Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports)/Archive 41

RFC on Notability (sports) policy and reliability issues

A discussion about whether any action needs to be taken regarding the current sports notability guidelines. 16:43, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Discussion (March RfC)

Summary

Providing a very broad summary for convenience: Most of those commenting (10 out of 13) in this section agree that there is some form of a problem caused by (some, at least) overly lax NSPORTS SNGs. Some editors note the difficulties posed at AfD by this (obligatory mention of the thread involving mass-created stubs at ANI) Some editors ask whether there's really a problem, and if there is, if it poses any harm at all. For your convenience, RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 19:13, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

To date, the WP:Notability (sports) guidelines have largely been used to justify the existence of a breadth of sports related articles that lack significant coverage in contrast to WP:GNG. This has had a huge impact on the encyclopedia, creating a canon of articles not in compliance with WP:Verifiability. It's my contention, that this has created a systemic problem in this area, drawing into question the quality and reliability of what wikipedia offers as an encyclopedia within the field of sports. This can be seen by a lengthy history at WP:AFD in which articles without reliable referencing or significant coverage are kept based on the lenient criteria in regards to sourcing at WP:Notability (sports). WP:INDISCRIMINATE and WP:5P1 would seem to indicate that we owe our readers better than this. I strongly suggest, that the guideline here not be used anymore to override WP:SIGCOV, and that we adopt a wikipedia wide policy on sports related articles that demands multiple sources in compliance with GNG.4meter4 (talk) 03:42, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

It's not clear exactly what change you are proposing. Can you state exactly what change you want made to site guidelines? User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 03:48, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm not exactly sure what the best solution is, which is why I wanted the RFC. I'm just saying, this is the problem. Isn't an RFC about getting people to problem solve together when a policy isn't working well?4meter4 (talk) 04:05, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes (in theory) and no (in practice). RfCs are usually when there's been some previous discussion but it's stalled with no agreed consensus; or when it's a formal proposal to alter policy in a clear fashion. We're still in the "brainstorming" phase so well unless you want to keep the RfC open to attract more people, it's malformed per the usual requirements. Though again WP:NOTBUREAUCRACY so if it does attract people that's a good thing. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 04:09, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Though some RfCs are opened for brainstorming, most are for specific proposals, and in most cases it's been more effective to brainstorm in a less formal manner. isaacl (talk) 04:13, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

The sports notability guideline already defers to the general notability guideline, as has been discussed many times over the years. However unless participants in deletion discussions actually refer to that portion of the sports notability guideline, closers don't take it into account. In accordance with English Wikipedia's guidance on determining rough consensus, closers aren't bound to discount expressed viewpoints based on guidelines. Accordingly the participants at deletion discussions have to be convinced to follow the entirety of the sports notability guideline, versus cherry-picking the parts they're interested in. isaacl (talk) 03:51, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Unless the proposal above is to get rid of this entirely and let GNG supersede it (a bit radical, but maybe not entirely without merits); then it is malformed and needs early closure until a proper RfC question can be put. I'd add the regular discussion and survey sections, but given my concerns I'm not going to do that just yet. @Isaacl Or maybe there needs to be recognition that some, if not many, parts of NSPORTS are not fit for purpose... RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 03:54, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Not sure what you are asking of me? There is disagreement on the utility of the criteria for various sports, but for better or worse, an insufficient number of editors have been able to reach a consensus on what to do for them. For other sports, discussions have proved fruitful and the criteria have been revised. RfCs can be more freeform... Personally I think for this particular topic, a more structured format would be beneficial, though. isaacl (talk) 04:00, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm not an experienced editor with RFCs, and I'm not exactly sure what the "proper" way would be. This is just my thoughts on a policy page that doesn't seem to produce good results for the encyclopedia. I really just wanted to draw attention to it, and see if we could come up with something better than the current system. Even if we were just to put a note in about references in each section of the NSPORTS page, so that its readily clear during AFD discussions it would be helpful.4meter4 (talk) 04:11, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Example formatting. Although the current variant is acceptable too so let's keep as is unless it poses problems at some later point in time (at which point it's perfectly ok to launch a more precise proposal). RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 04:26, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

The main issue at present is that it doesn't begin with a short, neutral statement before the first signature, which causes problems with how the RfC gets presented on the page listing all RfCs. isaacl (talk) 04:46, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Fixed. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 16:43, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Those who present the view "Keep, meets sport X criteria" are going to keep doing that anyway. Because... that's what has happened even as it has been pointed out on this talk page to those editors that (a) the sports notability guideline says that the general notability guideline should be met; and (b) routine coverage is insufficient to establish that English Wikipedia's standards for having an article have been met, including pure statistics from a database. isaacl (talk) 04:18, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Understood, but couldn’t we have an addendum to each section saying something like. “Cricket players must first have significant non-routine coverage in multiple reliable sources in order to apply any of the following criteria:” etc as an example. That way anyone citing WP:NCRICK can immediately be referred to the referencing requirements inherent in WP:NSPORTS. Part of the issue is that the policy page is not often read in full and is cited in piecemeal parts. If we were to integrate referencing requirements into each section, it makes it a lot harder to misapply policy in AFD debate.4meter4 (talk) 04:30, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Agree that problems are being caused by the unhelpful kind of "but it meets the guideline" voting (which an experienced closer should take with a grain of salt, per WP:ITSNOTABLE and WP:JUSTAPOLICY...). This could all be alleviated in part by changing the language from "presumed notable" to "likely notable" (see the above section started by myself, Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports)/Archive 40#No such thing as 'automatic pass'). For reference see also the thread at ANI, but I assume we're all aware of that. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 04:33, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Editors don't parse the language that finely. The nutshell summary, the first paragraph, the second paragraph, and the first paragraph of the "Applicable policies and guidelines" section already says "likely". For better or worse, some editors support an achievement-based standard for having an article on various sportspersons, and that's what they bring up in deletion discussions. isaacl (talk) 04:43, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

This is a guideline, and not policy. As per the guidance I linked to on determining rough consensus, closers aren't bound to override the rationales of deletion discussion participants based on guidelines. (This is exactly the response I got when I pointed out that closers aren't reading the entire guideline and are ignoring the consensus that established this guideline.) isaacl (talk) 16:55, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

• As has been stated many times and for many years (and as Isaacl mentions again here), there is absolutely nothing one can do to deter AfD participants from voting however the hell they please, on good grounds or bad, and it isn't any easier to ensure that closing admins rule on policy rather than on head count. Ravenswing 06:21, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
• It's not clear that there's a problem that needs fixing. The OP claims that the issue is "creating a canon of articles not in compliance with WP:Verifiability" but that's incorrect because sports stubs are usually verifiable by reference to sporting records and reports. Of course, these won't necessarily cover the subject's non-sporting activities but I don't get the impression that this is an issue in practise. If a sporting stub is expanded with other unsupported details then they can removed as appropriate as with any other unsourced content. The real beef seems to be that the stubs are short and often unlikely to get any longer. But we have a policy, WP:NOTPAPER, that says clearly that there's no practical limit on the number of articles that we can have. So, what's the problem and where's the evidence to demonstrate that it is significant? Verifiability applies to complaints too! Andrew🐉(talk) 18:00, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  The problem is that there's plenty of stubs about non-notable athletes who meet one of the arbitrary criteria here (for example, the recent lot of "has played x first class matches" cricketers) but who are not actually meeting GNG (beyond mentions in statistical databases). This seems to be more about WP:N (we don't have articles on everything) and WP:NOT (WP is not a statistical database or directory of athletes) than WP:V. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 18:14, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  Per the policy WP:IAR, we're not here to make and enforce arbitrary rules. What's the actual, real-world problem that we're trying to fix here? Are there actually any complaints or incidents which these stubs have caused? My impression is that these pro-forma stubs are largely ignored by everyone in the real world. Surely it's the high-profile sports stars that will generate significant readership, vandalism and the like. But the high-profile cases will naturally be correspondingly notable. The less the notability, the less that anyone cares. Andrew🐉(talk) 18:25, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  I seldom agree with Andrew Davidson, but here he's dead on: what's the actual problem here? Like most of you, I have little use for permanent sub-stubs, but as far as I can see the roots of the complaint here are "OMG there are a lot more sports stubs than I like, and far fewer articles on important things!" Alright, so stipulated, but we don't build policies around that. However uncomfortable the truth may be to some of you, the simple fact is that as a culture, we care a great deal about sports. Therefore, sportsmen get a disproportionate amount of media attention. I bet the tenth draft pick in the upcoming National Football League entry draft will have had more indepth articles written about him (and before he's played so much as a minute of professional sport) than about every 2019 Nobel laureate combined. Presuming this is an "imbalance" of some sort -- and lovers of popular entertainment aren't likely to agree -- there's no solution here that isn't far, far, far worse than the purported disease. Ravenswing 21:49, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

• My personal preference with sports BIOs is to have far more collected pages rather than separate articles in the hopes that those might attract more eyeballs and editor attention, thus being less likely to suffer from undetected vandalism or BLP violations. As discussed above, I think this is one of several areas where there is a tension between what the community as a whole desires and what the editors most interested in a topic desire. The community will is reflected in the SNG, the passionate editors are what results at AfD. I don't have great solutions. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:19, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
• My guess was this thread was started after the ANI thread I started on NCRIC/mass stub creation from sports database sites. I'm not sure I see a way to fix this except to deprecate NSPORT entirely and enforce the GNG strictly on sports articles, which should already exist. SportingFlyer T·C 18:49, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  I appreciate why English Wikipedia traditionally considers guidelines to be descriptive of what happens in practice, and thus why guidelines are not considered to be binding. Consensus can change, and English Wikipedia tries to provide a path for it to change from the ground up. However it leads to the result Barkeep49 described: deletion discussions can often be based on a biased sampling of the Wikipedia community. Those arguing for an achievement-based standard (and there are some prominent editors who advocate for a shift away from the general notability guideline, even as they acknowledge that current consensus supports it) can continue to do so even if the sports notability guideline in its current form no longer exists. So unless the sampling of those turning up to each and every deletion discussion for a given sport changes, I don't think changing the status of this guidance page will make a big difference to the outcomes. isaacl (talk) 19:26, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  This is not really about xFD, where results will always be skewed by the balance of interested participants. Largely, the horse has bolted with those articles, but that's no reason to leave the gate open. More than anything, change here is about putting a lid on the ongoing industrial-level production of directory-entry BLPs with zero significant coverage. _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 19:40, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  This guideline already shut the gate: it does not supersede the general notability guideline, and it specifies that listings in database sources aren't sufficient to meet Wikipedia's standards for having an article. The editors creating the articles aren't paying heed. Closers for deletion discussions aren't overriding participant views based on this guideline. There's not much more that can be done here. Editors have to be convinced to not create certain articles based on community consensus, and either the guidance on determining rough consensus has to change, or the participants in the deletion discussions have to be convinced. isaacl (talk) 20:04, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  The overriding guideline may have shut the front door, but it's the sub-SNGs (NCRIC, NFOOTY, NOLY, etc.) that are used to justify article creation, and some provide an extremely weak presumption; i.e. GNG-level coverage is actually highly unlikely at the lower end of the scale. As long those sub-SNGs remain unchanged, the gates remain wide open. _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 20:18, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  The individual sport-specific guidelines are within the context of the overall guideline. The encompassing criteria have been pointed out to individual editors for various sports, so there's no question that they understand them, but they disagree and continue to do what they do, as they prefer achievement-based standards. Words here have failed to change their minds. isaacl (talk) 20:27, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  Is this where we're going to get stuck, though? One of the single biggest complaints about Wikipedia is that there are too many sport sub-stubs, but as soon as any effort to fix the problem arises, the people creating these sub-stubs and the people who like these sub-stubs shout you down, and we're left with a massive cleanup effort. SportingFlyer T·C 21:01, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  The essential issues are bigger than the sports-specific notability guidelines. There is disagreement on the form of subject-specific notability guidelines. Numerous editors have put forward cases for achievement-based standards in various domains, independent of the general notability guideline. The way rough consensus is determined, guidelines are hard to enforce unless they have broad support, so every single deletion has to be argued individually. English Wikipedia's consensus-based decision making traditions make it hard to achieve compromise when there are strong proponents of opposing views. So we remain pretty well stuck trying to resolve those differing views, article by article. isaacl (talk) 21:15, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  SportingFlyer, we banned one user for doing that already. Are we sure this isn't sockpuppetry? Guy (help! - typo?) 20:39, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

  @JzG: I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to, especially given the discussion thread is stale. SportingFlyer T·C 20:44, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

  SportingFlyer, Sander.v.Ginkel and his massive sockfarm. Guy (help! - typo?) 08:35, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

  @JzG: I'm not aware of that particular case. Might be worth looking into. SportingFlyer T·C 14:59, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

• Part of the issue for me that GNG doesn't infer notability in sports people to a good enough extent. GNG has a recency bias to it as it's far easier to find sources to current/more recent sportspeople. It also has a high Anglocentric bias towards it due to it being much easier to find sources in English or in languages that use a similar alphabetical style to the English language. The discussion on GNG being more important than SNGs also wasn't well enough integrated into the guidelines at WP:SNG (which still basically says you can create an article on something that passes an SNG and it's deemed notable, but may be deleted later). Too many things say different things, which brings confusion. But as Andrew says above, is there really a problem here? These stubs aren't really causing offence/upsetting anybody, and when articles come up for AfD often contributors cherry pick on when to use the GNG superseeds all SNG and when not too. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 19:34, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  Well then we need to make it clearer which ones take precedence. As far as I see it, GNG is supposed to be the ultimate criteria; because SNGs are supposed to be helpful indicators of what may meet GNG - if they are not, then the SNGs need either to be rewritten or retired. Whether we need a more fundamental rewrite of notability and inclusion criteria is another question. The WP:BIAS concerns seem valid (well, yes, over time, information gets lost, there is not too much we can do about that, sadly), but then again, it's much preferable if articles are based on existent and verifiable sources (both for concerns about article content, and to be helpful to readers who might wish for more information), than if we assume "subject meets x criteria, therefore we should have a perma-stub on it even if that's all we can say about it". RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 20:03, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

That would be a start for me, just re-writing WP:SNG to say that GNG takes precedent would be a start and may help stop the production chain stub creation, but would have to be discussed with other SNGs. Is the issue stubs though, or just articles that don't pass GNG? Look at a FA this week in Lewis (baseball), for me this article doesn't pass GNG as the sources don't really cover him in enough detail to be significant coverage and the article is padded beyond belief, and yet it's a featured article. There's articles in hundreds of Olympians on here as well, how many of them would pass GNG, yet if we started AfDs on them they would likely all be kept because they competed at the Olympics. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 20:14, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

• Here's (another) problem with WP:NCRIC. I recently declined the draft Draft:John Dronfield, a headmaster at St Peter's School, York. There are two 20th century headmasters of that school with articles: Stanley Toyne and Richard Smyth (cricketer, born 1951). Both are "presumably notable" for their minor cricket careers; Toyne appeared in two first-class matches, and Smyth played for Cambridge University Cricket Club while studying at that institution. Why should the encyclopedia focus on these individuals? This is bias being introduced in the encyclopedia due to a fixation with cricket databases as "substantial coverage", and a cricket GNG that allows non-"fully professional" matches to be sufficient for notability. I would suggest that the requirement for CRIC also require either one non-statistical source, or one fully-professional match. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 20:12, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  WP:NCRIC doesn't require matches to be fully professional as cricket hasn't always been fully professional. Large amounts of cricket history have been when it was an amateur game. Making it one fully-professional match would rule out far too many notable people, such as W. G. Grace from being notable under the guidelines. WP:NCRIC is far from perfect, and there are discussions ongoing in how to change/improve it, but there's been no consensus so far on them. The only reason there's hundreds of articles at AfD currently is because one user has decided there should be, not because of any change in policy. He could easily have picked any other sport (football, American football or baseball for example) but picked cricket. I'm sure this is more than a cricket problem. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 20:19, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  Making it "one fully-professional match" would exclude Arthur Conan Doyle as well; in any event there are non-statistical sources for both (and SNGs are supplemental to the GNG). And my point on St Peter's School, York headmasters has not been addressed. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 00:42, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  And regarding "fully-professional" - the article on County cricket says nothing about current compensation (or lack thereof) for English county cricketers (it does note that participants in 1871 may have been "amateur or professional"). That seems an important detail to discuss in that article; perhaps some of the cricket editors could improve that? User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 01:12, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  @力: The top level (those that play first class) are all compensated (although for a long time the sport was solely "amateur" and no direct compensation was given or maybe even allowed - or if there was any if was rather meager; see this - and also World Series Cricket for a look at what drove the trend towards professionalisation). Nowadays, the minimum is (as of last summer, due to the pandemic) 24 thousand quid; while the total salary cap for a single team is around 2 million pounds (although it was scheduled to rise; don't know if that's been postponed due to COVID) - the corresponding minimum is 750 thousand. See this. Anyway, yes, the current leauge, at least in England (and I'd expect in most if not all of the other Test status countries) is fully professional. But a century ago that was not the case... RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 01:30, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  For background, the recent discussion on modifying the cricket notability guideline is at Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports)/Archive 39 (the whole archive page), in which explicitly requiring a non-database source was discussed (as well as the fact that the sports notability guideline already specifies that database sources are not considered sufficient to establish that the general notability guideline has been met). isaacl (talk) 20:21, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

This is what I was talking about, and further discussion is currently ongoing on the cricket WikiProject, but still there's no real consensus on anything as it's very much delete vs. create still. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 20:23, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

• The problem is too many pages and not enough people to patrol them, leading to a high incidence among athlete bios of vandalism and BLP vios. One out of six BLPs is about a footballer, and that's been the case for years. It's even higher when you add in all the other sports bios.
  The solution to this is to require all pages in mainspace to have at least two GNG-qualifying references. Articles with less than two GNG refs should be PRODable, and should be deleted after a week if no one adds two sources, similar to BLPPROD.
  I would support expanding BLPPROD to require 2 sources and not 1, to require them to be GNG-satisfying sources and not just any hyperlink (so stats websites wouldn't count), and I'd support expanding this to athlete BLPs, all BLPs, all bios, and even all articles.
  Fundamentally, anyone who wants to create a page on Wikipedia should be required to do the work of finding and citing two GNG sources supporting that page's topic. We should require at least as much from our autopatrolled editors as we require of AFC submitters. It's a waste of our resources to allow some people to create as many pages as they want and expect others to come along and properly source them. Not requiring sources for new pages may have made sense in the beginning, but it doesn't make sense anymore after 20 years. Levivich ^harass/_hound 20:17, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  Personally, I agree that those creating articles ought to find sources meeting the general notability guideline, but stub creation is still widely supported by the community. In any case, it's not something that can be addressed within the scope of the sports notability guideline. isaacl (talk) 20:32, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

• Comment. So why aren't all these GNG concerned individuals nominating Lewis (baseball) for deletion, or is the cricket project the target because we stood up for ourselves? StickyWicket (talk) 20:29, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  Saying "the cricket project" when it's just the controversial opinion of a few is not helpful. And even then, that would be LOCALCONSENSUS attempting to override GNG (which is a resounding "no, never"). And really, as pointed out above, this is probably also a problem with many other sports articles. And no, nobody is interesting in making a pointy AfD for a topic which is clearly notable (attracting secondary coverage from a book written more than a century after the events in question shows that this one clearly meets the "lasting significance" as well as "significant coverage" portions of GNG)... The dime-a-dozen cricketers from the same time period who played a couple of first class games and for whom that is all we know, in retrospect, are clearly not. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 20:57, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

  Interesting. So what you're saying is a man who swings a baseball bat once is notable. But a man who swings a cricket bat isn't? Unless of course some newspaper from eons ago takes a disliking to the subject, then someone mentions the subject in a book (where even they cannot identify them). The pad it up with stuff which isn't even about the subject and boom, notable! Would be nice if some of the people wanting to promote 'change' would be so willing to contribute to expanding the cricket project. StickyWicket (talk) 08:28, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  To be fair, the unknown Lewis player isn't notable "because he swung a bat once", he is notable because of how bad he was and that nothing else ever became of him. A single appearance, being average, and not being written about anywhere other than a stats database is not equivalent to a single appearance and holding records for it. I would recommend not using the Lewis baseball example for non-English pre-online sourcing as a comparison in the future. Yosemiter (talk) 00:44, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

• The way I've always understood SNGs is that they create a rebuttable presumption of notability in AFD discussions. If there's no SNG, then the burden is on the Keep !voters to show that GNG is met. If it can be verified that an SNG is met, then the burden shifts to the delete !voters to show that GNG is not met. The issues raised above aren't with SNGs in general, but with the alleged leniency of specific SNGs. If a particular SNG is problematic, debate that SNG and find a way to narrow it to the community's satisfaction (as has happened here numerous times already); don't get rid of the entire concept of SNGs. Iffy★Chat -- 20:45, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
• This argument has been around for years, and doesn't just revolve around NSPORT. Our solution is to find the SNGs where they are too lenient (where a large amount of the catchment would not pass GNG) and update them to be more in line with those athletes who do meet GNG. The idea behind these guidelines is that most of the people who meet them also meet GNG, so you can create articles on the subject without doing a mass search for sourcing before putting the time in. This all stems from a discussion over NCRIC. If too many cricket players who meet NCRIC don't meet GNG, it's in our interest to make that less inclusive rather than report editors who have lots of articles deleted. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:14, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

I agree with your points here. But I will say that there have been discussions as recently as 3 months ago here at updating WP:NCRIC and there was no consensus on changing it. Discussions are still ongoing on the WikiProject about change as well. It's all good in saying we should make it less inclusive, but if we cant as a community come to agreement on what changes are to be made, we can't do it. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 21:18, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

There's clear consensus it's too broad, though. The fact that there's no consensus to change it should mean that the entire SNG is deprecated, in line with what Fram suggested, as opposed to just having some sort of status quo. The error there was that the suggestion was to deprecate the SNG, not to fix it and deprecate it if it couldn't be fixed. SportingFlyer T·C 21:26, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

The issue there is there will never be consensus to remove it all together. There was plenty of people in the discussion saying it shouldn't be removed altogether when it was mentioned. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 21:32, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

I haven't checked, but I think I was one of the people in the discussion saying it shouldn't be removed altogether. That's not really my argument though - my point is that since there's a general consensus NCRIC isn't tailored to GNG, so if it can't be reformed, it should be removed until a better SNG can be crafted, not falling back on the current problematic one. SportingFlyer T·C 21:52, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm not saying you weren't, although I haven't read the whole of the discussion in detail. I just feel that removing it altogether until we come up with a new solution is just a way of removing it entirely, because with how discussions have gone, it's unlikely there will be a consensus on how to replace it either. Some of NCRIC works well, certainly for international cricketers and domestic cricketers playing in the bigger competitions such as the County Championship or big T20 leagues, so removing it entirely seems a bit extreme. I've suggested an option below, but I'm not sure it'll gain support either. I think we should also remember that the SNG problem goes further than Cricket, with other SNGs such as the football and Olympic ones being overly inclusive and a not great precursor of GNG either. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 09:37, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

• WP:NCRIC is probably one of the most restrictive sports inclusion guidelines, which people don't seem to understand. In football, anyone who has kicked a ball for a club who has a wiki page tends to get an artice, that could well be half a dozen appearances for a non-league club. Whereas for cricket the match has to carry status: first-class, List A, or Twenty20. If a player hasn't played in any of those matches, they don't get an article. Over the years I've PRODed/AfD'ed hundreds of players who don't meet that criteria. While football allows pretty much anyone in from many leagues, if you play club cricket in an ECB Premier League, you don't get an article. StickyWicket (talk) 08:35, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
• Support change I don't really want to get into the nitty gritty, but any SNG that is improperly calibrated to WP:GNG must be revised. Some SNGs are overly strict (e.g. WP:SCHOLAR), others overly lax as discussed here. Both cases are problematic. Polyamorph (talk) 15:42, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

Arbitrary break 1

• Support change somewhere. I don't know what the language of this change would actually be (though I like Levivich's proposal and the general ideas articulated by SportingFlyer and RandomCanadian above), but clearly there is an issue when SNGs are this poor at predicting general notability. The arguments for the status quo all seem to rest on defeatist, reactionary, or WP:NOHARM attitudes. These positions only make sense if you ignore WP:NOT; why have any notability criteria at all if it's technically not going to cause harm? Why not include every player who appears in a sports database at any adult level? At the same time, NOHARM could be used as an argument for making various sports SNGs tighter -- after all, athlete bios still have to meet GNG, so who cares if under stricter criteria trawling stats databases wouldn't occasionally uncover (e.g.) notable cricketers who weren't fully professional? If they truly had a lasting impact they should meet GNG, and furthermore shouldn't all the cricket experts over at NCRIC be familiar enough with historical leagues that they'd run across the likes of W. G. Grace outside of databases? No one is preventing editors from using non-directory sources for article creation, so the opposition here really seems to be toward reducing the number of mass-created, low-effort stubs one can make and abandon. Which is...basically opposition to how WP expansion functions in most every other discipline, where you can't just import half a kb of trivia from stats sites and call it done. JoelleJay (talk) 23:48, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
  • We don't need to be flailing around just for the sake of Being Seen To Do Something, the more so in that it's obvious there's no consensus that there's even a problem. Nor are you likely to win hearts and minds by jeering at those you oppose. It is entirely possible -- strange though the premise might seem to you -- that those who see no reason to invent new rules feel that the various NSPORTS criteria already (as the guidance explicitly states) operates under the premise that they are subordinate to the GNG, and that they are intended to reflect the likelihood that a subject that can meet them will meet the GNG.

