Wikipedia talk:Centralized discussion/Sports results

message: I think it's helpful to separate out the general question from the question of what to do with all the 2005 English cricket season articles. The main question is phrased in such a way that I think most people would agree to delete such articles. But the cricket authors are trying to do something rather different from what the main discussion implies, and I don't think people have realised that. As I argued below, I think they should be allowed to continue it for the rest of the season, although not setting a precedent. Stephen Turner 16:31, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I also think this is helpful - I would possibly agree with the main thing we are discussing, that individual games are below the notability limit, but I don't want to see that used as a means of deleting heaps of potentially useful and relevant content which could easily be merged into more substantial articles. Sam Vimes 19:13, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comment 

message: For a start, the assertion that the matches are "non-notable" is a stretch - it's the premier competition of English cricket. A non-notable match would be a local league match between two city sides, say. These matches are well visited, some of them are even screened on TV, and unlike American sports, there are no "play-offs" - each game is almost equally as important (possibly with the exception of the C&G Trophy Final. Sam Vimes 05:47, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: In my argument above, I changed (early on) the word "non-notable" to "routine, non-championship" because notability is used as a term of art in Wikipedia, and I didn't want to just assert it in a conclusionary manner. But really, what is notable about a regularly-scheduled sporting event? Yes, it is viewed (ephemerally) by a large number of people, but so are a number of scheduled, live entertainments. We do not have things like Radiohead in Montreal, August 15, 2003 or Phantom of the Opera, Her Majesty's Theatre, June 4, 1989. But when there is some special notability to the event, it is clearly worthy for inclusion, e.g., The Concert for Bangladesh. -- MCB 23:50, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

text: I think everybody who wants deletion has their own goals on this, honestly. Personally, I'm in favour of the second option you list (merging them into seasonal reviews). But I'm sure there are people out there who prefer the first. That's part of the problem with dividing an argument ilke this up on the lines of include vs. delete. I'll probably start a 'the case for merging' section when I have a few minutes to write up my opinion again. Lord Bob 19:48, 22 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: As you will see by looking at my comments above, neither I nor anyone else proposed a "total ban on non-championship games", but rather that "routine non-championship sports results" do not belong in Wikipedia. Obviously things like The Play are notable and worthy of an article; a description of a routine regular-season baseball or football game or cricket match is not. --MCB 23:37, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: The case for inclusion

message: I agree that individual sports events shouldn't have articles. The people writing the cricket articles claim to be doing something different, however — the articles are supposed to be temporary, as a convenient way of writing season reviews for each team and each competition without duplicating the reports of the same match in several different places. I think these reviews of the whole season are sufficiently notable to be articles, and the sub-articles should therefore be allowed to stay until the end of the season (which is very soon now).
However, I do not think that the process should be repeated in the same form next year. I think putting the articles in the main namespace was a big mistake. How was the person who just finds this one article supposed to know the whole plan? I also think that insufficiently notable articles shouldn't be in the main namespace even for a few months, and I don't like to see articles in the main namespace that are planned to be deleted. It was better when they were subpages of "2005 English cricket season", but someone objected to that for some rather weak reason to do with transclusion of subpages being allegedly forbidden.
I have another problem with the cricket articles, in that they have too much hyperbole. They read like journalism, not an encyclopaedia. But if I'm not prepared to edit them myself, maybe I shouldn't complain about that.
I'd also like to note in passing that the premise of the question contains a geographically-biased assumption. The talk of "championship events" really doesn't exist in the same way outside North America. The winner of the season is the team which finishes with the highest league position — there is no subsequent knockout phase. (There may sometimes be a second, knockout competition, but that's a completely independent competition and usually regarded as less significant).
Stephen Turner 08:39, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah. That happened originally (having them as subpages of Wikipedia:WikiProject Cricket). Then they got moved out of Wikipedia space because mirrors didn't pick up the transclusion (that was actually the argument against it back in May - it's down in the Village pump archives) I think, however, that that might be the path of least pain. Sam Vimes 17:04, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That's an interesting problem, I wasn't aware of that. I tried to track down the archived discussion but the Village Pump is an absolute hell-hole for that kind of thing. Hrm. I still think it would be the easiest way to go, but now I have something new to think about. That's the wonderful thing about Wikipedia, nothing is ever easy. :P Lord Bob 18:34, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I moved the discussion to the transclusion pages for ease of reference.  Although not that easy.  See Wikipedia talk:Template namespace. I did mean to knock something up at Wikipedia:Transclusion usage in articles at some point, but never got round to it. Hiding  talk 18:56, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Neutral/mixed 

