# Talk:Ottoman ironclad Mesudiye

Should not this article be titled "Ottoman battleship Mesudiye", it seems that most relevant sources refer to it as such, and per wikipedia common name i imagine thats what it should be.XavierGreen (talk) 20:56, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

No, the ship spent most of its career as an ironclad, and given its small size and the fact that it never actually received it's main guns, it's hard to actually call the ship a battleship. The 1903 reconstruction produced at best a weak coastal defense ship. Parsecboy (talk) 10:09, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
Your own personal assessment is original research, as I indicated above, the vast majority of sources call her a battleship, so per [[1]] it should be titled as such.XavierGreen (talk) 13:22, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
No, they don't. Neither volume of Conway's refers to her as a pre-dreadnought, for instance. And there are a number of other references that call her an ironclad after the reconstruction: Gallipoli: Command Under Fire, Gallipoli: The Battlefield Guide, and To Crown the Waves: The Great Navies of the First World War (which refers to her as an "armored vessel", directly before referring to Turgut Reis and Barbaros Hayreddin as battleships). Contemporary experts also referred to her as an ironclad: Brassey's Naval Annual and this edition of International Marine Engineering, and Hazell's Annual (which refers to the ship as a "coast defense ironclad"), for instance. Even Sondhaus can't make up his mind, calling her an ironclad in The Great War at Sea. More curiously, The Balkan Wars 1912-1913 and The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East both refer to the ship as a "cruiser" (which is arguably a fair characterization for a ship armed only with 6" guns). Parsecboy (talk) 14:16, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
Oh, and I had a look at The Ottoman Steam Navy, which is the best source you'll get on the subject, and they describe Mesudiye after her 1903 refit with what I imagine was the official designation "Muharbebe gemi (armoured vessel)", rather than "zirhli (battleship)". Parsecboy (talk) 10:06, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Here. Parsecboy (talk) 00:54, 17 December 2023 (UTC)