User:Dennis Bratland/Draft MOS:SPORTFLAG RfC

The following is a draft working towards a proposal for adoption as a Wikipedia policy, guideline, or process.
The proposal must not be taken to represent consensus, but is still in development and under discussion, and has not yet reached the process of gathering consensus for adoption. Thus references or links to this page should not describe it as policy, guideline, nor yet even as a proposal.

RfC to either strengthen or remove 'official representative' requirement for flag icons in sports

Proposal replace MOS:SPORTFLAG with one of the two options below, either not strictly official, or official, or to reject both and make no change at this time.

The point is to say clearly whether or not the current practice of most sports-related WikiProjects of using flag icons on virtually all international sport topics is or is not consistent with the MOS guidelines, and to resolve confusion and contradictions by consolidating the flag icon rules for sports in one place if consensus favors treading sports by a different standard than other topics.

Not strictly official option:

Unlike military service and political office, sports persons or sports teams do not need to officially^[a] represent a country to have a flag icon in an article's infobox, or in lists and tables. If flags, nationalities, or national symbols are commonly^[b] displayed by reliable sources alongside competitors' names, they may be considered to "represent" that country, even if reliable sources do not directly state they are official representatives. A country can be "represented" by an unlimited number of competitors, and they do not need to be selected from among all potential competitors of that nationality by means of a national tournament or other process to fill a quota of international representatives.^[c]

Official option:

As with military service and political office, sports persons or teams must officially^[a] represent a country before a flag icon may be considered. Editors who wish to add a flag icon to an article have the burden to cite a reliable source that directly supports that the subject is an official representative of that country.^[d] The frequent use of flags, colors, national anthems and other national symbols, by news media, or by the competitors themselves, or by the sport's governing body, is not sufficient unless there is direct, verifiable evidence of official representation.^[e]

There are three options here and that means ranked voting (it's not a vote but work with me here) isn't out of the question. Closing discussions and Consensus don't have specific guidance on how we do that, but the editor closing this discussion could take such preferences into account, if the information is given to them in a way they can use. If you abhor official, you might say you favor no change but prefer not strictly official if your first choice isn't going to happen, along with a brief explanation.

Generally other editors would appreciate keeping lengthy comments to the discussion section and keeping your !vote rationale concise. Survey answers often attract replies, but starting discussion threads outside the discussion section isn't going to win you any popularity contests. Just saying.

If Official is chosen, most of the mentions of sports can be kept. If Not strictly official is chosen, mention of sports in most places will be removed in order to avoid contradicting the sports flag icon guideline. This would include deleting 6 of the 7 places where Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Icons discusses sports, keeping the 7th as it deals with logo copyrights, not flag icons. Click [show] for specific text changes.

Detailed list of changes

;1

[No change if official is chosen; sports removed if not strictly official is chosen]

Shortcuts

When icons are added excessively, they clutter the page and become redundant, as in this sportsperson's infobox. Pages with excessive icons can also cause loading problems for some people.

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MOS:WORDPRECEDENCE

[Official version:]

Flag icons may be relevant in some subject areas, where the subject actually officially represents that country or nationality – such as military units or national sports teams. In lists or tables, flag icons may be relevant when such representation of different subjects is pertinent to the purpose of the list or table itself.

[Not strictly official version]

Flag icons may be relevant in some subject areas, where the subject actually represents that country or nationality – such as military units or national sports teams. For sports topics, see MOS:SPORTFLAG below. In lists or tables, flag icons may be relevant when such representation of different subjects is pertinent to the purpose of the list or table itself.

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MOS:INFOBOXFLAG

[No change if official is chosen; sports removed if not strictly official is chosen]

As with other biographical articles, flags are discouraged in sportspeople's individual infoboxes even when there is a "country", "nationality", "sport nationality" or equivalent field: they may give undue prominence to one field over others. However, the infobox may contain the national flag icon of an athlete who competes in competitions where national flags are commonly used as representations of sporting nationality in a given sport.

