Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cricket

1829

1829 debutantes:

Bobo. 21:07, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

That's good. I like that. Tell me, do you use a facility within CA to match players to their debut years as I'm not aware of one? ----Jack | ^{talk page} 18:42, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

No no - just filter by season and find the cricketers for whom it says: "T Paley made his debut in first-class matches", or such. It's a long process, sure, but it's consistent, and I love doing the same thing consistently over and over again - at least that means I'm focused on a single task at any one time. That's how I got my first-class players lists done, after all. When I have more energy, possibly at 1am or so when everything has settled down, I'll attempt to make a list for 1830 debutantes. Bobo. 21:08, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Ah, I started doing that once but I got fed up of constant page changing on CA which takes too long (I actually hate it as a site, technically speaking; it's dominated by its adverts which impact usability to a ridiculous extent). So I use the seasonal battting averages in name order and work it out from there by reference to lists of who has played previously (I have these in an XL). Again, very long-winded, especially wikifying the names, but it gets there in the end. Thanks for doing the other years too. ----Jack | ^{talk page} 18:16, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not rushing over the process. I've got my mind on doing a few other things at present - and anyway, that's probably enough redlinks to be getting along with by now. ;) Bobo. 20:08, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Is this something that you guys want , I mean list of debutantes by year ? If so for which years ,let me know .I already have the first class scorecards downloaded,picking the debutants from that should be done by a simple program ? Sumant81 (talk) 09:26, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Don't worry Sumant, I've got all the information done already, just a case of getting it all done and formatted so that I can read it. Bobo. 14:32, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Sumant, I already have lists of the cricketers who still need articles from over 160 teams, so don't worry if the task will take you too long. Bobo. 14:40, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

All 1829 players now have articles. Startpoint for redlinks moves on to 1830. ----Jack | ^{talk page} 04:24, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

1830

Bobo. 21:41, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Done. We now have articles for all significant cricket people who were active up to and including 1830. Startpoint for redlinks moves to 1831. ----Jack | ^{talk page} 06:04, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

1835

Bobo. 03:24, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Something gone wrong here. Several of these such as Ward, Cobbett and Wenman made their debuts much earlier. By the way, James Broadbridge should redirect to Jem Broadbridge. ----Jack | ^{talk page} 06:08, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Judging by my new list, I think I must have put a separate year as the start year - probably a typing error, entirely my own fault. Will post an amended list soon. Cheers. Bobo. 13:51, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps the worst ever cricket article of all time!

Most loved cricketer!!! I've not requested speedy delete or what not just yet, it deserves its five minutes for laughs! Howzat?Out!Out!Out! (talk) 18:50, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

As well as being deeply trivial, I suspect that most of its text has been lifted straight from the ESPN Cricinfo article it was based on, and so it's in breach of copyright as well. JH (talk page) 19:44, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

It doesn't even include Archibald Fargus... Howzat?Out!Out!Out! (talk) 19:55, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Free Wisden e-books

Google Books have made the 1864 and 1866-71 Wisdens available as free e-books. The available formats include PDF, for those of us who can't handle anything more fancy. See here. JH (talk page) 19:47, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

So, it's true what they say about the 1864 edition. Some sections are anything and everything but cricket! ----Jack | ^{talk page} 04:58, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

1836

Bobo. 00:30, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

1835

Shall we try this again? Saves me slapping myself with a wet fish... ;)

Bobo. 01:38, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

1840

Bobo. 05:27, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

1837

Bobo. 05:39, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

1841

Bobo. 10:50, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

1842

Bobo. 17:11, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

1843

Bobo. 21:34, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

1846

Bobo. 04:23, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

More digitised old cricket books available online

The person who alerted me to the old Wisden's now available online had now come up with a whole load of other notable old cricket books freely available online:

http://archive.org/details/talkswitholdeng00pullgoog http://archive.org/details/memorialbiograph00maryuoft http://archive.org/details/felixonbatbeing00clubgoog http://archive.org/details/wgcricketingremi00grac http://archive.org/details/fewshortruns00harr http://archive.org/details/cihm_38217 http://archive.org/details/cricketsongs00galegoog http://archive.org/details/cricketofabelhir00bens http://archive.org/details/cricketfield00pycr http://archive.org/details/cricketwgg00gracuoft http://archive.org/details/cricketc00steerich

