-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Stan Shebs wrote: | For instance, we've | sucked in quite a bit from the Dictionary of American Naval | Fighting Ships; the content is about as authoritative as one | can get, and is frequently written as well as anything else | in wikipedia, in which case there's not much to improve on | once links are added. However, there are times when we have | to prune out the anti-communist rah-rah left over from the 50s, | update with ship info postdating a DANFS volume, and in a very | very few cases - fix an actual mistake. Over time I expect | that the wikipedia ship articles will become better than their | DANFS ancestors. | | Stan Those links immediately make our articles better than the DANFS originals. You don't have to wonder how [[Abner Read]] served on both the aircraft carrier ''Enterprise'' and the submarine ''Dolphin'' -- you can click on the links and realize that he served on the schooner ''Enterprise'' and the brig ''Dolphin''. A DANFS article may specify that a ship visited a foreign country and was reviewed by "the king"; once I've imported it, you will not only see the King's name, but you can also click on it. On another tentacle, refusing to reuse anything ever written, no matter how authoritative, is silly. The public domain is a Good Thing[tm], and I intend to make full use of it. - -- ~ Sean Barrett | The pellet with the poison's in the flagon ~ sean(a)epoptic.com | with the dragon; the vessel with the pestle ~ | has the brew that is true. --The Court Jester