User talk:Serenity

Military Ranks

I would have messaged you before now but I only just now figured out how to use the talk function.

I don't appreciate you just blanket undoing all of my changes which is why I simply remade them. This is a wiki so I fully expect my revisions to be further revised to some degree, but I think it's incredibly disrespectful to just undo them in their entirety. In addition many of my changes were clerical (changing lower case letters to capitals for example) and undoing those to me makes no sense.

Second, the reason I keep removing the Petty Officer Second Class/Master Sergeant and Rear Admiral ranks has nothing to do with them not being on Ron Moore's list. It has to do with the fact that unlike other ranks like Rear Admiral, which although not mentioned on Ron Moore's list, have been definitively established on screen; those two ranks have not been established by any authority for the show onscreen or otherwise. In addition I thought we abandoned trying to match it with the U.S. Rank system when we struck that part of the chart. I think we should limit the ranks we list to those that have been definitively established, especially given how complex the rank structure is getting.

Third I believe it's valid to offer possible explanations for rank insignias that haven't been shown. I believe you yourself offered a great deal of speculation on the page dealing with Valkyrie, and if not at least supported them when I tried to edit them to support different theories; so I don't see how it can be ok to speculate on one page but not on another as long as the speculation is reasonably supported.

If you have a problem with something I put up let's discuss it rather than engaging in an edit war, such tactics are completely counterproductive and a waste of both of our time. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Grandmaester314 (talk • contribs).

The ranking system is about to become even more complex. However, I've had to revert your edits and lock the page temporarily, since I really don't want an edit war to go on—plus Serenity's are the closest to the actual stuff used on the show, as opposed to your edits. (As a consultant / assistant researcher on the Battlestar Galactica Props and Costumes auctions run by PropWorx and Unviersal, I have access to behind-the-scenes documentation regarding the rank pins used in the show. I'll add the missing ranks and their corresponding pins here in a few weeks or so, since it's not a high priority for me at this moment.)

Also, given Serenity's status as an administrator and the fact that he can edit the page even if it's locked, I'll ask that Serenity not edit the ranks page in question until it's been unlocked again.

Don't take this action personally. It's just that none of us should be wasting our time editing the page until I get the chance to add what needs to be added there. Thanks! -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate - Battlestar Pegasus} 04:41, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

• As for the style edits. Ranks are not capitalized unless they're used as titles, followed by a name. That's what other pages here do, or should at least. It's the standard that Wikipedia uses (although a bit inconsistently) and it's what's used in the real world generally; for example here or the official Navy style guide. That's why I changed that. Yes, the ranks are capitalized in the table, but that's a bit different from prose.
• I reverted some of the additions to the names, because some of them were superfluous. It's just supposed to be a few examples, not an exhaustive list of all officers. So I removed Shaw as lieutenant for example. And the stuff about "Razor Part 2" and such doesn't make much sense. There aren't any parts to the movie.
• I initially removed the rank insignia speculation because I thought it went on for far too long for a mere footnote and drew too much comparisons to real-world examples. Then I realized that there is merit to it and re-added it in a condensed form, that gets the main point across. See footnotes #11 and #12. It's still there.
• As for the real-world rank comparison. That has been discussed at some length on the talk page, and while arguments can be made for both, it was generally felt that it makes most sense to have a commander to be the same as a captain. But getting rid of the comparison at all is the best course of action, considering the trouble it caused.
• As for the speculative ranks. They've been there for maybe two years and nobody complained about it before. The footnotes make it clear that they haven't been established on screen, so they can easily be ignored if someone prefers that. I think there are more arguments to include them than there are against them (there is just no reason to not have them, when the rest of the NCO list follows the usual structure). In any case, this is probably a moot point with Joe having something of a complete list. In general, this is an article that lends itself to some deduction. Assuming that there is a rank missing or how some insignia might look can be well-grounded reasoning. That's a bit different from just wildly guessing about the purpose of a certain ship type for example.
• I realize that this has been a sad edit war and I didn't like it, but we are both to blame. I pointed out the capitalization issue in the edit summary for example. We could also have discussed this on talk pages earlier instead of just reverting back and forth. I left a note on your talk page about something else and should have written another when this went out of hand, but I wasn't sure if you'd read it. -- Serenity 15:33, 29 August 2008 (UTC)