    If there are individual criteria with which you disagree, AND for which you've done the legwork to demonstrate that an unacceptably high percentage of those who meet it do not meet the GNG, then make that case and propose your changes. Ravenswing 05:30, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

• Support change- Firstly, the cricket SNG is demonstrably very bad at predicting which articles will be shown to meet GNG- the proportion of these that get deleted at AfD are proof of that- and any subguideline that seeks to carve out an exemption from WP:V and WP:GNG is not OK. Secondly, the mountain of microstubs does do harm. For the worst and most obscure of these articles it can actually be difficult to distinguish between similarly-named people, introducing inaccuracies and potentially creating BLP issues. Multiple pages containing minimal information each are a pain to the reader because they have to flip between several similar articles to get any kind of useful information and context. Unattended clouds of microstubs are susceptible to undetected vandalism. And they contribute to making the Random Article feature a pointless joke. Thirdly, I have objections to the way the Wikiproject behaves. Producing contentless substubs at a rate of one every few minutes is A-OK- but a few AfDs a day posted an order of magnitude more slowly and typically containing an order of magnitude more work than the article they're about is apparently a great crime. Then we get told by the Wikiproject we're not allowed to object to the bad articles on non-notable people until we've cleaned up all the bad articles on notable Test cricketers for them. And the sort of content one would expect to find in a biography, like biographical information, is derided as unnecessary filler, so it isn't as though they let you do the job properly even if you want to. Plus, you get a ceaseless stream of smarmy commentary that you can only possibly be objecting to bad articles because your motivations are awful and you can't edit properly. ... In short, write-only memory is a bad idea, and so is outsourcing the job of article writing to people who are unconvinced of the merit of the work and whom you intend to obstruct and insult at every opportunity. Reyk _YO! 06:47, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
• Comment I'm happy to support change if somebody can name any form of solution to the problem that will likely result in some for of consensus. This was the problem when NCRIC was discussed here at the end of last year rolling into the start of this year. Plenty of people said "oh yes it needs to change" but nobody could come up with solutions that gained any form of consensus. There we different viewpoints discussed, from re-writing NCRIC completely with various drafts created, but no consensus, too removing NCRIC entirely, again to no consensus. The only potential idea I have that may gain any form of support would be to create a list of competitions that qualify as 'notable' (there's a list currently, but it just lists all competitions that have FC/List-A/T20 status) similar to used in football, but again that would be fraught with discussions on what competitions are notable and what aren't, although AfDs have tended to show that NCRIC is not great at presuming notability for certain Pakistani and Sri Lankan cricketers. To be honest I'm not even sure that this would get support given how the previous discussion went. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 09:32, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  How about this:

  • Biographical information and substantial sources -> stand-alone article
  • Only playing statistics in databases -> entry in a team list of players

  Reyk _YO! 09:45, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  That's going to remove a lo-o-o-ot of Test cricketers. You can't tell me "they're obviously notable" because there are many for which there are no references. Bobo. 13:20, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  Personally I think that's an overly simplistic view on it. I think list articles are a good alternative here, but the cricket WikiProject were told in the past that list articles were unnecessary and unwarranted and so may well be against them, although some have been created recently for articles deleted at AfD. The whole point of SNGs though is that they presume notability, with your suggestion we may we just get rid of them entirely as they'd have to pass GNG. There's plenty of Olympians who just have articles because they competed at Olympics in the past, so we'd have to do the same with all of them as well, and footballers as well, and I'm sure other sports. By creating a list of notable competitions that better reflects presumed notability it would at least stop some article creation on subjects that were never going to be notable, but also appease those on the WikiProject somewhat. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 10:12, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  That hasn't been my experience. Three or four years ago I participated in a few of these AfDs and suggested mergeing/redirecting to list articles. For this I got screamed at. It wasn't WPCRIC being told list articles were out of the question, but them telling me that. Anyway, SNGs (at best) provide a rebuttable presumption of notability- it's not a permanent exemption to sourcing requirements. I would argue that, if the article creator cannot find anything beyond match score cards, and neither can the AfD nominator, nor anyone else at the AfD- then that presumption has been rebutted. Reyk _YO! 11:20, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  Reyk I don't recall that at all, any archived discussion? StickyWicket (talk) 19:22, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  Bobo192, AssociateAffiliate, Lugnuts and Johnlp will probably know more on why people didn't want list articles in the past. SNGs are there to show that sources likely exist for topics, when it's not always possible to find sourcing on people, perhaps because all information on them isn't online or is in different language sources that are difficult to find in a search. I've said above in the discussion why I don't feel GNG is great for completely determining notability for sportspeople because of it's bias towards recency and it being Anglocentric, and this is why I feel that keeping SNGs but improving them is important. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 11:29, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  Rugbyfan22 I honestly don't recall such a conversation. And right now, even lists (some of which are FA and reliably sourced with in-depth leads) are being deleted. StickyWicket (talk) 19:22, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  I'm not sure it was ever a conversation, I just remember I think Bobo mentioning it in a previous discussion when someone suggested list articles, I'm not sure how long ago we're talking about as well it could have been years ago and consensus on list articles may have changed. Obviously there have been some international century lists deleted (which I disagree with), but i don't see a problem with 'List of xxxx cricketers' being created as it seems that the AfDs are going to continue and articles be deleted. It's at least a starting point for reaching some form of common ground. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 19:32, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  I've been around the cricket project for more than 15 years and we've had lists in most of that time. Indeed, lists of the kind being discussed here have pointed the way, with their redlinks, to "missing" articles on cricketers who might pass the SNG. Many of the lists that have recently been deleted or merged back into individual cricketer articles were specifically created as a result of a vote in the cricket project when it was felt that tabular, primarily statistical material was unbalancing the narrative style on important cricket articles. Johnlp (talk) 20:32, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

• Support change The issue with SNGs is that they do encourage the creation of articles that should be notable, but when they're not calibrated to the GNG, this becomes irrelevant. In the context of sports, WP:NSPORT says GNG must ultimately be met. I think the easiest thing to do would be to deprecate the SNGs which clearly don't pass GNG, I think the two which clearly don't at the moment are NOLY and NCRIC but others likely exist, and replace them with text which actually predicts when a player will have been written about in significant coverage. This differs from the previous proposal by acknowledging that a properly calibrated SNG should exist, but when it's clear the current SNGs don't, we shouldn't be supporting them. SportingFlyer T·C 11:30, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  Agree generally with this. In theory the SNGs should have been tested so that someone just meeting the bar set would likely pass GNG, but I’m not sure that’s ever been done. For example, how likely are sportsmen to be notable if they made a handful of appearances in an early season of the Veikkausliiga, or perhaps one game for Sussex in the 1892 County Championship, or who finished towards the rear of the Shooting at the 1912 Summer Olympics – Men's 30 metre rapid fire pistol competition and who never made the Olympics again? Personally, I’m not convinced why SNGs exist when there is GNG, but that may be a minority view. Eldumpo (talk) 16:51, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

• Comment - It has been my opinion all along that both should exist, and people protested. Now people think it is necessary I question their aims for the project. The amount of division which is now present in the project has driven away long-term members, of whom Rugbyfan22 has listed four of us. I don't see the purpose of a spiritually incomplete project. Basically, we are stuck inside 1984, and that does none of us any good. The impetus for article creation no longer exists, as proven here. Not to make too many excuses but I'm going through off-wiki stuff at the moment and it's making me tired. With all of this going on, I apologize if people think I was somehow snapping or being unnecessarily defensive. Change is hard and confusing. Bobo. 11:54, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
• Comment - As for stubs with sporting information and biographical information, there's always going to be two groups - one group who says there is too much biographical information and one which says there is too little. I see very little middle ground. Bobo. 12:12, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
• Comment I see two problems here. The first is the concept of articles sourced only to statistical databases; cricket is not the worst offender here (the Olympics articles are worse, actually). I recommend that discussion be a separate RFC. The second is that the standard "one first-class match" doesn't correlate well enough with GNG. For at least modern biographies (people with post-2000 appearances, roughly), I recommended abandoning first-class as a criteria entirely, using "fully professional" or an explicit list of leagues. Appearing in one match in the Indian Premier League should indicate notability, playing one match for Cambridge University against an English county side should not. Yes, the criterion may not work for pre-1945 cricketers; I think we're better off with a gap in the SNG until somebody can fix CRIC for those people. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 16:41, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  The guideline could be rewritten that only those who have played at the top international level (this is more restrictive than just "first class"; and should probably work even for most pre-modern era players) are presumed notable (a presumption which is of course rebuttable at AfD); and that players who have played in top domestic leagues (FC, T20...) may be notable but that there is no presumption: it is up to the article creator to provide sources establishing GNG. But this distracts that the issue is not just with NCRIC. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 16:48, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  My position is that for a well-crafted SNG, the "statistical database" issue isn't a problem, or is at least far less of a problem. If (hypothetically) the football SNG required that people appear in a FIFA World Cup match, people should be content to have an article created that was only sourced to a statistical database; the presumption would be that sources exist. I haven't noticed this type of problem with WP:NHOCKEY, as an example. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 16:56, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  While I appreciate RandomCanadian's comments I feel his suggestions are overly uninclusive. Plenty of domestic cricketers gain significant coverage, some certainly far more than some international cricketers. Any player that's played in the Indian Premier League, Big Bash or County Championship in the last 10 years will almost certainly have significant coverage. International cricketers who perhaps have played a couple of One Day Internationals for Nepal would gain less coverage than them, but be included because of that change in SNG. Improving the list of competitions that lead to presumed notability could be done but would take much discussion at the cricket WikiProject. But as you say this is a problem with the majority of SNGs not just cricket. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 17:27, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  The suggestion with NCRIC was just that. It could be "at the top international level [i.e. countries with Test status; or ODI/T20] (any time period) or in top-level domestic leagues (modern era; since [pick a date - prob. not earlier than the World Series Cricket])... Cheers, RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 17:48, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  Ah apologies I misread it. It's the only solution I can think of though that may get some consensus from the cricket WikiProject though. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 17:54, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

• Comment As per the previous discussion about NCRIC, I do think an evaluation is needed for that particular SNG. Or at the minimum, a look into the practice of simply creating sub-stubs based solely on a stats database listing. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Prem Bhatia (Gujarat cricketer) is a prime example of why this should not be done. If indeed, Prem Bhatia (Gujarat cricketer) is the same subject as Prem Bhatia (Delhi cricketer), and all we have are two stats databases to compare and create our own conclusions, that is a practice that is frowned upon across any other topic in Wikipedia. Unfortunately, I am simply an observer here as I am not an expert in Cricket or how to find the appropriate non-English print sources, I can't come up with a good way to "fix" the SNG. 18:29, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  I should say there is significant coverage of the Prem Bhatia Delhi cricketer, it's just not sourced in the article, but understand the point you're trying to make. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 18:41, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  I wouldn't be surprised if there is, but I find it hard to criticise someone making mass AfDs when they can't find sources when the creators are putting in basically the same amount of effort in source finding. Both behaviors lead to mistakes and cruft (either AfD cruft or multitudes of sub-stubs). There is a reason both sides have recently been brought to ANI. Yosemiter (talk) 21:21, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

• Support change as per all the previous similar discussions. As always, it's a question of what change. I'd generally support anything which would prevent notability claims based just on extant data with no in depth coverage at all. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 18:48, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  I've attempted a rewrite of the beginning. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 19:33, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  And of course it was reverted saying "no consensus". No good deed goes unpunished... RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 03:37, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

• Support complete removal The reality is that NSPORT is past saving. Discussions about what was or wasn't said in the past are a sure sign that we're going round in circles. I remember editors claiming that we need criteria such that 99.999% of people satisfying the criteria should be notable; something so far from the reality as to be laughable. We've had folk creating the FAQ with different wording from the actual guideline (the "very likely"/"likely" difference) and then we've had long discussions with the conclusion that all this makes perfect sense. Apparently the FAQ is actually part of the guideline even though it says something completely different. And of course, this all makes no difference anyway, stubs continue to be created on an industrial scale. Recently I had cause to look at Eddy Carbonnelle, "a Belgian field hockey player" (thinking he might also be a golfer). Even though the sole reference uses "Carbonnelle" the article was created as Eddy Carbonelle (one n). Perhaps this slip was related to the fact that the article was created at 17:56 on 22 September 2019, between the creation of Guy Debbaudt at 17:54 and the creation of Freddy Rens at 17:57. I'm reminded of the Monty Python "5 minute argument" sketch. However this seems to be the "90 second article creation" sketch. And this is fundamental issue here, the article is created in 90 seconds but removing it is orders of magnitude more difficult. Of course, this is nothing to do with NSPORT, showing that NSPORT is largely a diversion to the fundamental issue. Nigej (talk) 20:32, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

  It took at least three emails and at least three misspelt sources for me to work out how to spell Michael Bolochoweckyj's name... Bobo. 01:55, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

  In this case the source was correct. You'd think a cut and paste would be the most reliable action. Nigej (talk) 07:14, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

  So I presume you're in favor of ditching ALL SNGs, Wikipedia-wide? WP:BIO, WP:CREATIVE, WP:PROF, the whole kit and kaboodle? (That, as well as pitching in to deal with the consequences, which would almost certainly involve a thousand articles at AfD a day.) Ravenswing 06:29, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

  No. I'm happy with the others. It's just this one that is being abused on such a massive scale. Nigej (talk) 07:14, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

• Strongly oppose of removal all SNG but some SGN guidelines could be tighten - Sport SNG covers a huge array of sports and to blanket removal all of them is not just for (1) Some of the team sport members would not have in dept, sign coverage such as water polo, cricket or volleyball yet we allow a cat article to be in stand alone page as it have 3 IRS coverage of no important as compare to a player have represented their countries in Olympic or Commonwealth games for years. (2) Some of subject the pre-internet ear, and it might be difficult to find enough IRS to meet GNG. (3) If we remove sport SNG then we would face other SGN to be removed as well and all those academic [[WP:NACEDEMIC], politician WP:NPOL and WP:NORG will effected and we would see very little academic page, and thousands of companies and politicians pages emerge. (4) If certain sport SNG needs to be tighten, then let that particular SNG to be discuss in the WikiProject first to have want need to changed agreement and then bring the discussion to Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports) to gain consensus approval. Cassiopeia^(talk) 03:01, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

  1) Agree that many individual members of teams might not be independently notable. Whether we should function as a pseudo-database for such or simply provide external links to complementary websites is a valid question. 2) coverage was also different in pre-internet times (and many sports have changed dramatically over the past century, for example cricket which went from an amateur sport to the multi-billion dollar industry it is nowadays) - it might indeed be the case that such subjects simply did not attract significant coverage in their lifetimes or thereafter and are thus not notable - if that's the case, then RGW comes to mind. 3) A valid proposal - maybe the whole concept of SNGs should be revisited. Maybe we could have GNG link to a new page, WP:Subject notability guidelines, which would explain the intention (supplement to GNG) and limitations/usage of these; with additional links from that page to agreed-upon SNGs which are fit for purpose. 4) I oppose this per WP:NOTBUREAUCRACY and WP:CREEP - editors should feel free to address a perceived problem in whichever way seems the most appropriate, not have to go through multiple hoops. Usually that involves posting a discussion on the talk page of the affected page (or if it's a wider policy change, at VPP) and advertise it at other relevant pages if necessary. And as said, the problem isn't just with one or two SNGs here and there: it might simply be a waste of time changing them one by one. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 03:35, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

  For the sports-specific notability guidelines, the only thing that's worked for over a decade is changing them one by one. If the discussion at the notability talk page regarding subject-specific notability guidelines were to be restarted and reach some agreement, that would be great. I would caution that expectations should be tempered, though, given that people have been trying for many years now and I still see a lot of fundamental disagreement at present. isaacl (talk) 04:40, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

• Strongly oppose removal of all SNGs, but some SGN guidelines could be tightened as per Cassiopeia - this needs to be considered on a sports-by-sports basis. If the cricket SNG is not up to scratch it, change it so it is. Do not attempt to get rid of SNGs as a whole, that is asking for trouble. GiantSnowman 17:45, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
• Support changes per the above. Any SNG that encourages the creation of articles without enough verifiable text to be a stand-alone article need to be overhauled so it is clear that we should NOT be doing that. Stand-alone articles should not be created unless and until there is clear and unambiguous evidence that there exists a reasonable chance that enough source text can be brought together to actually write a good article about the subject. If all that could ever be said about a subject can be contained in a single sentence or paragraph then we don't need a stand-alone article. Information about such subjects doesn't need to be erased from Wikipedia, but where (for example), a person can be noted as having played on a team for a single game, we can adequately cover that information in other articles and don't need to create an entire article where all we can say is "So and so played in one game". This doesn't include people for whom there is other good source text (perhaps even because they only appeared in the one game, i.e. the Moonlight Graham effect), however, if we can't actually write an article about the person, maybe we shouldn't create that article. --Jayron32 18:01, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

  Per Wikipedia:Notability (sports)/FAQ#Q1, the intent is that individual sport SNGs should reflect that sufficient sources exist to write a decent article. If an SNG criteria is too lax, it needs to be tightened or removed (e.g. playing one game in XYZ league). Stand-alone articles should not be created unless and until there is clear and unambiguous evidence ... That evidence is generally meeting the SNG, the whole purpose that SNGs exist. If it's not reliable, the specific SNG needs to dealt with.—Bagumba (talk) 07:46, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

• Support change Change in these guidelines is definitely needed, and I will support any reasonable proposed changes in the hopes that one of them gets consensus, because almost anything would be better than the mass of poorly sourced sports articles we have now. ( especially cricket)Jackattack1597 (talk) 23:08, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose removing all sports SNGs. I've edited in the area of Australian rules football for a couple of years now, and created about 80-odd biographies of new players, covered by the SNG WP:NAFL. It's a straightforward and unambiguous guideline: if you've played or coached a match in the top men's or women's league, you're presumed notable. Yet I always make a point of ensuring the articles include more than enough (non-statistical) sources to unambiguously pass GNG, and I've never researched a debutant who would fail GNG if an article were created.

My point is that NAFL, despite its simplicity, is very good at correctly predicting notability. Much of the above discussion has focused on the persistence of potentially problematic guidelines such as NCRIC as a rationale for removing all sports-related SNGs, but doing so would risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. – Teratix ₵ 01:38, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose changes We tighten SNGs all the time. If there is one that appears to be lax and you can do the legwork to show its lax then propose changing it. But sweeping everything together is not the way to do it. -DJSasso (talk) 11:51, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose All While some SNG's definitely need to be reviewed and changed, removing them entirely would be a mistake and could lead to the deletion of a lot of articles of older athletes who's coverage cannot be found online. Best, GPL93 (talk) 13:52, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
• Strong oppose, we can fine tune SNGs, but removing them would be the wrong move in my opinion. Also, I have no issues with stubs, and no issues with tons of them being from sportspeople.--Ortizesp (talk) 21:02, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
• Suppot any change requiring significant coverage to be found will reduce the endless creation of permastubs on non-notable individuals and is a plus imo. (t · c) buidhe 07:56, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

RandomCanadian's Proposals

Overriden by better thought out and more formal proposals. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 16:40, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Add specific proposals here. JoelleJay (talk) 16:59, 29 March 2021 (UTC) In order of increasing severity/effort/expected opposition: These were not originally intended as formal questions for voting. Rewrite the introduction to make it clear SNGs are not substitutes for GNG; and adjust the page elsewhere if required. (ex. something like this; although the details can be changed). Deprecate the SNGs which do not in practice provide a correct indication of notability Re-do the whole concept of SNGs; creating a separate WP:Subject notability guidelines page and linking accepted and effective SNGs from there. Deprecate NSPORTS entirely Now of course, non exhaustive listing. Surely others have had good ideas too. And then of course there's the entirely opposite "nothing to fix here" position, but I don't think there's many supporters of that option. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 17:38, 29 March 2021 (UTC) Support Option 1/Oppose options 3 and 4 and support improving certain SNGs The SNG text needs rewriting to be clearer as RandomCanadian says, and certain SNGs clearly need improving. However, re-doing the whole concept will likely cause a minefield of problems as as shown by discussions above there are so many different opinions on SNGs and how they should be used. Removing NSPORTS entirely again I disapprove of as GNG is far from perfect for proving the notability of sports people as myself and other users have mentioned above. Certain SNGs need improving/tightening though (Cricket, Olympics + others for example) and it should be down to the relevant WikiProjects to work out how to improve them, with the support of the NSPORTS community and not the force of the NSPORTS community telling specific projects what to do and how their guidelines should be, although the wider community should have a say on any new proposals specific WikiProjects come up with. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 17:55, 29 March 2021 (UTC) Are we workshopping or voting here? I would say that we need to have text which explicitly states that SNG's do NOT override the need to have source text about a subject. If the source text doesn't exist, the article shouldn't. I guess this is most in line with 1 and 2 noted above, but I think we need to get together a solid proposal before we just start voting. --Jayron32 18:04, 29 March 2021 (UTC) It feels like a mix of both. I feel like the consensus so far is pretty clear, we'll see if there's consensus about the proper ways forward. SportingFlyer T·C 18:42, 29 March 2021 (UTC) (edit conflict)I was clearly workshopping above (if I didn't say it explicitly now I do); the subsequent !vote notwithstanding. There seems to be overwhelming support for some form of change in the previous sub-section. Now that would take someone sifting through that and determining what kind of changes are most favoured before making a formal question. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 18:44, 29 March 2021 (UTC) I've now tried to provide a summary of the initial discussion section. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 19:15, 29 March 2021 (UTC) Support 1/2 Option 3 increases the scope significantly and is unlikely to lead to change, though I support it, and option 4 ignores that SNGs can be useful guides when properly calibrated. I think Option 1 makes absolutely clear the sports SNGs are guides to when GNG is established and do not supplant the GNG, and I support option 2, deprecating the SNGs which encourage stub creation (cricket and the Olympics, and maybe a review of football (perhaps changing that guideline to "fully professional leagues where all players receive or should receive GNG-qualifying coverage".) I also consider "deprecating" to mean updating specific SNGs, where a no consensus result leads to the SNG being removed. SportingFlyer T·C 18:42, 29 March 2021 (UTC) Support 3 and 4. Thousands of articles about players who happen to be professional but lack WP:GNG coverage, and who will not matter one iota 10 years from now, don't need to be in an encyclopedia, which should focus on topics that can stand the test of time. This is especially true for articles that don't do much more than offer some statistics. In my opinion, SNG has succeeded only in causing a proliferation of rather useless pages that won't matter a few years from now. If we keep SNG, then it should specify inclusion criteria beyond GNG, to include sports figures of actual significance and filter out routine coverage that gives only an illusion of actual notability. ~Anachronist (talk) 18:53, 29 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose. The problem is that some sub-parts of this SNG (cricket in particular) are not appropriately tailored as accurate predictors of notability. The solution is to fix those sub-parts, not to undermine the force and effect of the sub-parts that are appropriately tailored. Cbl62 (talk) 19:14, 29 March 2021 (UTC) That seems a lot like supporting number 2. But again we're still trying to find a solid proposal that will attract broad support and fix the problem. Putting off the task to future RfCs to resolve each problematic SNG individually seems like a waste of effort. There appears to be broad agreement that some of them are problematic. Maybe we should figure out a framework as to how to resolve these. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 19:19, 29 March 2021 (UTC) Except #2, which do not in practice provide a correct indication of notability, is toothless. "correct indication" is purely subjective. I suggest that specific changes to individual sports are proposed. Vague waves will not result in change.—Bagumba (talk) 05:56, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Proposals regarding the subject-specific notability guidelines (SNGs) are better discussed in another venue, such as the Wikipedia talk:Notability, in order to gather input from a broader spectrum of those who will be affected. isaacl (talk) 19:49, 29 March 2021 (UTC) Regarding overwhelming consensus: if you haven't already, please read Wikipedia talk:Notability/Archive 71. As far as anyone has been able to determine so far, there is no consensus yet on any changes to how subject-specific notability guidelines are handled. isaacl (talk) 19:54, 29 March 2021 (UTC) I think the words of Wikipedia:How Wikipedia notability works should be heeded. "Notability" is not supposed to be a measure of whether someone is worthy of attention or something. It's supposed to be the answer to the question "will we have enough sourcing available from which build a suitable article". So if the issue is more fundamental than just NCRIC and some others, it might be worth asking: what is a "suitable article"? Random off-wiki examples: [1] [2] [3] [4]? Or is a shorter page like [5] suitable for sports figure? All very valid questions. I personally prefer when we're closer to serious, academic writing and not the pop-culture journalism side of the scale. Does not prevent us from having articles on entertainment/sports/pop culture topics - but they really should be more than "x was a y-sportsperson who played for z team". RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 20:40, 29 March 2021 (UTC) It's a good discussion to have—in a broader venue. (And that essay isn't saying that "notability" is supposed to be something; it's discussing what happens right now in practice. If we start discussing the broader issues, all that happens now is subject to change.) isaacl (talk) 20:45, 29 March 2021 (UTC) The issue at hand is specifically the sports SNG, though. I imagine a proposal to get rid of SNGs in a broader forum will go down about as well as kicking a hornet's nest. SportingFlyer T·C 21:22, 29 March 2021 (UTC) Even getting rid of specific problematic SNGs has required, what, a previous RfC with no consensus, and now this... To be exact, I was not suggesting getting rid of all SNGs; merely redefining their use and limitations thereof given the problems here (which are not unique to sports personalities) RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 21:29, 29 March 2021 (UTC) To clarify, then, are proposals 1, 2, and 3 referring to all subject-specific notability guidelines? isaacl (talk) 21:41, 29 March 2021 (UTC) In the current context: 1 and 2 do not. If you ask me: Should we do a wider RfC to get support for 1 and 2 across all subjects; and also 3 (since here obviously is of insufficient scope)? The the answer is a resounding Yes. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 21:57, 29 March 2021 (UTC) In that case, the proposals should specifically say something like sports-specific notability guidelines. As written, they sound like they're referring to the subject-specific notability guidelines. And then the broader questions raised by RandomCanadian have a narrower scope. I once proposed stating there should be sufficient coverage available to write a biography describing significant aspects of the sportsfigure's life, and it was pointed out that this is a standard beyond the general notability guideline. So within the context of the general notability guideline, "suitable article" is pretty barebones. Coverage that consists solely of "X played Y for Z" is routine coverage. For many sports, the interested editors agree that routine coverage is insufficient to meet the general notability guideline. isaacl (talk) 21:39, 29 March 2021 (UTC) Athletes are (typically) notable for playing sports, so I would expect the coverage of them to cover their sporting careers rather than other aspects of their life. In fact, excessively covering other aspects of their life rather than focusing on what they are notable for probably violates WP:UNDUE. Smartyllama (talk) 22:19, 29 March 2021 (UTC) Obviously I can't speak about all athlete biographies, but most of the ones I've seen provide adequate weight to the athlete careers. (Well, Cassie Campbell comes to mind as an exception, as there are five sentences on her hockey career, with no personal accomplishments listed other than serving as captain.) isaacl (talk) 22:26, 29 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose all If particular guidelines are problematic, adjust them. There's no need to destroy everything simply because we don't like a few guidelines. Smartyllama (talk) 22:16, 29 March 2021 (UTC) We're not at the formal !voting stage yet (and given what others say, that might likely have to happen at a broader venue); but apparently people are taking it like that... How come "if particular guidelines are problematic, adjust them" (quite similar to option 2 in spirit; which might need rewording though so fair point) but "oppose all"? RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 22:23, 29 March 2021 (UTC) Because the solution is adjusting them, not deprecating them entirely. Smartyllama (talk) 22:29, 29 March 2021 (UTC) It's preferable to have no guideline (the fall back then is GNG, which is what SNGs are supposed to show anyway) than a broken one. As I said that seems a minor quibble in wording, and the questions likely will need to be taken to a broader venue. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 22:31, 29 March 2021 (UTC) Based on the consensus so far, my suggestion for a solution here might be to: Identify and deprecate specific problematic sports SNGs (I'm thinking "deprecate" does not mean "remove," unless we cannot reach consensus on a replacdescribedement guideline within a certain amount of time); Put on the record that mass creation of sports stubs sourced only to statistical databases should be discouraged. SportingFlyer T·C 22:59, 29 March 2021 (UTC) I am generally in agreement with SportingFlyer's point # 1, though I'm not sure (i) what the practical difference is between "deprecate" and "remove", and (ii) how we get there given that the prior discussion on the cricket guideline stalled and seemingly accomplished little (or nothing). As for SportingFlyer's point #2, I am sympathetic, but I'm not sure how one would define "mass creation". Also, if an SNG is well calibrated to GNG, I'm not so concerned with sub-stubs, as those sub-stubs can eventually be expanded through our usual collaborative process into meaningful and encyclopedic content. Cbl62 (talk) 00:59, 30 March 2021 (UTC) @Cbl62: I understand "deprecate" and "remove" are pretty much the same in practice, but I visualise "deprecate" being softer - it would keep the text of the old SNG around while a new one is being discussed and provide an incentive for consensus to be reached (as a no consensus would mean full removal, as opposed to "nothing changes"). I'm also not that concerned with sub-stubs if they can be expanded or if they pass GNG, but when you have a second division footballer who passes GNG, it's a better look to take five minutes creating the article and linking in one or two significant sources than it is to spend 90 seconds creating the article sourced only to a statistics database. I would not move a sports biography into mainspace from AfC if it had only one source to Soccerway or CricInfo or football-reference, especially if it were a BLP; we should discourage auto-patrolled editors from creating these pages directly on mainspace. SportingFlyer T·C 08:33, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Both of these seem fine. The second one could be stronger. I think if we combine my first two proposals (R.C. 2 = S.F. 1; so just need to agree on a wording for that one) and yours we can have something that will accomplish at least a good part in solving the problems yet be palatable to enough editors to pass. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 23:13, 29 March 2021 (UTC) I consider these not mutually exclusive, to be clear. SportingFlyer T·C 23:17, 29 March 2021 (UTC) Comment Solution should be fixing specific SNG (cricket in particular) by tighten the criteria (I have seen more than 30+/- cricketers with only first names and no last names, which we couldn't even be sure they are the cricketers which we thought they are/were, were argued to death on AfD and they were voted a keeps and one year later those articles were re-AfCed and this time they were all vote deletes). A sub article can always be expanded in future date that is the reason we have sub class in Wikipedia. Cassiopeia(talk) 01:23, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Comment I'm only commenting from my interaction at the larger notability picture here: option 1 may need some tuning given the discussion from 2-3 months ago at WT:N in that at a general level the community consensus between the SNGs and the GNG is not clear. I know that NSPORT here is developed based on the principle of Option 1 - the individual criteria are minimally sufficient to start an article, but the expectation is to get to the GNG, but this is not a position that was shared by many editors involved in the WT:N, with "once you meet the SNG you're fine" approach being very common. I personally think the Option 1/NSPORT is the right way for this, and NSPORT should have the freedom to express this explicitly (particularly for the more "troublesome" criteria that keep coming up) given the results of that WP:N that said that there's not consistency in the SNGs. --Masem (t) 23:49, 29 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose All: For reasons of ... (No. 1) On the face of it, this isn't objectionable, but the NSPORTS guidance already stipulates that the SNGs are, after all, subordinate. What manner of wording do people think would actually get through, 36-pt type screeching "YOU DUMB BASTARDS, PAY ATTENTION TO THIS" ... ? (No. 2) Aside from which "deprecate" means to remove, not to correct, each and every one of you who claims that NSPORTS is broken has had the ability to weigh in on any sports SNG that sticks in your craw. I absolutely agree that some of them are/have been broken, and I've been part of the weighing in. Any that haven't been changed means that there is no consensus to do so, and if you haven't attempted to contribute to the solution, you're part of the problem. (By the bye, precisely how many of you have actually done any legwork to determine exactly how specific SNGs need to be tightened in order to produce an acceptable GNG hitrate? No, I didn't think so.) (No. 3) Does anyone honestly envision this proposal as anything but an epic disaster, as constituents pour in from all over Wikipedia to defend their pet criteria, and to bash those of areas in which they have no interest? (No. 4) I would consider supporting any proposal to set the GNG up as the sole arbiter of notability, Wikipedia-wide. Any attempt to get rid of NSPORTS while leaving the likes of WP:CREATIVE, WP:CORP, WP:PROF, WP:NGEO (the latter two of which explicitly admit that they don't pay attention to the GNG) kicking around to spawn hordes of NN articles of their own is absolutely operating off of an agenda, and neither a pleasant nor a subtle one. Ravenswing 01:33, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Ascribing an agenda when none exists is unhelpful (I'm myself a cricket fan, despite my geographic reality). As I said, these proposals need some further work. Re. specific points: no. 2 - so we agree that some SNGs are broken; and yet we fail to agree on how to replace them. Seems that since there's agreement that some SNGs are inappropriate as they stand, it would be more logical to deprecate those and fall back to GNG until we can agree on a replacement, instead of keeping something patently broken. no. 3 - I was not envisioning this proposal as getting rid of SNGs, I was thinking of this as centralising SNGs and making a summary of their proper usage as a new page, while still keeping the existing guidelines, i.e. applying no. 1 to all SNGs (hence a proposal outside the scope of this discussion, but getting feedback on it here is useful); no. 4 - I have no particular qualms with getting rid of the SNGs altogether (especially if they keep getting used as improper substitutes to GNG); especially the ones which admit that they do not give a flying flamingo about GNG; but I placed it last because I think it is extremely unlikely to pass, given the already significant opposition to even removing single SNGs... RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 02:17, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Asserting an agenda is unhelpful, but there are editors above with the candor to admit that they advocate wiping NSPORTS out while keeping all other SNGs -- including others that are routinely abused -- intact. I stand by my characterization of that. I don't accuse you of doing so. That being said, my take (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that the proposals you set out aren't necessarily ones you might support so much as setting forth the various options. Ravenswing 03:43, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Thanks. Re. your take: correct; I was always aiming for further discussion. Cheers, RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 04:15, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose All: Second the above what Ravenswing said above - to remove all SNG/SSN would be openning the Pandora's box. Cassiopeia(talk) 01:54, 30 March 2021 (UTC) oppose all or if forced to choose, option 1. I don't think change is necessary.-- Earl Andrew - talk 03:16, 30 March 2021 (UTC) (EC) Support all. 1. The SNG/GNG/N wording clearly remains confusing if there are still any sports AfDs where !voters argue "keep meets N[X]", and especially if any are closed as keep where GNG has not been demonstrated. The language in WP:N is poor as it places GNG and SNG on equal footing -- even though the context is their capacity to presumably meet notability, positioning them as "either/or" here predictably leads editors to believe all SNGs provide an equally direct avenue to notability as GNG does. It then has to be pointed out that N is essentially kicking the ball back to individual SNGs, some of which explicitly supersede GNG, some of which have stricter requirements than GNG, and some of which fully submit to GNG. It then has to be explained that, actually, meeting most SNGs only presumes notability, and you do still need to meet GNG, even though apparently GNG also only "presumes" notability, plus N presents SNG and GNG as non-hierarchical, which they are for certain SNGs, but... etc. etc. NSPORT makes this worse by immediately catering exclusively to the AfC crowd with its first-paragraph bolded instructions perpetuating a GNG-SNG "either/or" relationship -- inevitably necessitating clarification that the criteria for creation are less stringent, yadda yadda yadda. 2. There are numerous archived threads discussing how frequently AfDs in a particular project are either closed as delete at alarming proportions, or are closed as keep without the subject meeting GNG. The criteria for those sports are deficient and must be dramatically reassessed. 3. We have three types of SNGs with three completely different pathways to meeting notability. These should be explicitly distinguished. 4. NSPORT is subordinate to GNG. So why treat it as if it's more than a rule of thumb? JoelleJay (talk) 05:04, 30 March 2021 (UTC) The language in WP:N is poor ...: That's an issue to take up with WP:N, not targetting a specific SNG.—Bagumba (talk) 05:41, 30 March 2021 (UTC) The sports notability guideline does not ask to be treated as more than a rule of thumb. Its third paragraph explicitly says These are merely rules of thumb. isaacl (talk) 05:54, 30 March 2021 (UTC) *Gestures broadly*. Plenty of people here seem to think it is absolutely critical for article creation as an alternative to GNG. That sounds like more than a rule of thumb. JoelleJay (talk) 20:06, 30 March 2021 (UTC) In which case I don't think there's too much we can do to convince them it isn't, except pointing at the existing text; which they're also de facto objecting to changing because it supposedly already makes the point that the SNG is subordinate to GNG explicit (more often, it's just a generic "oppose all per x;" which does not help us determine whether A) they're objecting to the principle as a whole or B) to the specifics of the proposal. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 20:15, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Yes, as I said earlier, some editors want to have achievement-based standards to determine if a given subject should have an article. The consensus that created the sports notability guideline explicitly disagreed with this point of view, preferring to craft criteria that serve as predictors for meeting the general notability guideline. So as written, the sports notability guideline establishes rules of thumb. This disagreement is one reason for the stalemate in revising the criteria for some sports. (Another one is disagreements on what constitutes adequate coverage to meet the general notability guideline.) There are some sports whose interested editors agree with the predictor view, and have been able to revise the criteria to improve their predictive ability. isaacl (talk) 22:47, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose all Malformed request that is unclear if it's a reform of WP:N itself and its general endorsement of SNGs, a criticism of all SNGs, or particularly an NSPORTS issue. There is an issue with some individual sports, and it's unfortunate those editors have not policed themselves, but that doesn't justify grouping all sports by association.—Bagumba (talk) 05:50, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose all - this is going to be be met with a huge hoard of sports editors disapproval. And it's almost impossible to police. Tennis Project Guidelines for notability have been meticulously debated to make them work. We used NSport as much as we could but GNG is so vague and doesn't always work for each individual sport. Tweaks must be made so that we have an enforceable framework that we can show our editors in case of argument. It isn't 100% and some barely-notable or perhaps some barely-not-notable players slip through, but it is a good working model in an unperfect environment. We have to deal with notability in dozens of languages across the globe, and the tiniest country's press reports. We have to deal with players with similar achievements of today's players but who played in 1890. So we set guidelines of very likely GNG to stop countless edit wars and arguments. We point to Tennis Project Guidelines and NSPORT when new editors have questions. We've been as specific as we can in our project's guidelines so as to leave little wiggle room. If a player in question does not meet Tennis Project Guidelines, but someone insists they meet GNG, it gets opened up for debate to see if they can prove it to all wikipedians. Since we worked so hard on getting the guidelines correct, these debates actually happen infrequently. So to just ditch this system is incredibly wrong imho. I can't speak for other WikiProjects as I have no idea how they set up their own project guidelines, but Project Tennis guidelines have worked really well for our editors. Fyunck(click) (talk) 06:11, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Good work, considering this clauses 4,5 and 6 are basically cart blanch to create and keep any tennis bio (since people think Ntennis trumps GNG). Clearly most appearing in lower levels of the nation cups (clause 2) and on the lower tiers are not notable to gain GNG, as having a profile on ITF or WTA or ATP is not good enough (of which there is loads). So I find it amazing that you Fyunck are stating that the tennis guidelines are as good as they can be. Games of the world (talk) 10:14, 2 April 2021 (UTC) Support 1 and 2- although it's true that the SNGs defer to the GNG, and this is stated clearly, the problem is getting the enthusiasts of various subject areas to admit this fact. Not to mention all the closing admins who ignore lengthy and well-researched delete votes, only to throw themselves reverentially at the feet of anyone saying "keep- meets NDERP ~~~~". It's plain that the actual guideline needs to be clarified even further, so that anyone can understand it; even those who don't want to. As for point 2, I think it is feasible to investigate take stock of those SNGs that don't provide a good predictor of meeting GNG. It's not so hard to tell the difference between an SNG being used as a decently accurate predictor of whether sources will be found to exist given enough research, and being held up as an exemption from sourcing requirements altogether. Thus it should be feasible to deprecate the SNGs that are not doing their job, while leaving the good ones be. Reyk YO! 06:21, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose all especially 2 which is, I'm afraid, completely untestable. You absolutely cannot write requirements like this. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 07:03, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Support option 1 is any change is made - just to make it clear that the SNG is a presumption of notability only, and if GNG is not met, players are not notable. There is a large body of AFD consensus that clearly shows that footballers/soccer players who play for a few minutes in 1 or 2 games are not notable, despite passing the SNG. GiantSnowman 09:26, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose all These are just not very good. -DJSasso (talk) 11:52, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose all per The Rambling Man, Djsasso and others. Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 16:43, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Support option 2 only, oppose all others. SNGs are an alternative to the GNG. Passing one is enough for notability and you do not need to pass both GNG and an SNG. If there are concerns that certain SNGs are giving unwanted articles a "free pass" (which, for the avoidance of doubt, I have no evidence for or against), then that should be resolved by tightening or deprecating the offending SNGs. Stifle (talk) 15:53, 31 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose all of the above. The GNG is deeply flawed as it usually comes down to whether or not significant coverage has been found. That itself is not a good indication of whether a subject is suitable for an encyclopedia entry. SNGs do not generally defer to GNG - many existed prior to GNG, and objective measures of encyclopedic relevance are much preferable to a flawed measure of how much coverage has been found. If there are issues with individual sports, these should be discussed to resolve them. --Michig (talk) 07:12, 1 April 2021 (UTC) How is the GNG flawed? I don't understand the nature of your objection to it? My question to you regarding your objection is simple: From where do you get the information to put in an article? --Jayron32 13:17, 1 April 2021 (UTC) I explained above why the GNG is flawed. Information needs to come from reliable sources. These don't necessarily need to consitute "significant" coverage to allow verification. --Michig (talk) 17:22, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Fram's proposal