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Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Icons#Accompany flags with country names

[No change if official is chosen; sports removed if not strictly official is chosen]

The name of a flag's political entity should appear adjacent to the first use of the flag, as no reader is familiar with every flag, and many flags differ only in minor details. Nearby uses of the flag need not repeat the name, especially in a list or table. (For example, in this infobox, flags of countries involved in a battle are first given with their names. Following this, the flag alone is used to identify the nationality of military commanders.) To achieve this, the flag-and-name template {{flag|Japan}} (or {{flag|JPN}}) would be used first, and {{flagicon|JPN}} in subsequent uses. However, some editors feel that some tables such as those containing sports statistics (example) are easier to read if {{flag}} is used throughout.

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MOS:FLAGBIO

[No change if official is chosen; sports removed if not strictly official is chosen]

* Use the flag and name of the country (be it a state or a nation) that the person (or team of people) officially represented, regardless of citizenship, when the flag templates are used for sports statistics and the like. If a French player is awarded a medal for playing in a German team, the German flag would be used in a table of awards. The Scottish flag would be used with regard to the FIFA World Cup, but that of the UK for the Olympics. Caution should be used in extending this convention to non-sporting contexts, as it may produce confusing results. And a countervailing example would be an article about a sports team that officially represents a particular country but is composed of members who are citizens of several countries; a table of players at such an article might list them by their country of actual citizenship or professed nationality.

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[This entire section would be replaced by either official or not strictly official above.]

Flags should never indicate the player's nationality in a non-sporting sense; flags should only indicate the sportsperson's national squad/team or representative nationality.
Where flags are used in a table, it should clearly indicate that they correspond to representative nationality, not legal nationality, if any confusion might arise.
Flags should generally illustrate the highest level the sportsperson is associated with. For example, if a sportsperson has represented a nation or has declared for a nation, then the national flag as determined by the sport governing body should be used (these can differ from countries' political national flags). If a sportsperson has not competed at the international level, then the eligibility rules of the international sport governing body (such as IRB, FIFA, IAAF, etc.) should be used. If these rules allow a player to represent two or more nations, then a reliable source should be used to show who the sportsperson has chosen to represent.
If a sportsperson most usually represents a specific country (e.g., Germany) but has represented a larger, supernational entity on some occasions (e.g., Europe) it may be more appropriate to use the national flag; this will often need to be determined on an article-by-article basis.

Subnational flags (e.g., England rather than UK) are traditionally used in some sports, and should not be changed to the national flag without consensus.

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Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Icons#Non-free images

[No change in either case.]

Use of company logos, sports team crests, and other images protected as intellectual property (including as copyrights, trademarks, and service marks) in articles can only be done on a fair use basis. Use of such images is nearly always prohibited (for more information, see Wikipedia:Non-free use rationale guideline and Wikipedia:Logos).

Please !vote for either * Official, * Not strictly official, or * No change. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 05:06, 16 May 2021 (UTC)

Notes

^ ^a ^b By the common defintion of officially, e.g. "In an official manner or capacity; by virtue, or in consequence, of one's office; by or in presence of an official; with official authority, sanction, or formality." (OED) or "in a formal or authoritative manner" (Dictionary.com) "in a formal and public way" (Google/Oxford Languages).
Whether governmental or not, officials select from among their nation's competitors which of them will represent that country, whether by sanctioning national tournaments or some other selection process.
^ Wikipedia's due weight policy determines whether the use of national symbols is prevalent among most reliable sources for a given competition, event, or championship. This is analogous to the WP:COMMONNAME guideline for article titles, "as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable English-language sources".
^ This guideline makes the MOS more consistent with the local consensus of most sports-related WikiProjects, so flag icons can be used for most international sports topics, such as any FIA, FIM, or Grand Slam tennis events or championships. Topics that would not meet this criterion include the National Football League, English Football League, or NASCAR, often because they are national, not primarily international, in scope. The logic behind why sources do or do not commonly use national symbols is not a great concern; we are only trying to determine which practice is prevalent among reliable sources.
^ Official representation can also be determined when we can cite reliable sources that verify each country has a quota of competitors selected by tournaments or other process within that country, or selected as representatives and entered in the international competition by an authority or sanctioning body for that sport or event of that country.
^ Examples of official representation are the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup. In motorsport, many FIA championships like Formula One would not have reason to include flag icons, in contrast to more recent FIA world cup series like the FIA Motorsport Games, which do explicitly have a quota of nationally representative teams, and reliable sources directly verify that competitors represent countries rather than themselves. FIM is similar, with individual competition in Grand Prix motorcycle racing, in contrast to official national team representation in Motocross des Nations, and various other motorcycle world cups. Most topics on List of world cups are organized on Olympic lines, and so could use flag icons. Because this is different from the local consensus of most sports WikiProjects, many such articles would need flag icons removed to be consistent with MOS guidelines.

