Talk:Celso Golmayo Torriente

Notability concerns

Can someone please explain to me the notability of this person ? SyG 13:41, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

• The article says that he was the Cuban Chess Champion in 1897. Is that not sufficient? Quale 00:56, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

I would be inclined to disagree. Let's assume there are 200 countries and each of them has gotten a national champion every year for the past 110 years, that would mean we ought to create as much as 22,000 articles on chess players ? Of course it is a matter of taste, but that sounds a lot to me. SyG 16:23, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

I think your calculation is a bit high—all national chess champions put together isn't anywhere near 22,000. Our page on the Cuban Chess Championship suggests that were only about 15 Cuban chess champions through 1984 (the list is incomplete). I would strongly disagree with anyone who says that Wikipedia shouldn't have bios for 15 or more Cuban chess champions. Overly great concern with "number of articles" will often lead to undesired results anyway. Generally any Olympic athlete is is considered notable enough for a page, and there have been a lot more than 22,000 Olympic athletes, most of them never national champions in their sports.

But regardless of the exact numbers I disagree as a matter of policy. A national chess champion would seem to meet a few requirements of WP:BIO, namely "The person has received significant recognized awards or honors." (the championship title), and "Competitors who have played or competed at the highest level in amateur sports (who meet the general criteria of secondary sources published about them).". Note that the second criterion suggest that winning a championship isn't required—simply playing in it might be enough. Personally I think it would be very unwise to try to rank the national champions by saying things like "the Cuban Championship isn't important to me, and 1897 was a long time ago, so he's out". I favor inclusion of any national champion for whom WP:V requirements can be met. Clearly Edward G. Winter found him notable enough to research and write about. I don't see any reason to substitute your opinion over which chess players are notable in place of his. In my view the most sound policy ties encyclopedic notability closely with the availability of WP:RS sources rather than trying to apply our own views about who is notable and who isn't (which is a form of original research, actually). As a general rule, if a person is notable enough for reliable sources to have written about, then that person is notable enough for this ecyclopedia. I think that idea is becoming popular in the Wikipedia community, but we'll see. The greatest weakness of this article is that it is based on a single source, giving it a reliable source rather than reliable sources. Multiple independent reliable sources would be much better. Quale 19:46, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks very much for your detailed explanation. I have to explain that my current understanding of "notability" is primarily based on WP:RS, so having added to this article a written book as a reference annihilates my concerns about its notability, even if I would obviously prefer several sources instead of a single one.

Thanks also for your explanation on the current number of articles on Olympic athletes in Wikipedia, that will surely influence me to be less strict on notability of chess players.

About WP:BIO and WP:V I do not know... My problem is that there are numerous "titles" in chess, like IM, GM, WGM, WIM, Fide master and blah blah blah, so for the moment I would not call all of them notable.

About national championships, somehow I do not see the "national championship of Virgin Islands" as notable (of course it is an extreme example). Also having "played" in a national championship can confer notability only if this championship is not some kind of "Open" where everyone can play in it. Thus in order to get the notability of a given chess player having won/played a given national championship, I would tend to ponder the following questions:

1. What was the notability of the discussed championship at the time the discussed chess player won/played it ?
2. What is the degree of selection for players to enter this national championship ?
3. What is the result achieved by the discussed player (1st, 2nd, last,...) ? SyG 09:47, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

• The printed source I added, Gaige's Chess Personalia, actually provides only the most basic bio info for the chess players and composers it lists. Golmayo's entry is exactly 3 lines long: other than his name, it gives 1) year and place of birth, 2) date and place of death, and 3) a pointer to additional bio info to be found in La Stratégie. An entry in Gaige alone isn't sufficient for an article, as it would qualify as a trivial mention. It can be very useful, however, for confirming bio dates and places, spelling of names, and title information. About notability, Gaige writes in the intro: "To minimize the formidable obstacles of deciding who is "important", this book provides FIDE and ICCF titles and year awarded; provides ELO historical ratings for players active before titles were awarded (as given in The Rating of Chess Players Past and Present, 2d edition, by Arpad E. Elo [New York: Arco, 1986]), uses FIDE [Elo] ratings to select many of the world's strongest living players; and has drawn on the work of many colleagues and predecessors." Presumably Gaige included Golmayo on the last basis—the work of his colleagues and predecessors. Now there are a lot of entries in Chess Personalia (nearly 14,000), so I do not suggest that we should nor do expect that we will ever have bios for all of them, or even most. On the other hand, a chess bio of a person in the era covered by Chess Personalia for someone not in the book is probably suspect. You have tagged some like that (e.g., Carmine Nigro), and I have left those tags because I am also uncertain whether they meet WP:BIO. Quale 15:33, 23 September 2007 (UTC)