Talk:Little Boy (atomic bomb)

Article name

Per CZ:Naming Conventions, this article should live at Little Boy (nuclear weapon), or if you absolutely must insist, LITTLE BOY (nuclear weapon). Despite the comma-style practice that Richard Jensen started (singlehandedly and against my repeated objections), it is not CZ policy to use commas in this way for disambiguation. We use parentheses for these. --Larry Sanger 21:30, 26 September 2008 (CDT)

Parentheses actually make more sense. Please do not confuse me with someone that tremendously cares about Jensen's practices; by all means, let's plan to get things back to Battle of Gettysburg. I am following what appeared to be an accepted pattern, which people with appropriate permissions could have changed long ago.

At least in the military area, particularly U.S., I do think there is merit to having major-term (minor-term) disambiguation. For some obscure reason that the Soviets were careful to avoid, the U.S. tends to do things like having an M1 tank and an M1 rifle, an M60 machine gun and an M60 tank, etc. In one series of designations, a B61 is a missile and in another series, a nuclear bomb.

I suspect more people would start with "tank" or "rifle" than the designation, if generally searching for someone There are literally dozens of nuclear weapons types, mostly having a letter and number; LITTLE BOY and FAT MAN were exceptions. The tests, as operations, had names, but the individual weapons did not -- well, the first fusion device was called Mike, but the operation was CASTLE BRAVO. Howard C. Berkowitz 21:44, 26 September 2008 (CDT)

Remember that in the abc field you can have the order switched such that all related terms sort together in the categories. For example, LITTLE BOY (nuclear weapon) and FAT MAN (nuclear weapon) would be nuclear weapon, LITTLE BOY and nuclear weapon, FAT BOY respectively in the abc field of the metadata. Chris Day 21:59, 26 September 2008 (CDT)

Again, I have no problem, other than there has been a lot of inconsistency of military designations for equipment, weapons, etc. Whatever we do, is it something that can be made consistent? Howard C. Berkowitz 22:04, 26 September 2008 (CDT)

I'm just testing the nuclear weapon configuratin with brackets to see how well they cluster in the categories. Chris Day 22:13, 26 September 2008 (CDT)

Done, see what you think of the sorting under nuclear? Chris Day 22:27, 26 September 2008 (CDT)

I have no particular problem with it; as I mentioned on your userpage, I'd just like to get consistent. Howard C. Berkowitz 22:30, 26 September 2008 (CDT)

Another possibility is to just call it "LITTLE BOY" but in the abc field call it "nuclear bomb, LITTLE BOY". This way it sorts in the correct location but does not have the messy identifier in the title. Chris Day 22:39, 26 September 2008 (CDT)

Especially when something is code named, the identifier doesn't strike me as messy; the code name is supposed to be meaningless Howard C. Berkowitz 22:41, 26 September 2008 (CDT)

True, but history has a knack of taking the meaningless and making it unique and meaningful. Chris Day 22:56, 26 September 2008 (CDT)

Re-named as Little Boy (nuclear weapon)

There is absolutely no question but that the vast majority of literature on the subject of nuclear weapons uses Little Boy ... not LITTLE BOY. There is also no question, in my opinion, but that most readers looking for this article would search for Little Boy. So I re-named the article. Milton Beychok 22:32, 10 June 2011 (UTC)

And quite right, too. A certain person's penchant for writing terms like this or Operation Overlord in block capitals was, frankly, well........ John (talk) 10:56, 18 March 2024 (CDT)