It's ridiculous. There are tens of thousands of completely worthless sub-stub articles on athletes that will never be expanded because they're really not notable. No information whatsoever to expand on them because they're not discussed anywhere. But the notability requirements for athletes is sooooo pathetically low, that everyone that's in any way associated with a professional team, or has competed at the highest amateur level, is entitled to an article.

I know this gets brought up often and cries for change are always shot down because to tighten the requirements would somehow put the athletes of the pre-internet age at a disadvantage as far as notability goes.

Well hot damn, power of words. Make them an exception, but these thousands upon thousands of worthless pages need to go.

I recall this comes up at the village pump a lot... Particularly wrt the soccer players

e.g.

Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_51#30.2C382_articles_related_to_soccer_players

Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_55#WP:Athlete:_1.2C712_soccer_player_articles_created_in_2_months

:I can't understand the need for all the American football player articles either. Someone gets drafted and plays a few games in a minor league? Who cares?

Fozzie's right - WP is actually stricter when it comes to pro athletes than any other BLPs. Since every time a pro player joins the team/plays a game/is sold, traded, released/retires there's a mention in the newspaper - even for the crappiest little non-league teams - if Wikipedia applied WP:N to the letter there'd be literally tens of thousands of crappy unread and unwatched BLPs.

WP:ATHLETE isn't a licence to create shitty stubs, it's a deliberate throttle on the number of shitty stubs that can be created. If Wikipedia got rid of the WP:ATHLETE guidelines it would be giving carte blanche to turn Blofeld's and Razorflame's bots and their ilk loose on the archives of The Non League Paper, and I'm not sure that's really what you intended.

I disagree completely that WP is strict on athlete stubs. That's a joke. We have an article on every person to ever grace the grass of a pro-team's practice field or sit on the bench of an amateur team that made it to the championships.

I also don't think the guide needs to go. It needs to be strengthened, which is what I meant by words being powerful.

Also 90% of these stubs would never pass the GNG. These people don't have anything beyond trivial mentions. That's why they are unreferenced BLPs, including nothing past a link to a team roster in the EL section, and can never be expanded past a mere sentence or two.

Personally, I think Wikipedia:WikiProject Football/Notability gets the balance about right, with their "fully pro team at the national level" guideline, even though it discriminates against places like Canada where in most sports there is no "national level". But I don't make the rules.

I'd love to set a higher notability bar for athletes, but one of the many things working against that is the fluid nature of professional sports leagues in Europe (specifically, promotion and relegation, where a streak of bad years can knock a team down from the highest league to the third or fourth division)

Here's an example of the level of inclusion.

The team I follow in England, Cambridge United, plays in the "Blue Square Premier" league. This is the FIFTH level of footy in England (Premiership, Championship, League 1, League 2, Blue Square Premier, in order).

If folks are familiar with major league baseball (specifically the way the minor leagues are set-up), the Blue Square Premier league would be the equivalent of a single-A or rookie league baseball. So, if they were a US equivalent, there is no way in hell that they would be notable (Of course, the fact that they would be an affiliated team of one of the major league teams also works against them)

But they are an independent, fully professional team, and thus, under the WP:ATHLETE guidelines, qualify for notability (not all teams at the Blue Square Premier League are fully professional, some are semi-professional, where some or all players have "real life" jobs to supplement their sports earnings).

There's just no way to write a policy that could take into effect the shifting nature of European sports., (for example, if you limited it to say, the top two leagues of each nation, what would you do when a team like Leeds United, who were a top team for quite sometime in England, fall down to the third division, where they currently are?)

Looking at an article such as Spoke Emery, I wonder if there is some better way to present the information. Maybe a summary page of 1920s Philadelphia Phillies-related persons. I just cannot see that article ever being expanded much beyond the current 700 characters.

Or Luton Town F.C., who until 1992 were one of the top teams in the entire country and are now languishing on the fifth tier, Wimbledon F.C. which split in half in 2004 with two successor teams squabbling over which is the "real" team, Berliner FC Dynamo which was one of the powerhouses of European football until 1990 and is now languishing in a semi-pro regional league... European sports just don't translate to the American model.