Survey (Sport flags)

Discussion (Sport flags)

Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Icons is just a guideline, and what, if anything, should be done about articles that don't conform to the MOS is outside the scope of this discussion. The focus here is what the MOS is even trying to say, so that anybody can read and understand it with a minimum of confusion or any need for expert interpretation. Editors who are ignoring the MOS now the can continue to ignore it if the MOS changes. Some editors do take the MOS seriously, and compliance becomes unavoidable to meet the criteria for WP:Good articles and Featured articles. Adopting not-strictly-official would make it obvious that a few articles don't conform, while the status quo now is rather fuzzy. Choosing the official option would codify that a very large number of articles are outside the MOS. Many editors would dislike either outcome, but all would benefit from guidelines that are unambiguous and consistent.

Table of topic classes with explanation

Grouping sports topics in three classes or categories in this table illustrates the distinctions drawn by the proposed options, and comparing these categories with current practice helps to illustrate what problem is solved by revising the MOS. Our goal should be to tune the wording to make it easy for any editor to know which of the three categories a topic falls into, and to establish a broad consensus as to where we want to draw the line for flag icons.

Neither official nor commonly used ⤆ typically national or intranational	⤇ Not strictly official typically transnational	⤇ Official typically international
Bold font indicates that the current versions of that topic use flag icons for nationality
National Football League English Football Association United States Auto Club Major League Baseball Premier League The Boat Race CMLL World Heavyweight Championship	Formula One MotoGP Australian Open The Championships, Wimbledon FIM Trial World Championship Lance Stroll Masters (snooker) Tour de France Most, but not all, World championships	Olympic Games FIFA World Cup FIA Motorsport Games Trial des Nations Davis Cup A1 Grand Prix The Ashes Cricket World Cup Most, but not all, World cups

In the first category, both the National Football League and United States Auto Club (USAC) are primarily national, not international, and reliable sources don't commonly display national symbols for each competitor. The current version of the USAC article has upwards of 250 US flag icons, and three non-US flags. This doesn't meet even the least restrictive MOS rules, and the use of flag icons in this class would require a blanket MOS:FLAG exception for sports.

Both Major League Baseball (US) and the English football league system (UK) include, just barely, more than one nationality, but reliable sources do not commonly display US flags for the 29 American teams and a Canadian flag for the one "representative" from that country, nor are flags necessary or meaningful to highlight one or possibly two not strictly UK-national English football league teams.

The second category has competitions which are international in scope, and which we can verify that high-quality sources routinely identify competitors with flags and national symbols. We can even cite sources that refer to competitors as "representing" their nations, but in an apparently figurative way, much like The Beatles "represent" the UK as the face of the British Invasion, or Marylin Monroe being called a sex symbol who "represents" women. With few exceptions, the current versions of articles on topics like Grand Slam tennis or Grand Prix motorsport use flag icons.

