Talk:HNLMS Friesland (P842)

Military history: Maritime / Dutch / European Start‑class

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Two questions[edit]

I have two questions about this article:

Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers, "Publication dates in an article's citations should all use the same format" and "Access and archive dates in an article's citations should all use the same format". This article currently uses both DMY and ISO. What is the preferred format for this article?
Reference #4 includes a translated title of "Dutch Warships for Polish?" Should this be "Dutch Warships for Poland?"

Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 18:45, 5 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Originally all dates in the citations were yyyy-mm-dd. The edit summary for the edit that changed some of them credits help from an automated editing aid. I am not a fan of this kind of aid for exactly this reason. About ten years ago an automated tool expert, who I won't name, unilaterally decided to set a bot to work on every BLP, placing a {{defaultsort}} that followed the assumption that every individual had a european style surname that was the last component of their name. Of course this assumption didn't hold true for people with traditional Arabic names, traditional Japanese and Chinese names.

This enormous mistake caused years of confusion -- based on all the hours of my own time it wasted, this overly confident tool expert probably wasted thousands of hours of other volunteers time in their effort to have automated tools "save time".

All kinds of later volunteers assured me they knew the individuals with Arabic names that were on my watchlist should be treated as if their names followed the european convention of an inheritable surname, because of the existence of a {{defaultsort}}. Clearly, in hindsight, the placing of a {{defaultsort}} fields should never have been trusted to a robot.

WRT the translated title, you are probably correct. I relied on google translate, but your alternate wording does make more sense.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 01:42, 6 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Geo Swan: Looking at the edit history, it appears that the two edits that include "AWB" in the summary were not the edits that changed the date formats, and there have been no robot edits to this article. I've manually changed them all to ISO. I've also changed the trans_title from "Polish" to "Poland".

Volunteer editors and bot operators are humans who have good intentions but sometimes make mistakes. Both automated editing aids and Google Translate are similar - they are both helpful tools, but both require some amount of human oversight to prevent mistakes. Happy editing! GoingBatty (talk) 03:38, 6 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestion[edit]

G'day, great work so far on this article! Just a suggestion, it might be worth structuring it in a similar way to, for example, Yugoslav torpedo boat T3, using a "Background" section to cover why it was built, then a "Design and construction" section to explain those aspects. All things in the infobox should be covered in the body of the article. You could then have a "Career" or "History" section for the operations it has been involved in since commissioning. That would bring it into line with the usual practice for ship articles, and it is then often possible to duplicate much of the "Background" and "Design and construction" sections in articles for other ships of the class. Cheers, Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 03:15, 12 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]