Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chess

WikiProject Chess Shortcut: WP:CHESS
Navigation Menu
Project Page	talk
Assessment	talk
Assessment statistics	talk
Review	talk
Chess Portal	talk

Skip to: Bottom of page to add a new topic or see most recent new topics

chessgames.com

See Talk:List_of_chess_openings#Wiki_as_an_advertising_hook?. It isn't doing that for me and I'm not a paid member. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 23:49, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

Not sure what links he's referring to - but if there are any links to ChessGames' "opening explorer", that will indeed run into a paywall after you step through a few moves. That may be the situation. --SubSeven (talk) 00:50, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Your definition of "a few" is different than mine. In fact you can step through the first 13.5 moves (27 ply). If it really were only a few moves before you hit a pay wall I would strongly suggest the removal of the links, but that isn't the case. Quale (talk) 02:32, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

My experiences are not matching yours.. just hitting random lines I'm hitting paywalls on move two, four, six.. [1][2][3][4] --SubSeven (talk) 02:58, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Wanted to put a Chessgames.com link in Infobox for King's Gambit, Rice Gambit, but was stopped after White's 6th move here. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 03:06, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Chessgames.com does have a paywall for its "Opening Explorer". One hits it when one gets to less than 300 games or so. (The games in the database are all freely accessible, though.) Toccata quarta (talk) 03:21, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

I apologize. It must depend on the opening, although it may have something to do with the number of games in the database with the stem line chosen. I should not have assumed that you would hit the paywall at a uniform depth in all lines. Here's the example in the Chigorin D. to the Ruy that I had tried: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/explorer?node=1379197&move=14&moves=e4.e5.Nf3.Nc6.Bb5.a6.Ba4.Nf6.O-O.Be7.Re1.b5.Bb3.d6.c3.O-O.h3.Na5.Bc2.c5.d4.Qc7.Nbd2.cxd4.cxd4.Nc6. Note that in your first example it's a very uncommon line, 1.Nc3 c6, where the chessgames.com database apparently has games with only three continuations, and two of those have a total of only five games. The most common continuation 2.e4 is behind the paywall here, but if you enter this position through the much more common Caro-Kann sequence 1.e4 c6 2.Nc3 you can go much deeper if you follow the common lines. Quale (talk) 03:31, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Chessgames.com's "Opening Explorer" does not have a mechanism for identifying transpositions. Toccata quarta (talk) 04:04, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

So, after reading WP:EL, it seems that content with paywalls is forbidden as external links, but may be OK to use as a reference. So, I'm not sure which one is the case here, I didn't run into the link(s) in question. I would certainly encourage anybody who sees a link to the Openings Explorer as an external link to remove it. --SubSeven (talk) 00:51, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

WP:EL doesn't say or even imply "forbidden", it says:

"one should generally avoid providing external links to sites that require payment or registration to view the relevant content".

I've never seen a link to the Openings Explorer in EL section of any article. (Only in article Infoboxes.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 05:59, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

An EL in an infobox is still an EL. --SubSeven (talk) 15:16, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

Right, I see that. Template {{Infobox chess opening}} contains parm 'chessgid' with description:

chessgid is the ChessGames.com internal Opening Explorer code for this opening, that is the part that comes right after node= in the html of the opening explorer

Just to clarify, are you encouraging editors to remove the Openings Explorer link from Ruy Lopez Infobox, and from other similar articles? Ihardlythinkso (talk) 18:01, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

I agree with removing links to the ChessGames.com opening explorer. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 18:14, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

That's what I'm recommending, yes. Fair enough on the wording of WP:EL, it's not 100% forbidden, but unless there's a good reason to make an exception in this case, I think it's time to do some cleaning. --SubSeven (talk) 18:58, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

User:SubSeven removed the Chessgames.com Openings Explorer link from {{Infobox chess opening}} template, affecting all openings articles that had a link to the Openings Explorer. I'm not sure the justification of that, for two reasons: 1) as noted above, WP:EL doesn't forbid those links, and 2) also noted above, the links already added to articles uniformly didn't exceed the paywall threshold (or they wouldn't and couldn't have been added in the first place), so where the links existed, the paywall wasn't a factor and didn't inhibit access to the info provided by the Explorer.

