Category:ShipLink Templates

FredBot creates shorthand templates so (human) editors can more easily create links to our ship articles without having to remember the ship's year of launch, type any special characters, or properly employ italics, etc. These templates also offer some neat options to further describe the ship.

The Basic Idea

Each such has the form of XX-ShipName, where XX is a two-letter country code (UK, AU, FR, DE, AH, JP, etc). It produces a link to the ship of the given name.

Ships of same Nation with the same Name

If there is more than one such ship, the last one of them launched for which we have pages is referenced by the default template. Previous ships of the same name may be referenced by other templates with numeric prefixes (1, 2, 3, etc), counting backward in time. For instance:

• H.M.S. Dreadnought (1906) is to be referenced by {{UK-Dreadnought}}, as it is the last ship by that name that we have a page for
• the turret ship H.M.S. Dreadnought launched in 1875 is referenced by a template named {{UK-1Dreadnought}}, as it is the next-previously launched ship by that name.
• if we create a page for an even older ship by that name, we'd use {{UK-2Dreadnought}}

The charm to this convention is that one seldom has to think about ships with the same names when working with the World War I period ships. Only when you know there was a later ship of the same name do you have to ask, "How many later ones were there?" The answer to that question is the digit you place in the prefix.

The dismal aspect to this little innovation is the sickly feeling we get when a more modern ship page is created for an existing ship name. Tony generally has to handle these, and FredBot "bumps" all the existing templates to higher digit prefixes and automatically updates all references on the site. It's ugly.

Parameters to include Type and/or Prefix

A parameter named "f" can be set to "p", "t", "c", "pt" or "pc" to cause the name to be embellished with any national prefix (e.g., "H.M.S.") or the ship type, e.g., "armoured cruiser" or ship class, e.g., "London Class heavy cruiser", complete with a link to the page for the ship class. It's pretty neat!

For instance, using Devonshire as an example,

• {{UK-Devonshire}} produces: Devonshire
• {{UK-Devonshire|f=t}} produces: heavy cruiser Devonshire
• {{UK-Devonshire|f=c}} produces: London Class heavy cruiser Devonshire
• {{UK-Devonshire|f=p}} produces: H.M.S. Devonshire
• {{UK-Devonshire|f=pt}} produces: heavy cruiser H.M.S. Devonshire
• {{UK-Devonshire|f=cp}} produces: London Class heavy cruiser H.M.S. Devonshire