Replaced by the "revised" proposal section below. It seems more likely to get a consensus without the "non-local" aspect added.
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
The actual text needs working, obviously, but the proposal is to add one element to the "mathematical", "statistical" requirements all sports have (one match, has participated, one win, ...): a player is presumed notable if they meet that statistical requirement and has substantial coverage in at least one non-local, non-routine source. All the other rules stay the same, but no longer will be stats-only creations be acceptable. Note that this is still a lesser requirement than the multiple sources asked for by the GNG: these would be needed when challenged, but for creation, you would only need one substantial source. Thoughts? Fram (talk) 07:31, 30 March 2021 (UTC) What is "non-routine"? If there's an article about an Australian Rules footie player shearing a sheep for charity, but all other reports are match reports, does that pass? The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 07:56, 30 March 2021 (UTC) That is non-routine, yes. It indicates that the player is known enough to give him attention when he does something besides playing (it would be unusual to get this in non-local news, I guess, although I remember a BBC TV (national) fragment about a curling player on his farm (in Springwatch, I guess). "must provide reports beyond routine game coverage" is already part of the "basic criteria" of NSPORTS, so defining non-routine hasn't been a problem so far it seems (it also returns 4 times in the sections on amateur, college, ... sports). Fram (talk) 08:12, 30 March 2021 (UTC) My only issue is that "local" varies. A player in Melbourne may get non-routine coverage in Melbourne and be notable, I was at an AfD where a player from Šibenik received coverage from the "local" regional newspaper and was deleted. I'd support this if "non-local" were reframed or clearly defined. SportingFlyer T·C 08:25, 30 March 2021 (UTC) See Wikipedia:Notability (sports)/FAQ#Q4: What is your expected timeframe for historical, pre-internet subjects where the sources are offline?—Bagumba (talk) 08:47, 30 March 2021 (UTC) None. If you don't have access to any sources besides statistics, don't create it (as a standalone article, of course the subject can be included in lists). Fram (talk) 09:04, 30 March 2021 (UTC) This is a very sensible proposal. SportingFlyer T·C 09:22, 30 March 2021 (UTC) That contradicts WP:BEFORE (If the article can be fixed through normal editing, then it is not a candidate for AfD.) and WP:AFDISNOTCLEANUP.—Bagumba (talk) 10:41, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Also, this has a problem with WP:BIAS, if we're only encouraging creation for countries with good online newspaper archives. A lot of e.g. South African newspapers don't have online archives, and yet there would be lots of national/regional coverage about players. Joseph2302 (talk) 10:57, 30 March 2021 (UTC) How does that contradict WP:BEFORE? For starters, articles which would fail this proposal could be redirected to lists of players (which is a valid WP:BEFORE solution). And of course, if you don't have and can't find indepth sources (with a reasonable search), then the article can't be fixed through normal editing, and there is again no WP:BEFORE problem. WP:BEFORE doesn't mean that "if a source may, perhaps, exist somewhere, it should be kept", and neither does AFD mean "even if a source is found afterwards, it may not be recreated". Fram (talk) 11:18, 30 March 2021 (UTC) If the subject flourished before the internet, do you consider a search of offline sources part of BEFORE or not?—Bagumba (talk) 12:29, 30 March 2021 (UTC) No, searching for such a source is not a part of WP:BEFORE (and before anyone misinterprets this: kudo's to those who do such a source, such sources are perfectly acceptable; just like sources behind a paywall may well be acceptable reliable sources, but it is not necessary for WP:BEFORE to check if there are sources behind a paywall either). One needs to do a reasonable search like everyone with unrestricted Internet access could make; beyond that, if you don't find enough to warrant keeping an article, the WP:BURDEN shifts to those arguing to keep to provide actual sources instead of claiming that they must exist (or worse, that they don't exist but that NSPORTS allowss having a standalone article anyway, which is false already). Fram (talk) 12:43, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Every first-class cricketer whose article is present on Cricket Archive (paywall) will also have a profile on Cricinfo (no paywall). Not a problem. If the only problem people have is WP:PAYWALL, they can always fix the articles themselves rather than take them to deletion. If people want to remove every reference to Cricket Archive, so be it. It's just that when we first started creating and citing articles, the site had no paywall. (And even today, the paywall is so easy to get around...) Bobo. 12:50, 30 March 2021 (UTC) That's not what the above is about though, it is about indepth sources, not statistics (it also isn't just about cricket but about every sport). A "profile" on these two sites is just a database entry. I know that these sites also carry articles, but that's not what you are talking about. Fram (talk) 13:24, 30 March 2021 (UTC) People seem to confuse CI as just purely stats, it isn't. Lots of players how profiles on there and beyond that the site provides a list of matches played by each player too. So if I say John Smith made 43 first-class appearances between 1900 and 1910, I can use their match list page as a source for that (otherwise it would be OR). It isn't simply a runs scored and wickets taken kinda website. If people claiming it is were to go on there, they'd figure that out instead of shooting from the hip. StickyWicket (talk) 13:53, 30 March 2021 (UTC) No idea which people you mean. I replied to the statement that players with a profile on one, will have a profile on the other, and that one of the two is behind a paywall now: all of which has nothing to do with WP:BEFORE. Players who have more than their statistics (and a list of matches played is just statistics) and the bare minimum of personal info (date and place of birth and death), those who have actual articles about them (texts describing their career, their biography, their club career, etc.) are notable under this proposal, so no problem there. But having an entry on either or both sites doesn't as such suffice. Fram (talk) 14:17, 30 March 2021 (UTC) I don't actually think this has anything to do with WP:BEFORE. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think Bagumba's assumption is that this will allow a user to send an article to AfD if it's sourced only to a database site without needing to do a BEFORE search. We are not trying to make it easier for users to AfD articles. What we are trying to do is discourage the creation of articles that can't be sourced beyond a mere statistical directory by adding a wee burden to the creation process, namely identifying a source that's not a statistical directory, especially for users with auto-patrol which means their creations aren't subject to NPP/AfC. If LeBron James doesn't have a page and I create one sourced only to basketball-reference, that's not really a problem. If I create LeBron along with 100 other NBA players sourced only to basketball-reference, even if they all ultimately pass GNG, I think that would be a problem. It's even more of a problem if I'm creating these articles for the members of the 1952 last-place Sildavian Olympic fencing team, who may not even have local coverage. SportingFlyer T·C 15:54, 30 March 2021 (UTC) SportingFlyer: Education outreach aside, the only remedy to discourage the creation of articles that can't be sourced beyond a mere statistical directory is to delete the page (or move to Draft:) or get a WP:TBAN if they are serial creators. Consider the "Stubs" thread (below).—Bagumba (talk) 00:09, 31 March 2021 (UTC) What is "non-local" news? Is that not from the same town, city, state, country? The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 09:43, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Not from the same town/city (for sources specifically aimed at that city, not sources which are called after a city but aimed at a much wider audience, like the FAZ or the NZZ (excluding their "local" or "regional" section, if they have any). County level (for the US), Province level (for Belgium or the Netherlands), ... is still too local, Statewide or countrywide will usually be enough (for countries with some population at least, an Andorran newspaper is basically a city newspaper only). Fram (talk) 10:24, 30 March 2021 (UTC) No, that's just adding another layer to WP:RS which we don't need. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 12:56, 30 March 2021 (UTC) WP:IS already says "A newspaper in a small town might write about the opening and closing of every single business in the town, or the everyday activities of local citizens. An enthusiastic local music reviewer may pen a review of every single person who comes on stage in their town with a guitar and a microphone, whether it is an amateur garage band playing for the first time or a major touring group." and goes on to indicate that subjects which only have such sources should not have a standalone article (though may warrant inclusion in a larger article). What I propose is just making clear that this also applies to sportspeople. Being listed in discogs or musicbrainz or allmusic ("listed", not a full biography) plus having local sources isn't enough for a band: they why should being listed in sports databases plus having local sources be sufficient for sportspeople? Fram (talk) 14:28, 30 March 2021 (UTC) No, there's no need. There seems to be a proclivity to somehow creep-filter a reiteration of basic Wikipedia principles into this kind of thing. RS is sufficient. Besides, if only local sources picked up someone breaking a world record, it would be absurd to discount it. This is just another subjective argument point in the overall process. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 14:36, 30 March 2021 (UTC) That seems contradictory. First you don't believe we should add "non-local", because that's not used anywhere else. When shown that it is already used 5 times on NSPORTS alone, you reiterate that it isn't used in RS. When shown that it is in WP:IS, it suddenly shouldn't be reiterated? You (and plenty of others) have demonstrated that this principle is not well known, so repeating it certainly seems necessary. Abandoning basic principles used for all other topics, just to appease sports biographies, is not adding another subjective argument, it is holding all subjects to at least the same basic standards. As for your example of a world record, any examples of this actually happening? Fram (talk) 14:49, 30 March 2021 (UTC) I think this does have some merit as it seems reasonable that there be at least 1 source other than statistics that can affirm notability. I suppose in theory you could also go a little further and say that 3 line stubs do not meet the notablity criteria. "John Smith is a cricketer born in 1891. He played for the MCC and Middlesex and died in 1943." (or words to that effect) do suggest a lack of notability but if that can be fleshed out more, then you can confirm notability. But I do agree with Fram's proposal because anything else can be dealt with under GNG. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 09:18, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose as this is really no different to SNGs in practice (at least with footballers/soccer players), but making it so explicit will simply deter editors from creating good content / encourage deletionists to go on an AFD spree. Nobody needs that kind of headache. GiantSnowman 09:28, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose Fram's proposal Per GiantSnowman. For some sports this might work, but as GiantSnowman says it's not much different from what's already there and will likely lead to hoards of extra AfDs. Specific SNGs need improving as has been mentioned above, and the text needs re-writing to be clearer, but the concept doesn't need changing. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 09:47, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Support: This makes reasonable sense to me. And folks, seriously: can we avoid "But what if someone does X????" and "But I participated in an AfD where someone argued DERP ..." arguments? The measure of this proposal isn't going to be whether some whackdoodle can dig out an indepth piece of proper length from a reliable non-local source about sheep shearing, and if we measured the worth of any proposal by whether some idjit is likely to abuse it at AfD, bloody hell, Wikipedia's never going to change another rule. It's whether players have non-routine coverage from other than fawning local sources eager to beat local deadlines. And yes: tightening the rules will lead to more AfDs being filed. So what? Unless you're an AfD regular, that doesn't affect you. And in practice, SNGs have been tightened many a time -- both in NSPORTS and Wikipedia-wide -- and the alleged "hordes" of AfDs have never actually materialized. Ravenswing 09:55, 30 March 2021 (UTC) No we can't and won't. Currently a lot of the various significance criteria are objective, i.e. has played at least one First Class cricket match etc. Suddenly "non routine coverage in non-local news" introduces two purely subjective measures which just totally overload the situation with arguments. It's not a good way to go. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 09:59, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Non-routine coverage is already in NSPORTS as we speak: the proposal doesn't introduce it, it tries to enforce it. E.g. the page currently states, for games, "A game that is widely considered by independent reliable sources to be notable, outside routine coverage of each game, especially if the game received front page coverage outside of the local areas involved ". This doesn't seem to cause any serious problems. The whole of GNG is based on "subjective measures" like "significant coverage". Rejecting this proposal on these grounds seems a bit strange. The current criteria are objective, but insufficient, as many AfDs and discussions have shown. Tightening the objective criteria is opposed by people wanting to keep as many articles as possible, or who argue that e.g. "one" game is clear-cut, but "ten games" is a random choice (and "one full game" for e.g. soccer is also not acceptable, because what about player X who played 20 times as a substitute). The intention is to have guidelines which accurately reflect whether we can write real articles about the subjects, based on reliable indepth sources: not whether we can have rehashed statistics only. For actual articles, you need actual, indepth sources. Yes, there will always be borderline cases, and no solution will magically stop all discussions and AfDs. But the "subjective" criteria have served us well for many non-sports subjects for many years, so there is no reason why they couldn't work for sportspeople. Fram (talk) 10:18, 30 March 2021 (UTC) I think the only way you can stop a flood of AFDs is bring in a grandfather clause (like we have for usernames before the username policy came in). Anything made before the date it comes into force shall have the old rules apply wheras anything after has to fulfill the new requirements. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 10:21, 30 March 2021 (UTC) These articles are already eligible to be deleted at AfD, but they're contentious because there's always a number of voters who say "passes the SNG!" We've had some instances in the past where specific closers are loathe to discount the "passes the SNG!" votes if there's enough of them, even though absolutely no evidence of the article passing GNG exists. In my mind, this doesn't create a new problem. SportingFlyer T·C 10:28, 30 March 2021 (UTC) (ec)Or, as an intermediate solution, present a timeframe for such articles to be improved. The intention is not to AfD 10,000 articles the day after this proposal or something similar gets accepted. But one could e.g. make a special "notability" header, indicating that "this article doesn't meet the minimum requirements as currently written" and give people a year after this banner is applied (with the banner being applied manually and at a reasonable pace, not some bot tagging). If the page doesn't get an acceptable source after a year, it can be redirected to a list in many cases (which means that it can be easily resurrected once someone finds the wanted source), or deleted in the fewer cases where such a redirect is not possible. Simply excluding them completely from the new guideline would create two classes of articles, which seems unfair and confusing. Fram (talk) 10:30, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose per WP:CREEP and WP:NOTLAW. Our policies and guidelines are supposed to represent actual practice rather than being prescriptive laws handed down by self-appointed rulers. The recent FA, Lewis (baseball), demonstrates that such statistical freaks are quite acceptable as content for sports. The proposal is explicitly intended to reverse decades of practice on the project but there's no mandate for such a high-handed and disruptive edict. Andrew🐉(talk) 16:16, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Can you formulate the same perhaps in a civil manner? Or simply in correct sentences? "The proposal [...] has no mandate for such a high-handed and disruptive edict" makes no sense. Do you mean "the proposer" or "this talkpage" or .... ? Of course I don't have such a mandate: if there is some reasoned support for this proposal and after it has been finetuned, it may become an RfC. Actual practice is that many articles technically meet NSPORTS and get deleted or redirected anyway, and that too many editors hide behind NSPORTS to avoid having to engage with the actual arguments in those discussions, i.e. the lack of indepth sourcing. Fram (talk) 11:15, 30 March 2021 (UTC) The irony is that it's the SNGs that are often prescriptive laws handed down by self-appointed rulers. Reyk YO! 11:42, 30 March 2021 (UTC) I can't help but think that if those who were so willing to delete articles were around to help make these decisions while these were the rules we were following, I would respect their opinions more... Bobo. 11:53, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Bobo, would it have really been so much better if I had participated in those discussions when I first made my account in 2007, as a 15-year-old whose sole exposure to cricket was through Hitchhiker's Guide? Why would my opinion then have been so much more "respectable" than it is now? JoelleJay (talk) 20:44, 30 March 2021 (UTC) To be honest that's not really the issue. The issue is that in theory we're all heading towards the same goal but we're doing so with such odd inconsistencies in justification as we can. The response was more to do with "self-appointed rulers". Do we need rulers? Of course not. The trouble is that we no longer tackling the project to the same ends. And that is where the project has fallen apart. Bobo. 21:45, 30 March 2021 (UTC) @Rugbyfan22: Trying to think of the easiest example and the example I'll always use is Gwalior. Played a single Ranji Trophy match in 1943-44, and thus have 11 names in their first-class list to add. These are (number in brackets is number of appearances in first-class cricket minus one if the answer is more than one (ie, they played for more teams than just Gwalior): RD Mathur (0) (deleted via AfD disussion) Balbhadra Singh (1) (deleted via AfD disussion) Roop Singh (0) (still exists although based on same skeleton) Janardan Navle (64) (Test cricketer) DK Yarde (8) (for five different teams, full name not available) SN Kunzru (0) (full name not available) (deleted via AfD disussion) Daya Shankar (0) (still exists although based on same skeleton) Ram Singh (0) (still exists although based on same skeleton) CN Haksar (0) (full name not available) (deleted via AfD disussion) Khanwilkar (possibly Khanwilkar (Gwalior cricketer), depending on how we disambiguate "single-name" names) (0) (full name not available but you could infer this may have been the name he went by anyway) (deleted via AfD disussion) Afzal Ahmed (0) (article redirects to team he didn't play for). Five of these six redlinks were deleted via AfD discussions, and I wrote based on the same "skeleton". To summarize my thoughts, basically, if we're discouraging keeping articles with "zero information", working on "skeletons", and zero sources (even including CA and CI), which have not been "improved" since their creation, as I've said before, we have to start deleting Test cricketers. Let's not be inconsistent. "No first name available" is not a deletion criterion. What exactly are our criteria for randomly sending articles for deletion? In recent times, the answer seems to be "just discovered article exists and I don't like this article"? We're stuck in 1984 and that is not healthy. For nearly 13 years we were absolutely fine getting on with our work and then people randomly start coming along and crowing about how much they dislike the article(s) in question. I think we were doing just fine as we were. If we had just been allowed to get on with our work, and those so willing to delete were willing to co-operate in helping us achieve our tasks, we'd be finished by now. Bobo. 11:51, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Personally I have no indication of what order/criteria Storm is doing his AfDs in. Originally they seem to be have been in alphabetical order with a lot of cricketers starting with A at AfD. It's likely some of those that exist with other appearances and no real other coverage only exists because he or another user hasn't gotten to them. It's a difficult balancing act as I feel that coverage for some of those that have been deleted in the past does exists, and am only trying to come up with some form of solution due to the threat of the cricket SNG being removed entirely altogether. I imagine international cricketers aren't being AfD despite being similar because they are just that, international cricketers and people will have a view, likely based on no policy, that they should be kept for that reason. Also for the final redirect I redirected to Madya Pradesh as Gwailor were absorbed by Madya Pradesh and no Wikipedia page exists for either List of Gwailor cricketers or Gwailor cricket team (which redirects to Madya Pradesh. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 12:02, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Basically, if serial delete-voters had anything to add, they would do so rather than protest such articles exist. Bobo. 12:05, 30 March 2021 (UTC) You're never going to get rids of the types of voters who abide by GNG or the Lambert types who just vote delete, despite having no real interest in cricket whatsoever. A lot of the time those voting/nominating cricketers at AfD have no interest in cricket and are just doing so to follow whatever policy they abide by/worship. I hope you don't feel because I'm suggesting what I feel to be a reasonable change to NCRIC I am one of them. I just don't want to spend 30 minutes of every day for the next months/year voting on AfDs (where quite possibly the could have been BOLDly redirected), and don't want to see those who have created cricket articles (of which I have created at least 30 I'd say) have to continuously see their work scrutinised as not being good enough. If we had an updated NCRIC (which we're miles away from and I won't proceed with my potential change without the support of the majority of cricket article creators) we can at least get to work filling out those that are missing from presumed notable groups, and creating list articles for those that are no longer considered notable if they don't pass GNG. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 12:27, 30 March 2021 (UTC) And by using the words "not good enough", you've hit the nail on the head. There can be no definition of "not good enough". (Please understand that again that's not a personal attack, just a direct quotation). The articles that are "not good enough" include all the one-sentence Test cricketer articles. Bobo. 12:40, 30 March 2021 (UTC) "You're never going to get rids of the types of voters who abide by GNG" - and why would you want to get rid of these policy-abiding voters? The solution to avoiding AfDs and the gratuitous generalisations you are making is to make articles which actually have some proper content. The best counter-argument to "not-notable" and "no significant coverage" is to expand the article - if there's nothing to base that on, well then yes the article needs deletion. If NCRIC and other SNGs are not helping in filtering that, I fail to see why we would not want to get rid of them. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 12:57, 30 March 2021 (UTC) That's because GNG only exists for the sake of selective exclusionism. If what we need to do is to prove CI and CA are "independent of the subject" and "independent of each other", then fair enough, there are people who can do so better than me. If we need to inflate an article to include pages and pages of nonsense, then I'm sure we can do that too. Bobo. 13:05, 30 March 2021 (UTC) GNG is not there for the sake of exclusionism. It's there to ensure we have articles that can be based on existing significant sources and are not just needless promotion (as happens with other subjects) or subjects which are of no interest to readers (if the only thing we can say about someone is "they played x sports matches", we're not really being helpful to our readers...); but actually contain something significant which is not just sourced to routine coverage. CI and CA are independent of the subject; but it does not change that for non-modern cricketers, they're very often just non-significant statistics. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 13:09, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Yeah that wasn't brilliantly worded, what I meant was those that use GNG as gospel and completely ignore any SNG whether it be a sports SNG or otherwise. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 14:49, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Support in spirit if not in exact wording. The question is always whether we can find sufficient sources to make a proper article. This is non-routine (well, at least, considering most cricketers are not captains... - even if it is mostly an interview); this is routine. So the only difficulty is defining what is "routine" and what is not. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 12:43, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose But could potentially support if "non-local" were removed. There is no reason local sources can't be used if they are reliable and independent Smartyllama (talk) 12:50, 30 March 2021 (UTC) I'm open to that suggestion. The problem I see is that local sources in general should probably be disallowed for notability purposes (like it is done for politicians), as local newspaper print the tiniest bits of "news" if they have interest in the village or small region, e.g. printing all births, marriages and deaths, all local kid sports events, the opening of a new bakery in town, and so on and so on. But perhaps that part should be discussed on a more general level, not specific for sports (although sportsis one of the main "local" fillers of such newspapers). Fram (talk) 13:24, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Indeed. Many cricket (and golf, and no doubt other sports) reports in local media are largely written by the clubs in question (I know, I used to write some of them) making independence and neutrality an issue; they then get woven together and printed without attribution so there is no way of making a determination. wjematherplease leave a message... 13:50, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose largely per Smartyllama. Cbl62 (talk) 13:39, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose per Snowman, Rubgyfan, Andrew D, et al. Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 16:44, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Support. Why should article creation criteria for sports figures be so much more privileged than those for figures in other disciplines? Especially if they have the same criteria for deletion? The requirements of "non-routine" and "non-local" would already exist at AfD and are standard for creating biographies in many other professions. The proposal is still more lenient than GNG, even though ultimately that is the necessary guideline an article must meet to be protected from deletion. So what on earth would this change other than reducing the number of sports AfD timesinks?? JoelleJay (talk) 20:28, 30 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose Look my biggest problem with this is the non-local part as most of the earlier year players might not have the sources outside of the area where they played especially if they had played 15-20 first classes matches in that period and now you are saying that this need to be factored in, it's going to be a struggle to satisfy this agreement. Maybe the removal of "non-local" might help but I am not really sure this is the right path. HawkAussie (talk) 05:51, 31 March 2021 (UTC) Oppose. My biggest probelm is also with the non-local part. That's very selective. Coverage at the end of the day is coverage, local, national, or international. it's not for us to move the goalposts. StickyWicket (talk) 08:31, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Stubs

