Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Traditional fishing boat


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep.  MBisanz  talk 18:57, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

Traditional fishing boat

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

Fails WP:SYNTH, as no reference presents it as a coherent topic outside of the history of a specific culture. Some references, such as [https://www.fao.org/3/a0699e/A0699E04.htm#4.1.5 Ref. 1], mention some variant of the term in passing without clearly defining the or presenting it as a coherent topic; that reference distinguishes it from motorized vessels, while [https://web.archive.org/web/20081121042952/http://www.endangeredcoast.org/home.htm Ref. 37] (already a dubious source) and Smylie (2013) use it in the context of a specific culture, and Ref 33 does not use the word traditional at all. Similarly, the vast majority of the contents of this article are a mishmash of various boat types and some WP:OR, and it does not really provide a coherent definition of the topic. See also Categories_for_discussion/Log/2022_March_30, which has similar concerns. –LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄ ) 21:51, 14 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: History, Geography,  and Transportation. –LaundryPizza03 ( d  c̄ ) 21:51, 14 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Comment: This really is an article that needs discussion. I visited it, quite expecting to !vote delete. But what I began to see was a sort of fleshed-out list article of a sort that works very well in an encyclopaedia. It is not synthesis to present a whole range of small fishing boats from across the whole world in a single article. In fact that is almost a definition of encyclopaedic: an inclusive overview. Had the article stopped there, I would happily have gone for Keep. But having declared at the top that the article would be an overview of "boats used for fishing that are or were built from designs that existed before engines became available", it fulfilled its remit beautifully (and with references) down to Catamarans. It then wandered rather, and started to describe the constructional characteristics of boats, ropes, planking etc., which had it stuck to traditional pre-engine fishing boats might have been okay(ish) - except it couldn't resist the temptation to wander off into boatbuilding generally, and by the end of "Planking" was wiki-linking the diesel-engine, which is hardly in the spirit of ".. before engines became available". It then lost the plot completely, in "European boats", which abandons all pretense at restricting itself to fishing boats, and covers the Viking longboat, cargo boats, decked schooners and more or less anything else it felt like.
 * My recommendation is therefore Keep up to the end of Catamarans, and Delete the rest of the material, which has nothing to do with an encyclopaedic overview of small fishing-boats the world over. If any of it can be usefully Merged to other articles, fine, but it doesn't belong here. And yes, that's three decisions in one AfD response, completely illegal and no doubt a headache for the bot that has to assess my viewpoint, but my defence is that the article itself is so mixed up, it requires a mixed-up response. Elemimele (talk) 23:17, 14 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Comment - : your view seems strange and unbalanced to me. The evolution of fishing boats cannot be put into any kind of perspective without appreciating something about the technology and evolution of rope, hull consruction techniques and methods of propulsion. In turn, much of this evolution was driven by what worked for fishermen. Further, if you read the final section on European boats again, you will find it is almost wholly about traditional fishing boats. I cannot imagine what you are seeing there that could lead you to think otherwise. — Epipelagic (talk) 02:24, 17 April 2022 (UTC)
 * then the scope and arrangement of the article need redefinition. The scope is deliberately and explicitly restricted at the top to designs that existed before engines became available. Implicit in the article's arrangement (the fact that it begins with a set of sections dealing with coracles, canoes, reed-boats, rafts etc.; and the emphasis on undecked, open boats, with a statement that most larger boats have engines) is that the article is restricted to small boats of the sort used by indigenous peoples. This is a reasonable scope, because if you extend it to include all types of boats that could be used for fishing, it becomes a list of all boats. That's precisely what's happened in the European boat section, where we start with two paragraphs on Viking longboats, of a sort rowed by 30 men, probably not a routine fishing vessel - but these boats gave us the constructional techniques that evolved right through to 20thC fishing boats. The distinction between fishing and other boats, in Europe, is a bit artificial, because innovations in one sort of boat naturally influenced the building of boats for other purposes. If we then add details of the evolution of constructional materials and techniques, the scope of the article becomes "the entire history of boats and boatbuilding". In some way we have to restrict this article to a manageable field. That's why I'm suggesting trimming it to just the indigenous small boats as was probably the original intent. The history of boat building is pretty important, but we can't cover everything here. Elemimele (talk) 08:17, 17 April 2022 (UTC)


 * : You seem to want to restrict the article to small boats of the sort used by indigenous people. You claim that "was probably the original intent" of the article. For what it is worth I am the original author, back in the mists of time, and I can tell you that confining the article to boats used by indigenous people was not the original intent. The original intent was to cover traditional fishing boats generally, including European boats. That is why the article was called "traditional fishing boat" and not "indigenous fishing boat". Your claim that "the scope of the article becomes the entire history of boats and boatbuilding" is just not true. The article is an overview of traditional fishing boats, and naturally includes some acknowledgement of relevant contruction techniques. The article contains 4,171 words, way short of what is regarded as a long article on wikipedia. — Epipelagic (talk) 02:14, 19 April 2022 (UTC)
 * thanks for the clarification. In that case, I think the scope of the article is too big and ill-defined for its current title. I'd suggest removing the reference to fishing from the title. Look at the section on canoes and kayaks; it acknowledges (rightly) that they were used both for fishing and transport, it mentions canoe clubs, who don't have anything to do with fishing, and it mentions large historical canoes that were probably intended for 18 people, where we honestly have no idea what they were for. The European section mentions Viking longboats, which aren't generally associated with fishing. This has happened because it is impossible to separate the history and construction of small fishing boats from the history and construction of small boats for all other purposes; the same people were building all sorts of boats, for all purposes, using the same constructional techniques; a person who lives on the edge of a river might use their dug-out canoe to fish, to get to the other side, or to convey stuff downriver. In its current form, the article is analogous to Small cars used to convey children to school, an article that would inevitably get confused with Small cars used to go shopping and would much better be renamed Small cars and allowed to get on with the job. I'm not an enemy of the current article. But at the moment, it doesn't deliver what its title says it should, so either the article needs to be cut back to the subject matter of the title, or the title needs to be changed to reflect the subject matter of the article. I'm sympathetic to a change of title, because WP currently doesn't seem to have any other overview of the construction of small boats across the globe. Changing the title doesn't, of course, stop the article from discussing how the construction of small boats was driven partly by the need for fishing vessels. Elemimele (talk) 08:38, 19 April 2022 (UTC)