Is/was it the consensus of ProjChess to remove the Openings Explorer link from all chess openings Infoboxes? (If so, then the template doc specifying 'chessgid=' should also be removed to complete the change, so as not to cause confusion.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 12:57, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I waited about two weeks after the conversation concluded, and nobody had yet argued to keep the links, I took that as consensus. You're correct about the 'chessgid=' in the documentation of course. Regarding your two reasons for being unsure:

• WP:EL says to avoid them, so we are avoiding them. And this is not a single link to paywalled content, this is dozens, if not hundreds. We need to make an argument FOR, not against, a massive campaign to send people to paywalled content.
• Your second reason, I'm not really understanding. The way the explorer works is, once you start to 'explore', you soon hit the paywall. All of these links were of limited usefulness. --SubSeven (talk) 19:33, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Your first point that the links violate WP:EL policy doesn't fit. When the links were used in article Infoboxes, the relevant content was not "hidden behind a paywall". (If there was a paywall ahead of the opening position in the Infobox, then linking to the Openings Explorer wasn't done.) The links to the opening position in the Infobox has usefulness to see Chessgames.com complilation of statistics for frequency of play, win-loss statistics, and alternative lines. I don't know why you would roll forward with your assumption that including such a link contians implicit guarantee of full use of the Openings Explorer -- it is just a link to aforementioned info and perhaps more capacity (backward exploring, perhaps forward exploring in some cases). Ihardlythinkso (talk) 07:54, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Speaking of opening explorers

Check out Module:Opening theory. Feel free to rename/improve as appropriate. I tested it on the longest deepest opening for which we had an article. Turns out we go deeper than wikibooks in this case [5]. ―cobaltcigs 09:58, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

Edit warring by IP(s)

Comments are welcome (in fact, needed) regarding the recent editing history of the article Four Knights Game, Halloween Gambit. Thanks, Toccata quarta (talk) 03:33, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

I admit I don't work on the articles of chess openings here all that much. But I think it's questionable whether these articles should be commenting on the soundness of these openings or their sidelines at all. Openings fall in and out of favor all the time. You are going to have sources that conflict with each other a LOT. Why even try and keep up with it? Soundness is basically an opinion anyway. Should a general encyclopedia be commenting on whether the Ng6 line of the Halloween Gambit is sound? State the moves of the opening, state the names and moves of 'named' sub-variations, and be done with it-- that's what I would think would be appropriate. But I hope people who actually do the work on these articles could comment. --SubSeven (talk) 02:13, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

"Soundness is basically an opinion anyway." Right. But the consensus of GMs is that the Ruy Lopez is sound, and WP should reflect that. And regarding 4.Nxe5 in the Four Knights Game, I doubt anyone could find one GM w/ opinion it is a sound opening. Of course there are a lot of openings between those two extremes, but hey! Ihardlythinkso (talk) 03:02, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Sure. I think any opening with its own article such as Ruy Lopez can be assumed to be sound anyway. My concern is more with the sidelines and sub-variations. --SubSeven (talk) 03:45, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure I'm following totally. Blackburne Shilling Gambit is example of opening article that does make contention on its unsoundness. (And there's some relativism here, right? I.e. what is sideline or sub-variation is pretty much an arbitrary line.) Anyway my beef w/ Halloween was that the new adds were reflecting distinct POV that 4.Nxe5 in Four Knights Game constituted "new discoveries in theory" which declare the move sound, undoing previously held theory which did not consider that. (And as mentioned I don't think there is even one GM saying 4.Nxe5 is sound. Meanwhile the IP editor first stated he "never said it was sound", "only playable", but then he reversed himself, saying he *did/does* take position that 4.Nxe5 is sound.) IMO one needs solid source(s) to make that kind of sweeping change of thought re assessment of 4.Nxe5 in Four Knights. (The IP also acknowledged same as a reversed assessment when he said "theory changes through time", etc. [He simply wants to change it *now*, in the WP article. User:Brittle heaven gave a very good response to that on the Halloween Talk page, IMO.]) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 19:35, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Commenting on soundness of openings still seems like a slippery slope to me, but if that's how it's generally done in these articles, what do I know. I think Brittle is on the right track in regards to sources. If you limit sources to key publications like yearbooks, Informants, ECOs, MCOs, etc. it can be manageable. Crucially, these are also secondary sources. Wikipedia should never be a clearing house for zero-day theory, even if it's GMs that are contributing the information. --SubSeven (talk) 00:12, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

For what it's worth, the latest source I know of that covers this line is Lysyj and Ovetchkin's "The Open Games for Black" (Chess Stars, 2012). They give a 4.Nxe5 a "?" and cite a line where they claim a clear edge for Black. If anyone's interested in adding it to the page I can give the line here. Cobblet (talk) 04:02, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Actually I just checked Kaufman's 2013 edition of his repertoire book. His recommendation improves over the Gaillard - Platel game for Black (the game where this IP had an improvement for White). Again I would be happy to provide the line. It boggles my mind, though, why we have Wikipedia articles for openings that are treated with single-line refutations in the literature... Cobblet (talk) 04:20, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I think you should add cites to both those references to the article. Unfortunately many bad openings attract a lot of attention from amateurs, and that attention can make them WP:GNG-worthy of articles. In this particular case there is more than a one refutation line claimed since Euwe and Pinski have very different ideas about how to handle the gambit. Without an article a non-specialist would find it hard to discover this. Thanks for your help. Quale (talk) 03:01, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Frankly, if it were up to me, I would delete the Halloween Gambit article entirely and redirect to the section under Four Knights Game. There I would write:

4.Nxe5?! is the Halloween Gambit. After 4...Nxe5 5.d4 Black retains the better chances by returning the piece with 5...Nc6 6.d5 Bb4! 7.dxc6 Nxe4 8.Qd4 Qe7 9.Be3 0-0 10.Bd3 Bxc3 11.bxc3 Bd6 12.cxb7 Bxb7 13.0-0 Rfe8 14.Rab1 Bc6 and "White has no compensation for his poor pawn structure" (Kaufman). Keeping it with 5...Ng6 6.e5 Ng8 7.Bc4 d5! 8.Bxd5 N8e7 9.Bg5 Qd7 also leads to a clear advantage according to Lysyj and Ovetchkin, although Kaufman notes that this line carries more risk for Black.