Enjoy! JH (talk page) 18:31, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Taking a break

Taking a break from list-writing at the moment - it's sort of driving me insane. On my own personal list I'm up to 1871 - if I can, I'll make sure they're all disambiguated and post them all on User:Bobo192/Debutantes. Stay well, all. Bobo. 00:26, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Nice work, Bobo. I'll try to chip away at the redlinks over time. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 06:26, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Charles MacKenzie

Hi all - any idea how to disambiguate this chap? Lord MacKenzie clearly won't do... I'll settle for Charles MacKenzie (cricketer) for now, but if anyone has any bright ideas, feel free to fix it when I post the names. Bobo. 19:49, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

In List of historic Senators of the College of Justice there's a redlink for Charles Kincaid Mackenzie, who I imagine is the same guy. So I suggest going with that. Looks like he may have been one of those cricketers who was more significant through other aspects of his life than cricket. JH (talk page) 19:59, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Aha! Cheers. As you can tell, I haven't posted the names yet, so I can fix them without even having to cause any problems! As it happens, I'm still busy working on 1876 as we speak. Bobo. 20:05, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Category question

Hello. This might sound like a stupid question, but what is the reasoning behind the categories Category:English cricketers of 1946 to 1968‎, Category:English cricketers of 1864 to 1889‎, Category:English cricketers of 1919 to 1945‎, etc in the cat Category:English cricketers? Why the breakdown by these years? Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 06:28, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

These are my own guesses for the reasons, so might be wrong in some instances. 1864 was when overarm bowling was legalised and the first edition of Wisden was published. 1890 was the first season of an official County Championship. 1919 was the first season after WW1, and 1946 the first full season after WW2. The significance of 1968/9 is less obvious, and it may have been chosen as a dividing point to very roughly equalise the number of players in the preceding and following periods.

Inauguration of the Sunday League was in 1969, and the 1969 County Championship was the first, I think, with the current points system introduced. Overseas players were allowed for the first time in 1968, and Yorkshire's dominance waned too. Apparently. S.G.^(GH) _ping! 20:10, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Rationale was to delimit categories by using historically significant years rather than century or half-century years. 1969 was the season in which the CC was drastically reduced in scale. Much earlier, 1787 was the year when Lord's and MCC were founded: this was a real watershed in the game's history whereas 1801, for example, meant little. ----Jack | ^{talk page} 18:16, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Will Rhodes

Just created a stub article on this promising young cricketer. Does anyone know if he's related to his fellow Yorkshireman, Wilfred?

Also, anyone who fancies turning the redlink in the article blue is more than welcome. It's a bit of an omission not to have at least a placeholder this far through the English summer. --Dweller (talk) 12:15, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

No relation of Wilfred. Will Rhodes comes from Nottingham, in fact. Not Kirkheaton. He's the third W. Rhodes to play for Yorkshire. ----Jack | ^{talk page} 18:56, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Second one was this chap from Bradford who played in one match in 1911. Slightly confusing on the scorecard as it was a match in which Wilfred wasn't playing. ----Jack | ^{talk page} 12:35, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

In time there'll be need for more disambiguation, as Billy Rhodes[1] who played for Nottinghamshire was born in Bradford and played as a junior for Yorkshire. But he doesn't have an article yet. Johnlp (talk) 13:20, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, chaps. Do you think the pre-existing article on William Rhodes (cricketer) might be an unhelpfully vague disambiguation now? --Dweller (talk) 15:44, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Bot edits

A fairly wide-ranging bot has been sweeping through articles of many kinds doing the small-scale corrections and style preferences that make us a more orderly place. Most of its work looks pretty much on the spot, but I've noticed a couple of perhaps more contentious points:

• On biogs, where dates of birth and death in lead paragraph/intro also contained the places of birth and death, it seems to strip out the detail and put a birth phrase at the start of the main text without a capital letter for the start of a sentence. The death details are put at the end and sometimes the grammar is a bit stark. I've redone Nummy Deane, which is on my watchlist, without undoing the sensible changes, but if you track back through the changes you can see what the bot is doing. (In the case of Gilbert Parkhouse it created a different grammatical error.)
• It seems to replace all hyphens with en dashes between two sets of figures, which is right for cricket seasons and lifespans etc. But I noticed on Gentlemen v Players (and probably elsewhere) that it had done it also with bowling analyses and that to my eyes looks odd (but not so odd that I reverted: I thought I'd bring it here first).

What do others think? Johnlp (talk) 14:35, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

H'mm. Interestingly, in GvP it has made an endash change in "13–144: AP Freeman, Lord's, 1929" but not in "13-?: FW Lillywhite, Lord's, 1835". ----Jack | ^{talk page} 19:01, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

I presume it looks for two consecutive numbers separated by a hyphen and then replaces the hyphen. I think I'm more bothered about the grammatical errors it makes and the American English it introduces in terms of "born 25 December 1906" and "died 25 December 1906" when British English (which a lot of cricket articles should be) would say "born/died on 25 December 1906". As the bot owner claims to be doing this in the interests of WP:TIES, it's a strange outcome. If it's done all the cricket biographies like this, it'll be a massive job to undo these errors while retaining the sensible changes. Johnlp (talk) 21:52, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

I've left the bot owner a note asking him/her to drop by. Johnlp (talk) 22:07, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

I believe this is a script, not a bot (that you'd leave to run unsupervised). Is this an example of "bowling analyses"? 13–141: T Richardson, Hastings, 1897. Tony (talk) 05:09, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

• Yes, the edits were script-assisted, and the changes to the lead were done manually to eject birth and death dates to the body of the article. These were done to leave a cleaner lead where there is a minimum of non-essential biographical information. In a manner that does not excessively impact my productivity. But actually, I'm actually more concerned at what has been apparently identified as "Americanism". The "Hubert Gouvaine "Nummy" Deane (21 July 1895 – 21 October 1939)" thing is a MOSBIO convention, we don't do "born/died [on 25 December 1906] in [London, England]", as it's taken as read, or otherwise redundant; the places of birth and death don't belong in the lead. The I'm ignorant about the cricket scoring notations, so I'm prepared to accept that the script may not render these in a completely 'correct' manner, and will modify the script and run another pass to fix these. -- Ohc ^¡digame!_{¿que pasa?} 05:28, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for coming here to discuss. I think there are two strands going on in your reply, one to do with the script-assisted changes that were made, the other a wider point about MOSBIO, on which I'll perhaps open another thread here (though I'm busy workwise today). The "Americanism" I noticed was in the main text (not the intro) on Hubert Webb (cricketer) and it may of course just have been a one-off glitch: I don't follow all that many cricketer bios on my watchlist (and not all of them are named "Hubert"). But on Nummy Deane, Geoff Lomax and elsewhere the paste of the birth place/date details left a paragraph starting without a capital letter and on Gilbert Parkhouse it created a grammar problem where there was none before. The bowling analysis style change prods at one of our areas of weakness and inconsistency as a project: I remember discussion here maybe seven or eight years ago about whether it should be 9-63, 9/63 or even 9–63 or 9—63, but I don't remember the outcome (I think it was to standardise on 9/63) and we probably have all of these varieties and more littered somewhere around the collection of articles. That's why I brought that here for discussion rather than directly to you: we probably ought to decide that here first. As User:BlackJack points out above, your edits introduce an anomaly into at least one article... but I suspect we have a lot of anomalies already. So maybe leave your script modification on that until we've sorted ourselves (if we ever do...). I'll come back on MOSBIO later, because I think there's a point to be made there as well. Thanks again for discussing. Johnlp (talk) 11:59, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

