Talk:USS Monitor/Archive 3

Nominated for GA
The USS Monitor article has been nominated for GA. A preliminary review was conducted above. To start the review and/or leave comment go to the GA nominations page or the USS Monitor GA review page. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 17:00, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Summary style
The article is currently at 63 kB of prose. That's a very big article. Yes, the Monitor was highly influential, but the ship itself doesn't seem notable enough for such a massive treatment. This is a very informative, well-researched article, but it could use a lot of trimming (per WP:SUMMARY).

For example, the treatment of the two battles is almost as long as the actual battle articles themselves. There's an almost excruciating amount of detail in some cases. If you look at "Final voyage", there's a very long paragraph on waves crashing, pumps failing and orders being handed out. Even a dramatic sinking can become fairly dreary with a blow-by-blow recount. All those minor details make for even less encyclopedic reading when it comes to presidential hand shaking, the receiving of one-dollar dinners and rudder realignments.

Peter Isotalo 13:51, 28 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your comments. Most naval historians agree that the USS Monitor is among the most notable ships in U.S. naval history and marked a turning point in naval history altogether. You can ask for other opinions at WikiProject ships and elsewhere if you feel strongly about this. There are plenty of GA and FA articles that exceed 63 kb becasue the subject involves itself with many things. You are the first person to come along and regard some of the coverage as "dreary". The USS Monitor involved many people and events (not just battles) during the Civil War, and as lengthy as you may feel it is, it is still a summary as there are entire books written about this vessel and its history. After it passes GA review it will be nominated for FA, the requirements of which demand a well written and well covered account. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 18:48, 29 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Well, even 100 printed pages (this would be around 30-35) would of course be a "summary" of all the available literature. But also completely unreadable. Monitor is primarily well-known because of it's influence, not it's extended career or anything like that. And the only person who is genuinely notable due to Monitor is Ericsson. Compare this article with ship-related FAs about far broader topics: it's as long as dreadnought, longer than ironclad warship or battleship and twice the size of pre-dreadnought battleship.
 * At the very least, the finer details of the two battles should be moved to separate articles, because the amount of information here can't really be considered a summary.
 * Peter Isotalo 22:33, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm afraid I disagree entirely with everything you say here. The Monitor was and is known because of the epic battle she fought 'and' because her role in it changed the course of naval history. The two ideas are inseparable. Ericcson and the ship's commander, Worden, and even some others, are also fairly well known, albeit not as much as Lincoln. And like the dreadnought, Monitor became its own class of ship. The article is a well written summary with excellent scope. The dedicated articles covering the battles Monitor was involved in need to be longer and better written, which is why the battle sections in this article rival them in size and coverage. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 02:27, 30 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Add :The Battle of Hampton Roads article is more than ten pages long while the section covering that battle in this article is less than a page, so comparing the section here to that article in terms of length was not very appropriate. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 01:45, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Definite article in ship names
I see that someone went through a couple years ago and added definite article to all ship names, in the interest of consistency. Unfortunately this clashes with Naming conventions (ships). I fixed the first sentence of the lead but refrained from fixing the rest (just the ones with USS or CSS prefixes) pending discussion. Kendall-K1 (talk) 18:23, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20041212084431/http://www.moc.org/ to http://www.moc.org/

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Cost conversion to 2018 dollars reverted
Hello.

In the field at the top of the article, I added a conversion to 2018 dollars: Ship original cost=$275,000 ($7.35 million in 2018 dollars) This was reverted by Sturmvogel, who says "Currency converters do not work well with capital costs". Sturmvogel has provided no information on why this is the case. I will add the currency again and invite him to discuss on this page.Newzild (talk) 03:00, 12 March 2018 (UTC)


 * When you add something and get reverted, the polite thing to do is discuss it on the talk page. Adding it back in before the discussion even starts is aggressive and confrontational.
 * You did not give a source for your conversion. Where did you arrive at this? If you've used the Consumer Price Index, Sturmvogel is quite correct in reverting you.
 * And giving a fixed end date is unhelpful. When I come back in 2028 and read this article, that number will be useless to me. We normally use Template:Inflation to get the most up-to-date conversion. Kendall-K1 (talk) 03:16, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Inflation converters use the cost of living to derive their figure, but warship costs have far exceeded that number. The battleship HMS Barham (04), built a century ago, cost about 2.5 million pounds. The latest British Type 26 frigate, a ship about a quarter the size of the battleship, costs 8 billion pounds for 8 ships, once R&D is factored in. So run your converter again based on 2.5 million from 1913 and see how many tens of millions of pounds it yields, compared to the billion actually being spent.
 * Also, do some digging, there have been plenty of other discussions on Wiki invalidating inflation calculators for capital costs that have nothing to do with changes in the cost of living.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 03:24, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
 * The inflation conversion is misleading at best even in dealing with items affected by COLAs. It doesn't (can't) take account of cost changes that have varied at rates other than the nominal COLA. IMO, it shouldn't be used at all.  TREKphiler  any time you're ready, Uhura  09:37, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Good point. Just to use some examples from my own experience from when I was a kid in the late '70s, paperback books in the US have increased by about a factor of 6 or so, but gasoline has merely doubled. And I have no idea what those ratios are for those in the UK, Germany or Zimbabwe.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 11:24, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
 * ♠I was thinking of the U.S. auto industry in particular. Prices in the '80s were artificially inflated as a result of the "voluntary import quotas". There's also changes in wage/pay structure that complicate things even further, so even using the number of weeks/months' wages (which I would have favored) isn't truly accurate, either. And when this is all true, using a script seems like a really bad idea.
 * ♠FYI, if anybody cares, this issue's also been raised (by me...) here.  TREKphiler  any time you're ready, Uhura  16:27 & 16:32, 12 March 2018 (UTC)