The forum's most discussed single engined fighter of ww2 is....

[Marcel]

I'm into textmining and tagclouds, so I decided to make a tagcloud out of fighter names.
I took 90 fighters and made search strings out of them (regex for the ones who can program). I only did single engined fighters. This I unleashed on the Aviation forum. Took a few hours to stroll through that forum and then I made a tag cloud out of the answer. Here it is (sorry for the size, it was needed to fit them all):

The winner is unsurprisingly the Spitfire, it was mentioned 32705 times over the last 10 years. Runner up is the P-51, with 28482.
The Bf-109 lingers behind at half of that: 16391 times.
On average, axis aircraft are mentioned half as much as allied aircraft.

 

[parsifal]

which were the least mentioned SE fighters. at a guess i would think French, and minor minor nations. To be fair should perhaps only think about types in quantity production and those serving during WWII.Possible contenders might be

MB 152, MS406, D520, IAR80, CA13, Pzl11, Pzl24, Fokker DXXI, IK-2, IK-3

I wonder also if a known type has never been mentioned in ten years. now that would be a find....

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

On average, axis aircraft are mentioned half as much as allied aircraft.

How can that be possible! This forum is accused of being to Luftwaffe oriented???!!!!!

 

[nuuumannn]

Never fear, Adler, I have a possible reason for the Spitfre being mentioned more often than the LW types! Just because "Spitfire" is mentioned does not necessarily mean it is the subject of discussion; it would be more telling if there was a means by which the aircraft that has had the greatest number of threads opened on it or that were the actual subject of discussion within a thread or post could be determined.

 

[parsifal]

How can that be possible! This forum is accused of being to Luftwaffe oriented???!!!!!

just shows we shouldnt assume anything. mind you those 16000 entries about the 109 might all be positive, whilst the 32000 spitfire entries might all be things i dont want to talk about....

 

[Marcel]

which were the least mentioned SE fighters. at a guess i would think French, and minor minor nations. To be fair should perhaps only think about types in quantity production and those serving during WWII.Possible contenders might be

MB 152, MS406, D520, IAR80, CA13, Pzl11, Pzl24, Fokker DXXI, IK-2, IK-3

I wonder also if a known type has never been mentioned in ten years. now that would be a find....

Well, I probably missed a few fighters when constructing the listm but:
The MB 152 is no 70 of the list (39 mentions)
MS.406: no 46 (304 mentions)
D.520 is no 37 (532 mentions)
IAR 80 is no 65 (96 mentions)no 29 (689
CA13: I have not in my list, should add that one
PZL11: no 71 (28 mentions)
PZL24: no 79 (10 mentions)
D-XXI: no 29(689 mentions)
IK-2: no 74 (16 mentions)
IK-3: not in my list.

Fighters not discussed were the Bristol Buldog, Curtiss CW-21 and the Avia BH-33. [edit]Found out I had a typo in the searchstring for the CW-21, it was actually mentioned 127 times[/edit]
Mind you, my search might make mistakes. I cannot believe the CW21 was never mentioned, but it does't show in my result.

I think it is save to say that anyone mentioning Spitfire or Mustang should be banned because of lack of originality

it would be more telling if there was a means by which the aircraft that has had the greatest number of threads opened on it or that were the actual subject of discussion within a thread or post could be determined.

We could check the thread-names or only the first post, that could easily be done if I change the regex in my crawler. But in my experience the number of occurrence of a word id roughly co-linear with the times it is really discussed. So it's safe to say that the BF109 is less discussed in this forum.

just shows we shouldnt assume anything. mind you those 16000 entries about the 109 might all be positive, whilst the 32000 spitfire entries might all be things i dont want to talk about....

That is correct. I could even check that, but it means using nl (natural language) algorithms which would make my program much more complicated. It was just a little experiment for me. Maybe when I have time, I'll fire up my nl-toolkit. But I'll probably have to crawl again as I now collected the data in a form that was most suitable for regex searches.

 

[Thorlifter]

Let's stuff the ballot box.

F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair

 

[Marcel]

Let's stuff the ballot box.

F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair, F4U Corsair

I only analysed the Aviation section. But I can also manipulate if you wish:

 

[Thorlifter]

 

[Wayne Little]

What about....what is Jan thinking....

 

[pbehn]

Did the search look P51 and Mustang? or P51 or Mustang?

 

[vikingBerserker]

So the top mention on a WW2 aviation site is........bacon.

Man, we are one messed up group!

 

[buffnut453]

Bacon and Kate Beckinsale...ooops, there I go again!

 

[vikingBerserker]

Dammit, now you have me side tracked.

 

[Marcel]

Did the search look P51 and Mustang? or P51 or Mustang?

Good question.
I use regex (Regular expression - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), which considers all these possibilities.
The search string for the p51 was a rather long one:

(p(| |-|\.)51([bcdk] | )mustang)|(p(| |-|\.)51([bcdk] | ))|(mustang)

What this does is:
1. look for p51 mustang, where p51 can be p51, p 51, p-51 or p.51 and then all variation letters or no variation letter.
2. count all occurrence of p51 with all variations not found in step 1
3. find occurrences of mustang without the p51 stuff.
Of course the search is case insensitive

The difficulty is anticipating on the sloppiness of people. If everyone would type it the same way, it'll obviously be more accurate.

The spitfire is in comparison easy:

(spitfire)|(spit )

I guess a few contaminations in this one come from the messerspit, a name people sometimes give to the rare hybrid of a spitfire and a DB601 engine that once flew in Germany. But I guess that did not add much to the 32000+ hits I got.

 

[pbehn]

WOW Marcel a lot of thought has gone into that You could have added A36 and Apache I suppose.

 

[Marcel]

WOW Marcel a lot of thought has gone into that You could have added A36 and Apache I suppose.

Yup, there are probably more little inaccuracies. It's difficult to get it all right in a reasonably amount of time and most of these mistakes aren't significant anyway.

 

[Marcel]

What about....what is Jan thinking....

Ah, not much I'm afraid:

 

[vikingBerserker]

I'm actually not seeing a problem with those!

 

[GrauGeist]

Marcel, here's a question:

When crawling for Bf109 results, did you use all possible spelling variants like Me109 as well as Bf109?

This could also mean spelling associations like Me-109G or Bf 109-f, bf.109 g-2 and so on. Or are you simply using a catch-all that looks for "109" in specific?