I recall the discussion about bowling analysis format and I'm sure we agreed on the Aussie style of 9/63 but it never became a recognised standard and it looks as if 9–63 has tended to dominate in practice. I think the consensus was reached because someone suggested that bowling analysis should visibly differ from innings total, hence 9/63 and 903–7 declared, though I don't think the Aussies liked that last one too much. ----Jack | ^{talk page} 12:30, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

• I have already done all the cricket bios that I needed to do, so you may be relieved to know I won't be back again with those for quite some time. But let me just say that for my decanting to "Born 12 October 1925, Swansea, Wales, Parkhouse was educated" as I did at Parkhouse, I really don't consider that to be an error of any sort. The story needs to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Thus, I find it weird not to see any mention of the death at the end of the article in a logical place because it's a show-stopper. I believe the ejection of "He died 10 August 2000, Carmarthen, Wales." to the end is a logical move because it kind of puts a chronological cap on the biography. That's not to say there shouldn't be other sections after that to cover other specifics. However, I think it's more problematic to move the birth and death places to the end of the lead. I believe it is structurally incorrect on two counts: they really aren't important enough to belong to the lead, and what's more the info doesn't appear anywhere else in the article. In the same vein, the revert of Deane, whilst apparently corrected a minor grammatical error introduced due to the lack of initial capitalisation, actually reintroduces the structural problem that I mentioned also existed in Parkhouse. The longer time that has elapsed since the death, the less relevant are the exact dates of birth and death, that explains the difference in treatment to Parkhouse in that connection. I do apologise for the laziness for not capitalising the 'B'. -- Ohc ^¡digame!_{¿que pasa?} 14:53, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Actually, the Parkhouse article after your script left it read: "Born 12 October 1925, Swansea, Wales, Parkhouse was educated at Wycliffe College at Stonehouse in Gloucestershire, Parkhouse appeared in wartime non-first-class matches for Glamorgan and also in fixtures arranged for the 1945 season." You need to read right to the end of the sentence to get the grammatical problem of two main clauses in the one sentence. I was going to open a MOSBIO discussion in a separate tab, but as you've made your point here, I'll respond here. I think where you have a relatively brief biography – as most sports biogs will tend to be – that relies for notability on a passage of a person's life that's probably quite a small percentage of the total, then the job of the lead/intro is to summarise the whole life, identify the historic era in which a cricketer played, and place the claim to notability in that context, so birth and death info can go (succinctly) in there. If, as you seem to want, you add birth details under a heading that says "Cricket career", then that's misplacing it to my mind. For full-scale longer biographies (and we have some very good ones of those in WP:CRIC, many of them courtesy of User:Sarastro1) then the full chronological approach you favour is of course justified. But for these more limited biographies where we're merely filling in an often-brief cricketing heyday and there's seldom much more to say because notability was fleeting, I don't think you need to be so prescriptive about the, er, batting order. Johnlp (talk) 17:44, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

To my mind, the obvious place for birth and death details is in the lead immediately after the person's name. Putting it in the cricket career section is nonsensical, especially when there are non-cricket sections which discuss the person's wider life. Either Confucius he talk rubbish or there is something wrong with site standards. ----Jack | ^{talk page} 18:17, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Retirement

Hello all! It is with regret that I have to say I am retiring from editing. Unfortunately I'm not in a good place in my life right now, so I haven't the energy or motivation to do all that much! It's been a pleasure though, I hope you all keep up the good work. Howzat?Out!Out!Out! (talk) 06:12, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Sorry to hear that. Take care, thanks for everything you've contributed. The Rambling Man (talk) 07:11, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Seconded. --Dweller (talk) 07:17, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

a great shame; you've contributed a great amount to Wikipedia's cricket information. --Roisterer (talk) 07:30, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry to hear that. Thanks for all your good work. I hope that before too long things will improve and you'll feel able to return. JH (talk page) 08:56, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

... and when you come back, as I hope you do, there will still be plenty of work to do! Johnlp (talk) 09:23, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

I hope things get better for you soon. Nev1 (talk) 14:42, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

All the best, AA. Hope everything turns out for the best. ----Jack | ^{talk page} 18:51, 13 August 2013 (UTC)