Maybe if allowing stub articles was discontinued, and people could concentrate on the crap that is there already, we wouldn't have this problem. Stubs articles are just useless.

Excuse the hell out of me. I just have to ask a stupid question.

Why do athlete BLPs deserve a special policy? Where's the "special policy" to prevent mass creation of worthless stubs on, say, obscure Spanish politicians? Why not extend the same policy to all BLPs, or even BDPs?

The regulars here should not answer that. Not even Brad or One or other Arbcommers. And definitely not Blofeld. Blofeld is merely a mean little boy who needs a good spanking and to have his computer taken away.

I'd like to hear the answer from a WMF salaried employee.

Niki Østergaard is a perfect example of a piece of shit athlete stub that qualifies merely because "professional" is in that single sentence that will ever exist in the bio.

We should have a rule against one sentence articles. They should all be deleted.

They aren't really articles, they're just... um, sentences.



Are any WMF employees even here? And you can forget getting any answer to something like that.

"We"? I mean, if WR had a rule against one-sentence articles, emesee would never be heard from again...

OK, I know what you meant, but before Jon Awbrey comes out of his cave, sees "we" in reference to WP, grumbles, and declares six more weeks of loathing, might I suggest that "we" belongs on WP and "they" belongs here?

Much thanks...

Request processed and rejected. I go back and forth between saying "we" and "they". When I'm actively editing and pop over here to say something, I say "we", because I'm focused on WP. Otherwise, I say "they". You're a smart cookie. You can figure it out.

We They could easily squeeze out another sentence using the information from the infobox!

Interestingly enough, the Danish Wikipedia has no article about this chap...

But oddly, German Wikipedia does. Very exciting the expanded article looks, too.

Check the article again, I managed to scrape up some more information, but most everything about this guy is in Danish, and the automated translation tools are less then wonderful.

Not to downplay your work on this specimen article, but that's a bit like using paper towel to cleanup after a flood.

Heh. What can I say, I just said to myself "There has to be more then one sentence available, right?, and there is.. just most of it is stuff like this:

Thorsager MC arrangerede i dag Stjerneløbet, og for tredje gang på bare fire dage lykkedes det Niki Østergaard fra Team Capinordic at køre først over stregen. I spurten henviste han Glenn Bak (Blue Water) og Christian Moberg (Team Energi Fyn) til henholdsvis anden og tredjepladsen.

”Det var endnu en dejlig sejr, og forhåbentligt er det denne sejr som sender mig til VM. Lige nu føler jeg i hvert fald ikke, at jeg har kunnet gøre mere for at overbevise landstræneren om, at jeg skal udtages,” forklarede Niki Østergaard efter dagens sejr.

Rytterne skulle i dag køre seks omgange af 26 kilometer, og med to omgange igen kørte det afgørende udbrud væk i sidevinden. Ud over de tre nævnte ryttere sad de to Glud & Marstrand Horsens ryttere, Kasper Linde og Jacob Nielsen, også med i udbruddet.

”Vi fandt hurtigt ind i et godt samarbejde og fik slået hullet ned til resten af feltet. I finalen prøvede både Kasper Linde og Jacob Nielsen flere gange at angribe, men grundet den hårde modvind var det umuligt at køre væk. Så vi tre andre kunne kontrollere det. Dermed skulle det afgøres i en spurt. Med 250 meter åbner Glenn Bak spurten, og jeg kommer med på hjul, så jeg kunne passere ham på de sidste meter. Glenn er absolut ikke langsom, så der skulle trædes mange watt for at gå forbi ham,” tilføjede Niki Østergaard.


Unlike most major languages, which you can babelfish and get a pretty decent translation from, (with the occasional bit of ludicrousness from the Engrish), Danish does not seem to play nice with automated translators

So he's saying roughly 1 out of 10 bios on WP are of footballers.

