Talk:Suggestion/@comment-25490263-20150216091405/@comment-861160-20150307035948

The reposted comment on the first page only lists the proposed alterations, not any of the reasoning behind it. It gives a broken (at least on my browser) link to this thread which has all the relevant opinions, so of course it wouldn't really foster much discussion on the subject in the new thread as why the changes were happening in the first place are not apparent at all from that thread alone.

Apparently the Mogami-class examples I gave were just drawn off of a mistake resulting from Mathiaszealot's misunderstanding, so I'll let that slide.

After thinking about this a bit today, I arrived at the conclusion that the issue really boils down to two differences in opinion:

1.  The purpose of Template:Shiplist. Is it primarily a navigational feature of this site (I don't think anyone can argue that it isn't), or is it also a tool which should be as complete and unambiguous as possible at the cost of screen real estate? Space which, if you look at proposed/executed changes to collapsed tabs and expedition tables, appears to be a thing that we care about.

I view the template as a navigational tool. I access it every time I look for a specific ship/hull classification page via Nagato's picture, and it's also present on every single ship info page as well. I think that this is its primary purpose. By adding more classifications and rows to it it just becomes cluttered with 70% empty lines because some classes are just too unique. As I said before I don't mind having the links on the table somewhere for the sake of full disclosure, but duplicating entries in the table to fill a row doesn't seem like it accomplishes much to me outside of expanding the size of the template, because it's possible to get to every ship page and max stat page without doing that.

To make an analogy, I view the Shiplist template as a Table of Contents. It has every entry listed once in a logical order so you can flip to the right page. The new system makes it more akin to an index, where as many relevant terms are listed as possible, with page numbers (links) to every relevant page on the topic.

If we consider the case of a complete stranger to Kancolle, then I don't think just looking at the shiplist template will do them much good anyways because it's a text list of names that will mean nothing to the typical layperson, and they're probably better served by the By Class page which there for that express purpose. You need some knowledge of the game to utililze Template:Shiplist no matter what, so I think modifying it based on the assumption of no prior knowledge is a mistake.

2.  Is it better to classify ships based on their starting class, or their final eventual remodel?

First of yes, yes, I know Chitose-class is base AV and not CVL, but that's just an exception here I can live with.

This point is certainly more subjective than the previous, but I think that base remodel is the better way to classify ships for the purpose of this template. Of course on other pages that doesn't necessarily hold true, but everyone that's had a Kiso or a Mogami knows they started out as a light cruiser or heavy cruiser, and thus there is nothing illogical about looking for them under light cruiser or heavy cruiser. This holds true regardless of whether or not we have aviation cruiser and torpedo cruiser rows and it was the operating logic behind the old table, so people are used to it already.

I also don't think it's misleading to put two classifications in one row because the logicical process that would need to occur for someone to be misled by this (on top of never viewing the detailed comparison pages or individual ship pages), for example with Torpedo Cruiser is:

The heading says Light Cruiser and Torpedo Cruiser -> Everything in the list is both Light Cruiser and Torpedo cruiser -> There is no fault in the assumption that Naka, Isuzu, etc. are all Torpedo Cruisers

At this point warning bells should probably kick in, which should lead to the alternative conclusion: This table lists light cruisers and torpedo cruisers in the same row because they're all light cruisers at some point. And then they will hopefully confirm this by visiting the relevant list pages.

Granted, this is the internet and there is no greater force in the universe than stupidity, but I could also make parallel counter-arguements that people will confuse Tones as exclusively heavy cruisers because they didn't bother to read the list in the heavy cruiser row. Either way there is some potential for ambiguity.

Thus, I would rather have the version that is complete, but doesn't sacrifice the size of the table.