The Dreadnought Project

tone · Site Admin Joined: 29 Oct 2004 Posts: 486 Location: Boston

Would anyone with Conways volumes for 1860 (and possibly 1906) be able and willing to enter data to seed the Wiki for ship pages?

In essence, one will have to, for each ship class, create a page with a boilerplate intro and then flesh out a datablock with citations detailing a few facts about each unit, e.g.:

name
launch date
builder
fate (by default, "Sold")
fate date

And, if available, pendant numbers, order date or details and possibly laid down date

An example would be, as in a Russian monitor class:

Jim Broshot · Posted: Sun Sep 02, 2012 12:13 pm Post subject:

I've done this, sort of, for the British First Class Cruisers (armored cruisers), from the Orlando class (1885) to the Minotaur class (1905). I used Conways and other sources (I have the Ian Allen WWI Royal Navy book, and the contemporary publications you can find online, Brassey's Naval Annual, etc.). But the data is on a Excel sheet.

I have one for French armored cruisers but it is incomplete.

tone · Site Admin Joined: 29 Oct 2004 Posts: 486 Location: Boston

Jim, would you be patient and willing enough to enter the same data for our site?

There would be a few quirks, such as how we footnote such things (footnoting every element is a goal for us... but I am working to make syntax for such as painless as it could ever be).

tone

Jim Broshot · Posted: Sun Sep 02, 2012 7:07 pm Post subject:

tone (?)

I can try. You will have to send me a template - I'm not a Wiki type contributor and used to do these lists in pencil and paper.

Footnoting will be a problem. I know what I consulted but didn't make an entry for each ship.

tone · Site Admin Joined: 29 Oct 2004 Posts: 486 Location: Boston

I think the task must really be one of using books to ensure these have footnotes. It's hard to do correctly, as I occasionally find even my favorite baseline source (Conways) has an error. Wikipedia benefits from many eyes, but I also find the rate error there... plus you must also rely on inference or consensus when major sources don't agree.

I wonder if perhaps I could start by scraping Wikipedia and then checking the data against Conways and add footnotes where they agree and check additional sources when they differ? That makes the data entry process one of primarily fact-checking.

tone