Direct evidence that competitors are official representatives is lacking, or at least is controversial among Wikipedia editors, and has been a subject of debates for many years. There is little agreement as to what a citation to support this would look like, and it relies heavily on subject experts parsing the language in carefully selected sources. Evidence that reliable sources predominately use national symbols is overwhelming and uncontroversial. Edge cases that help define this boundary include Formula One driver Lance Stroll, whose Canadian nationality is commonly emphasized by sources, meeting the first criterion, but he wasn't selected to represent Canada by Canadian official, not meeting the second criterion "selected as representatives and entered in the international competition by an authority or sanctioning body for that sport or event of that country."^[1]

The third category includes many Olympic Games style competitions, where we can verify in Rule 41 of the Olympic Charter that competitors are representatives of nations, and cite sources that state directly that these representatives are chosen by officials of that nation to fill a defined quota assigned to each nation. In the case of motorsports, we can verify in both primary and secondary sources a distinct difference between traditional international motorsports like Formula One the new FIA Motorsport Games "in which drivers—in contrast to the historically transnational norm of motorsport—competed under their national flag."^[2]

A similar dividing line can be seen in motorcycle sport, between FIM's Grand Prix motorcycle racing or FIM Superbike World Championship compared to various world cups like the Speedway World Cup, or by contrasting FIM Trial World Championship with Trial des Nations.

--Dennis Bratland (talk) 21:25, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Why is this needed

Below is a sampling of some of the longest disputes over flags in sports spanning more than a dozen years. The MOS of 2008 or 2013 isn't all that different from the current version. Small changes in wording have been tried, but the essential boundary lines haven't really changed. The disputes over these boundaries haven't changed much either. Editors 10 years ago were reading the same rules and reaching the same contradictory interpretations as they do today. The same arguments, often citing the same facts from the same sources, are repeated, across different topics and WikiProjects, and the acrimony and bitterness of the early days looks much the same as today. There's a whole sub-genre of WP:ANI and WP:3RRN disputes between editors who want to remove or insert flag icons.

What this suggests is maybe the problem is the boundary between appropriate and inappropriate flag use is poorly defined, or fails to represent global consensus. For those reasons, it might be better to seek a new consensus around one of two new boundary lines between appropriate and inappropriate flag icon use, in the hopes that editors who read the MOS will disagree less over what it means.

--Dennis Bratland (talk) 18:40, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

References

^ Rencken, Dieter; Collantine, Keith (February 11, 2020), "Canadian F1 pair Stroll and Latifi to race under American licenses", The Drive
^
- FIA (June 28, 2019), New 'Fia Motorsport Games' Announced With Rome As Inaugural Host City 31 October - 3 November 2019, The Council approved the 'FIA Motorsport Games', a new international, multidisciplinary sporting event that will see drivers competing not for individual recognition, but for their country.
- FIA (November 9, 2018), 18-Strong Entry List For Inaugural Fia Gt Nations Cup; GT showpiece to be hosted at Bahrain International Circuit next month, Held at the Bahrain International Circuit on 1 December 2018, the event will pit nation against nation in a patriotic twist on the traditional racing format.
- Watkins, Gary (December 30, 2019), "2019: the year that saw motor racing's first 'Olympics'", Motor Sport, Some might argue that the games can only ever be some kind of novelty event in a sport that in recent history hasn't been drawn up on national lines. But the flags of 49 nations flying over Vallelunga suggests that 'our' Olympics can become an important event on the motor sport calendar.
- Næss, Hans Erik (2020), A History of Organizational Change;The Case of Fédération Internationale de L'Automobile (FIA), 1946–2020, In essence, the Games brought together drivers from five racing disciplines into a single event in which drivers—in contrast to the historically transnational norm of motorsport—competed under their national flag.

[Officially-1] By the common defintion of officially, e.g. "In an official manner or capacity; by virtue, or in consequence, of one's office; by or in presence of an official; with official authority, sanction, or formality." (OED) or "in a formal or authoritative manner" (Dictionary.com) "in a formal and public way" (Google/Oxford Languages).
Whether governmental or not, officials select from among their nation's competitors which of them will represent that country, whether by sanctioning national tournaments or some other selection process.

[Commonly-2] Wikipedia's due weight policy determines whether the use of national symbols is prevalent among most reliable sources for a given competition, event, or championship. This is analogous to the WP:COMMONNAME guideline for article titles, "as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable English-language sources".