It seems the more generic issue is Wikipedia:Stub not being more stringent on discouraging stubs that are only sourced to a name in a listing or a database entry. This is not unique to sports, and can be seen with actors, politicians, etc. If WP:STUB were clearer, there would be stronger basis to move articles to WP:DRAFT namespace and apply WP:TBANs to serial creators of subpar stubs. Without such guidance, it's misguided to lay the blame on SNGs.—Bagumba (talk) 11:02, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

We were creating "sub-par stubs", as I'm sure you call them (that's not an attack, sorry if it sounds like it), for years before any serial delete-voters were around. My issue is not with "sub-par stub creators", but with those who have nothing to add to them and yet protest that they exist. Wikipedia is not paper. We don't run out of paper. I can't even remember the last time I created an article. Bobo. 12:00, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

While it is not paper, Wikipedia should be well organized and easy to use, and lots of tiny articles which contain no useful text is not the best way to organize information. --Jayron32 12:20, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

"Well-organized"? That's why player-by-player team lists should exist alongside the articles themselves. This would make it well-organized. As for "useful text", frankly any text other than facts is unnecessary. Bobo. 12:22, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure I ever advocated for fan fiction about the players in question??? Who is arguing that we fill articles with made-up things? Why would you feel the need to say that "text other than facts" was something being advocated for? I certainly never said such a thing. --Jayron32 12:25, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Not you, don't worry. Bobo. 12:26, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

It was a good thing when Wikipedia was starting and had an urgent need to encourage content creation. The question is whether it is still applicable now?—Bagumba (talk) 12:23, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

There is still a lot of scope in article creation. And I don't believe anyone standing in the way of that is helping the project progress. Bobo. 12:26, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

The goal is to encourage content creation, yet better filter potentially non-notable subjects. Is that "standing in the way"?—Bagumba (talk) 12:33, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes, because there is no universally-applicable definition of "potentially non-notable" (I hope you don't mind me quoting you directly), and there is so little done in terms of article creation currently taking place, that you wonder whether that's what they're here for. Bobo. 12:37, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

there is no universally-applicable definition of 'potentially non-notable' : We discuss in hopes of gaining consensus on one. If this is truly a known dead end due to precedent, we should document the findings in hopes of avoiding jumping into the same rabbit hole again. —Bagumba (talk) 00:34, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Being "potentially" non-notable is adding a weasel word which goes completely against the project's principles. Bobo. 08:09, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Bobo192: To be clear, are you saying that the status quo is fine, and there is no potential for improvement? —Bagumba (talk) 11:16, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

I am of the belief that Wikipedia should be infinitely inclusive based on subject-specific guidelines. Otherwise, why are we here? That's why there should be no need for "potential" non-notability. Bobo. 11:19, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

So some subjects are inherently notable, independent of GNG, right? And that's reflected in SNGs? —Bagumba (talk) 11:24, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

GNG only exists for the sake of selective censorship. N states that articles can exist based on GNG or the criteria outlined in a subject-specific notability guideline. Bobo. 11:26, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. I believe I understand your perspective now. —Bagumba (talk) 11:40, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Forgive me though, that's not where my argument was supposed to go. My argument was about fostering article creation. Which isn't happening, at least in the cricket project. Bobo. 11:56, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

The difficulty is that a lot of these stubs are created because they "meet N-whatever", with no second thought afterwards. What the notability guidelines should really be is something that helps filter out these articles which are unlikely to be sourced to anything but such database listings - and per WP:NOTDATABASE, Wikipedia is not such a thing: we need to have enough sources to write more than just basic biographical and statistical details. If the existing guidelines are not doing that, we either need to tighten the SNGs, or if that is too difficult, we need to get rid of the problematic ones with "sorry, you couldn't agree on something useful, so go back to GNG". RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 12:51, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

I wonder how many Test cricketers we would be deleting if we did that...As for "something useful", we've had that for almost all the time I've been here. We've had a simple notability guideline (which we all agreed to even if it were not written down) which people followed because we were allowed to keep achieving the project's goals. To be honest, back then there were so few cricket articles on the site that we were not in danger of creating less "notable" articles! Bobo. 13:08, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

So what? If the only thing we can say is "X played Y test matches", we're not really being helpful to our readers. WP:NOTDATABASE. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 13:12, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Then we get rid of those as well? Ay caramba.... This is where (not a personal comment) this is becoming ridiculous... Bobo. 13:13, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

I think you're missing the point entirely, the information that they played in the test matches is not being removed from Wikipedia. Their names are not being erased from every mention in the encyclopedia. Nothing is being lost. What we are all saying is that the reader is not well served by having that information (and nothing else) in hundreds of tiny, separate articles. For such information, it is better to have it in places like list articles and the like. We're not arguing for some sort of damnatio memoriae where we erase any mention of the subjects in question. Just that creating separate articles for them is not the best way to handle it. --Jayron32 13:59, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Now you can see why those of us who have been around for the best part of a decade and a half can't take these conversations seriously... Bobo. 13:19, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Either, A) yes, we accept that some test cricketers; especially from the pre-professional era; are not notable. Or B) the articles are expanded to demonstrate there is actually some coverage beyond routine statistics. We're not here to catalogue people's achievements. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 13:21, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

All Test cricketers are notable, from 1877 to present, that is a position that WP:CRIC will not budge from. Given they played at the highest level of cricket, even one-Test wonders will have lots sources on them - Test cricketers who are deceased will have lengthy obituaries in Wisden, irrespective of country. StickyWicket (talk) 14:02, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

If that is true, then it is trivial to find the sources and the SNG that says "all test cricketers are notable" is not needed; it's superfluous because if the sources exist, then the subject passes WP:GNG with flying colors, and we don't need extra criteria to make them notable. --Jayron32 14:09, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

No we don't anyway, they played international cricket at the highest level of the sport, they are automatically notable in their own right. StickyWicket (talk) 14:17, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Ehh, no, that is not how WP works. There's no such thing as being automatically notable. As I said, we're not there to catalogue people's achievement. If they only thing we can say is they played Test cricket x times, we're better off having a redirect until someone bothers to do the hard work of finding proper and significant sources to flesh out the article. A poor article is worse than a redirect to a list, both for readers (information consolidated in one space) and for editors (anti-vandalism, fewer things to keep an eye one, etc). There are about 450 single match test cricketers ([6] - about 200 of them are before the 1950s: considering the amateur nature of the sport up to and a few decades beyond that point, it's not certain they'd all be automatically notable and have received coverage equivalent to their contemporary peers - it might, again, be more convenient for everyone to have a list and not individual articles). Cheers, RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 16:41, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Then sadly this project has moved past a point where it is worth anything. How sad this has become. I'm going to go over here [points] and be sad for a while. Bobo. 13:23, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

I'll reiterate what I stated somewhere above: There is an issue with some individual sports, and it's unfortunate those editors have not policed themselves, but that doesn't justify grouping all sports by association. —Bagumba (talk) 00:16, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

We'd been doing perfectly fine until recently and that's what makes me so sad. The way we were editing fostered article creation. I know there's a crusade against facts in today's culture, but really, this shouldn't be happening. Bobo. 08:22, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

There's nothing wrong with stub articles existing. Lots of articles start as stubs and grow. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 00:23, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

It's contradictory to 1) say we are happy with the status quo on stubs and 2) decry the existence of permanent stubs. —Bagumba (talk) 00:38, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

The problem is the fact that you have people who just create stubs because they can and don't expand on them. For example the way when I create articles (that is rare now for me) is try to get at least get it past the 1500 bytes part with references so it can not be deemed a stub. HawkAussie (talk) 05:57, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

We're entering into the "stubs are harmful" argument. But "stubs" is just a label that we've decided to apply at random. There is no universal definition of "stub". The articles being deleted right now are short articles which contain all the facts without paragraphs and paragraphs of needless trivia or waffle. Having to read past paragraphs of waffle is tiring. Bobo. 08:22, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

What we call stubs are normal entries in many traditional reference works. Brief entries are best as they can be organised efficiently, are easy to look up and present the key details in a succinct, easily-read fashion. This format was suitable for paper-based works and is now suitable for modern devices such as smart phones and smart speakers. It's the long rambling articles which are more problematic as they make readers wade through huge amounts of irrelevant prose to find the fact that they want. It's like the infobox wars. Most readers and writers accept infoboxes as sensible capsule summaries. The opposition to these seems to be mainly a matter of form over function. We should prefer functional entries as an encyclopedia is intended to be used as a tool, not admired as an artwork. Andrew🐉(talk) 10:32, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

There was a time and a place that I could almost guaranteee that if an article had a sentence's worth of text, and an infobox, such as those articles created by 02blythed, the presence of an infobox would almost make people forget stubs existed. The fact that nobody thought to expand on them and would rather delete them instead says more about them than it does 02blythed. To be frank, that's not much different to what we have today with many Test cricketers. Many of these Test cricketer articles are no better than "cookie-cutter" articles and still don't come under criticism. Bobo. 10:46, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

I agree. I have a "build it and they will edit" view when it comes to stubs - if you create them, other editors will expand them. GiantSnowman 10:55, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Maybe the wish to delete is simply the admittance of having nothing of worth to add. That says more about deletionists and/or exclusionists (ie those who refuse to create in the first place) than it does about creationists/inclusionists. Bobo. 10:59, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Maybe the wish to delete is the acknowledgment of finding no further information that can be added. That might say more about the information available for creation of the article on the subject than deletionists/creationists. I don't see editors on either "side" attempting to expand any of the sub-stubs. Yosemiter (talk) 16:00, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

I really tried to find as much as I could for that article. If it will keep this article up, I can find Korean sources and link them to the article if google can translate it. All I am asking for is to have every major boxing world champion have their own article. There aren't that many left and once they're done I can start focusing more time on expanding stubs. The issue is that there aren't that many editors that spend time fixing up the old articles. Most boxing editors deal with the last 20 years. I am very much working alone on most of my projects. Please go to my user page and take a look at some of what I have done. I have likely done at least one or more thing for well over half of the articles of former boxing champions. I see which articles are constantly watched and those which get an edit by someone other than me maybe once in 6 months. These are all articles that have value as the professional boxing record table as I have added to 188 fighter's article is in itself of value to this website if it is on a well known fighter or if they are a lesser known champion with minimal coverage. They were all world champions and their careers deserve the same equal respect of being allowed to be displayed among those they defeated and lost to.CaPslOcksBroKEn (talk) 22:57, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Fram's revised proposal

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

WP:PROPOSAL states: Proposals for new guidelines and policies require discussion and a high level of consensus... This is not a new proposal but it is a substantial alteration to a significant guideline and a similar preference for a clear consensus would therefore be applicable. The discussion is, however, quite closely divided. Those supporting the proposal suggest that it will make this guideline comply with language that already exists in the General Notability Guideline and What Wikipedia is not. Opposers generally argued that the proposal would remove or prevent the creation of worthwhile articles, even if they are stubs. Underlying preferences about the utility of "perma-stubs" are also evident and are perhaps predicate to the question posed by the RfC. Based on both the quantity and quality of the arguments, there is no consensus to implement the proposal. (non-admin closure) Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 06:42, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

---

The actual text needs working, obviously, but the proposal is to add one element to the "mathematical", "statistical" requirements all sports have (one match, has participated, one win, ...): a player is presumed notable if they meet that statistical requirement and has substantial coverage in at least one non-routine source. All the other rules stay the same, but no longer will be stats-only creations be acceptable. Note that this is still a lesser requirement than the multiple sources asked for by the GNG: these would be needed when challenged, but for creation, you would only need one substantial source. Thoughts? Fram (talk) 08:35, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

• Support- we definitely require more than statistical database entries. Some prose and actual biographical information in non-routine sources is necessary. Otherwise, the info should be presented in list format. Reyk _YO! 08:46, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
• Comment - This still doesn't tackle the concept of Test cricket permastubs which are somehow sneaking under the radar having had zero sources (even to statistics websites) since they were created. If those who were so keen to delete, were as keen to work on these, we might get somewhere. Bobo. 08:51, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

• Reply: Quite aside from that we don't judge sweeping changes to NSPORTS through the sole and exclusive lens of "OMG NCRIC!!!" -- and you'll forgive those who are not knowledgeable about cricket (i.e., most of us) from stomping all over a topic area in which we're unfamiliar -- what about "has substantial coverage in at least one non-routine source" won't tackle those sub-stubs? Ravenswing 22:49, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

• Support in principal. The wording should be consistent with GNG, i.e. "significant coverage in at least one non-routine reliable source that is independent of the subject", and "non-routine" needs to be defined clearly. _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 09:15, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose It is apparent that it's the sporting records or statistics that most interests sports enthusiasts. Other biographical details are nice to have but not essential. The recent FA of Lewis (baseball) demonstrably proves that this is acceptable content. Andrew🐉(talk) 09:44, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
  • But people have written at some length about him, even if it is to say that despite his negative records, people haven't been able to find out more about him. He has been the focus of specific attention, not just an entry in a database. Fram (talk) 11:42, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

    Yes, it's pretty misleading to equate this article with the contentless cricketer bios under discussion. The point isn't that this unfortunate pitcher only played part of a game. It's that he played so conspicuously and record-breakingly poorly that multiple sources remarked on it specifically. There's a lot of discussion about how his first name was lost to the mists of time as well. A better comparison would be a fill-in player who got carted around the park at 25 runs an over with multiple sporting publications discussing it, not the single-appearance fill-ins who were so uninterestingly mediocre that they weren't remarked on at all except as statistical entries. Of course, if the cricket Wikiproject ran baseball as well all we'd have on Eddie Gaedel is a statistic on his single plate appearance with all the biographical information omitted as "bumf". Reyk _YO! 12:41, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

    The cricketer articles "under discussion" (euphemism central we are) are mostly started and/or contributed to by project members who have no interest in article creation. You would think they'd have something to offer the project in return. Awkward pause. straightens tie. Bobo. 12:50, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

    As the author of Lewis (baseball), I can tell you @Andrew Davidson:'s take isn't so far off. Lewis would be considered for deletion; he's been covered in one full-length biography, has been written about in a paragraph by Macht, and has been written about in a sentence off-hand by a Baseball Digest writer. Outside of that, he's not been written about that much. Therapyisgood (talk) 23:00, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose per Andrew, and the fact that what might be "substantial" to me might not be "substantial" to you. This will also have zero effect on articles being created. All that will happen is a young player will make their sporting debut, a stub will be created, and then someone will PROD or AFD prior to there being any in-depth coverage (either located or available), then there will be a lot of bickering at AFD for nothing. What's the point? GiantSnowman 10:50, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

  There are barely any cricket articles being created right now other than those by AA and Lugnuts. If others had anything to offer they would do so. Bobo. 11:09, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

  Bobo, this is not just about cricket, it is about all sports. Fram (talk) 11:11, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

  Fixed. Fair enough. Bobo. 11:14, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

  "There are barely any cricket articles being created right now other than those by AA and Lugnuts"- there's also quite a lot of English women's cricketers being created too, although almost all of them are C/start class. Joseph2302 (talk) 11:28, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

  All new articles for female cricketers for English domestic teams over the last 30 days have been created by a single user. Bobo. 11:41, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

  • Would it be better if I use "significant" instead of "substantial"? Because that's used throughout all notability guidelines. And it will have effect on articles being created: with this rule, we can a) redirect such articles to lists while pointing at the guideline which supports this, and b) educate editors on how to go about creating such articles in the future. If push comes to shove, it would even allow us to restrict the most recalcitrant editors from creating any further pages, but let's hope that never necessary. Basically, it removes a layer of wikilawyering from people arguing to keep separate articles without any readily available significant coverage because it meets some statistical standard. "prior to there being any in-depth coverage (either located or available)": if no in-depth coverage is available, then the presumption that arbitrary rule X indicates that someone will have such coverage is clearly incorrect, and the article should not have been created yet. Having a clearer statement in the guideline to point to when making this observation may convince more editors that it should indeed be a name in a list for now, until better coverage exists or can be found. But feel free to post a better proposal to achieve this result. Fram (talk) 11:11, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose definition of a substantial source is not well defined, and leaves this even more open to interpretation. Joseph2302 (talk) 11:28, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
  • A source which has significant coverage, as defined in the GNG. These oppositions start to feel like wikilawyering more than anything else, rejecting standards which have been used for all other articles for years because they are ill-defined, subjective, ... Fram (talk) 11:39, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose WP:NSPORS is a guideline, everybodey should meet GNG, stating that people must have coverage in multiple sources. Stating that 1 source is enough, feels like overruling GNG. WP:NSPORTS must indicate, from a sports-perspective, the people that are highly likely to meet WP:GNG, and so people want an article of that person because what is important: WP:Readers first (including stating This encourages readers to stay, to follow links to more information, maybe even to contribute to Wikipedia themselves.). If a high percantage of people of a certain rule is proven not to meet GNG, the rule should be deleted. SportsOlympic (talk) 11:49, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
• Support, if this is not met, then it sounds unlikely GNG are met. Especially for living people, having a non-statistics source is essential for responsible encyclopedia writing. —Kusma (t·c) 13:12, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
• Support also per Fram. I don't get how all the oppose votes (they're not !votes) are objecting to this. If you have a notable subject which meets GNG, then you don't have to worry about this. What this will do, like all the previous proposals, is to correctly discourage people creating perma-stubs which are not and cannot be sourced to anything but statistical databases; and also remove the wikilawyering from AfDs when this kind of thing is noticed. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 13:35, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
• Support, per Fram and others. A small step in the right direction. Group/list articles should also be encouraged. Johnbod (talk) 13:48, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
• Support as this also overcomes a minimum that would be expected to be there to avoid speedy deletion (specifically WP:CSD#A7 related to no sign of importance). Every other NSPORT criteria generally is around a factor of importance; this one general one is a claim that is about presumed importance just because they have documented playing a game. Added the requirement for at least one additional source, non-stat base, that shows importance, significantly helps to improve this. I know that this should not be an issue in the long-run, as the claim is that if a person has played a professional game, then more than 99% of the time, there are more sources for that person, but this would avoid mass creation or encouraging stubs without any work to at least expand them. --Masem (t) 13:57, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
• Weak oppose This isn't wrong, but is redundant with the existing language concerning GNG and just creates additional potential for misinterpretation. Per WP:NOTBURO, this is completely unnecessary as existing guidelines accomplish the same thing. Smartyllama (talk) 14:09, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
• Support This is one possible way to fix the current under-sourced stub problem. I strongly disagree with the assertion that this is unnecessary, since it clearly fixes a problem. SportingFlyer T·C 14:15, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

  How does it fix the problem? Right now the process is 1) someone creates a stub article about an athlete who passes NSPORTS but may or may not pass GNG, 2) someone nominates the article for deletion, 3) people at the AfD analyze sources both within the article and elsewhere to determine notability, and 4) a consensus is reached (or it is closed as no consensus.) How would the process be any different under this proposal? Are these articles magically not going to get created? Guidelines and policy aren't magic. Smartyllama (talk) 14:21, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

  That process for a single article is not the problem; it is the fact that current criteria encourages the mass creation of articles based on stat tables (as evidence that a person played a game). And dealing with large number of articles via the AFD route is a waste of everyone's time (not only those of the sports Wikiprojects but also at AFD, etc.). It is better to set a slightly higher bar that would 1) reduce/discourage mass creation and 2) even for one-offs, reduce the likelihood they would be rushed off to AFD. --Masem (t) 14:26, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

  What's interesting is that I usually run into the opposite problem. 1) someone creates a stub article about an athlete who does NOT pass NSPORTS or Project Guidelines 2) it gets nominated for speedy deletion but the article creator feels it meets GNG rather than NSPORTS and wants a full AFD hearing. 3) people at the AfD analyze sources both within the article and elsewhere to determine notability, and 4) a consensus is reached as very weakly passing GNG even though it fails NSPORTS. That's what I see more often. Fyunck(click) (talk) 18:24, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

  The common thing is that whether created because the stub's creator thinks they meet NSPORT or GNG, the process of AFD typically finds more sources to validating keeping the article via either route. This is fine and the right way the process should work, but the issue is that AFD is a very low-bandwidth (few editors) process, and the mass creation of stubs that potentially will see AFD is a net negative, as that's a potential plugging of the process. So the proposed language simply puts a small limiter on the rate of article creation that also reduces the likelihood AFD may be required, avoiding flooding AFD with nominations that otherwise likely will end in a keep but will take editors' time and energy to figure out. That onus should be on those creating the stubs to make sure they don't overtax AFD, and by asking for one more source, that helps. --Masem (t) 19:12, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

• I think this is fairly reasonable; importantly, it acknowledges that passing an SNG is an alternative to passing GNG. It also discourages mass creation of permastubs. Stifle (talk) 15:54, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
  • WP:NSPORT still clearly requires GNG to be met. This is just to discourage permastubs sourced only to statistical databases. SportingFlyer T·C 15:59, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
    • Except that it doesn't do that, if anything it would actually give credibility to the argument that an SNG was an alternative to or over ruled GNG. The whole point of an SNG is to be a guide as to when sources likely exist when they are not readily available, saying you then need a source just to meet the SNG defeats its entire purpose. -DJSasso (talk) 16:05, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
    • SportingFlyer Repeatedly asserting that something that's not policy is policy doesn't make it policy. Drop the WP:STICK. Stifle (talk) 08:51, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
      • @Stifle:, NSPORTS literally says, as a general baseline: "In addition, the subjects of standalone articles should meet the General Notability Guideline.", so I don't see where he says something that's not policy (well, guideline). Fram (talk) 09:40, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
        • Selective quoting. Firstly, "should" does not mean "must". Secondly, NSPORTS also literally says "The article should provide reliable sources showing that the subject meets the general notability guideline or the sport specific criteria set forth below" (emphasis not mine). "Or" means that one or the other is acceptable. If both were required, the conjunction would be "and". Another quote from NSPORTS: "Failing to meet the criteria in this guideline means that notability will need to be established in other ways (for example, the general notability guideline)".
          There is absolutely no valid reading of this guideline that admits the interpretation that GNG must be met in addition to the relevant SNG. If you wish to change the guideline, feel free to gather a consensus to that effect. Stifle (talk) 10:55, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
          • You are conflating two things here; the (equally selective) quote you provide is about the state of the article, its sourcing (which is what this proposal tries to change), while the quote I presented is about the actual subject: the current NSPORTS says that the subject has to meet the GNG, but that it is sufficient for the article to provide sources showing that it meets the SNG, as it is presumed that sourcing then exists that meets the SNG. An article that doesn't meet the SNG sourcing standards can still be about a notable subject, but then will need to show the GNG (multiple indepth sources) directly. As for "If you wish to change the guideline, feel free to gather a consensus to that effect.": gee, I never thought of that, perhaps we should have an RfC about sports notability where I try to gather a consensus for a proposal to change the guideline? Finally, why do you berate someone to "drop the stick" a full week after they posted their comment? Fram (talk) 11:40, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
            • Fram, I believed Stifle mis-closed a cricket AfD which failed GNG but technically passed NCRIC which is currently at DRV. Having worked on the text at WP:SNG and following the 2017 RfC I've been under the clear impression that WP:NSPORTS requires its subjects to ultimately meet the GNG. This isn't true for every SNG, of course, but NSPORTS, like several other SNGs, is written in a way (or supposed to be written in a way) that predicts that GNG is met, i.e. there shouldn't be any subjects which pass the SNG which fail GNG. In practice, this isn't 100% true, but when individual sports SNGs get adjusted, demonstrating the articles they cover will meet GNG is part of the process. I thought this was obvious, and other contributors to the discussion on SNGs agree NSPORTS requires GNG to be met (I asked Newimpartial specifically as they had some objections to the specific 2017 RfC, and they agreed), but Stifle called this interpretation an "extreme stretch" at the DRV based on their interpretation above, which appears to be the broad concept of "SNG or GNG is okay," which isn't really how it works, being highly context and subject specific. SportingFlyer T·C 13:03, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
            • I apologise for and withdraw the "drop the stick" comment; I had not paid attention to its timestamp.
              I would support a proposal to tighten or deprecate overly loose SNGs, but there is no point in having SNGs if you say everything has to meet GNG anyway. Stifle (talk) 10:01, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
              • I'm honestly not trying to poke you with a stick so apologies in advance if it comes off that way, but SNGs aren't pointless if GNG is required: they provide a useful guideline for users, especially new users, in determining which articles will be "automatically" acceptable to create, and specific sports projects (specifically football) do delete players who technically meet the SNG if GNG is comprehensively failed. The GNG's not the easiest thing in the world to understand - it's not hard, but it can be opaque to new users. Guidelines which predict when the GNG will be met help the project, guidelines which don't lead to the inevitable gridlock of passes SNG/fails GNG discussions at AfD. SportingFlyer T·C 20:46, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
            • Just to note I didn't "mis-close" anything; the closure you refer to above has been endorsed at DRV. Stifle (talk) 12:08, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose Kind of feels like its defeating the purpose of an SNG which is that it is a guide for when sources likely exist to meet GNG. To prevent things like systemic bias against pre-internet era biographies. Now we are requiring a reference on the SNG as well? If anything that actually lowers the bar in that it gives weight to the idea that the SNG overrules GNG when it does not (or as the comment above mine mentions an alternative to GNG). -DJSasso (talk) 16:02, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose For me this take away the whole point in having sports SNGs, which are there to show that coverage does likely exist. As Djsasso says it will likely bias against non-recent sportspeople and sportspeople who compete in non-English language countries or countries where newspapers haven't been archived. What we're doing here is basically creating a GNG-light, and I'm not sure that's really needed or necessary. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 16:13, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

  "bias againt non-recent people" - that is probably a legitimate reason why there would not be articles, as non-recent people might not have the same kind of coverage as more modern examples (and information gets lost with time - not our job to right that). Again, the real problem is that if there are no sources about something, we shouldn't just create articles in the hope that some obscure one will be found. People creating articles should do the hard work before creating it and expecting it to be "somebody else's problem". Yes, I know, it's more time consuming to do proper research, but then again (to take other non-sports articles I have worked on: this or this are for more helpful to readers than stuff like this). And WP:Readers first - the point of SNGs shouldn't be them being used as arguments against deleting or redirecting a poor article; and yet that is what they are too often used for in practice. Instead of shying away and saying "well that's not the real problem" (as much as it might not be), we're better off accepting that that is part of the problem, and at least it's one part that can be fixed more easily than the others. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 16:30, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

