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US vs U.S.

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Wikipedia:Manual of Style says: When referring to the United States, using "U.S." rather than "US" makes it easier to search for automatically. When referring to the United States in a long abbreviation (USA, USN, USAF), stops (periods) should not be used.

The following categories need to be re-named to conform to this practice (there are many more which are already properly named). -- Beland 02:25, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

  • I agree with Beland. Also, these are way too specific, planes have multipurposes you could end up with a single plane having 10+ categories. Sortior 03:44, Dec 16, 2004 (UTC)
  • Blanket-support both Beland and Sortior. This is going to be a fairly major task however. Anybody willing to take on the task of merging and cleaning up? --fvw* 06:34, 2004 Dec 17 (UTC)
    • (responding to both above) Role in aircraft categories is always the primary original one that the aircraft is designed for. In the vast majority of cases, this fits neatly into a single category. A full description of the scheme can be found here - a scheme that has been successfully applied to every one of some 1,400 aircraft articles that we have here on Wikipedia. It's not broke, and doesn't need fixing :) As for US vs U.S., I agree that we should follow our own manual of style - isn't this a perfect job for a bot? --Rlandmann 11:34, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)
'Broke' isn't the word I was thinking of, rather 'bloated'. —Mike 02:20, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)
Sure it's big, but it's also logical, consistent, extensible, well-documented, and scrupulously well-maintained. In any case - if there is to be a serious move to recategorise the aircraft articles, it should probably be discussed first with WikiProject:Aircraft. --Rlandmann 04:49, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
  • I am always in favor of "U.S." instead of "US" (or "United States", which is much better if it is being used as a noun instead of an adjective), but that's a personal preference. However, we really ought to be consistent here, and "U.S" is at least marginally preferable (since no one has succeeded in getting that provision removed from the Manual Style to date), so let's go for it. I'll do the deleting if Pearle will do the moving. -[[User:Aranel|Aranel ("Sarah")]] 02:28, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)
  • Stop the presses! (It may be a cheesy line, but I love it.) Before we go about moving all of these I would be willing to pick through these and see how much of this we can simplify. For an example of what I am proposing, refer to Category:Swiss military trainer aircraft. I was able to reassign the 5 articles to two categories (they only had one to begin) and eliminate 10 categories from the structure without any loss of information. —Mike 03:05, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)
  • Regardless of the MoS, I can say that I have never seen anything in America where United States was abbreviated U.S. In fact, we often abbreviate United Nations as U.N. and United Kingdom as U.K., even though these should be UN and UK. Ergo, I'll go with U.S. over US. →Iñgólemo← (talk) 18:15, 2004 Dec 21 (UTC)
    • Did you mean to say "I have never seen anything in America where United States was abbreviated US"? (That would seem to make sense based on the rest of your comments.) -[[User:Aranel|Aranel ("Sarah")]] 19:02, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Comment of —Mike copied from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Aircraft/Categories: "Also, at least a few of us believe that many of these categories are too specific. Some categories only have a single article with little hope of adding more"

That's definitely true, but then, they're not the bulk of the tree. It's also worth considering that at 1,400 articles, we still only have something like 1/4 of the coverage of Jane's Encyclopedia of Aviation, which details "over 5,000" aircraft types. Moreover, our coverage is heavily biased towards aircraft by major manufacturers (particularly US and UK firms) and towards military aircraft, reflecting (I believe) systemic biases.

Mike continues: "users are required to navigate through multiple layers of categories to find the articles", and again I agree. It has been a longtime goal of mine to implement a series of shortcut templates throughout the hierarchy, linking (for example) Category:US bomber aircraft 1930-1939 to US bomber aircraft of other decades, other US military aircraft of the same decade, and other nations' bomber aircraft of that decade.

:As a demonstration, I've just implemented the above example - please take a look -- Rlandmann 03:40, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

You can see the beginnings of this in place amongst the topmost levels of the hierarchy (amongst Category:Aircraft 1960-1969 or Category:German civil aircraft for example). If consensus emerges that this is an area of major concern, I'm prepared to give an undertaking to implement that scheme throughout the entire hierarchy within a reasonable timeframe (say 90 days?). --Rlandmann 12:40, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

  • The goal of the discussion here is not to determine if we should condense these (I personally feel that it would be more useful if we did, but I'm not an expert or even an interested amateur in the field), but whether we should rename the lot of them to have "U.S." instead of "US". Can you comment on whether you would support that change in principle? (When I say, "in principle", I mean "as long as you personally don't have to do the moving". ;) As for adding templates, I imagine that Beland could have Pearle add them as part of the movie, if you would be willing to create them and explain how they should be applied. -[[User:Aranel|Aranel ("Sarah")]] 15:31, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I agree that this discussion should be about renaming US to U.S. (as Beland originally framed it) - I'll state (again) that I fully support such a move. I'd even be happy to do it by hand. If I'd been aware that our MoS gave preference to U.S., I would have created the category tree to reflect this from the beginning. However, having said that, some contributors to this discussion have steered in in the direction of "let's condense the aircraft categories" at an early stage, so I feel it necessary to make the case against. --Rlandmann 22:11, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The navigation templates are nice when you want to get somewhere fast, but they are also take up a rather large fraction of the category pages (at least Category:US bomber aircraft 1930-1939). One of th major reasons we have the category mechanism is to make things easier to maintain. If every time the membership of a certain category changes, we also need to update a template, and vice versa, the two will gradually drift out of sync unless there are people who specifically come by and fix those problems, or someone (not me) does automated checks. If it were me, I'd probably just use categories alone. But, having pointed out the downsides, I'll let the aircraft folks decide whether the benefits justify the costs.

As far as implementation goes, if we have consensus here for US -> U.S., I'll just do that to get it out of the way and get it off my style-correction todo list. Others can feel free to proceed with reorganization or consolidation in parallel; it should be easy enough for you to tell when the punctuation conversion has happened and to cope appropriately. Y'all can coordinate the reorg on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Aircraft/Categories or whereever, and bring it back here when we get to the point of actually needing to delete categories again. -- Beland 02:10, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Pearle is working on the below now. -- Beland 03:43, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Oops, this move conflicts with the following previously approved:

Move to Category:U.S. federal government images. Neutrality/talk 20:24, Dec 4, 2004 (UTC)

Currently contains Category:California Government images. While California is a part of the US Government structure, it is not part of the US federal government. -- Cyrius|✎ 06:13, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Moved out. Neutrality/talk 03:38, Dec 13, 2004 (UTC)

I've previously accidentally tried null edits, but the server seems to ignore them. Doing an action=purge (instead of action=edit) on these image pages seems to have no effect. Maybe if you, as an admin, purge the cache of the new category page or the template itself, that will fix it. Otherwise, I guess we need to ask for help on the technical page of the Village pump. -- Beland 04:37, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Done

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The below are ready to be deleted if they have not been already. -- Beland 07:35, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The following also need not be capitalized except for U.S. -- Beland 02:25, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

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