[Examples1-3] This guideline makes the MOS more consistent with the local consensus of most sports-related WikiProjects, so flag icons can be used for most international sports topics, such as any FIA, FIM, or Grand Slam tennis events or championships. Topics that would not meet this criterion include the National Football League, English Football League, or NASCAR, often because they are national, not primarily international, in scope. The logic behind why sources do or do not commonly use national symbols is not a great concern; we are only trying to determine which practice is prevalent among reliable sources.

[Quota-4] Official representation can also be determined when we can cite reliable sources that verify each country has a quota of competitors selected by tournaments or other process within that country, or selected as representatives and entered in the international competition by an authority or sanctioning body for that sport or event of that country.

[Examples2-5] Examples of official representation are the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup. In motorsport, many FIA championships like Formula One would not have reason to include flag icons, in contrast to more recent FIA world cup series like the FIA Motorsport Games, which do explicitly have a quota of nationally representative teams, and reliable sources directly verify that competitors represent countries rather than themselves. FIM is similar, with individual competition in Grand Prix motorcycle racing, in contrast to official national team representation in Motocross des Nations, and various other motorcycle world cups. Most topics on List of world cups are organized on Olympic lines, and so could use flag icons. Because this is different from the local consensus of most sports WikiProjects, many such articles would need flag icons removed to be consistent with MOS guidelines.

[6] Rencken, Dieter; Collantine, Keith (February 11, 2020), "Canadian F1 pair Stroll and Latifi to race under American licenses", The Drive

[7] 
FIA (June 28, 2019), New 'Fia Motorsport Games' Announced With Rome As Inaugural Host City 31 October - 3 November 2019, The Council approved the 'FIA Motorsport Games', a new international, multidisciplinary sporting event that will see drivers competing not for individual recognition, but for their country.

FIA (November 9, 2018), 18-Strong Entry List For Inaugural Fia Gt Nations Cup; GT showpiece to be hosted at Bahrain International Circuit next month, Held at the Bahrain International Circuit on 1 December 2018, the event will pit nation against nation in a patriotic twist on the traditional racing format.

Watkins, Gary (December 30, 2019), "2019: the year that saw motor racing's first 'Olympics'", Motor Sport, Some might argue that the games can only ever be some kind of novelty event in a sport that in recent history hasn't been drawn up on national lines. But the flags of 49 nations flying over Vallelunga suggests that 'our' Olympics can become an important event on the motor sport calendar.

Næss, Hans Erik (2020), A History of Organizational Change;The Case of Fédération Internationale de L'Automobile (FIA), 1946–2020, In essence, the Games brought together drivers from five racing disciplines into a single event in which drivers—in contrast to the historically transnational norm of motorsport—competed under their national flag.

[8] FIA (June 28, 2019), New 'Fia Motorsport Games' Announced With Rome As Inaugural Host City 31 October - 3 November 2019, The Council approved the 'FIA Motorsport Games', a new international, multidisciplinary sporting event that will see drivers competing not for individual recognition, but for their country.

[9] FIA (November 9, 2018), 18-Strong Entry List For Inaugural Fia Gt Nations Cup; GT showpiece to be hosted at Bahrain International Circuit next month, Held at the Bahrain International Circuit on 1 December 2018, the event will pit nation against nation in a patriotic twist on the traditional racing format.

[10] Watkins, Gary (December 30, 2019), "2019: the year that saw motor racing's first 'Olympics'", Motor Sport, Some might argue that the games can only ever be some kind of novelty event in a sport that in recent history hasn't been drawn up on national lines. But the flags of 49 nations flying over Vallelunga suggests that 'our' Olympics can become an important event on the motor sport calendar.

[11] Næss, Hans Erik (2020), A History of Organizational Change;The Case of Fédération Internationale de L'Automobile (FIA), 1946–2020, In essence, the Games brought together drivers from five racing disciplines into a single event in which drivers—in contrast to the historically transnational norm of motorsport—competed under their national flag.

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