  Except recent bias is a form of POV editing, one of the worst kinds because people often don't realize they are doing it. It is in fact our job to make sure we don't have a recent bias. It is not a case of right great wrongs, it is a core tenet of what we do here. Yes, people creating article should do as much as they can when creating an article, but for many 1800s sports figures for example that requires going to a specific city and digging into physical newspaper archives. Remember notability is not temporary. So just not having articles because we don't have editors who are able to go to some town in another country to dig through the archives does not mean we shouldn't have the article per WP:BEFORE. The real problem here, as it always is, is some people think perma-stubs are an issue, they aren't. The general motivation it seems behind this perennial debate almost always comes down to people who aren't interested in sports articles saying I don't like them. -DJSasso (talk) 16:43, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

  My view still remains that it's the SNGs that need fixing, not the full guidelines themselves. Sure some of the text around the guidelines themselves could do with tidying up to be made clearer, however I feel creating GNG-light for sportspeople isn't the option. SNGs are there to show that sourcing likely exists for a topic. For more historic sportspeople sourcing still can likely exist. Take our favourite current topic of cricket. A test cricketer for England in 1900 will still likely have been covered significantly to some degree in books and newspapers at the time in the same day a test cricketer for England today would do. Just because that information isn't online doesn't mean that the topic isn't notable. Obviously lots of the stubs that are created could be better and would be better with a source of something other than a statistical database, but what you seem to be saying is that the problem is people aren't making good enough articles. Take Hannah Jones (Surrey cricketer) as a random example. This is a large well written article, but of all 13 sources I don't think a single one of them passes GNG and only scraped pass what is deemed a weak cricket SNG (8 matches, less than what's being discussed as a potential cut off of 10). I have no plans to take this article to AfD and don't think it should (and sources may exists), but basically this article in 7000 bites of unneeded waffle on a non-notable person if sources don't exist (no offence to the article creator, I'm just using it as an example here and I could have used other examples). Rugbyfan22 (talk) 16:55, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

• Weak oppose I like the concept, but "non-routine" doesn't feel like the right word. I'm considering "one non-statistical source"; sure it may allow articles where the only coverage is WP:MILL day-of match coverage, but there normally won't be "substantial" coverage of obscure players in a box score / match write-up. (the statistical tables or their writing in prose should not be enough) User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 18:36, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
• Support this only for BLPs. For pre-internet era people, it is hard to find sources online especially in non-English countries and their representation is low on Wikipedia. Störm (talk) 01:19, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
• Support. This would strongly increase the likelihood that a given sports figure will pass GNG. If someone wants to create an article on some prehistoric sportsperson whose coverage, if it exists, is somewhere offline they can't access, they can post the name to the appropriate wikiproject in the hope that someone there does have access -- just like editors in almost every other topic have to do. Are bios of notable athletes so much more urgent to create than those of notable 18th-century sculptors (or whatever)? Of course not. The only difference is that athletes have stats databases from which editors can presume notability, pad their creation stats, and then pass along the burden of both determining if the subject is even notable, and actually writing an informative article, to hypothetical future editors. JoelleJay (talk) 03:51, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose. As with the GNG, this would come down to whether significant coverage has been found, and many sources, particularly older ones or those in languages other than English, can be difficult to find. Verifiable real-world significance is a better measure, which is what SNGs should provide. --Michig (talk) 07:17, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Playing one single game or whatever mere participatory bar you set is NOT real-world significance. Reywas92^Talk 17:01, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
    • I didn't say it was. That's a matter for the detail of the SNG. --Michig (talk) 17:22, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

  Michig, I don't really understand this argument. The articles will still have to satisfy GNG if they're taken to AfD, and the expectation is that they will be expanded with SIGCOV eventually anyway. If they don't, then they aren't considered notable for WP, and those who want to keep will still have to present a strong case for BIAS. What's the problem with shifting that discussion to before the stub is created rather than some indeterminate time in the future? JoelleJay (talk) 17:00, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

  The subjects of articles will likely need to satisfy WP:N, not necessarily GNG. --Michig (talk) 17:22, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

  @JoelleJay: I don't see a problem with having participatory thresholds. The real problem is that some of the "one game" thresholds are not good predictors of notability. The real solution IMO is to adjust the thresholds to ensure that they are properly calibrated. Hopefully, the prospect of this discussion will be an impetus to the subprojects tightening their standards. Cbl62 (talk) 22:48, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

• Weak Support I do like this proposal as at the end of the day, the basis is on the WP:GNG aspect and not the SNG issue. It's a step towards something better instead of just a plan result. The main issue will go back to articles without this easy access either via availability and the possibility of Anglo bias to come into play. HawkAussie (talk) 12:28, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose. I appreciate Fram's efforts to find a solution but, after cogitating on the consequences, I oppose this proposal on the following grounds:
  1. This proposal throws out the baby with the bathwater. Many sports SNGs are tightly and appropriately calibrated to GNG, e.g., WP:NBASEBALL, WP:NHOOPS, WP:NGRIDIRON, and others. In those contexts, we have a high degree of confidence that the material can be expanded, and stubs sourced to reliable statistical databases are legitimate and valuable steps in an article's incremental development. The real problem is with mass churning of sub-stubs based on seriously flawed SNGs (e.g., WP:NCRIC) that have clearly been shown not to be accurate predictors of GNG. The solution should be focused on the problem.
  2. There are likely hundreds of thousands of existing sports biographies that are sourced only to statistical databases. If this proposal is adopted, and applied retroactively to existing stubs, it would invite a literal flood of AfDs reminiscent of Exodus 10:3–6. (This concern could be ameliorated if the proposal were to be amended to state that it applies only to new article creation.)
  3. The proposal represents a major shift in our decades-long approach to sports biographies. Before we adopt such a dramatic shift, a neutrally-worded notice should be posted to each of the relevant sports projects inviting their input.
  4. "Substantial" coverage is a vague concept. If this proposal is to move forward, the wording should be changed to our established concept of WP:SIGCOV.
  5. "Routine source" is a new and undefined term. The existing concept at WP:ROUTINE refers to "routine coverage" of events, not to "routine sources". Sources are instead governed by our WP:RELIABLE and WP:INDEPENDENT requirements.Cbl62 (talk) 13:11, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

     Agree with all of this. We should be finding the SNGs that aren't good predictors of notability and notifying the specific WikiProjects of those SNGs to allow them to come up with solutions to better align them with GNG. The Cricket project is currently going through a discussion like this which would better align it with GNG. The proposal is like chopping off a leg because of a broken toe. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 14:15, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

     There are several NSPORTS that explicitly are based on a measure of importance and thus likely to be notable, eg those that involve the athlete being inducted into a Hall of Fame or equivalent. Most of the rest are the issue, in that playing in a sport at a certain level is presumed to lead to more sourcing that demonstrates notability/GNG. When articles created on that basis have been challenged at AFD in the past, nearly all the time, that sourcing was revealed and the article kept. So these criteria are reasonable indicators of notability at the end of the day, so these are technically not bad criteria. But they are presented in a manner that notability doesn't have to be shown upfront, and thus allows routes to rapidly create articles off statistics tables or the like. Adding just a bit of effort to show that there's at least some additional sourcing beyond stat tables is pushing some of the work that would have happened at AFD to article creation. I would ultimately agree that it is better if NSPORT's criteria were based on stablished merit (Hall of Fame recognition) or otherwise already meeting the GNG, but I can't see the project stripping all those out without major major problems on past and future articles. --Masem (t) 18:41, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

     You have to remember it's only really American sports that have proper Hall of Fames. Judging merit in other sports is much more difficult as different people will have differing opinions on what merit is or should be. I also feel that the proposed criteria has a bias towards current/recent players and Anglocentric players as I have mentioned above. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 19:22, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

     Merit-based criteria for all SNGs is very much one that favors America and/or Western English-speaking regions, but keeping in mind that the ultimate goal is to make sure that we are driving towards full articles on these people (athletes or not) that incorporate secondary sources at some point, there still will be work on articles created from merit-based criteria to expand out from just that one recognizition. Its just that at the start of creation of such an article, that merit shows importance from the start. That nonAmerican or European regions in sports lack clear ways to show merit is a systematic bias beyond WP's control, but we ignore that becuase we're not requiring "merit" to be the only way to show a topic to be notable.

     While we can say, from past experience that showing an athlete has played professionally via a statistic table will nearly always lead to more sourcing given the time and effort to do that, we don't want editors to simply feel they can create stubs based only on that statistic; there has to be more at some point, and due to the recent issue of mass creation, we just want a bit more effort to show some additional sources - doesn't have to meet the GNG at this point but that it does exist - to help. Think of the use of a statistic source to support the SNG criteria as training wheels - it is enough to help support the start of the article but at some point those are going to be removed (we're going to look beyond the statistics to just notability). We want editors to think about getting past those training wheels from the start. --Masem (t) 20:01, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

     What you're suggesting seems to be more what SportingFlyer suggested below. I was more willing to support SportingFlyer's proposal minus the part on banning users. Frams proposal is basically just GNG but a bit softer. It can be difficult to find significant sourcing on more historic sportsmen and women and sportsmen and women in non English speaking countries and alphabetical styles different from English. Sources likely exist for them if they pass SNG (yes some of them are lax and need tightening) but it may require time consuming research or subscriptions not accessible to all creators. SportingFlyer's proposal at least gave the option of a match report or short bio from a team a sportsperson plays for as a non-statistical source which then overtime could be added to by others who have access to other sources or sources in their languages. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 20:09, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

     Cbl62, I don't think @Fram: is proposing to do away with BEFORE, therefore this wouldn't lead to a sudden spate of AfDs at all. It would just take a fraction more work to create an article -- and if other SPORTS guidelines are good at predicting GNG it should be no problem to find one non-stats ref for them. The only issue I see here is in the cases of athletes from places and times that aren't well-covered, but basically every other wikiproject already deals with this by acknowledging BIAS and coordinating access to rare offline resources, so there's zero indication sports projects would be disproportionately affected. Perhaps these projects should instead shift away from the expectation that all athlete bios will be started as KITTENS (are they? do the majority of creators actually make 90-second single-source stubs and abandon them?), or that stub propagation is the only way to build an encyclopedia. JoelleJay (talk) 17:48, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

     I agree with much of what you said, particularly the need to acknowledge geographic and temporal bias and that a heightened BEFORE standard applies when these factors are implicated. Cbl62 (talk) 18:18, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

• Support This is already a requirement, and it needs to be actually freaking enforced. WP:SPORTCRIT says "Trivial coverage of a subject by secondary sources may be used to support content in an article, but it is not sufficient to establish notability. This includes listings in database sources with low, wide-sweeping generic standards of inclusion, such as Sports Reference's college football and basketball databases." and the section above it says "In addition, the subjects of standalone articles should meet the General Notability Guideline." Sure, get rid of the word "routine", but it's clear many people are just stonewalling anything because they love their perma-substubs. This is no "dramatic shift", it's applying the same rules that apply to everyone else rather than giving no-coverage athletes a pass. Reywas92^Talk 17:01, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

  WP:N states that a topic is presumed notable "It meets either the general notability guideline (GNG) below, or the criteria outlined in a subject-specific notability guideline (SNG)". This proposal basically removes the second part of that statement, which whether you like it or not is a dramatic shift. Sportspeople articles are often created because the pass a sport related SNG and have been created in this way for many years. Also if what your saying in this proposal is already a requirement, why do we need to add this proposal if all that's in the proposal is in the guidelines already. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 17:48, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

  Reywas92 -- regarding "It's clear many people are just stonewalling anything because they love their perma-substubs." That's simply not true and does not assume good faith. I am not a lover of sub-stubs. To the contrary, I'm the one who initiated the original discussion of the cricket guideline. There IS a problem with the cricket guideline that needs to be fixed, and I went so far as supporting Fram's (I think it was Fram) earlier proposal to suspend the cricket guideline altogether until a more calibrated guideline is crafted and adopted. I still think that's the best solution. An SNG that allows for mass creation of sub-stubs for non-notable persons (and which can never be improved) is a problem that needs to be fixed. Cbl62 (talk) 18:18, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

• Note: I added a neutrally worded notice of this discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football#Proposed change in sports notability policy. I suggest this notice (or something similar) be posted at the other impacted wikiprojects. Thoughts? Cbl62 (talk) 18:34, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
• Support: "This is already a requirement, and it needs to be actually freaking enforced." That sums up my POV admirably. Ravenswing 22:45, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose. Best sorted at individual projects, rather than by people who have no interest in the topic they're trying to establish policy for, and once done will never return to [insert project]. StickyWicket (talk) 13:58, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

  That would be great, if the individual projects could get their stuff together and actually fix the problematic SNGs. So far, the only place where that happened was a well advertised RfC at WP:MILHIST (where the decision was just to get rid of it entirely). If there's no other fix forthcoming, then a more robust solution that will both more forcefully enforce the existing guidelines AND hopefully put into motion the remaining reluctants seems entirely called for. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 16:39, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

  The cricket project is actively discussing proposals at the moment. The Olympic SNG has been another one discussed as a problem, and there have been others mentioned. I'm sure others in this discussion will be able to need more that need work, and then could perhaps start discussions with the relevant projects about improving their SNGs if there is a consensus over a particular SNG being weak. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 19:00, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

  @Rugbyfan22: Where is that discussion taking place? Is the project close to reaching consensus? Submission of a new guideline calibrated to GNG will go a long way toward resolving the concerns leading to this discussion. Cbl62 (talk) 02:03, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

  Cbl62 The RfC is here, it proposes changes to both WP:NCRIC (this guideline) and CRIN (related project-level essay). –dlthewave ☎ 03:25, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

  Dlthewave beat me to it but yeah that's the link. I'd also say it proposes change to WP:OFFCRIC (another project-level essay) that's an aide to WP:NCRIC in a similar way to how WP:FPL is an aide to WP:NFOOTY. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 13:22, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

  The cricket project has been "talking" for over a year about reforms, and it's patently obvious that there's a large constituency (if not a plurality) who want none. "We don't need to do anything because they're talking" is a poor way to go about things, at this stage. Ravenswing 18:32, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

  I disagree. If you've read the discussion you'll see that there is an appetite for change and improving the guidelines. Of course there will be some that will oppose, as there will be for any discussion that happens on Wikipedia, but it's looking likely that something will change, even if it's not the proposal I've suggested. I don't think anybodies saying we don't need to do anything because they're talking either. If there's a suitable change that would be likely to work then that's a good thing. Personally I quite liked SportingFlyer's proposal minus the user banning bit and thought it would help. I'm slightly against Fram's proposal because of the effect it would have on historic sportsman as I've mentioned above. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 18:56, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

  It seems strange that we have both NCRIC and CRIN. The normal process would be to upgrade the project-level advice page to Guideline status and label it as such, perhaps with a summary at NSPORTS, but in this case it seems that the official guideline is a condensed version that directs editors to the essay-level page for further detail. If CRIN truly is the guideline, it really shouldn't be edited "in-house" by project participants without wider community input. Wikiprojects have no special authority to create guidelines and I'm afraid that attempts to do so are leading to practices that create conflict because they don't reflect the wider consensus. –dlthewave ☎ 05:41, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

  I agree that the relationship between NCRIC and CRIN is confused - and, as I've said a number of times, CRIN is bloated, rambling and was edited without discussion a number of years ago in order to push a specific user's POV. It needs to be substantially cut down in order to make is usable as a explanation of what we mean by NCRIC. Or getting rid of entirely. I've made some specific suggestions at the current discussion at CRIC.

  The advantage of having CRIN in a useful format, is that people who have some knowledge of cricket and who have considered the sources that are available can produce some helpful guidelines. That's where wikiprojects have their strengths. Blue Square Thing (talk) 09:28, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

  @Ravenswing: There is more initial agreement about the current proposals put forward by Rugbyfan22 than I've seen on any other set - and that includes here. It's a sensible compromise in my view and will help provide an initial line where notability can be judged. Of course, a pile of people might object to it. In which case, people here need to do something about it - and that's been utterly lacking as well over the last year or so. I've avoided much of the discussion because, frankly, I'm fed up with going round in circles. We have a detailed proposal at CRIC. It's pretty decent but needs some ironing of details. It would be a move forward and has more support right now than any of the proposals here. It's worth a month more of everyones time. Blue Square Thing (talk) 09:51, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

• Support and Require the author to include a substantial source at the time of article creation - The current practice of writing poorly-sourced articles on the presumption that substantial coverage probably exists somewhere, and then expecting other editors or AfD participants to find those sources, turns WP:BURDEN on its head and creates huge piles of notable and non-notable articles for others to sort through. If you can't find substantial coverage but you suspect that sources exist that you don't have access to, don't create the article. Wikiprojects are great places to ask for help with these potentially-notable topics. This might require a broader discussion of our creation/deletion processes, but I would also strongly support an explicit ban on creation of stubs sourced only to databases/lists/tables and a new CSD category that allows deletion on sight with no WP:BEFORE requirement.

Unlike other SNGs like WP:ACADEMIC, this guideline does not supersede GNG, and it seems misleading to include the "presumed notable if . . ." statements in each section. In my experience it's counterproductive to have "guidelines that aren't actually guidelines", even if there's a disclaimer at the top of the page, since they're easily misunderstood or misrepresented.

One final note: There've been a few "Wikiproject X is unlikely to agree to Y" comments. Keep in mind that Wikiprojects have no special authority over their topic areas; guidelines are approved by the community and do not need a project's stamp of approval. –dlthewave ☎ 01:57, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

I also want to add that I don't think individual mass-article-creators are the root problem or deserving of blame here. They're generally working in good faith under the blessing of a large portion of the community, and I hope that clarification of the relevant guidelines will help prevent bad blood between folks who interpret them differently. –dlthewave ☎ 02:22, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

• Support. It is logical to assume that if you can find 1 substantial source then the topic is likelier to meet GNG than if you can find 0. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 13:55, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose This would likely open up many articles on athletes who played before the digital age for deletion. It's not uncommon for the only easily available sources to be the routine coverage for these athletes. Best, GPL93 (talk) 17:08, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
• Support - The issue here is mass article creation. It's a really bad problem in general on wiki, particularly with Geostubs that often contain simply wrong data, but sports is also a huge problematic area. I do not understand the rationale behind allowing editors, without first seeking consensus, to got through a statistical database and create, through WP:MEATBOT-style editing, many thousands of articles all sourced to a single source, all of which are one or two sentences plus an infobox - what exactly is the value-add in that? The data is already on the database they consulted if anyone wants to access it. They are not collating that data with anything else. It is simply not possible to collate the information of e.g., a long-dead South African test cricketer from the 1920's who played a hand-full of tests and did nothing else of note in a meaningful way to allow the creation of a meaningful article. This is not creating articles but simple data-entry. That it is being done manually and not by a bot is worse in my view, as it means human error is a factor - I would be happier if it was being done by a bot.
  AFD/PRODs are explicitly NOT a solution for this kind of editing. The gargantuan task Carlossuarrez46 created for the California stub clean-up team is a shining example of why this doesn't work - a system where it takes a week and perhaps a total of 30 mins-1 hour of work to delete an article simply cannot handle people creating an article every 90 second for 1-2 hours each day. After a year of multiple editors PRODing/AFDing Carlos's stubs (all based on bad sourcing) they have barely made a dent in them.
  FRAM's proposal at least assures us that we will no longer have articles that consist of nothing more than statistical trivia copied out of a database. FOARP (talk) 19:01, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose. Having read and considered all of the above, I find myself in full agreement with the comments by each of Andrew, GiantSnowman, Masem, Djsasso, 力, Cbl62, StickyWicket and GPL93. These comments are sensible, realistic and in compliance with the site's editing policy. As cricket seems to be the main target here, I have also studied the proposal by Rugbyfan22 at WT:CRIC and I find myself in support of that too. As far as this entire discussion is concerned I can only reiterate the view of StickyWicket who said SNG is best sorted at individual projects, rather than by people who have no interest in the topic they're trying to establish policy for, and to which they will never return once done. No Great Shaker (talk) 19:26, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
• Support I don't think it goes far enough but any change from the current situation in the direction of WP:GNG should be encouraged. Polyamorph (talk) 21:24, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose per Djsasso, Cbl62, and GPL93's reasoning and arguments, and instead focus on reforming and improving the actual problem guidelines (like the cricket one) so that they calibrate better to GNG. Ejgreen77 (talk) 21:39, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
• Support - Yes, I think it should be made clear that substantial coverage beyond a quick mention or statistical data ought to be required to achieve notability. I support this above measure, despite feeling that just one substantial source isn't good enough. I would rather use the three-source criteria, with substantial coverage in more than one reliable source for any sports-related biographies. Otherwise, we'll have too many articles that can never be more than stubs without any truly useful information. The proposal above is at least a step in the right direction. I'm also open to the possibility of eliminating the criteria for sports notability entirely and just using the easy-to-understand GNG formula. StoryKai (talk) 18:30, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
• comment - this may have been discussed above, but how does this proposal really change articles being created with just a source to a stat page, or no sourcing? All this does is mean that the subject would have to have such a non-routine source exist. That is already the suggestion of these SNGs that they would meet GNG if you searched enough for them. I don't see how this tackles badly/poorly sourced articles that are created. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 19:04, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose All this would do is introduce a bias against pre-internet sportspeople and lead to masses of AfDs. As Cbl62 says, the solution here would be to sort out the SNGs that fall short of the GNG standard (e.g. WP:NCRIC) rather than to undermine the SNG system entirely. Microwave Anarchist (talk) 19:22, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
• Support It's in a way disappointing that it has to come to this. Because guidelines and policies like WP:GNG, WP:NOT, WP:SIGCOV and WP:ROUTINE already make very clear that notability and suitability for inclusion in Wikipedia is judged on significant coverage and not purely on merit (i.e. appearing in a match or tournament table). Yet these are continuously ignored and articles created and saved at AFD's purely and merit and not notability through abusing SNG's. Thus making this change has simply become necessary.Tvx1 19:28, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
• Comment What does "non-routine" mean? If a book covers (includes a write-up for) all biographies for a certain team, would that be a "routine" source? Therapyisgood (talk) 20:04, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

  Routine coverage generally covers things like game accounts and routine game interviews, transaction announcements, and purely statistical sports biographies. A book with in-depth biographies would likely not be a routine source, though its independence and non-promotional nature would have to be evaluated as well. isaacl (talk) 20:21, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

  There have been past discussions about clarifying what constitutes "routine" coverage that should be discounted, but they have not led to consensus. WP:ROUTINE covers such things as "planned coverage of scheduled events" and "sports scores". In addition, most everyone agrees that listing in comprehensive statistical databases and short "transactional announcements" (i.e., player x traded, signed, released, or placed on injured list) are routine and do not bestow notability. In-depth sports coverage from newspapers and books is fine and counts toward a GNG analysis -- subject to other guidelines such as WP:INDEPENDENT and WP:RELIABLE. In between, there is a large gray area that is debatable. It's similar to the "in depth" issue in any GNG analysis, where reasonable minds often disagree on how many words are enough. Cbl62 (talk) 22:33, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

  Routine coverage also covers team rosters, match cards, rankings etc. Everything that is not in-depth. Tvx1 14:48, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

• Strong Oppose not sure why we are the gatekeepers of pages, I don't think it hurts to have stubs. If we really wanted to flesh every single page out there could we? Yes, but I don't think that's the point of Wikipedia. And even if you did, I'm sure people will find a way to half ass that. If you don't like the stubs, make more of an effort to flesh out pages, it's that simple.--Ortizesp (talk) 21:00, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose per StickyWicket and Microwave Anarchist. (1) Each sport is different. Individual sport projects can change their SNGs if they want or as needed. We don't need to add a guideline that applies to every sport. (2) This would just introduce a bias against pre-internet sportspeople. Sportsfan77777 (talk) 21:23, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

  I think people are confusing recency bias (something which is not unique to WP - historians and academics have access to far more sources, primary and otherwise, surviving from the most recent centuries than they have from further back) and recentism (in all likelihood many things which appear to be important now will in the end not have much beyond relatively short bursts of attention and will fade in the annals of history as another insignificant pop culture thing). A lot of things for which we get coverage today in the internet era simply would not have had the same coverage in pre-internet days. This is sometimes caused by factors other than just the new possibilities internet (this is not limited to sports, either). So again it is a wider question. But that, at least in my opinion, doesn't change that we shouldn't be creating articles which will have no significant content, no matter which things where achieved by that person. If the sources are hard of access, then get them before writing the article. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 23:48, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

  @RandomCanadian: we shouldn't be creating articles which will have no significant content - I dont think the assertion that these articles will have "no significant content" is a fair one - the work at Wikipedia:WikiProject Football/The 1000 Destubbing Challenge shows that a one line stub based on a statistical entry (e.g. Colin Cook (footballer), Eric Johnstone, Trevor Lawless) can be transformed into a decent length articles if one has access to appropriate sources. And we shouldn't be creating articles which will have no significant content is just WP:IDONTLIKEIT - stubs are perfectly valid articles. Sure, it would be nice if they were expanded, but having stub articles isn't inherently a problem. Microwave Anarchist (talk) 07:53, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  @Microwave Anarchist: Cook seems to have played a significant number of games over many seasons for a team (Chesterfield) that was, at the time, in the second tier of British football. This doesn't compare with the "one-game wonder" and other similar examples. I have no problems with stubs. I have a problem with stubs which are unlikely to be expanded with anything but mere statistics. These do no service to our readers and are better replaced by more comprehensive and more easily manageable list articles. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 19:36, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  @RandomCanadian: These "one-game wonders" are pretty few and far between (you don't become a professional sportsperson for one day only), and even then, there is no guarantee that they won't pass GNG in their own right. Also, who are you to say which articles will/won't be expanded with anything but mere statistics - that is the purpose of SNGs. All adding the requirement for a non-routine source to be present would do is discourage article creation and create a systemic bias against historic sportspeople and sportspeople from non-Western, non-English-speaking countries. Microwave Anarchist (talk) 21:15, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  Those one-game wonders often get significant coverage for being just that, perhaps even more than someone who played two or three games would, given how unusual it is. Moonlight Graham was featured in a movie where the prominent plot point was he only played one major league game and never got to bat. Would he have such coverage today if he played two or three games? I doubt it. Smartyllama (talk) 12:43, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose per above. It would create more problems than it would solve and pre-internet bios would be a huge problem. Plus this would bring back the inherant bias against females in older sports articles, where they do the same thing as the guys but got less coverage. Fyunck(click) (talk) 21:53, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose due to (but not limited to) "non-routine source" being a completely subjective term. Dmoore5556 (talk) 23:43, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

  WP:SIGCOV is clear what constitutes routine and non-routine. If need be we can link to that. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 23:48, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose, would significantly increase gender gap in sports-related coverage I imagine women's sports have been covered significantly less in mainstream news than men's. This change would significantly exacerbate the gender gap in sports-related biographies. Setting a mainstay for these, such that anyone is notable who played in at least 1 game, no matter what, no matter if the coverage exists outside a database or not (yet), would provide recognition for women's sports. Also, pre-Internet coverage is a significant concern. If you play in a professional-level game, you should be notable enough for a Wikipeida entry. The notability generates from having played in a professinal-level game, not whether someone has covered it or not. Therapyisgood (talk) 23:52, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Keep in mind that the current criteria, showing that one game was played, is known to only be a "placeholder" while fully demonstrating the player meets the GNG at somepoint; if that can't be shown, then this guideline appropriate calls for merging or deletion. Thus, this has zero impact on the gender gap issue because that already starts with the systematic bias of poor coverage of women's professional sports pre-2000ish, which is something we cannot overcome. This would not change that at all. --Masem (t) 00:27, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

    If anything, loosening the criteria would increase the gender gap by making way more male players notable (both historically, before women's teams existed, and currently, due to there just being more men's teams in general). JoelleJay (talk) 05:13, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

    Yep. It would be sausage fire-hose.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:06, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  Actually Therapyisgood in my experience the opposite is the case. Invariably the basement-dwellers creating and policing these SNGs are working in accordance with their own biases. At WP:FPL, for example, we have several male leagues which are not professional edit warred onto the 'presumed notability' list. Bring back Daz Sampson (talk) 17:37, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose - There's nothing wrong with having stubs, and this proposal would only serve to make Wikipedia more Anglocentric and widen the gender gap due to bias in what sources choose to cover. HumanBodyPiloter5 (talk) 09:42, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose - I don't see how introducing vague new guidelines will improve the project. I want to spend my time on wikipedia editing articles not endlessly debating deletion discussions.--EchetusXe 10:48, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose - do not see the need for this, or the logic that certain things are "routine" and others not. Player movements being news shows that they are indeed notable, as are "routine" match reporting. The fact that some people don't like that sports are popular and to them mundane things make the news is a separate matter.Skeene88 (talk) 12:23, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose in isolation: We have hundreds, probably thousands, of musician/actor/politician articles that are the equivalent, a list of their recordings/appearances/elected positions with no biographical content, often not even a date of birth. Sometimes they may be written as sentences, but they are still very limited in scope. Maybe Wikipedia should insist that any autobiographical article should have enough content to be a biographical rather than a record of professional life, but until it makes such a determination for everyone, I see no reason why sports articles should be subject to it. Kevin McE (talk) 13:38, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
• Comment It seems like a lot of people on both sides of this don't understand what "routine" sports coverage is and isn't. WP:ROUTINE says coverage of sports matches or other regular events like player movements are routine with regards to the notability of those events. That is why we don't have articles about individual matches unless they are significant events like championships or have lasting impact like the first match ever broadcast on TV. It does not say it is routine with regards to the players or teams involved in those events, and in fact WP:ROUTINE explicitly only applies to events, not people or teams. While we shouldn't have an article on every single sports match, trade, or transfer, the fact that those events typically lead to coverage of the participants is not routine with regards to the notability of those participants. Smartyllama (talk) 13:54, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  I agree that WP:ROUTINE applies on its face only to events. That said, it's been common practice in AfD discussions to refer to passing references in game coverage as "routine". In truth, people are really mixing two different concepts. The concept that really applies is WP:SIGCOV. Passing references to a player in a game report lack the necessary depth to qualify as SIGCOV. However, sports coverage can qualify as SIGCOV if the requisite depth is present. Cbl62 (talk) 14:49, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  It's no true that people are completely exempt from WP:ROUTINE. It even includes a people related example. Just appearing in the result of match or competition or a team roster is simply routine. That's not significant coverage.Tvx1 14:54, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose - Would be a regressive step in my view.Fleets (talk) 15:46, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
• Support - why are people so worried about article creation requiring a source that shows the subject meets GNG? If the SSGs legitimately have done what they are supposed to do in setting the bar at individuals who will very likely meet GNG, why would this be a problem? I will say, this should be broader than just a sports requirement though. Because sport articles aren't the only culprits. Rikster2 (talk) 16:04, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  Because it will likely limit article creation to recent internet age, Western players only... GiantSnowman 16:09, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  Then put a start date on it. There are plenty of barely sourced stubs that are the result of just laziness. Rikster2 (talk) 16:12, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  ...or...simply don't change it? because otherwise it gets too complicated, with too many exceptions & carve out etc. GiantSnowman 16:22, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  I am pretty tired of seeing (for example) single-line 1960s-80s Olympian stubs created with zero citation except a link to sports-reference.com. That is laziness. I create a lot of pre-internet 20th century athletes and never have problems finding at least one legitmate source if they are truly notable.Not changing anything just seems like a shield to hide behind so as not to address the issue. Rikster2 (talk) 18:00, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  Ditto. But do you think changing the SNG will prevent people creating such articles? No. It's a much better use of everybody's time to try and improve those articles, rather than wasting time at AFD debating them. GiantSnowman 18:08, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  Except people do debate them at AfD, and when a purge happens, it's a massive fight for everyone involved - those who like the SNG, those who support multiple sources, and many over articles which literally cannot be improved further. This proposal probably won't change anything in practice, but a lot of these stubs were created by only one or two users, and this would at least give us something to point to as a "please don't" if creation continues. SportingFlyer T·C 18:58, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  From #Hypothetical walkthrough below, it's more about giving the community more actionable options when these articles are created. Short of adding more time limits for page creations by new users, people are going to create what they want to create. It's more about what can be done after.—Bagumba (talk) 09:09, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose. This would add an arbitrary bias to the process.. Why are sports people always being singled out here as opposed to politicians or others that have limited coverage? We don't want to have an incomplete history of these sports just cause some guy in the pre internet age is hard to find sources on. We currently have a bright line with specific data points that are easy to understand and don't require subjective judgement.. it is better to keep it that way. Spanneraol (talk) 16:20, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  So what? "Singled out"? It needs to start somewhere. As for the bit about pre-internet; that is not an opinion: there was simply less content being generated when it required more expenditure and time (typesetting, printing, distribution,...) than nowadays. This in addition to the fact of history the what was covered in newspapers is not the same thing as gets covered nowadays. The sources being harder to find is only a small bit. Tell me, is there any example of a "one-game wonder" or something being expanded from a statistical dump in prose to a more proper article based on such harder to find sources? And the information wouldn't be lost either way - instead of having separate articles, we'd just have a list article grouping them together (a net advantage to the reader), which is a better way to present the encyclopedic information (the purpose of notability guidelines being identifying topics which will have enough source material that we may write something on them) and more useful than dozens of non-maintained stubs (WP:Readers first). RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 16:41, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  What's the purpose of moving the articles to a list? That just makes it harder to navigate.. If you are looking at a roster and want to find out more about that person, then clicking on their name should bring you to an article with all the information on them.. not to a list with a slew of names on it. This is a disadvantage to a reader, not the advantage you claim it is. I have seen many articles that expanded from stubs to more substantial articles based on editors having the time and desire to work on them. The Lewis example cited elsewhere is an example of that. Spanneraol (talk) 16:47, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  Re. lists ever heard of {{anchor}}? Re. the rest examples such as Lewis (who is exceptional in having been really poor at it, and us not knowing his name) are exceptions. How many other articles about one-game wonders are there, really? I am not talking about stubs in general. I'm talking about one-game athletes such as this RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 21:21, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  Lots and lots of articles on players who have played 1 game (or in a lot of cases 0 major league games) that are more than just stubs. In many sports (not all which is why we have different guidelines per sport) you are notable way before you even get to that 1 major league game. In the sport I edit in most, there are large numbers of junior players every year that haven't even touched a pro game yet who have extensive coverage and big articles written on them. People always seem to get hung up on the 1 game but forget about their careers before that 1 game which is what their notability usually comes from. That 1 game is just a bright line indicator. -DJSasso (talk) 22:48, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  (edit conflict) How about Lewis (baseball), the article is a featured article and started as a one line stub with an infobox. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 16:49, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

• Support with some copyediting. That "at least one non-routine source" wording is a confusing way to put it; just spell it out: "at least one source that provides in-depth coverage, not just statistics". Anyway, this change, when worded more clearly, will be good because stats are just primary sources (sometimes tertiary). They are not secondary material and do not add to notability, so they cannot be sole basis of notability. It's important to remember that the purpose of this guideline is to help editors predict whether a topic within a paritcular subject area will pass WP:GNG. It is not an anti-GNG competing ruleset. It isn't really a rule set at all, but (ironically perhaps) a statistical prediction tool. The problem with the current situation is that people who do not understand this (or who just don't care) are treating it as if it is a rule that permits virtually context free "article" that consist of little but a name and statistics, which is in violation not only of WP:N but also WP:NOT#DATABASE. All it's doing is causing more and more pseudo-articles that need to be either AfDed or rewritten. If anyone in a sport is actually notable, we will be able to find non-statistical information written about them. And that, by the way, is why "non-routine source" is not the proper wording for this. The sources will mostly and in some cases only be sports-specific ones, which I think most people would interpret as "routine" with regard to sports. That's not what the drafter intended to imply, but the wording is vague enough it's the inference a lot of reading editors would accidentally walk away with.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:06, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

• Support There needs to be some sort of substantial source requirement to have any sort of biographical detail. Otherwise, you end up with rather pointless and arguably worthless articles like Frank Bahret who played in two games over the course of a week and had a batting average of 0%. There is never going to be further coverage of the guy, nor should there be. He is not someone who is notable whatsoever. Silverseren^C 17:50, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Not sure why you of all people, or the various supporters of this movement care whether they get more page views or not. How do you know someone isn't interested in that athlete when reviewing past seasons? Or as trivia? Or as a strong supporter of the team? Obviously someone took the time to create the page, and it's getting pageviews to this day.--Ortizesp (talk) 19:20, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

• So now you're trying to determine notability via pageviews? I care about whether articles meet notability criteria. The entire point of the SNGs are to make claims that in-depth sources should exist for the subjects out there that meet the GNG. If there are articles that blatantly fail that and the SNGs are propping up those articles, then the SNG is wrong and the article should all be deleted. When it comes down to it, it is still the GNG that needs to be met and, if any article challenged, then it should be required to meet the GNG regardless of what an SNG claims on the topic area. Silverseren^C 20:32, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

• You're twisting my words, I'm not arguing pageviews determine notability (although there is obviously some correlation). Notability criteria is never going to be objective, and my opinion generally is if they pass SNG they should pass GNG. I just don't think we have to be as strict with it as you do.--Ortizesp (talk) 13:48, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

• Question to opposers. There are a substantial number of participants who argue introducing a stricter sourcing criterion for article creation (although still looser than what an article is ultimately required to meet) would worsen pre-internet/non-English bias. Some of this might be from a general misunderstanding of how NSPORT relates to N (that it supersedes or is an alternative to GNG). But I think a lot of editors are going off a good-faith implicit assumption (possibly stemming from FAQ #1) that sports SNGs are accorded copious, indefinite interpretive leeway from WP:BIAS. In other words, some editors believe that if there is the smallest possibility an athlete was covered in any way by offline/non-English sources, an SNG-meeting article cannot be deleted until someone claims to have searched those sources. This results in the burden of proving notability always being 100% the responsibility of deletion nominators, and ensures that even if a nom fully meets the search thoroughness set out by WP:BEFORE, there will be substantial pushback unless they demonstrate they looked at physical newspaper archives/speak the relevant language. If ULTRA-BEFORE isn't performed, the AfD may be closed as keep under the vague, unvoiced assurance that a future editor who does have ULTRA-BEFORE capability will come across the article and expand it with the hypothetical SIGCOV. However, BIAS is applicable just as much to non-sports biographies. So, my question is: do other SNGs afford (e.g.) historical subjects so much time to find sources before/during/after an AfD, based on such little non-algorithmic evidence that those sources exist? If not, what do they do when creating articles on non-GNG-meeting figures or when confronted with a deletion, and why can't sports editors also do that? JoelleJay (talk) 19:33, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

• You make a good point, JoelleJay, and I am inclined to agree with those in support of this proposal, however, until we can agree that no former boxing world champions will have their Wikipedia articles deleted and make it so that I can finish adding the small amount of former champs' pages that there are left to publish without being prohibited by this proposal, I have to continue opposing this proposal, which is unfortunate considering how it can prevent from unneeded Wikipedia articles from being published. I just want protection for EVERY former boxing world champion who held a major world title. These major world titles only include, the World Boxing Association's (Also known as the National Boxing Association until 1962) Super and Regular champions, the World Boxing Council's primary champions, the International Boxing Federation's primary champions, the World Boxing Organisation's primary champions, the Ring Magazine's champions, and the New York State Athletic Commission's champions. I understand that this may sound like a lot to ask for considering how many sanctioning bodies I listed, but if you want me to, I can spend some time researching how many former world champions don't have their own Wikipedia articles. I assure you that there aren't even 30 left. Even if there were 30 left, considering that 596 articles are added daily, I don't see how this would be negative for the website in any shape or form since this is only an issue for past champions, that of which the number is finite.CaPslOcksBroKEn (talk) 22:47, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

• Comment (because I am still mid think). As you can probably tell by my contribs, one of things I focus on is Olympic athletes, which I do my best to expand into standalone articles where I can (and cut down where there is too much stuff). One of the problems for this is that (for instance) US college athletes will have more in-depth coverage (in English) than say a two-time weightlifting Olympic medallist from North Korea. Obvs. both are notable, but it will always be easier to destubify the college athlete. Red Fiona (talk) 19:59, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  And that's today. With Olympics, think about the a two-time weightlifting Olympic medalist from the 1940s. They are equally notable yet it will take even more digging. And women's sports articles will really get hammered. Our project makes sure that women are treated the same for the identical accomplishments, even though the press coverage is more sparce. The Women's sports project would come down on us like a ton of bricks if we start deviating from that.... and rightly so. There must be some flexibility for pre-internet and past centuries. NSPORT is a great guideline but it is more general in nature and can't cover all the nuances we have to deal with every day as editors. It really helps with policing when an editor can see in black and white just what i's have to be dotted and what t's have to be crossed, before they create an article. It allows the projects to deal with more important items than a stub that happens to slip through that is borderline GNG. Sure, we still have challenges that take weeks to resolve, but they are few and far between because we have items we can point to. It's worked really well at Tennis Project, but I can't speak to other sports. Fyunck(click) (talk) 22:09, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  Again, at some point, per the general NSPORT guideline, all these criteria are just placeholders, and it is expected that the articles can be expanded to meet the GNG. That means at some point, better sourcing than just stats or the like will need to be shown or the article will be deleted. That will affect any athlete regardless of gender, nationality, etc. The primary aspect here is that with the suggested change, the article wont be created until at least some basic sourcing beyond stats can be shown, rather than waiting until the eventual AFD to demand that sourcing. That sourcing is going to have to come at some point, and it really should be up to those that want these articles to do a minimum amount of effort to find a source or two beyond a statbook. That might mean it will take more effort for women players or non-Western players, but that's still an effort that has to be done at some point. --Masem (t) 03:33, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

  And I feel that is a huge problem that will do a great disservice to female articles and articles of the 19th and 20th centuries. That is why I oppose this plan. You are correct that we would hope to fill in the blanks in the future, but many times it's the fact the article exists at all that someone with more access to old press reports, or someone who speaks and writes a foreign language, notices it and adds to it, rather than creates it from scratch. Your explanation above is exactly why SNGs exist and help us. And in real life editing, whether this passes or not, these articles will still be created, someone will ask for deletion, and the project editors will vote to keep. Most votes only have about six to ten editors, and mostly from the topic up for deletion. Fyunck(click) (talk) 03:53, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

  This ideal situation (stub articles are found by random readers and get expanded) is fully desirable, but we have to balance that against the fact that that current SNG guidance also allows for proliferation of mass-created stubs of male athletes. In contrast, having something like article creation drives to bolster the representation of female athletes or those from countries with poor media coverage, where there is targetted plans to provide the sourcing, would be far more appropriate to work within all the issues in question without raising any problems. Also, I will point out that we can still provide redirects of these athletes to suitable team pages (on the assumption that the team is notable) so that they are searchable terms and potentially a means to expand from that. --Masem (t) 14:00, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

  I think my main concern/question would be what counts as routine. For example, in a slightly different hypothetical case of a North Korean weightlifter who had competed at the Olympics but not won a medal would e.g. a BBC link to the Olympic weightlifting results be routine but a BBC article discussing the effects of her performance at the Olympics on N Korean weightlifting be non-routine? (Sorry for any mistakes, talk page editing on mobile is a terrible experience) Red Fiona (talk) 23:22, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

  @Redfiona99: Yeah, you got that pretty much exactly. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 00:04, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

• Complicated Issue: I share the concern of Fyunck(click) that women, BIPOC, and especially pre-Internet figures need to have SNGs that clarify why their accomplishments in a given sport are, in fact, notable. I recall an issue over the significance of an amateur sports figure of the 1800s who was of the nobility and thus it was not considered proper to except money for competition in those days, yet they had some very notable accomplishments. That’s just one example. Yet I also agree with mass article creation based off of a statistical database being a really useless waste of bandwidth. I think I agree with those who say, “just enforce the freaking rules we have.“ Montanabw^(talk) 22:47, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Montanabw - I sympathise, but at the same time I don't think we can "just enforce the freaking rules we have" until there is literally something saying "Don't create masses of one-sentence articles based solely on a statistics database, and yes that means you". Right now citing WP:MASSCREATION is always simply answered by saying "but I didn't use a bot/tools" even though WP:MEATBOT says that this also counts as mass-creation and was made specifically to cover this scenario, and they get away with it based on that argument. The end result is tens of thousands of problematic articles for some future clean-up crew to have to go through like we are with the Iranian "village" case. FOARP (talk) 13:50, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Surely that's a problem of articles for creation or stubs more than SNGs though. If I wanted to stop mass creation of stubs I'd try and get consensus for change there rather than changing an SNG. Rugbyfan22 (talk) 16:37, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Most of the people doing this are/were autopatrolled, so AFC/NPP is no barrier at all to this behaviour. You can say "well, then they should lose the autopatrolled bit", but in the two most recent cases one editor had to be desysopped to lose it (and they're still voting on it at Arbcom, though it looks likely to happen if only as a result of uncivil conduct) and in the other a clear consensus to remove autopatrolled formed right before the editor concerned posted a very worrying message on their talk page and the ANI discussion got hatted. I have also tried raising this issue over at Wikipedia talk:Autopatrolled but I'm not sure it is seen as a problem for Autopatrol either. FOARP (talk) 18:51, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

• Support - The current situation is ridiculous (for all the reasons outlined) and if the other sports SNGs are anything like WP:NFOOTBALL they too are disingenuous shams. I suspect some of the objections here are because thousands of completely non-notable sub-stubs will be exposed to deletion and it will be a big clean up job. Well hard luck, frankly. Bring back Daz Sampson (talk) 17:37, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

In what way is NFOOTBALL a disingenuous sham? People seem determined to criticise it yet no better guidelines are ever suggested... Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 20:04, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

If you see an issue with WP:NFOOTBALL (which I agree is probably too lax), then propose a change to NFOOTBALL. Some SNG's are actually pretty tight, such as WP:NHOOPS which narrows down inclusion to a few specific leagues and even national team play does not guarantee inclusion. Throwing out all SNGs at once instead of working on them individually is a massive oversight. Best, GPL93 (talk) 12:29, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

• Support - Need to try and move away from stubs that are only sourced to stats databases, they add little value. Eldumpo (talk) 18:45, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
• Support per Fram. This seems like a reasonable solution.4meter4 (talk) 00:17, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
• Support - Although I'd prefer to go further, this seems like a sensible requirement to reduce the number of pointless, crufty, sportsperson articles that basically boil down to "person X did thing Y" with no other supporting information. If someone hasn't attracted at least some prose discussion then they clearly aren't notable, and merely existing in some stats database does not suggest that they are worth devoting time and resources to in building, monitoring, and maintaining an article here. Pyrope 00:16, 10 April 2021 (UTC)
• Reluctant support. This change shouldn't be necessary, but it clearly is due to pushing the guidelines so far - I agree with others that simply enforcing existing rules ideally should have covered this, but it clearly hasn't. In general, there is not that much harm to "borderline" notability articles existing that can be expanded over time, so a SNG allowing some articles that probably don't meet GNG (yet?) but have at least something isn't a problem. However, this has clearly been extended far past the point of usefulness, so best rein in the SNG. Something that is not a table or a chart seems a very easy criterion to meet. If that can't be met, just upload the dang table or chart itself onto Wikipedia for the 1988 Some Obscure Minor League Team Roster, since raw data can't be copyrighted in general, and we'll still have exactly as much coverage as the breakout articles. SnowFire (talk) 20:15, 10 April 2021 (UTC)
• Cautious support. The use of statistics sources encourages the worrying tendency to create a directory of sportsists, which is something Wikip[edia is not. The same is true of appearing int he Olympics. Easily half of all articles on Olympians should be redirects to lists, because there are, and probably never will be, any reliable independent soources to support an actual biography of a living person. Guy (help! - typo?) 20:37, 10 April 2021 (UTC)
• Support per other supporters - it's basically impossible to meet our core content policies without at least two solid (meaning gng-satisfying) sources. I support anything that moves us in that direction. Levivich ^harass/_hound 00:56, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
• Support If there isn't one decent non-statistical source, there shouldn't be an article, especially looking at recent post-internet age subjects. And as per dlthewave, the author of an article should be required to include a substantial source at the time of article creation. Ym2X (talk) 17:24, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose. The newly created Wikipedia article of the former WBA bantamweight world champion Park Chan-yong, would have to be up for deletion. I could not find any articles that were written about him as the primary subject, but his place in boxing history as becoming a legitimate world champion must be allowed to be recognized. Regardless of the level of notability or recognition a championship boxer has recieved, the accomplishment of winning a major world championship required to be the undisputed champion should be held with the same respect that every single former or current boxing world champion with an existing Wikipedia article is currently given. This proposition would dimish the amount of noteworthy information on a subject allowed to be represented. Wether you like it or not, Wikipedia is an extremely valuable resource for researching sports and even more so researching boxing. The likely thousands of boxing record table on the site is absoultely necessary to have as it is. The history of boxing is incredibly rich and deep and without allowing editors to keep records in a different format than on Boxrec.com, it would make researching the expansive history so much more difficult and time consuming. Simply trying to research which titles different champions held before the 1960s would become much more convoluted. The value of having Wikipedia articles for former world champions should be seen as inherent. Despite the attempt to push Wikipedia away from being a stat keeper, when looking at some extremely notable fighters' articles it is apparent that even though they may have many sources and good amount of writing on the page, they still aren't anything more than a glorified stat database. Kindly take a look at Barbados Joe Walcott's Wikipedia article. By the logic of some of the people on this thread, this article should be up for deletion. Take away the boxing record and the paragraphs going into detail about specific fights and the article is a 13 sentence, two paragraph biography stub that "add little value". Are you going to tell me that everything on that article not covering his personal life is easily accessable in one place outside of Wikipedia? The claim that stat keeping adds little value quickly falls apart when you take a quick look of the most notabale boxer in the history of the world, Muhammad Ali. Compare his championship record as it is on Boxing record for Notability (sports)/Archive 41 from BoxRec (registration required) and his boxing career article. In his first reign as heavyweight champion, boxrec.com only lists the WBA and WBC titles he fought for. Imagining that Wikipedia did not stat keep for his boxing record, after hours of research, one will realize that when he defeated Sonny Liston, in addition to winning the WBA and WBC titles, he also won the NYSAC, and The Ring heavyweight titles. Furthermore, in his second and third reign as heavyweight champion, it would be unclear that he was the Ring heavyweight champion and that he fought for that vacant title against Larry Holmes. Sure, this is all accessable on list of The Ring world champions article, but who is easily going to see that article and find their way there? I was recently watching a Joe Rogan podcast where they broke down Joe Louis' professional boxing career. The first place they went was his Wikipedia article. They proceeded to scroll down and use the boxing record table. Not boxrec, not list of The Ring world champions, not list of WBA world champions, not list of world heavyweight boxing champions, but Joe Louis. Everyone that is in support of this proposition must understand that the fight against using Wikipedia as a record book will only convolute the process of researching sports, especially sports with extensive history over hundereds of years. I am just talking about boxing because it is what I spend my time contributing to Wikipedia. I don't even want to imagine about how this would affect finding information on other sports for fans of any level of interest. CaPslOcksBroKEn (talk) 17:52, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Comment. @CaPslOcksBroKEn: , I can't speak for other supporters (although some also noted this below), but I don't think Park's article is really what this proposal is targeting, nor would it be likely to be deleted at AFD. This proposal is more about reining in two-three sentence stubs that are solely a recitation of "Player X played 2 games in the Bundesliga second division" or briefly on some minor cricket squad and the like. Park's article is safe, I think most editors agree a world champion surely has Korean-language sources out there to expand the article with later. SnowFire (talk) 20:22, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose. While I do understand the intention of this proposal, I'm in agreement with a few other editors; it's the individual SNGs that need to be changed. I've used NBOX as a rough guide for a lot of articles I've created. For example, an amateur boxer who has competed in the final of a national tournament or in international competitions; or a boxer who has previously challenged for a world title. And surprise surprise, they also turn out to meet GNG (because NBOX isn't, let's say, NCRIC). However, the same coverage will be extremely difficult to find for boxers in the pre-internet era who are from non-English speaking countries. CaPslOcksBroKEn gave a prime example above; a boxer who is one of a handful of Korean's to have won a world title is clearly notable, has encyclopaedic value, and would have received significant coverage in his home country. However, such sources from 1980s Korea aren't readily available. Presuming an athlete is notable (and that coverage exists, somewhere) because said athlete has competed at the highest international/world level in their field, is common sense. Presuming an athlete is notable because they played in one match that has been "judged by a substantial source" to have been at a high level is, quite frankly, ridiculous. If the aim is to stop mass creations of crappy one-line stubs or to stop people using sports SNGs to keep crappy one-line stubs, then said SNGs need to be tightened up. – ².O.^Boxing 20:00, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
  • What oppose voters aren't addressing: if the sources about the 1980s Korean boxer aren't readily available, then why the heck should we have a stand alone page about the boxer? If we have no sources for that page, why do we have the page?! Just include the boxer on a list of boxers. What is the problem with that? What is the obsession with having a stand alone page for people based on their accomplishments (instead of based on source availability)? The only answer I can think of is that people equate having a stand alone page as some kind of indicator of importance. Well, it is, I guess: an indicator of importance to English speaking people. But you know what? 1980s Korean boxers aren't that important to English speaking people, that's why they're not written about much in English, and that's OK. We can be a global encyclopedia and even have foreign language sourcing... but until such time as someone writes the article with the sourcing, there is no need for a stand alone page just because "sources must exist", as the argument goes. Levivich ^harass/_hound 20:09, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
    • My issue is it feels like people are moving the goalposts. There are tons of sources for many obscure athletes, but they tend to be directories/game sheets/newspaper articles that don't always go out of their way to speak individually about the athletes. Often, the fact that the player is mentioned at all is significant, and in real-life they are significant, but many Wikipedias now want to ignore that reality. I don't understand this obsession with removing notable or near-articles on Wikipedia, I feel it would be more productive and intuitive to have a discussion to improve the articles.--Ortizesp (talk) 20:21, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
      • We have sources for the page. Please check my orignial post because I provide a link to the article in question. It has multiple sources. What it doesn't have, however, are articles that were written specifically about him. The reason why I am fighting to keep these types of articles up and to allow the creation of more is that they are exclusively for WORLD champions. The clarification is that they held MAJOR world titles REQUIRED to become the undisputed champion in thier weight class. I will concede that it doesn't matter to the average English speaker wether this article stays up, but what damage does it do? It contains no lies and is sourced, just not up to the standard of non world champion athletes or non athletes. The significance it has on the English encyclopedia is that I am just trying to create articles for former WORLD champions. They were not Korean champions. I understand not making Wikipedia articles for Korean OPBF champions from the 1980s because they were not significant in any shape or form when it came to unifying a division and being the only champion. If this article was about a top 10 rated contender who challenged for a world title, but didn't win and it had as little coverage as the one I'm referring to, I would honestly not care. This really isn't a lot to ask for. MMA on Wikipedia has the criteria of having 3 fights in the UFC, being rated in the top 10, and obviously, having won a Bellator or UFC world championship. If this effects the articles I'm thinking about like I feel like it will, it only decreases the value of this website. I really shouldn't have to be fighting to stop the deletion of a former WBA WORLD CHAMPION.CaPslOcksBroKEn (talk) 20:35, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
        • You're still not addressing the issue I'm raising. You say "deleting" as if that means the encyclopedia won't cover the WBA world champion. Nobody is talking about that. Nobody is suggesting the encyclopedia shouldn't cover all world champions in every sport. The issue isn't whether the information goes into the encyclopedia or not; the issue is whether it's a stand alone page or a list page. If the only sources we have are statistics, if there is nothing to say about a champion other than that they won a championship, then why should we insist on putting it in a stand alone page instead of in a list of champions? Why does every champion need to have their own page? That's what no opposers are answering. Why a stand alone page and not a list? Levivich ^harass/_hound 20:44, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
          • On the page WBA bantamweight world champions, you will notice that Park Chan-yong is listed as having won the title. Nothing more nothing less. It says who he beat and who beat him for it, but it has absolutely no information beyond that. There is no link to his boxrec and there wouldn't be since it isn't formatted in that way since the majority of champions have their own articles. How many fights did he have? What was his record? In what way did he win the title? By knockout? Decision? What type of decision? What type of knockout? Technical knockout? Corner retirement? Majority Decision? Unanamous decision? Split decision? Points decision? How many rounds was it scheduled for? It was in the 1980s so was it a 15 round fight or 12 round fight? When he lost the title, how did he lose? All the same questions. What was his record before and after winning and losing the title? What did he retire with a record of? When was he born? Where was he born? How tall was he? Well I guess if this proposal passes and causes this article to be deleted, none of these questions about a legitimate world champion will be able to be answered on Wikipedia. If you take a look at that article I created and compare it to the list of WBA world bantamweight champions, you'll realize what I mean when I say that this is "deleting" valuable information. Yes, I call it valuable, because I am a boxing nerd who wants to see the access of boxing knowledge be at our finger tips. Lets imagine for a moment that I never made my first edit and was still a normal person. I hear about former bantamweight and featherweight champion, Wilfredo Vázquez and I go to his Wikipedia article. I'm looking through his record, then I notice that the champion he fought in his first title fight, named Miguel Lora, defeated him in a 12 round decision. Who is this Lora guy? He beat this highly touted future champion? He retained a world champioship versus him? Let me go to the link for the title. Oh, there's no information about him on this list besides the dates he was champion and his ethnicity. Well I don't know what else to do so I guess that's that. Now, let's imagine I decide to dig deeper and I type his name into google with boxer next to it to be certain I can find more information. Ah, boxrec, let's see what this is. Oh, what? It won't show me the number of rounds? I need to create an account? Are we really supposed to expect our readers to go out of their way to make accounts for websites they've never heard of in order to see the record and career of a world champion we have on a list? Beyond this, if Lora was a Ring magazine champion, they would never see that even if they did create an account as boxrec does not list those titles like they are listed in the boxing records here on Wikipedia.CaPslOcksBroKEn (talk) 21:06, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

The situation you're describing is one in which we have too much information to include in a list entry. That is the opposite of the situation I'm talking about. Levivich ^harass/_hound 21:41, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

• There are so many sportspeople that I don't think lists are reasonable. I'm fairly certain 99% of athlete stubs right now could be expanded to fit the higher standard of criteria you want, I just don't know if it's a reasonable use of time in every single case. And I don't know what would be gained from making huge, conglomerated lists instead of the various stubs and articles we have now.--Ortizesp (talk) 22:05, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Sure, any list entry can get expanded back into a full article anytime there is a willing editor armed with RS. What's to be gained by having lists instead of stand alone pages is fewer pages to maintain and thus a higher quality product for our readers. It's easier to watchlist 1,000 lists than 10,000 stubs. The question remains unanswered: what's to be gained from having stubs instead of lists? This is the question no one ever answers head-on. The question is about stubs instead of lists, not articles instead of lists. And the answer, AFAIK, is that for team sports players, it can be difficult to determine a redirect target (to which list do you redirect the name, if the player has played on multiple teams in multiple seasons?), but other than that, there is no advantage of stubs over lists. Levivich ^harass/_hound 23:01, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
    • Isn't it inherently obvious that stubs can be better than lists? Stubs have more details, are easier to grow, easier to find, and are generally larger than their entries would be on lists. Categories, infoboxes, pictures, etc may be lost in lists. I don't think the quality of articles is better in a list, it would just be easier to patrol/organize. And this is notwithstanding 1. the sorting issue, especially at the sheer volume we would be dealing with, and 2. the absolute amount of time, manpower and scrutiny this would required which would be better served working on these stubs to begin with.--Ortizesp (talk) 23:46, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
      • Not from my POV. Articles generated from bare listings in databases will only have the data in that database written out in words. It is always far easier to read a table at a glance than it is to read through a sentence. Data in tables is also sortable and re-arrangeable to compare one player with the other. The situation you are talking about is where there is sufficient information to write an article (i.e., material beyond that in databases). FOARP (talk) 14:34, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
        • Well, we'll have to agree to disagree. You can write a meaningful page by just citing databases. And there's plenty of stubs right now that are invaluable and necessary as stubs, and don't need to be expanded. If this destructive proposal proceeds you and I both know that tons of valid articles are going to get crushed up into these proposed lists. Not sure why you are proposing something that is destructive to Wikipedia, instead of focusing attention to strengthen the articles we already have.
          • @Ortizesp It's worth asking "why are they valid?". Are they valid because guidelines written some years ago say they're valid? Or are they valid because you can learn something from the articles that you couldn't learn from reading a table? Does it make sense to effectively auto-generate thousands of articles that are basically just statistical data in prose format? In what circumstance is purely statistical data not better presented in a table? FOARP (talk) 10:48, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
• Support Perfection is the enemy of progress. We badly need something, the sports criteria of "did it for a living for one day" has become the notability-wide poster-child for an SNG run amok. Don't make it too tough or that would be a poison pill, just a bit tougher. PLEASE bring something to the finish line. North8000 (talk) 19:21, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

  No it isn't, what are you talking about.--Ortizesp (talk) 20:16, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

  My impression is closer to "yes it is", but that's primarily because for the past few months I've been working on mass-created articles, so maybe I'm suffering from availability bias? OK, so to test this I clicked ten times on "random article", and got three single-reference geostubs and one single-professional-game sportsman stub in ice hockey. Now, your mileage may vary, but I'm leaning toward "yes, this is a wide-spread problem". FOARP (talk) 10:58, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

  Unsure if this point has been made previously in this untrackable mass of comments - but just because a sports stub has not been improved does not mean that it cannot or will not. That's a very important point. Everybody is acting like 'once a stub, always a stub' is the norm when it really is not. GiantSnowman 11:02, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

  As an example: 18 hours in the life of the "Doesn't seem notable, no reliable sources" Martin Willock article: multi-diff. -- Jonel (Speak to me) 20:25, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

  I see two sources that could maybe be considered SIGCOV ("Willock pushes for team spot" and "Idyllic setting provides training for tough grind"), although the latter is from the local newspaper. What was the point of this comment though? JoelleJay (talk) 22:19, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

  This proposal wouldn't have prevented the creation of the Willock article, but it might have given us a Start-class article from the very beginning instead of when it got AfD'd 5 years later. –dlthewave ☎ 02:08, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

  This proposal literally tries to prohibit the creation of the Willock article as it was created. -- Jonel (Speak to me) 02:11, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

  @Jonel: I don't think it is trying prohibit the creation of the Willock article, I think it is trying make the Willock what it became. And that only happened because it got nominated for deletion. If the work was done by the creator in the first place to make it what it became after being only a sub-stub, then it would not have taken the time from other editors to make the Willock article have any GNG sources. It is actually a good argument to why sub-stubs should not be created. It took six years and an AfD to expand. Essentially counters the argument of "create it and they will come (to expand it)..." Yosemiter (talk) 02:18, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

  The problem is that many of these articles are created (often at astronomic paces), left alone, and then not improved until somebody has the guts to take it to AfD, where it is shown many articles are not actually about notable subjects (take the recent spat of cricketers). Article creators should take the effort to write up proper articles which show at least some significant coverage of their subject and not just dump statistics and make it someone else's problem, which does not improve the encyclopedia either for readers or for editors. It's not that hard - your responsibility as the article creator is look up sources and do the WP:BEFORE before creating the article, not make it someone else's problem 5 years later at the AfD. I know, I've myself created/expanded a few articles - nobody expects this to be easy or instantly gratifying, I don't see why we should give a free pass to sports. If this guideline helps in reducing the number of statistics directories and instead makes new articles about sportsmen more thorough, it's working as intended and solving an actual problem. And if it saves us from the vague-wave "meets NSPORTS" !votes at AfDs which treat SNGs as though they are superior to GNG (the are not), by actually putting some meat to the SNGs, also working as intended. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 02:28, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

  The stub was fine, the person is notable, there is no deadline, AfD is not cleanup, and WP:BEFORE is explicitly about AfD rather than article creation. -- Jonel (Speak to me) 02:43, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

Besides the selectively chosen "the stub was fine" example, how many more "the stub was not fine and the person was not notable" examples are not taken into account? Ex. Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Allen_(Cambridge_University_cricketer)? It's always much better if article creators would bother to create stuff like (to take an example outside sports, since it's not my usual topic) this than stuff like [this (and leave the actual work to someone else). I know which one is more helpful to our readers - WP:Readers first is a very valid reason why we'd not want stats-dump stubs... RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 02:55, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

• I think we can all agree that making a B-Class article is better than a stub. Simultaneously, a stub is better than nothing at all. What you are recommending will mean these articles won't be made to begin with, and I fundamentally disagree with your view on this. The reader is NOT helped by nothing at all.--Ortizesp (talk) 01:04, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

  I'm confused, why would the proposed sourcing requirement prevent the creation of articles on notable topics? Wouldn't editors just create B-class articles instead of stubs? –dlthewave ☎ 01:24, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

  The "other side" has some merits, in that not all articles need to be good (or even B-class) right from the start. However, this was never the target of this proposal. The issue is with the non-biographies of sports person who happen to meet some of the overly liberal SNGs and which are an absolute mess to clean-up afterwards. The fact that many of these are getting at AfD recently might be leading a push to make the SNGs harsher, and to reduce the amount of editors who keep !voting to keep articles for which no sources can or will be found. The discussion shouldn't be re-framed in the direction of the "notable, but the article creator couldn't bother to make a more complete article" (which are more often than not signs of ages past when criteria were not so strict, and usually, an exception rather than the rule) RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 01:44, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

  @Jonel: AfD is not supposed to be cleanup. However, this example is quite evident of WP:HEY and if the work had been put in beforehand, it would have saved the time of many others, including those that saved it (in this case, the time and efforts of User:Joseph2302, who was not the creator). It does not discount the many other examples where sub-stubs cannot be expanded. While it is not an exception to "stubs will never and cannot be expanded", it is also not the rule that "all sub-stubs that meet a sports SNG can obviously be expanded". Definitely a borderline example. Yosemiter (talk) 03:10, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

• Support identifying at least one source of independent, reliable, significant coverage—if notability is challenged—as being a necessary but not sufficient requirement for keeping the article. Discussion at #Hypothetical walkthrough convinces me this is viable.—Bagumba (talk) 10:31, 20 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose I like this idea, but not when it starts nominating most of the work here I've done on Wikipedia for deletion. Before I got a Newspapers.com subscription via the Wikipedia library, most of my articles were just sourced to stats websites (I'd try to put at least 2 sources in the Refs and External links). In fact, I have added either pro football reference or pro football archives in just about all of my articles. And also, I don't see the problem with stub articles (at least for sports, I do kind of see a problem with some of the "unincorporated community" articles). I think of it as, would you rather have the article or not? If this proposal works it will nominate a huge amount of articles for deletion, which will most likely make the sports coverage just recent sports. Also, what about the articles that don't even have any sources. BeanieFan11 (talk) 16:58, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Easy: articles which don't have any sources either need one added, or they need to be deleted due to failing WP:V (an even less controversial standard than WP:GNG). There's no problem with using football reference or the like as sources for statistics: there is a problem if that is all you can find about the article's subject. If reliable sources have a recency bias (and that is true not just in sports, but also in history in general...), then it isn't our job to WP:RGW, especially not by making poor quality articles. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 00:49, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

  The ones that have demonstrated coverage will be kept. Why would we want to keep others that don't have coverage? Per the guideline WP:WHYN: We require "significant coverage" in reliable sources so that we can actually write a whole article, rather than half a paragraph or a definition of that topic.—Bagumba (talk) 01:03, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

  And I'll say it again... that method will destroy articles on females and pre-internet biographies. It will destroy articles that aren't about English language people. Articles where we have champions where statistics exist, that we know were notable at the time, but have trouble digging up the detailed Czechoslavakian newspapers. When you have a stub started it may give impetus to someone expanding, rather than starting from scratch. Or when you have a male Wimbledon champion that the press fawned over, but that same press ignored the female champion. Sorry, your a woman with low press coverage, you're out of here... You don't get the equivilent article the males have. There has to be some give and take, especially with older article, and this proposal is far too riged. Projects such as WikiProject Women's sport or Wiki Women in Red would be quite upset with the strict parameters being discussed here. I let two and only two people from those two projects know about this conversation. Maybe I'm wrong... maybe they will agree with the requirements of the proposed parameters. Stranger things have happened. I just wanted to be open about that fact. Fyunck(click) (talk) 04:34, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

  I understand there is systemic bias in reliable sources of non-whites and non-males. The problem is that without signficant coverage, how do you propose that Wikipedia objectively decide who "really" is notable? —Bagumba (talk) 05:49, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

  But that is exactly where WikiProjects can shine and do shine, if they are set up properly. At Tennis Project if a male meets GNG for winning the 1924 Australasian Championships, then the female winner also gets an article even if all we can find are statistics. We look at a tournament and see 100 past winners. With newspaper sources, 98 of them easily meet GNG. But two of them one was Japanese and one was Belgian from the 1910s. And editor can find stats and a passing mention and then creates stubs for those players, hoping that someone with Japanese or Dutch in their backgrounds can track down even more info. It's a chance sure, but we aren't lacking for space here and in older generations we take a pretty good educated guess. Heck in the mens tennis minor leagues of the 1960s-70s if you actually won an event, you'd get a writeup in the newspaper... GNG. But if a women won the exact same event, zilch, or maybe a tidbit that doesn't quite meet GNG. I guess just the men would basque in Wikipedia glory and the gals would be shut out. There needs to be some flexibilty and fairness in how we handle things, and this proposal takes that away or hamstrings us so much that the hoops editors have to jump through aren't worth the effort. Maybe if this proposal focused on 1990-present or turn of the century (2001)-present it could work or I'd have to take a harder look, but when I step back and see what could happen I can't in good conscience support it. Fyunck(click) (talk) 07:12, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

  That's the key, if WikiProjects are set up properly. You've already provided more transparancy for tennis than I remember seeing from any of the other sports in question, and I don't think there were many complaints about tennis to begin with. —Bagumba (talk) 07:34, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

  Then we should look at the individual WikiProjects instead of blanket "solutions" that affect all of them.--Ortizesp (talk) 15:44, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia already requires all articles to meet GNG (or NPROF) sourcing eventually; this is even explicitly stated on NSPORT. This proposal would change nothing other than to shift the burden of demonstrating notability to earlier in an article's tenure. Editors would still have to go through BEFORE and ATD when nominating something for deletion. The purpose of the encyclopedia, per WP:NOT and WP:WHYN, is to provide summary information in the form of articles. If the only reason a poorly-sourced standalone microstub is being created is so we have representational parity on gender, or to fulfill a completionist wishlist, then that article emphatically should not exist. WP:NOTDIRECTORY is very clear about this. And I see zero reason why athletes should be given special exceptions from our notability and verifiability policies; the editors who want those bios on wikipedia should be held to the same standards as they would be writing biographies of historical or under-served people in other disciplines. JoelleJay (talk) 08:16, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

This proposal changes a lot, it prevents tons of articles from being created and puts tons more in the spotlight to be deleted fairly or not. NSPORT assumes "the fact that sports figures are likely to meet Wikipedia's basic standards of inclusion if they have, for example, participated in a major international amateur or professional competition" which is what the SNGs are for. The proposals laid out are destructive and would impede notable articles from being created. I myself was in the process of creating pages for presumed notable African athletes, and have stopped in case your proposal goes through and makes it harder for these pages to pass through. It's not an easy task to find these references African athletes even when it's exceedingly obvious that they are notable.--Ortizesp (talk) 15:44, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Ortizesp, why is it obvious that good sources exist (that's part of what "notable" means) when you can't find them? —Kusma (t·c) 17:01, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Kusma Because my scope is limited as an English speaker. Many athletes in Asia/Africa/Middle East play in noteworthy competitions, but it's outside of my scope to find the best sources for them unfortunately. Google translate only goes so far.--Ortizesp (talk) 16:28, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

Ortizesp, the next sentence after the one you quote says Trivial coverage of a subject by secondary sources may be used to support content in an article, but it is not sufficient to establish notability. This includes listings in database sources... Under the current NSPORT guidelines creating solely-database-sourced articles is only supported when there is very strong reason to believe that significant, independent, non-routine, non-promotional secondary coverage from multiple reliable sources is available, given sufficient time to locate it. All the articles you say would be targeted by this proposal should be (and are, given the activity at AfD) equally targeted by the existing guideline. It's true that creating new microstubs would be hampered by this proposal, but almost by definition those pages contain zero information that couldn't be provided in a couple lists. Is there any WP:NOTDIRECTORY-compliant justification for sticking an infobox on a couple sentences when you can't even identify specific offline sources that might have SIGCOV? JoelleJay (talk) 01:13, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

JoelleJay There are articles that aren't targeted by AfD now, that will be if this proposal passes - articles that inherently pass the SNG, but don't necessarily have the full amount of references at this moment. I do believe generally those articles that already pass SNGs could be much expanded, but that there are barriers (in my case, infamiliarity with foreign languages) that prevent editors from always expanding them. I'd rather have a microstub than a couple of lists, and especially much more so than nothing at all. I think if you combine a couple directories of data, you can make a noteworthy enough article. I don't personally believe athletes that pass SNGs are privy to the WP:NOTDIRECTORY constraint, since in most cases they are assumed to pass GNG.--Ortizesp (talk) 16:28, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

Ortizesp, if you find what you think might be SIGCOV in a foreign language you can still add it to the references, bibliography-style, without actually expanding the article with info from that source yourself. That would be just as effective at preventing AfD targeting. Regarding your last sentence, I think the section I quote above from NSPORT makes it explicitly clear that athletes are subject to NOTDIR when considering notability. JoelleJay (talk) 21:37, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

• Support as a step in the right direction. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:25, 1 May 2021 (UTC).
• Support, with the understanding that sports people who do not meet the criteria for having an article can still be redirected to an appropriate list article. BD2412 T 22:40, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
• Support as this proposal aligns NSPORT closer with GNG. All the proposal does is put the onus of meeting the notability standard with the article creator. In practice, as others have said, nothing will really change at AfD except that editors who argue keep must point to a independent article about the subject. --Enos733 (talk) 05:56, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
• Support as at least a step in the right direction. The burden has always been on the editor who wishes to add information to provide sources for it. That should apply similarly for creating articles. First, find sources which satisfy GNG. Then, and only then, create the article, using those sources. If you can't find them, don't expect someone else to come along and do it for you. However, we must be absolutely clear that this is only an initial bar, and is no substitute for the article actually ultimately meeting the GNG. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 22:36, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

• Support: a good step towards bringing the lax sports SNGs more closely in alignment with the GNG. --JBL (talk) 10:58, 13 May 2021 (UTC)
• Comment What would happen if someone played for multiple teams and doesn't pass this proposal? What list would we redirect it to? Would we make a list called List of American football people who played for the Philadelphia Eagles, Saskatchewan Roughriders, and Kansas City Chiefs in that order? Also, if we will delete articles that pass a SNG but not GNG why do we even have SNGs? BeanieFan11 (talk) 19:01, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

  BeanieFan11, I don't see why the situation should be different than for WP:BANDMEMBER. If there are several teams/bands to possibly redirect to, a good choice is to not redirect at all but let the search engine work its magic unless the player/bandmember is notable enough for a standalone article. —Kusma (t·c) 19:36, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

• Support Fram's revised proposal per Levivich's rationale and in light of @North8000's recent analysis on how this SNG currently, single-handedly skews gender bias on Wikipedia. (Also why is this discussion still open?) czar 03:25, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Hypothetical walkthrough

I'm still trying to understand what is expected to happen if this is changed. There is already WP:BLPPROD, but this has no impact there. There's already an implicit requirement from WP:NSPORTS that WP:GNG is met, so that doesn't change anything for an article creator either.

Is the expectation for more urgency at WP:AFD, where at least one significant source must by identified? This is opposed to the current common outcome, where participants cite NSPORTS and presume they exist and !vote "keep", and there is no agreeable timeline on when these presumed source will actually be identified.

For articles that meet NSPORTS except no significant source is identified, is it best to delete or move to WP:DRAFT namespace?—Bagumba (talk) 04:58, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

I can't talk for others of course, but here is how I see the benefit and consequences of my proposal; at AfD, people can no longer just claim "meets NSPORTS" (well, NTENNIS or NCRIC or NFOOTBALL or NQUIDDITCH) without providing at least one non-stats, non-routine source for the subject. The "we are sure sources exist, but no one around here is able to actually find one", which is unacceptable for most other topics at AFD, should stop for sports as well. Secondly, if there are people who continue to mass create articles without at least one "good" source, they can be asked to change their approach, and they can no longer claim that their articles meet NSPORTS so no problem. It would eliminate two of the main issues many people have with NSPORTS, without adding burdens beyond GNG or without discriminating between sports. Fram (talk) 07:49, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

OK, that's in line with what I was expecting. As an AGF gesture if this passes, WP:BEFORE already suggests tagging with say {{Notability}} before resorting to AfDs. If we did use draft namespace, articles there can stay for up to 6 mos before being deleted. Plenty of time to salvage, if possible.—Bagumba (talk) 08:09, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Here is what usually happens at tennis articles. An editor creates an article and the project page is notified and those involved, like me, are notified. We check it meets Tennis Project guidelines. If it does we move along and rarely is that ever challenged. If it doesn't meet project guidelines we put it up for speedy deletion unless it's obvious it meets GNG. If that gets challenged because the creator says it meets GNG outside of tennis, it goes up for proper vetting. Only three to five editors will respond and GNG results are about 50/50. If it was okay'd per GNG it remains of course, but does not get a Tennis Project banner. If it fails GNG, it gets deleted. This is the usual way it works for us. I would expect nothing will change regardless of the outcome on our end. We will handle things the same way. We can't control the rest of Wikipedia however but they so rarely take an interest in tennis articles that it's hard to believe that suddenly they will. If they do then the articles that will take the biggest hits will be players and tournaments more than 20 years old and all the women's historical articles that are yet to be created, since they were written about less. That's how I see it. Fyunck(click) (talk) 08:18, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

If this passes, the greatest impact will be to sports whose main editors believe that certain players deserve a page based on a certain set of accomplishments and independent of the amount of coverage they receive. The argument would be that the list of articles would then be "incomplete". There might be WP:IAR reasons to keep them, but that needs to go beyond a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS when push comes to shove.—Bagumba (talk) 09:04, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Bagumba, you have put your finger on it. For some, completeness is all. That seems to me to be a fundamental abrogation of WP:NOTDIR. The only area where this has ever really held is schools, because a handful of editors went out and found actual sources for every single school article nominated for deletion. Many articles on sportsists, that could not happen, because there are simply no non-trivial sources about them. Guy (help! - typo?) 19:01, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

It's not for completedness, project pages set a criteria for what is deemed notable, and I think they generally hold true. I'm sure you could half-ass some references for any "no-name" player to pass your new criteria, and it would be a whole lot of work for very little gain.--Ortizesp (talk) 23:46, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

That's exactly what we want, though - if you're creating a page, you don't have to show that it's notable, but if it's at NPP someone will throw a notability tag on it, PROD it, or AfD it. Even adding one significant source beyond a directory listing, even if it's not used to cite anything in the article, goes a long way in demonstrating verifiability and the potential for notability. SportingFlyer T·C 23:56, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

I think it's a good practice, but still am against it being forced on every page. Tons of athletes are referenced by valid databases, and in my opinion that's good enough.--Ortizesp (talk) 00:04, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

In actual practice it will barely be enforced. The ones that monitor the great majority of sporting articles (and actually all articles) are the project members themselves. And that's whether it's vandalism, creation, updates, wiki-fights, etc... The people that care the most about those topics they edit and do their due-diligence to keep things on the straight and narrow. Plus, right now I don't really see this passing. Fyunck(click) (talk) 00:22, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

It should only be enforced on pages that don't meet WP:BEFORE. We also don't want people blindly AfDing articles that are notable just because sources that exist aren't cited.—Bagumba (talk) 11:41, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Some More Of NSPORTS' Greatest Mistakes

As an example of where we are going wrong, I invite you to consider Willem Tholen (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views). This was created by a prolific sports directory creator, now banned, but that's not the core of the problem. Sports editors routinely interpret the SNGs as mandating that merely competing in an Olympiad confers automatic notability. The sole source for this article is a sports directory. The article describes someone who competed in one Olympic Games and finished twelfth (not even a medallist). Googling finds that virtually all references to a Willem Tholen are to Willem Bastiaan Tholen, the most likely search target if anyone comes here looking for Willem Tholen. All references to the weightlifter fall into one of two categories: Wikipedia mirrors, and directories / results sites. In the 34 Google hits for "Willem Tholen" Weightlifter, there is not one single biography. This is an absolutely classic example of an article that should not exist - the painter should be moved to the main title with at best a hatnote linking to a list article on weightlifting in the 1928 Olympics.

I've mentioned before, I believe, my old swimming teacher, Bill Thornton, a Paralympian. I can verify that he competed in two separate disciplines (swimming, 1964-72 and wheelchair basketball, 1968). He took home Gold and Silver in 1964, Gold, Silver and Bronze in 1968 and a Silver and Bronze in 72. I can't even find a biographical writeup in the local paper, though he was a legendary figure in St. Albans. I can't even verify that he was born a Scouser, though he clearly was (he'd call you "wack" when shouting instructions). So: a figure of some local fame, a teacher who was widely known and recognised, medallist in at least three Paralympics, zero biographical sources available even from some offline searches in local archives. No sources means no article. That's sad, but correct. Guy (help! - typo?) 09:07, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

• WP:NOLY definitely deserves a discussion, probably after this closes. SportingFlyer T·C 18:50, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
  • +1; I had been waiting for the cricket hubbub to die down before starting such a discussion myself. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 21:42, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
• I fundamentally disagree with you. The fact that he competed in the Olympics in my opinion, and in many others' opinions, is inherently notable. It's a global competition followed by millions. If he's not the primary topic for the name, then the Olympians page should be moved and the disambiguation or painter moved to base name. If you wanted to make the page for your old swimming teacher, I would have no issue at all assuming we can prove he passes WP:NOLY/WP:GNG. I don't understand this obsession with destroying articles instead of improving them. There's also nothing fundamentally wrong with stubs.--Ortizesp (talk) 20:27, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Now imagine if the argument being made was, yes, he competed in the Olympics and even won a gold medal, but that gold medal is not enough to warrant him having a Wikipedia article because there aren't enough articles written specifically about him and our sources are purely record based and having been mentioned in an article about someone they competed against. This is the issue that's happening with boxing here should this go forward. I'm sorry to be interjecting with somewhat unrelated boxing talk, but this is important when considering what Wikipedia is for those researching sports. Park Chan-yong did something in the 1980s that is of the same significance as winning the gold or silver medal in the Olympics. He won a major WORLD championship. People here are arguing with me that including a Korean WORLD champion, meaning that when he held his championship it was REQUIRED in order to be considered the undisputed champion, should not be included on the English version of Wikipedia because there isn't enough significant English coverage of him despite there being sufficient documentation, even videos, of his achievements. Those who win WORLD championships in ANY sport deserve to have their accomplishments recorded on Wikipedia for those who may stumble across them, but don't invest the hours of research needed in order to create the articles in question.CaPslOcksBroKEn (talk) 20:45, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
    • I also did a Newspapers.com BEFORE search of the fight where Park Chan-yong lost to Vazquez, and only found two pieces of coverage, one sentence in a Spanish-language Miami newspaper and two sentences in a Minneapolis newspaper. However I don't think there's any doubt Park Chan-yong would get kept at AfD, he never quite got SIGCOV in the English language but English language coverage is not a requirement and verifying he won a world championship is easy. SportingFlyer T·C 21:40, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
      • Yes, per WP:NONENG, there is no requirement for English sources.—Bagumba (talk) 06:46, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
  • For my part, my answer to Ortizesp is that I don't understand the obsession for defending articles that do not satisfy the GNG and which can likely never be improved. Indeed, millions of people follow the Olympics, generally. Now: without looking it up, who won the gold medal in biathlon in 1976? Can you name any biathlete competing at Innsbruck? (There were over seventy.) I doubt you know. I doubt anyone here knows. The fact of the matter is that there are all manner of obscure athletes who competed in all manner of obscure sports over the last century, and odds are we're not going to find much even in local press about Romania's fourth biathlete in 1976, or Mongolia's fourth biathlete in 1964, and so on. Ravenswing 08:15, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

    It'd be annoying to click on an athlete from List of Olympic medalists in biathlon, just to see ... only that they won a medal. Those names are best redirected to the list itself, if that is all that is known about them.—Bagumba (talk) 08:41, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

    • Personally I think it would be more annoying clicking on an athlete profile wanting to find out more about them, just to be redirected to a list. GiantSnowman 10:28, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

      Understood. We just circle back to articles like Olav Jordet, text reverse engineered out of stats databases, and whether or not that alone is notable enough. —Bagumba (talk) 11:02, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

      I can't see having a productive discussion with someone who thinks we shouldn't have an article on a two-time Olympic medalist, four-time world champion, and winner of the Aftenposten Gold Medal. To what list should we redirect that? -- Jonel (Speak to me) 12:35, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

      Of the thousands of articles you could say were reverse-engineered from stats databases, I'm surprised you picked Olav Jordet, who easily passes WP:GNG in English. That article is not a problem, and it will be a problem if we think that article is a problem. SportingFlyer T·C 13:06, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

• There is absolutely no problem with Willem Tholen. Might add a note pointing to the painter. We should have an article on Thornton. I see a result from the Sarasota Herald Tribune from 9 November 1968 that clips "But Britain's Bill Thornton smashed the world Paralympic record in the ..." (Anyone with a Newspaper Archive subscription?) -- Jonel (Speak to me) 21:25, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Bill Thornton appears in blurbs about the Paralympics in some US papers for setting the world record. It's an AP article, so the coverage of him is one sentence long, and it's the same sentence in all of the papers I found (since it's a reprint of a wire article.) SportingFlyer T·C 21:40, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Jonel, how is it that Willem Tholen is an article that is allowed to be up, but a former world champion is in question because I have only used record books? Willem Tholen has ONE source and it leads to a record book of a website that says it's closing down March 1, 2020...I thought the debate was weather or not these stub articles are allowed to be up as they are only record keeping. I have to agree that Willem Tholen's article should be deleted. Merely competing and not winning gold or silver in the Olympics cannot be enough to validate an article when there is insufficient information on the person. That article also has literally one source. On the contrary, Park Chan-yong (boxer) is an article I recently created using multiple sources for his career as a professional boxer. The difference here is that Park Chan-yong competed AND won the WBA bantamweight world title, as opposed to somebody who competed in the Olympics and got 12th place. That is a great feat to accomplish as a human and having an athletic career, however, when that feat is not notable to even anyone researching the 1928 Summer Olympics that he placed 12th place in, as evidence by the insufficient coverage, then we have an issue. Maybe the foreign fighters just need more links to articles from their homes. That may be the solution. Google translate and re write it into an English version with links to the original language.CaPslOcksBroKEn (talk) 23:23, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

