utterly dedicated to rewriting Wikipedia to reflect the way they would like things to appear, rather than the way things are. If I insisted upon saying no pasarán to that here, I might as well seek treatment for monomania, or perhaps Dr Crusher should ask me to show her on the doll where Locutus hurt me. Hey, I'm not saying the line shouldn't be drawn anywhere, but maybe not here of all places and on this of all issues. Unlike some people, I realise when others have escalation dominance, and while some causes are worth assanging the deeds of the dominant no matter the odds, this is no such thing – but I hope the gentle reader has enjoyed this punny prose–laden outing nonetheless. PS: The gentle reader is not in Webster's but might as well be filed under the same abbreviation. If you get it, you can get it, and kudos.