User:GGOTCC/February 2026/Review essay

If you browse Wikipedia articles about ships of the US Navy, then you have likely seen this template:

Can we trust DANFS?

By GGOTCC

 This article incorporates text from the public domain Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships.

You almost certainly have, even without knowing it. More than 8,100 articles incorporate verbatim text from the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, making the dictionary one of the most cited sources on all of Wikipedia.

Introduction

The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, or DANFS, is an encyclopedia of ship histories. Compiled by a predecessor of today’s Naval History and Heritage Command, the series details the careers of ~10,000 ships of the US, Continental, and Confederate Navies. The first edition of the first volume was published in 1959 and covered each ship whose name started with “A”. The last, Volume VIII, was published in 1981 and covers W-Z. Each edition has since been republished with corrections and updates, and the last full print series was released in 1991. In total, a complete set weighs about 35 pounds (16 kg) and is some 5,500 pages long. For those not wanting to shell out 200 dollars on Ebay or visit every used bookstore in your region, Haithitrust has digitized a full early-print series here. In 2004, the modern DANFS website was launched, digitizing old entries.

Three decades in the making, DANFS is immense, and covers every capital ship, escort, sailboat, frigate, landing ship, and auxiliary to ever serve in the Navy and its predecessors. The series is arguably the most comprehensive single reference work on American naval vessels ever produced. As a publication of the US Federal Government, copyright does not apply. In the early days of the English Wikipedia, the DANFS entry on almost every ship was copied over from the website. In 2026, the prose on many of these articles has hardly changed.

Unsurprisingly, a Cold War-era publication of the US government has had its reliability questioned. The entry for USS Jarvis (DD-799), for instance, includes nationalistic boasting such as describing her, “as a unit of the powerful and versatile 7th Fleet” and part of, “America's deterrent to Communist aggression in the Middle East.” Similar issues are found throughout the print and digital editions. As of writing, the claims are still present in our article of the destroyer. Similar statements, such as, “protect democracy against the inroads of Communism”, "further action in the cause of peace and freedom", "task the defense of the Nation and the free world might demand", "helped to check Communist aggression in Southeast Asia", and “blessed land of freedom”, are the most obvious reasons why the source can’t be taken at face value.

Sourcing and coverage

Each entry lacks individual citations and the bibliography at the end of each volume only lists the most consulted works. While a number of secondary sources are listed, the dictionary's backbone are the otherwise inaccessible records held by the Navy and National Archives. These sources, often ship’s logs or internal correspondence, allow the dictionary to account for the position and mission of each ship at any time. Only an organization such as the Navy itself could sift through the massive amount of documents required to coherently piece everything together for each vessel. Often, the diversity of sources allows for a more detailed entry beyond a list of dates and locations. Almost no other source correctly identifies which Missouri each USS Missouri were named after, or the dates when a vessel was taken up from trade.

The reliance on records is the dictionary’s strongest aspect for the average reader and one of its weaknesses. Unlike a Good or Featured Article that presents the reader with a complete understanding of a ship from the initial development to an ultimate fate, “the dictionary is focused solely on the ship. No context is given for decisions, backgrounds are omitted, useful details are left out, and the contributions of other ships or other nations during operations are ignored.

The sheer volume of content and siloed coverage lead to entries that contradict each other or relevant information getting split apart. Research into each ship is not deep, evident as primary information is often relayed without criticism. For instance, I recently rewrote the article on USS Severn (1867). The respective entry calls the ship a sloop and states she featured a broadside of 8 guns. This description was accurate…when the ship was laid down. However, she was completed as a frigate with 15 guns in a change that affected every Contoocook-class sloop. Larger details such as this example can only be discovered with focused research, which the authors are unable to provide. Various details from combat reports are repeated even if claims are dubious, further highlighting the need for cross-referencing. This information can be easily gained from published books, which they did consult, but not systematically. I also cannot help but notice the absence of Erik Heyl’s Early American Steamers series, a similar encyclopedia of American steamships that was first published in 1953. Its inclusion would substantially round out entries on various ships which were requisitioned during the Civil War, primarily regarding each ship’s civilian identity, engineering, and career outside of combat.

Authorship and motivations

Due to the decades-long production and inconsistent budgets, a wide variety of people wrote the dictionary. Some were subject-matter experts, such as Howard I. Chapelle, while others were naval reservists, enthusiasts, commissioned officers, or office workers that were roped into the project. The online entries are currently maintained by award-winning author Robert Cressman, himself one of the writers on the last print books. While the dates of Cressman's updates are listed on the website, no information is given as to what was changed or who initially wrote the entry.

Something often missed when discussing the dictionary is why the US Navy went through the effort to make it. Ten years before the first edition was sold, the Navy was in a crisis about its future. With the invention of nuclear warfare, there was reason to believe the Navy would become redundant when the Air Force could strike anywhere in the world. The books are fundamentally intended to record the history of the Navy and preserve its importance. While they look nice on bookshelves, they provide political justification to support the Navy. Unsurprisingly, political meddling has occurred. Each book opens with a poetic description of how the Navy has existed as long as the country and why Congress should not write them off. As this was also primarily written during the Vietnam War, the books also overinflate the Navy's role in the conflict. Instead of ending bluntly, a number of the entries have flowery language about how the ship combats Communism or protects the free world. These statements often include claims that a certain ship is still sailing or off the Vietnamese coast; in reality, many of these ships were in fact moored in the United States and not in a condition to deploy.

Conclusions

DANFS is indispensable yet problematic. Accuracy and framing is questionable and the US government is one of the least neutral sources possible about its own military history. If something contradicts DANFS, it is reasonable to prefer other reliable sources. However, it is rich in otherwise inaccessible details that you are hard-pressed to find elsewhere; often, I find that modern coverage on a certain ship is cited to the DANFS entry. Whenever I start writing about an American ship the trinity of DANFS, USNI Proceedings, and Navsource forms the bedrock of any great article.

Ideally, the dictionary should be used to round out articles and provide details about periods of a ship's history others have neglected. While close paraphrasing and overreliance on the dictionary have become issues for Featured Articles, most content on the site cannot get such detailed attention. Without sustained editorial effort, many American ship articles would remain little more than their DANFS entries because there is not enough time to give attention to them all.

But there is no reason for us not to try. As the world's largest encyclopedia, why can Wikipedia not amend DANFS's faults and become even better?

Just like any 18-year-old last year, I spent my last weeks of high school and the summer working with the Navy. Among my many side-quests, I wound up assisting the Curator of Ship Models. The Curator is undeniably one of the best historians in their field, and I assisted them in identifying old ship models. To my genuine surprise, we used Wikipedia to compare ships with the models. The inclusion of images, inter-article links, and navigational pages immediately placed Wikipedia above DANFS in usability. If Wikipedia is the world’s largest encyclopedia on almost anything and everything, why can it not become the second Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships?