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Cbl62, per the attendance for the Iowa State game, I cross-referenced 1971 Iowa State Cyclones football team and saw the figure of 11,551, which matches the Iowa State media guide. I then scanned the Akron Beacon Journal article that you cited and saw the same 11,551 figure, so I guess you had just made a typo. I missed the part about the "2,000 high school bandsmen". This box score from The Miami Herald lists the attendance as 11,551, while this Quad-City Timesarticle reports 15,000. As for a general rule for reporting attendance, I don't know that we've ever discussed this. I know that Michigan counts everyone who walks in the building on game day (irrespective of whether they bought a ticket) in their attendance figures, so that presumably includes personnel for both teams, media, and facility staff. But they put that all in their exact, official count. Attendance generally gets reported one of two ways: exact, official figures or estimates that usually end in some multiple of 500 and often a multiple of 1,000. Adding together an exact figure like 11,551 to what is almost certainly an estimate of 2,000 additional people produces a sort of meaningless number of 13,551 that looks like an exact count, but isn't. It also strikes me as a possible SYNTH/OR, although Paulmcdonald has long argued that simply counting and adding verified facts don't qualify as SYNTH/OR. I think we're probably best off reporting 11,551 with a note about the "2,000 high school bandsmen". Jweiss11 (talk) 17:27, 10 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
There really ought to be a common rule that we follow in how we report game attendance. In the case of Michigan, the University (and we) do include unpaid attendance for such things as the thousands of high school band members who each year filled thousands of seats on band day. My vote would be to adopt a uniform and consistent rule across the board to include unpaid attendance. In some cases, unpaid attendance figures may not be available, in which case there's nothing we can do. But where we have a count of unpaid attendance, I think it should be included in the total. At a minimum and if you disagree, we should drop a footnote that the 11,551 does not include an estimated 2,000 unpaid band day attendees. (As for simple arithmetic, I'm with Paul. And it's my understanding that it's pretty widely accepted that simple addition of figures does not constitute SYNTH/OR.) Cbl62 (talk) 23:48, 10 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
