Forum:Weapon variants etc

Something that has come up recently that I think needs to be addressed is the limited/inconsistent merging and splitting of pages for variants of certain weapons. We've come across this issue numerous times in the past and I'd like to settle it once and for all. Something similar came up when we decided to make pagenames for vehicles consistent with the naming policies of the rest of the wiki.

So here's essentially what I suggest:

Clades. Weapons can be easily separated by their purpose into distinct clades (eg, assault rifles, carbines, battle rifles, LMG/GPMG/HMG, marksman rifle etc). This could be done by their in-game classification, or their IRL classification -- I think it'd be more consistent and less confusing to do it via their IRL classification, but it would work either way. Variants of a weapon in separate clades receive their own page.

Upgraded versions of weapons would depend on precisely how different the upgrade is from the original. We won't merge the M14 and M1 Garand, despite the fact that they're pretty closely related, because the two are extremely distinct. Essentially, what I propose is that if an upgrade to a weapon changes how the weapon functions fundamentally -- changing of the action or feeding mechanism, a changing of calibers, et cetera -- the upgrade deserves its own page. If the upgrade is marginal -- eg, the difference between the PKM and PKP, which mostly comes down to furniture composition -- the weapons should share a page.

So, for instance, PKP and PKM would merge, AK-47 and AK-74 would remain separate.

I think this is a simple, consistent method of deciding what weapons deserve separate pages. Юра  23:57, December 22, 2013 (UTC)

Discussion
I know it is a lot, but if we could all begin to compose a list right here of what would happen to each weapon article in reflection of your proposal, that would probably make it more clear. I support. 00:02, December 23, 2013 (UTC)