 * : I gather you think the article should be deleted because all that is needed is an article called perhaps Traditional boat. The article Traditional fishing boat was written specifically to complement the article called Fishing vessels. It is not intended to be a list as someone suggested below, but a brief historical account of the evolution of fishing vessels. Following your reasoning, we should also delete the article called Fishing vessel – we need only an article called something like Aquatic vessel since fishing vessels float like other aquatic vessels, and there can be some overlap between them. If we continue to reason like this, we should be able to shrink the size of Wikipedia to one tenth of what it is today. Then all that will remain is to get rid of the rest. "Traditional fishing boat" is a coherent concept that is widely used, with 1.58 million entries in Google Search. According to Google Books the term is also used in 6,830 books, and according to Google Scholar in 929 academic publications. — Epipelagic (talk) 23:56, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

Keep: WP:SYNTH is irrelevant. WP:PLOT could of been argued but that wasn't brought up by the OP. Bomberswarm2 (talk) 01:32, 15 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Delete: Actually this article needs some improvements otherwise it is meeting notability on a generic topic. But i just checked Copyvio and detected copyright violations, it is 80% copied from https://www.flickr.com/photos/danielmennerich/31297639612. If the issue can be resolved, I will change my vote. Jeni Wolf (talk) 12:02, 15 April 2022 (UTC)
 * the link you've supplied seems only to contain the text on coracles, and was posted to flickr long after the text appeared on Wikipedia. Here's the WP article, for example, on 8th March 2015: . The Flikr article is dated October 15th 2016. Flikr should have credited taking the text from here, but there's little point in fighting this sort of thing, it happens all the while. Elemimele (talk) 13:11, 15 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I posted the Flickr url on the basis of this report. Jeni Wolf (talk) 13:22, 15 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I don't doubt the two texts are near identical. But so far as I know, that tool merely looks for similarity, it doesn't check who copied who. You'll see at the top of the report, a comment "Be aware that other websites can copy from Wikipedia, so check the results carefully, especially for older or well-developed articles". In this case, it seems to me that the Flikr text appeared after Wikipedia's suggesting that Flikr copied Wikipedia, not vice versa. But I'm not an expert on this, so if anyone else cares to comment... Elemimele (talk) 16:27, 15 April 2022 (UTC)
 * May be you are right, the tool is not always right. Jeni Wolf (talk) 03:44, 16 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Comment per above discussion i am changing my vote to Keep. Jeni Wolf (talk) 03:52, 16 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Purge -- This would make a valid list article, which should be kept short, mainly existing as a means of finding the "main" sub-articles. It certainly should not have so many photos.  Their presence upsets the balance of the article.  This right place for them is in  the main articles.  About one photo per item would be appropriate.  Peterkingiron (talk) 16:50, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Sandstein   09:52, 22 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep – the article should be kept as it is. It was originally written about 13 years ago to complement Fishing vessels, and could do with some updating. A section on catamarans and outrigger boats was added about 4 years ago. I have deleted the section, since it was not really about fishing boats and may have been the source of some of the claims here that the article itself was not about fishing boats. – Epipelagic (talk) 01:47, 21 April 2022 (UTC)
 * That deletion is, I think, perhaps a loss, because catamarans and outrigger boats have been used as traditional fishing boats. You've said above that I think this article should be deleted; please don't put words in my mouth. I think the article's scope's got a bit out of hand, but I think every single word of it is interesting and encyclopaedic. The only question in my mind is whether its title should enlarged to include all the interesting stuff it contains, or whether the information in the article that isn't about fishing boats should be moved to a more general overview on the history and construction of small, traditional boats. I really, really am trying not to pick a fight here. The aim isn't to win anything, it's to end up with a better encyclopaedia. I do, however, apologise that the way I expressed my views in my first comment was untactful and overly forceful. Elemimele (talk) 05:46, 21 April 2022 (UTC) (to make this clear, I'll strike the word delete in my original flippant 3-way decision Elemimele (talk) 05:48, 21 April 2022 (UTC))
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.


 * I don't think that deleting an individual article is the way to address this. If changing the structure of articles on boats and ships is needed then it would be better to have a discussion about that, probably at a Wikiproject, rather than a deletion discussion about just one article. Phil Bridger (talk) 08:52, 23 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Keep . Hibernian (talk) 21:32, 29 April 2022 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it.</b> Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.