    You're talking to the wrong guy. I have no problem with an article on Park. Also, could easily add cites to the Official Report, to Olympic.org, and to Olympedia for Tholen. -- Jonel (Speak to me) 01:32, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

    • All I want is to be able to have every world champion have their own Wikipedia page. My estimates are that there are maybe 20 left without pages and I think that might be pushing it. I could spend a couple hours making a full list of them if you want a finite number if that would sway any of you. Think about it for a minute. 596 new wikipedia articles are added daily. I'm not even asking for 10% of that number in new articles. If this proposal didn't have the ability to delete articles on world champions, I would be on board with this. SportingFlyer, do you have a subscription to Newspapers.com? I have been held back from information for not paying them before. Okay, so you verified he won that title. What was his record when he won it? Maybe not a lot is gained from having this article, but what it does is relocate information into one location. Take a look at his professional boxing record that I included with his article and go to his boxrec from the External links of the article and tell me how easy it is to break down his career without making an account with a website you likely don't know much about. I don't really see what is so detrimental about including a comprehensive list of all of boxing champions in one cohesive place. I honestly agree with the proposition, because it would delete Wikipedia pages of fighters that never became world champions and or were not notable, which there are a few of that I have come across. I cannot and will not support this if it means that a single former boxing world champion will have their article deleted or prevent the creation of one of their articles. There really aren't that many left to make pages for and there aren't ever going to be more of them as current boxing Wikipedia is incredibly well "staffed" and on top of creating articles for new world champions.CaPslOcksBroKEn (talk) 22:35, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
      • That's a completely separate issue than what we're discussing here, I think, unless you're saying some world champions would never have been covered significantly by secondary sources in any language. SportingFlyer T·C 23:52, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

      CaPslOcksBroKEn: You can apply for free Newspapers.com access here.—Bagumba (talk) 06:50, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

• If you can't find anything in English sources, that does not prevent looking for coverage in other languages. If there is none there either, then most should be considered as redirects to the respective competition page (where there will surely be enough place to mention time, since most of the time these are just table farms); which will serve readers better. A select few could potentially be considered for IAR keeps, but that would be stretching it and IAR should be used sparingly. All of this does not, in any case, apply to random John Doe who played in a couple bog standard first class games for Whatevershire way back when or who fought a couple insignificant boxing bouts. These are the most frequent examples of the problematic "directory listings which really should be redirects", anyway. Gold medalists etc who didn't get any coverage are very likely more the exception than the rule, anyway. Cheers, RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 23:33, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
  • From my vote comment up above, Frank Bahret is the perfect example of this. He played a total of 2 games as an outfielder during a single week and had a total batting average record of 0%. The only source I can find anywhere on the internet outside of the stats websites and books with just name lists of all players that have existed is this book entry. And, to give it credit, it does note the existence of one other source, an article that has a single sentence on him. That's it. That is the entirety of coverage on the guy that exists and will likely ever exist. Silverseren^C 01:42, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
    • Given that someone found two more newspaper mentions of him in the time since you wrote this, I highly doubt that's true. I expect that at the least there was an obituary written on him, especially since he died young. Hatman31 (talk) 15:09, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
      • @Hatman31: And i'm glad they did find something else, but the titles of the new refs don't give me confidence in the subject matter. It seems like we're talking single sentence mentions again in articles that names everyone on the team. And here's the problem, even if there's also an obituary. Is that all the coverage? If that is the entirety of the coverage that exists and someone found the rest now, then we need only look at the GNG, since the SNG has been covered by finding all existing references. And with what is there, he still would not meet the notability standards of the GNG. There is no in-depth coverage outside of the one brief book entry. Silverseren^C 20:00, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
• To say that someone is NOT notable, who was active 100 years ago, the internet is not the best place to look for information and make your conclusion. You should look into old news papers, old magazines and old books. Besides of that, it's a common thing of from era, that athlets are not named in sources with their first name. (As that would take too much space in the newspapers.) Besides of that, finding a few people not meeting NOLYMPICS, doesn't say NOLYMPICS is wrong. After a quick search for this person in old newspapers, I find a lot more inforamtion than you found. I will probably find much more when I would search more in dept, and when I would also sources in others sources as delpher.nl. Here results of him winning the national competitions in 1926 0 and later in the newspapers in 1926 0b, 0c June 1927 1, 2. Two months later, in August 1927, he was official selected for the Dutch Olympic team.2b. Ahead of the Games he did several competitions and demonstrations, for instance in October 1927 3 January 1928 4 and in April 1928 5, 5b. Report about the Olympic Games about him, were not in dept, but it was mentioned in many many Dutch newspapers, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17. I just copied 12 examples, but can list more. SportsOlympic (talk) 15:03, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
  • I think a core fundamental issue here is not about the sourcing, but where the onus should be on who does that sourcing. If one wants to create articles on every pre-1950 Olympic athlete, great, but it should be their onus to at least establish more than simple records that can be documented easily, not leaving it up to "cleanup" to others to have to seek out those sources when notability is later challenged. That's the entire extent of what's being asked for. It is not a change in the long-term expectations of NSPORT or the GNG but where the work needs to be done. It is far better to get that work done at the start so that AFD is avoided than forcing work to be rushed when AFD is initiated. --Masem (t) 18:13, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
    • Or we could agree that Olympians are notable and stop wasting people's time trying to delete articles on them. -- Jonel (Speak to me) 18:41, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
      • It's exceptionally unlikely every Olympian is actually notable, though. SportingFlyer T·C 18:46, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
        • That's your opinion. Several others (including Wikipedia policy right now) disagree with you, including myself. --Ortizesp (talk) 21:16, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

          If you are referring to the sports notability guideline, it explicitly defers to the general notability guideline, so it does not establish overriding rules that all Olympians meet English Wikipedia's standards for having an article. (It also isn't a policy.) isaacl (talk) 21:28, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

      • There's a reason we do not have "inclusion guidelines", as we don't presume all classes of a topic are inherently notable. It all comes down to the availability of sources that gives enough coverage for a decent article. That type of thought towards significant coverage should start at article creation -- which many of NSPORTS criteria are guided towards, just not all of them -- and not as an afterthought or as someone else's problem to clean up after when it comes to mass creation. --Masem (t) 18:56, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
        • The guidelines specifically do "presume" all classes of a topic are notable. That's precisely what WP:N says: "A topic is presumed to merit an article if: It meets either the general notability guideline (GNG) below, or the criteria outlined in a subject-specific notability guideline (SNG) listed in the box on the right ... ." And when the "greatest mistakes" cited here include someone who has coverage in dozens of newspaper articles (as SportsOlympic showed above) and a guy who won two Olympic medals, four world championships, and a national sportsperson of the year award, I tire of spending time debating individual instances. Even if some mangled view of "notability" doesn't include all Olympians, the class is clearly close enough as to make no difference. And so AfD is a waste of everyone's time. -- Jonel (Speak to me) 19:21, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
          • NSPORT has only a few criteria that presume very limited classes (such as all Olympic athletes) whose members are all notable, and that still remains a presumption that eventually has to be proven out through meeting the GNG per NSPORT. There are no broad classes, such as all professional players in a given sport, that get a free ride; it is all about the sourcing quality at the end of the day. And if you're tired of debating individual instances, then the solution is to do the minimum amount of work upfront and avoid getting into those debates in the first place, which is what is being proposed. --Masem (t) 00:22, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose Sports before 1946 were hardly written about in a non routine way, other than some exceptional stars like WG Grace, which were notable. My cripe with NSports is how someone who plays 1 first class cricket or 1 Pro football game.Davidstewartharvey (talk) 06:17, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose using Google search as primary identification means for pre-internet people or people from countries where English is not the first language. In many cases, tehre will be offline or foreign language sources, as highlighted for the example given above. Joseph2302 (talk) 15:12, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

• @Davidstewartharvey: @Joseph2302: For clarity's sake, what exactly are you opposing? The above RfC, or comments in this break-out discussion? SportingFlyer T·C 18:02, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

• Is anyone seriously suggesting relying exclusively on Google search as a means of identifying people as notable? If so, they're horribly wrong but I don't see anyone doing so. Smartyllama (talk) 18:05, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
  • The break out discussion, in particular opposing the suggestion of redirecting Olympic medallists to a list article. Joseph2302 (talk) 18:06, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Thank you for clarifying, I appreciate it. I don't think anyone's proposed redirecting Olympic medallists to a list article, and I'm still assuming there will be a separate discussion for WP:NOLY, i.e. there's nothing to specifically support/oppose yet IMO. SportingFlyer T·C 18:14, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Fully agree with Masem here. Also, has anyone ever tried to determine NOLY's GNG prediction rate? If we limit it to post-Internet (maybe 2008 on) Olympians in Latin alphabet-using countries and don't see like 98% success I think that would be an extremely good indication we shouldn't assume notability for competitors in at least some Olympic sports. If SIGCOV of older Olympians just doesn't exist, even offline, due to the publishing constraints of the time, then those people should be redirects in lists. Otherwise, we are directly contravening WP:NOT. Personally, I think applying the expectations for coverage we have nowadays to subjects from yore is backwards -- that we'd have much higher quality, more informative articles if BIO SIGCOV was calibrated to the degree of influence needed for in-depth profiles by major national newspapers in the 1880s or something. JoelleJay (talk) 19:08, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

"Major national newspapers in the 1880s"? To my understanding, there were no "national newspapers" in the United States of the 1880s. Cbl62 (talk) 19:51, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Depends on what you mean by national.. but in that era the New York papers got pretty big circulation around the country. Spanneraol (talk) 19:59, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

There are countries outside of the US...... JoelleJay (talk) 20:03, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

• Note to think about; the information now at Willem Tholen, would have never have been at Wikipedia if the stub wasn’t started; and the stub wouldn’t have been created without WP:NOLYMPICS. And note, most of the person’s information cant be found easily; even not by experienced Wikipedia contributors. SportsOlympic (talk) 19:34, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Comment IMO the general question in the discussion is whether or not to tighten up the SNG a bit. There were a few opposes who seemed to support tightness but wrote "oppose" possibly due to some structural mis-understandings. They basically said that GNG already needs to be met on these and as a result either expressed concern that this would lower that (GNG) bar or that that sourcing requirement in the SNG is redundant to GNG. There are also many where the only concern expressed was that it could make it differentially tough for pre-internet figures. Perhaps they would be supporters if some allowance would be made for existing articles on pre-internet figures. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 19:08, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

Wider applicability

• So if this or any change gets made will the supporters be making the same kind of overtures towards stubs about actors, politicians, academics etc.? Or it just sports that you wish to target? GiantSnowman 11:45, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

  Yeah, I had brought up that this problem is not unique to sports. I haven't formally !voted yet, but I can also see the argument that if we bring too many domains in, nothing will ever be decided. Too many cooks in the kitchen. If it works well for sports, that might sway others to follow suit. —Bagumba (talk) 12:13, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

  Also, it's not stubs themselves that are the problem, but stubs that will never be able to be reliably sourced beyond a source or two demonstrating WP:V (or, for WP:GEOLAND, a separate ongoing discussion, stubs sourced only to unreliable sources which attempt to demonstrate WP:V.) It's the primary complaint people have with sports SNGs, I think - a film referenced only to say IMDB would get draftifyed pretty quickly if a BEFORE search wasn't clear, and there wouldn't necessarily be a "meets WP:NFILM" pile-on at AfD. SportingFlyer T·C 12:29, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

My response to GiantSnowman's post is. While issues are not unique to sports, I think 4-5 factors combined make sports uniquely challenging in this respect:

• A strong fandom factor
• The SNG's are at least partially a predictor of coverage (albiet probably not GNG grade coverage). And, to a unique degree with sports, sports coverage is itself a pastime rather than just conveying information (the later of which is more of a gauge) thus distorting the "coverage" measuring stick.
• It's an enterprise where recognition (I.E. in Wikipedia) equates to money (although other areas have that problem even more)
• The bar is currently far lower for the sports SNG than any other SNG except for geographic places, which is influenced by the gazetteer function in the five pillars.
• In Wikipedia, the overly low bar for sports has become the poster child for a "SNG run amok" Rather than an underlying factor, this is an indicator that a domino effect is less likely.

I think that these 5 factors are also an indicator of why we really need to do something here. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:13, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

I made some huge blunder and deleted some material. A thank you to those who noted it and caught it and reverted me. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 00:25, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

• Sports is special here in having much lower bars for inclusion than some other contemporary areas. This is an AFD for a company with a 250 million+ revenue, with much of the coverage correctly described as not being significant. It is a bit jarring to compare this with how 16 year old football player sail through AFD. —Kusma (t·c) 08:17, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

  Is that a sports problem or a Wikipedia problem? The company is clearly significant, you should be pointing at the people AFDing it. And why is it a surprise when a 16 year old footballer sails through? They generally get more media coverage, especially if they are only 16...--Ortizesp (talk) 14:36, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

  Sports is the only area where trivial coverage is deemed sufficient. Such a major inconsistency is a problem. It is a sports problem because the majority of Wikipedia operates under different rules. —Kusma (t·c) 12:16, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  Except trivial coverage is not sufficient for sports either. GiantSnowman 13:07, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  Except when it is[7]. Fram (talk) 14:06, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  Except where it is not. You, respectfully, do not edit in this area enough; I do, and I participate at numerous AFDs a day. There is longstanding consensus that player who scrape by on the SNG but fail the GNG are not notable (exceptions include people at the start of their careers, who are given a grace period, which is entirely reasonable). GiantSnowman 14:28, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  That's what we have WP:BTWN for. We correctly deleted the article about Peter Scholze (one of the world's leading mathematicians) when he was an exceptionally promising PhD student and expected to become notable soon. "Expected future notability" is a good reason to have a draft, but not a good reason to have an article. —Kusma (t·c) 14:38, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  Perhaps certain wikiprojects need to review WP:LOCALCON? _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 14:48, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  Since when was AFD consensus 'local'? GiantSnowman 14:56, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  When 90% of participants in AFDs related to a given subject are the same handful of people from the same wikiproject. AFDs with narrow participation scope are generally not a good guide to wider community consensus. _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 15:02, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  I've not even linked to the AFDs in question so where have you plucked that figure from? And are you saying that such AFD consensus (that GNG needs to be met) is wrong? GiantSnowman 15:48, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  A quick survey of the delsort archives is enough for a rough picture of participant make-up. And no. You claimed that footy AFDs have established consensus that we can essentially crystal-ball future GNG coverage for younger players, i.e. GNG doesn't need to be met; I am stating that consensus at such AFDs is often at odds with wider community consensus, i.e. that GNG must be met. _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 17:33, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  You are mis-reading what I have said, I hope not deliberately. GiantSnowman 17:35, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  Perhaps you could clarify what you meant here, if not meaning what I stated above: "There is longstanding consensus to allow young players at the start of their career who meet NFOOTBALL the time to be shown to meet GNG" (diff), and "exceptions include people at the start of their careers, who are given a grace period, which is entirely reasonable" (diff). _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 18:50, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  The RFC that established the sports notability guidelines explicitly stated that the general notability guideline was not being superseded and did not make any crystal-ball exception about potential future coverage. I can't speak about all sports, but the editors interested in the ice hockey and baseball projects agree that appropriate sources must currently exist in order for a sportsfigure to meet English Wikipedia's standards for having an article. isaacl (talk) 15:17, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  And such principle is what the Football project also follows, hence the number of AFDs resulting in delete of people who meet SNg only. GiantSnowman 15:48, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  No grace period is given for ice hockey and baseball players. For baseball players, list articles are used for drafted players of interest who have not yet met English Wikipedia's standards for having an article. isaacl (talk) 16:02, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  Compared to the non-sports AfDs that I've participated in, NSPORT editors have BY FAR the loosest definition of SIGCOV. A paragraph or two dedicated to a subject counts for basically nothing for non-athletes, and yet a couple mentions in a routine match report is enough for multiple editors here to claim SIGCOV. If these two articles featuring a non-notable actor were on an athlete he'd get like 10 Keep !votes immediately... JoelleJay (talk) 17:16, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  I'd actually argue that's NPROF, but that's a different can of worms. SportingFlyer T·C 17:18, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  I'm not sure what you mean, are you saying the criteria in NPROF are easier to pass than NSPORT? I agree with that, inasmuch that academics can meet notability through both the SNG and GNG (and I'm honestly of the opinion the NPROF criteria are too loose...). But professor deletion discussions rarely involve any discussion of SIGCOV, so they're not really comparable in that regard. JoelleJay (talk) 19:40, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  And? Obviously there's more of an appetite to keep the pages of athletes. There's no right or wrong answer to this, just a whole bunch of opinions.--Ortizesp (talk) 21:09, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

• I'm surprised that no one here has bought up WP:FPL which is very important when it comes to WP:NFOOTY. I am also surprised about hearing about how "easy" and "loose" the restrictions are. In my opinion, this all sounds like WP:IDONTLIKEIT with sports being the focus. We literally have discussions on what makes a league fully-professional, including that most, if not all, players and coaches need to be paid and be full-time professionals and that there is enough coverage of the league to presume notability. How is that "loose"? I'm sorry that Association football happens to be a very popular sport worldwide where there is a lot of money involved in a lot of leagues to make them fully-professional but that is reality of it. It isn't like editors of football articles give massive leeway to youth players who have only played in youth leagues or we say "whatever" to a guy with only appearances in the Nepal National League. It also isn't like we keep leagues in WP:FPL forever once they're there. If you want, you can debate it, and take the league off the list or limit it to a specific season. I don't know, I just find it very weird to say that these are loose when it just so happens to be in regards to one of the most popular sports in the world with a lot of money involved. --ArsenalFan700 (talk) 23:22, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

The loose conversation above wasn't discussing the SNG, but rather the coverage that users think is okay in terms of whether GNG is passed. I wouldn't be concerned about it at all if there wasn't a little bit of a walled garden going on in recent discussions. In terms of SNG, I've always viewed NFOOTY as a little bit looser than say NBASE since NBASE it's very clear when someone is considered notable/not notable, when they play in the US/Japanese major leagues, whereas NFOOTY works internationally and with leagues that aren't top tier. The football project usually do a good job of deleting articles that pass NFOOTY but fail GNG, though. SportingFlyer T·C 23:54, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, and majority of the time, if not all the time, it is because that player had an appearance years ago and either is amateur or doesn't play anymore. You need to have some nuance and leeway somewhere otherwise what is even the point of any of this. You're basically setting a simple standard, why is there any need to expand on it with useless WP:SNG? --ArsenalFan700 (talk) 00:02, 8 May 2021 (UTC)

FPL is one of the main failings of WP:NFOOTY. Leagues are evaluated not by whether all of their players usually receive significant coverage in reliable sources, but by whether or not the players earn enough money not to need a second job. It has nothing to do with GNG notability. —Kusma (t·c) 12:12, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

It makes the assumption any player playing in a fully professional league will pass WP:GNG, which is almost always a good assumption. It probably limits more leagues than would be on a GNG-qualifying list. SportingFlyer T·C 12:30, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

I am aware that FPL fails both ways. I am neither happy with it from an inclusion nor from an exclusion point of view, as it rather misses the point. I expect some of the top level NFPLs to generate as much or more coverage than some third tier FPLs. —Kusma (t·c) 13:27, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

I have been historically criticised - by both sides from the debate (those who think FPL is perfect and those that think it is biased) - for suggesting that FPL should be changed to incorporate the idea of GNG/significant coverage. If we did that some leagues would drop off and some would be added, but the core would remain unaffected. GiantSnowman 20:57, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose Instead of focusing on deletion, we should be coming together to expand articles that can and should be expanded and individually deleting those which cannot be. I assume that if this proposal passes, then a Wikipedia article such as Henry Brimm who was the second man to fight Sugar Ray Robinson to a draw, would be deleted as it is only a couple sentences long. Rather than trying to delete the article, I took it upon myself to begin expanding it with articles across the internet. As a community, there are too many people that are fixated on deletion. What have you all been working on? As editors of Wikipedia, I would hope that you all have your own individual projects to help expand the knowledge avaliable on Wikipedia. When I was trying to argue in favor of keeping a former WBA bantamweight world champion's Wikipedia page up, someone said that I could just create a Newspapers.com account for free and look up the information. All of the information we publish can be accessed in a very large part for free, so by that logic, what point do any of us have to contribute to this website? The information I have contributed to the boxing record in the article, Boxing career of Muhammad Ali, was information that I found on the internet for free. His entire record can be looked up on Boxrec.com if you create an account for free. Every piece of information on that article is accessable elsewere. What is the point of this website if people that "contribute" to it are only focusing on limiting the information as it can be researched on different websites also for free? We take information from multiple sources and we put them in one consise place. Anyone that doesn't want to spend their time looking up information and linking it to Wikipedia articles and would rather have those articles deleted is wasting their time here.CaPslOcksBroKEn (talk) 18:30, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

• @CaPslOcksBroKEn: Henry Brimm would be very easily kept if you brought it to AfD, I just did a quick search and he was clearly significantly covered in historical papers. The issue here is the articles which don't demonstrate notability and which we can't improve at all, not articles which are overly short. SportingFlyer T·C 22:26, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose How about, instead of getting rid of these stubs, expanding them with reliable sources? Jesus Christ. I thought WP was about collaboration between editors and working together on these articles. The purpose of WP was not to use a loosely-defined guideline to essentially wipe people's stories from the face of the earth. I don't understand why editors that have been here for decades don't understand this; not all articles are meant to be expanded. Not all articles have to be GAs or FAs. Not all articles have to be put up to the pedestal. How about we collaborate and work together on the articles; if there really is a problematic article, we can discuss it without whining like children about how GNG can't be met by a person who competed 100 years ago. God almighty. Lettler^{hello • contribs} 16:07, 16 May 2021 (UTC)
  • How about, instead of getting rid of these stubs, expanding them with reliable sources? ... I don't understand why editors that have been here for decades don't understand this; not all articles are meant to be expanded. Well, which is it? Editors should expand stubs or not all stubs are meant to be expanded? Save your "Jesus Christs" and "God almightys"; read the proposal and the discussion before voting (this is about stubs that cannot be expanded and why they'd be better merged than stand alone; nothing about this has anything to do with wiping anyone off the face of the Earth); then you might better understand what your colleagues are saying and not be so upset. Levivich ^harass/_hound 16:19, 16 May 2021 (UTC)
    • He's right in both senses, all stubs aren't meant to be expanded, and also editors should make an effort to expand stubs. It isn't contradictory despite what you think. And this proposal kills the stubs when they are merged into a list, isn't that obvious? And it's preventing future stubs from being created.--Ortizesp (talk) 14:09, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Proposal to update sports SNGs to be in congruence with WP:BIO1E

I personally believe that sports figures who only played or coached in one professional game should not be presumed notable on the pure basis that one game is one event. Sports notability policy should match WP:BIO1E by requiring players/coaches to have played/coached in multiple professional games, not just one. Further, it's unlikely that significant coverage will exist for the vast majority of one game players beyond sports fans statistical databases (i.e. no prose sources), making verifiability an issue. As such WP:NGRIDIRON, WP:NTRACK, WP:NBASE, WP:NBASKETBALL, WP:NFOOTBALL, etc. should all be updated to keep notability policy consistent with WP:BIO1E by requiring a minimum of two games instead of one.4meter4 (talk) 15:47, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Are you intentionally forgetting WP:NFOOTBALL, which probably has the largest number of leagues for which the standard is one game appearance? Rikster2 (talk) 16:30, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

WP:BLP1E has no real applicability to sports professionals. GiantSnowman 16:44, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

I agree with Snowman - none of the examples at the guideline are remotely similar and a professional game doesn't resemble the types of events described. Rikster2 (talk) 16:47, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Rikster2 I thought the "etc." was enough to catch all of them, but I added it since you think it was an important oversight.4meter4 (talk) 16:48, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

GiantSnowman I disagree. Players who only play in one game have no real significance to the sport or its history. Such articles are fancruft and trivia which can only be sourced to statiscal databses made for die hard fans. Broader policies like WP:BIO1E and WP:NOT would seem to apply. In the very rare cases where significant coverage does exist (i.e. prose articles with details) we can always keep those through WP:GNG. 4meter4 (talk) 16:51, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

I don't necessarily agree on that – players who make a single appearance can become a bit of a cult figure and there are regular articles on these players (e.g. this or this. Anyway, this is kind of irrelevant as AfDs on players with one appearance regularly end in deletion – the SNG does not stop this happening. Number 57 16:58, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Those individuals are the extremely rare person, and as such, prose articles will verify their notability. For every one game players that achieved cult status there are hundreds or maybe thousands of one game players who never achieved a following and are entirely non-encyclopedic.4meter4 (talk) 17:03, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Tell that to Lewis (baseball), amongst many, many others of notable one-timers. GiantSnowman 17:14, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Lewis (baseball) actually has some coverage to his name while the wast majority of these one game wonders do not. Alvaldi (talk) 17:18, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

WP:NSPORT, which WP:NGRIDIRON, WP:NTRACK, WP:NBASE, WP:NBASKETBALL, etc. are part of, already states that sports figures have to provide sources indicating that the subject meets the general notability guideline, something that gets routinely ignored. The solution to this mass creation of articles of non-notable athletes who have no coverage to their name but happened to get paid for playing some games is simply enforcing that the articles have to have significant sources that show they pass WP:GNG. Alvaldi (talk) 17:06, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Unfortunately that doesn't happen at AFD. Case in point Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Don Anielak.4meter4 (talk) 17:10, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Like I say, editors routinely ignore it but fortunately some closing admins actually do their jobs properly instead of just counting the !votes. Case in point Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Abdellatif Aboukoura Alvaldi (talk) 17:16, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

that Alienak article was just put up for AfD and I believe I agreed it needed sources and even put a notice at Wikipedia:WikiProject National Basketball Association to ask editors to improve it. But that is a sourcing issue, not a notability issue. The SSGs are meant to help determine individuals who LIKELY meet GNG. I you want to challenge the Alienak article on the grounds he doesn’t meet GNG, have at it, but you are using one event, which doesn’t apply to athletes and never has. Rikster2 (talk) 17:21, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Good point. I amended the nomination. However, I do think one event should apply to athletes. Best.4meter4 (talk) 17:29, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

But did you do a WP:BEFORE? Doesn’t seem like you did. Rikster2 (talk) 17:31, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

I did briefly, but I don't have access to newspapers.com. However, I suspect the coverage has mostly to do with his career as a high school coach and a college player and is therefore entirely trivial per WP:LOCAL and WP:NOTNEWS.4meter4 (talk) 17:39, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

College players routinely meet GNG based on coverage of their careers. Especially those who earned All-America status like Anielak. But if you can’t review the sources then you shouldn’t speculate. Rikster2 (talk) 17:55, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Ok.4meter4 (talk) 18:01, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

The reason 1 game is used is specifically because people who play 1 game will have had an almost 100% probability that they were covered in their minor league and amateur careers. Just because they were covered when they were not professional does not mean it is trivial. All we care about is that the coverage is not routine, which if the article is in depth and about more than just the game stats, then it is all good. -DJSasso (talk) 17:32, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Having played one professional game in any given sport is absolutely no guarantee that the player has any significant coverage about him. There are countless of articles on these one-game wonders that have nothing to their name besides a link to a statistical database website. I've seen plumbers with more coverage than many of these players in Afd. The only leagues where there is a high probability of a one-game wonder to have significant coverage are the absolute top leagues of the most popular sports, for instance the NBA, because getting there usually means they where a star somewhere else. But saying that every footballer that appeared in a match where everybody got paid is instantly notable is hogwash. Alvaldi (talk) 20:40, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Overgeneralizations are not helpful because they're often inaccurate. Players have to work their way up to the major leagues in any sport and will get coverage when they do so. Here's Hal Stowe, a one game MLB player I got to DYK last month. – Muboshgu (talk) 21:14, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

I can't say I am following all of the details of the enormous discussion here, but I broadly agree with this suggestion. There were at least two Olympians in my college sorority, and--while they are impressive people--the idea that because they once participated in the Olympics they should forever have articles about them in Wikipedia is pretty absurd. They are now both doctors leading ordinary lives. Calliopejen1 (talk) 17:56, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

You are not becoming “suddenly” an Olympian. Most of the Olympians will already have had a lot of coverage before becoming an Olympian. And of course, you can always search for a few examples; but that’s why it’s highly likely. If you can prove that <90% of the Olympians (who only competed once) are not notable, please show. SportsOlympic (talk) 18:17, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Depending on the sport, I don't necessarily think that assumption holds true. Many olympic sports just don't get much coverage, and coverage can be very country-specific. SportingFlyer T·C 19:07, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Locality of coverage is irrelevant. – Muboshgu (talk) 20:49, 25 June 2021 (UTC)