Template talk:Ancient seafaring

Lack of historical content at the linked articles
One of the first things I noticed when building this and adding links to relevant articles, was that in a lot of cases, there is little or no content about antiquity in the linked articles. Take, for example, the four articles listed in the second row, labeled "Locomotion". Of those, the Sailing article has a decent few paragraphs about the topic that someone seeking some information on Sailing in antiquity might find informative. But not one of the other three articles (Paddling, Towpath, Punt (boat)) has anything at all to say about early origins. This is true also of many of the linked articles, and points out content gaps in those articles.

Maybe given the volunteer nature of the project, this shouldn't be too surprising, but it does point out some gaps in our coverage of the ancient origins of many concepts still familiar today. It's kind of an unexpected benefit of having the nav template, in that it may lead us to backfilling some important early history into a lot of articles that already exist, but lack such background currently. An understandable WP:RECENTISM bias, no doubt, but still one that shoiuld be addressed. Mathglot (talk) 21:16, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I raised this at WT:SHIPS. Mathglot (talk) 07:52, 1 December 2023 (UTC) Here. Mathglot (talk) 09:59, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Historians and archaeologists
I'm thinking that maybe we don't need the level-3 labels "Historians" and "Archaeologists"; we could maybe just drop them, and just link them all under "Scholars". (Originally, I had that label as "Historians", but that didn't work, because of the large number of scholars contributing to the field who really weren't.) Mathglot (talk) 21:35, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

Piracy
I couldn't find too many articles to link under this group label, and I'm not sure if I haven't looked hard enough, or we don't cover the topic adequately, or there just isn't that much in the historical record about piracy in antiquity and so Wikipedia just reflects that in our coverage. Should we get rid of this group and move those two links somewhere else, or try to expand it? Mathglot (talk) 21:37, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

Vertical height and collapsible groups
Due to the vertical size of the template, I'm thinking of switching to template Navbox with collapsible groups. See for example, Nav box India topics at the bottom of the India article, or the second and third nav boxes at the bottom of Cleopatra. This template is still quite a bit smaller than nay of those, but it might be approaching the length where collapsing parts of it might help. Mathglot (talk) 09:34, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Reimplemented using collapsible groups in this edit. Mathglot (talk) 12:06, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Galleys and polyremes
Currently, bireme, trireme, quad, etc. are under polyreme, as they should be, which puts them into parentheses as a subgroup of polyreme. However, as they are all types of galley, rightly they should be under that, too, but that would give two levels of parentheses, but would that be too confusing for a reader? Ideas? Mathglot (talk) 20:21, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Wrecks and relics
At this writing, this is part of group 6, Research and education; but I'm wondering if it would be better to locate it under group 3, History? Mathglot (talk) 12:04, 21 December 2023 (UTC)