Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ongiara (ship, 1885)
I started this article, and a bunch of other articles on ships.  No one ever challenges whether we should cover Naval vessels, coast guard vessels, research vessels, because, I suggest, maritime vessels are ''different'' from the vehicles the advice in the essay otability (vehicles) is aimed at.  Some years ago I attended a conference where a speaker gave a surprisingly interesting and memorable talk on what we could learn about life in the middle ages from the extensive notes kept by the torture teams employed by the Roman Catholic Church's inquisition.  The most memorable point he made is that historians have many mysteries about peoples' lives in the past because certain kinds of information seemed ''"common knowledge"'' -- and there was a tendency to not record what was considered ''"common knowledge"''.  There is the same tendency today to not record ''"common knowledge"''.  His final point about the inquisition, was that the inquisition's clerks' detailed recording of every tortured confession back then actually answered a lot of historian's questions.  I suggest there is a class of topics, that we should cover, even if they seem ''"common knowledge"''.  Topics that seem "common knowledge", are worth covering, when we have good, reliable sources, because "common knowledge" can be wrong, because this is a world-wide project, and what seems obvious to locals is opaque to readers in ohter parts of the world.  Because When we rely on important infrastructure, like ships, ports, railways, airports, rapid transit, expressways, I suggest they are worth covering here, even if nothing out of the ordinary happened, provided we have reliable sources.  I suggest even the normal functioning of important infrastructure is worth covering.  The advice in the otability (vehicles), in so far as it has value, is addressed to artifacts that are (1) essentially identical to all the others in their class; (2) undertake essentially identical missions to all those in their class; (3) often they undertake routine tasks with other artifacts in their class -- fighter aircraft fly in squadrons; freight trains require multiple locomotives per train; buses keep schedules with other identical buses.  An argument can be made that there is no value in individual vehicles, like this, even if they are expensive, because their missions are generally routine and repetitive.  Ships aren't like that.  Patrol vessels get called upon to perform unscheduled rescues, freighters may go to different ports, on each voyage, because they carry different cargos.  Even ships like the Ongiara, which spent most of her working life on one mission, can't adequately be covered in a list article on river ferries, as each river is different
— User:Geo, 13:24, 19 June 2012 (UTC)
Stance: keep
Cited policy: WP:N||WP:N (Wikipedia:Notability)