Occasionally I use the toolserver to visit random BLPs.

In an unscientific survey I conducted today, I used the toolserver 10 times and it returned these random bios and 4 out of 10 were football players.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Ostwald classical scholar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Manicera 60s Uruguayan footballer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Lees actor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haim_Silvas current Israeli footballer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Cullinane Irish hurler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_Shearer British cookbook author
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cofie_Bekoe current Ghanaian footballer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._E._Taylor American musician
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Roche current Bishop of Leeds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dolan 90s Canadian footballer

I think I remember why I disappeared last time.

Wikipedia Review is not a house organ for Wikipedia.

At least, it wasn't when I signed up.

Ciao again.

Agreed.

Bye.

----

I just did what Tarantino did, and I came up with the following:

1. Joe Mihevc is a city councillor in Toronto, Canada.
2. Kate Mann is an American musician.
3. Wanda Ortiz is the bassist of the all-female tribute band The Iron Maidens.
4. Elijah Burke is an American professional wrestler.
5. Turgut Uçar is a Turkish football manager and coach.
6. Stanley P. Cox, better known by his stage name Mistah F.A.B., is an American rapper.
7. Fabrizio Gollin is an Italian racing driver.
8. Sandra Raluca IzbaÅŸa is a Romanian artistic gymnast.
9. Jon Michael Kleinberg (born October 1971) is an American computer scientist, MacArthur Fellow, Nevanlinna Prize winner, and the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University.
10. Andy Bell is a former freestyle motocross rider and racer who now stars in the Nitro Circus DVDs and television series on MTV.

So one footballer. Well, coach now.

Laugh hysterically ever since?

I tried it on Google Translate (which DOES have Danish), and got this:

Ahem, my Danish is much better than my English, I would have translated it something like this:

Oh, come on, let's not be like this! I really like Robster...

I mean, there are certain situations wherer "we" is probably appropriate. This might be one of them, because the fact is, one-sentence stubs are essentially useless on any encyclopedia, not just Wikipedia. So "we" could actually refer to all of human society in its entirety, or at least the internet, anyway.

Nevertheless, it would be nicer if folks (not just Lara) would say "WP should have a rule" instead of "We should have a rule," at least as a general, uh, rule. It isn't that much harder to type the capital "P," and it would make things slightly less confusing for casual WR readers who aren't already familiar with the issues in question.

As for stubs about athletes in particular, it's an interesting phenomenon - sports aficionados tend to be extremely completist, and many have a real penchant for consistency, too, but relatively few of them seem to pay much attention to "internal" matters, like policy or administrative issues, at least on Wikipedia. Whether this is related to the sports-geek vs. computer-geek dichotomy that seems to exist in society at large is hard to say, but it's hard not to suspect it.

There's a broader problem, I think, in the failure to distinguish between stub articles which need to be expanded, and articles which are just - appropriately - short. One sentence may be too little, but that Spoke Emery article seems to contain just about exactly the amount of information on Spoke Emery anyone would need. No reason it should be deleted - assuming it's accurate - but also no reason it should be tagged as an article which needs to be expanded.

I come across this a lot with minor television/showbiz celebrities. Articles tagged for expansion, when in fact they concisely and adequately summarize the little notable information needed about the individual.

...by which point they've already been paid more money than you or I will earn in a lifetime. I'm not saying it's right but I'm sure it's a subliminal factor in "notability" generalizations.

Given how much trash there is in many, many longer articles isn't it good that there are lots of short ones?

We're talking about sub-stubs, which are those that contain a mere sentence or two.

However, in my opinion, if there is not enough information on a person to consume more than a paragraph, how notable can they really be? And who's to say how much information is "needed" about a person? For me, if I'm interested in an individual or a subject, I often am interested to know more than whatever it is that made them notable. So, for biographies, if there's only a paragraph, it probably doesn't have all the "needed" information, as far as I'm concerned.


Difficult to argue with a good point.