message: After thinking about this for a while, and considering the opinions already presented, I don't have a strong opinion for inclusion or deletion of these specific articles, though if the pages are meant to be temporary, perhaps they should be marked as such with a template of some sort. My biggest suggestion, which hasn't been mentioned by anyone so far, is that this would be a very suitable topic for a WikiBooks project. So maybe for next season, a group of interested people could get together and make the Wiki English Cricket Almanac 2006 (or whatever). Then people deeply interested in cricket can get all the detailed reports from the almanac, and people writing encyclopedic summaries of the season or of specific teams can take source material from the finished almanac to use directly in Wikipedia. All these articles could include a template box up near the top that says something like "For more detailed information on the 2006 English cricket season, see WikiBooks:ECA2006". My personal thoughts:
Advantages:
#We don't end up with several hundred articles cluttering the Wikipedia namespace.
#No concerns about notability, since practically anything can go into the book, and people will only be taking the most relevant bits out to create Wikipedia articles.
#No concerns about WP:NOT, as I think an almanac is a fine WikiBooks project, whereas it's (at best) a controversial Wikipedia project.
#The almanac would still contain all the information necessary for anyone who wanted to do detailed research.
#More "official" (IMHO) than the alternate solution of putting all the relevant articles in User namespace.
#This same approach could be used by fans of any other sport that wish to include detailed summaries of every game. So there should be no worries about setting a bad precedent here. (I personally am concerned that someone will take the 2005 English cricket season articles exactly as an excuse to start trying to post detailed summaries of, say, every Major League Baseball game next year.)
#You get a nice "finished project" in the end, in the sense that your book can have an index, table of contents, and so on.
#Noone has to mention Pokemon! :)
Disadvantages:
#There are a lot more people who browse Wikipedia than WikiBooks, so maybe the cricket-almanac project will find fewer editors than they would otherwise. (This concern is hopefully alleviated by my suggestion to place a link to the project at the top of every 2006 cricket page.)
#Fewer eyes for the almanac project may also be a discouragement to the existing cricket editors. (We all want our contributions to be read!)
#There is the problem of pulling in information to Wikipedia from the book in an inconsistent manner; i.e., copying WP article text from different versions of the book, the fact that later edits to match summaries in Wikipedia may not propagate back to the book, and vice versa.
What does everyone think about this? To me, it seems a good compromise that addresses almost all of the concerns raised above, but obviously I may have missed something. If people from both "sides" think this is a good idea, it might be something worth strongly recommending for future seasons.
Colin M. 01:00, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: This isn't bad. People who are interested in the results would obviously be linked to Wikibooks from the Wikipedia article on the season in question, so people would know where the information is. I kinda like this, although I'm not sure what the Wikibooks crowd would think. If this ends up being what happens, it should probably be run by them first just so we don't have AfD War II on this. Lord Bob 18:30, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

text: I think it would be tossed off WikiBooks. "Wikibooks is not an in-depth encyclopedia on a specific topic." from Wikibooks:What_is_Wikibooks. They're aiming to create textbooks, not almanacs. So basically, if it's aimed to have an encyclopedic summary of the season, then it's not going to be on Wikibooks. However, I'm still to hear any good arguments against merging the pages into a full season review for each club and each competition, which I fully support and will probably need help to do from some friendly administrator when the pages are fully cleaned up. Sam Vimes 19:09, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: /me smiles sweetly.  Sam Korn 19:11, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I disagree that the current project has to be shunted off to Wikibooks in light of the fact that some people (not a consensus - SOME people) want it to be deleted. I think Vimes' compromise about making each individual result part of a larger page for each club, which will avoid "clutter" that so many people seem to be concerned about. User:Nach0king 10:50, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I hate to say it, but that has been the proposal all along.  Sam Korn 10:53, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

text: ...or WikiTrivia. —msh210 19:13, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  New proposal: WikiBook it! 

message: This discussion has run for about a week, with a healthy number of participants. I have the feeling that pretty much all the arguments have been brought out. How do people feel about closing this and moving on? 
As the creator of the discussion, my reading is that the discussion resulted in, truly, no consensus. Counting individual participants, I came up with 8 favoring deletion, 6 favoring inclusion, and 3 neutral/other. (By tradition, this is not a majority vote, and others may come up with different counts.)
Where do we stand? It seems unlikely to me that further discussion will result in any sort of consensus.  MCB 20:53, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Closing the discussion? 

message: As per this discussion on WikiProject Football, there is still confusion about pages with sports match results. Many are being AfD'ed, some with result DELETE, some with result KEEP or MERGE ... WP needs (this is my perspective) a central policy/guideline to differentiate between encyclopedic articles about sports seasons, without violating the WP:NOT rule of indiscriminant information lists. 
There's a proposed project, "WikiStats" or such (I prefer WikiSports to keep its domain defined and discrete), with related discussion HERE. Regardless of that slow boat, I feel WP needs a good yardstick to measure all these sports results pages against. Many, many editors are expending many, many hours of honest effort, thinking they're contributing to a better, brighter WP, but other editors are in opposition -- resulting in wasted effort, hurt feelings, and considerable strife. IMHO, naturally. David Spalding (☎ ✉ ✍) 16:52, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd love to seen an example or two of "game articles" that you refer to. Of course, the AfD discussions I've seen were for page which were not an "article" in narrow sense, only tables of results and data. Over on WP:NOT there was healthy discussion to discourage "almanac" pages that were little more than just data/results. The alternative you're referring to sounds promising.... David Spalding (☎ ✉ ✍) 16:17, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Here are two such single-game articles: 1985 Oregon State vs. Washington football game and 2006 Michigan State vs. Northwestern football game.  Admittedly, both articles need more sources and a lot more work, but it is also pretty obvious that they are notable events that have verifiable details. There is also a category here that has more examples. I can't speak for their merits since I haven't read the articles listed there, but if they have been following the suggestions at the project then they should be good. z4ns4tsu\talk 15:01, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks! Now that's what I call "an article," not indiscriminate info, or a just list of information. I hope pages like those can be held up as examples of notable events, covered in an "encyclopedic fashion." David Spalding (☎ ✉ ✍) 16:03, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  This issue is alive and well, and still causing a rucus