And then I'd give the relevant citations. I checked a few more recent books: Obodchuk (Four Knights Game, New in Chess 2011), Sakaev (The Petroff: an Expert Repertoire for Black, Chess Stars 2011) and Marin (Beating the Open Games, 2nd ed., Quality Chess 2008) fail to mention the gambit completely, while Lakdawala (The Four Knights: Move by Move, Everyman 2012) gives a weaker line for Black (White is at least equal) which is therefore irrelevant. Given that that's the state of affairs in the current literature, I don't think one can argue that the Halloween Gambit satisfies WP:SIGCOV, so we shouldn't have to have an entire article on it. I think my three sentences above ought to be sufficient. What do you guys think? Cobblet (talk) 04:08, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Put me down as a yes, definitely. It's a start in the right direction. I'd even consider paring things back even further. IMHO, a non-reference manual with limited expertise among its editorship should only aim to cover the initial moves of established, popular, named openings/variants, so that we can see the moves that characterize the (properly sourced) named variation. And go no further. Otherwise, we will constantly be challenged on quoted lines and whether they are currently the best. At present, I feel we are walking a dangerous line, which aims to give some guidance on what occurs next, when really a reference to a text that offers further information would be a much simpler, NPOV-guaranteed approach. That way, editors can simply change the cited 'recommended text' as new ones come along, rather than reviewing/updating any analysis. Brittle heaven (talk) 17:56, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

But wouldn't that plan differ little from the aim of the Simple English Wikipedia? Also, the devil's in the details ... e.g. Budapest Gambit, would you pare down the extensive coverage, and if so, how? Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 19:51, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

I can definitely see where Brittle heaven's coming from. So for the Halloween gambit we'd simply say something like 4.Nxe5 is the Halloween Gambit, which current theory regards as being dubious and give my two references, replacing them with new ones whenever the next repertoire book on 1.e4 e5 comes out. For a line as trivial as this (never played at GM level and whose evaluation is unlikely ever to change) such an approach also seems appropriate.

For me it comes down to what I feel is more likely to deter folks like Zimbeck from trying to add their analysis to Wikipedia. I think giving the two specific lines will slow them down (I'm quite confident he'll never find anything for White there) but I could be wrong. But even if Zimbeck discovered something in those two lines and tried to add his analysis, we should simply say, "Sorry, we cannot accept your additions because of WP:OR. Please consider publishing your analysis in New in Chess Yearbook or Chess Informant instead. Thank you :)"

As for the Budapest Gambit, I can definitely see places where coverage could be shortened. For example, in the Fajarowicz Gambit only 4.Nf3 (historically the most common move) and 4.a3 (the current refutation according to theory) deserve mention; 4.Qc2 does not. After 3...Ng4 4.Bf4 g5 only the most popular move 5.Bg3 should be given, since this is also theory's current recommendation. The entire paragraph Budapest Gambit#Line 4...Bc5 with a2–a3 could be excised since White rarely plays this way anymore. The coverage of Alekhine's 3...Ng4 4.e4 could be shortened to one or two paragraphs. And so on... that article's very well written, but unfortunately its sources are outdated, which is why it covers lines that theory no longer considers critical. Cobblet (talk) 22:29, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

It's a mistake to cover only current lines. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and historical coverage is one of its greatest potential benefits. If a line is out of fashion, the article should say so, and ideally explain why. That said, I don't think Budapest Gambit is a good example of what our chess opening articles should be. It's far too detailed, and this at least raises the appearance of WP:NOTHOWTO. (I say appearance, because you know that no Wikipedia article would be sufficient for preparation by a tournament player, but that's what it looks like to those not familiar with serious chess.) This also causes trouble because the evaluation of detailed lines changes too frequently, and I fear that some of the lines are just theoretical recommendations found in a single book and haven't been thoroughly tested at a master level. I think a higher level treatment such as that in Ruy Lopez or Slav Defense is better, but I'm not entirely objective about those pages because I worked on them. Quale (talk) 06:29, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Just one point: Budapest has "Good article" rating, one of 16 Good articles at ProjChess. (Wouldn't that be the time [i.e. WP:GAC] to correct or test such a criteria as "far too detailed"? And doesn't that show there's no agreed-upon standard or criteria re breadth & depth for openings articles yet? [I think so. But that issue is systemic: there are *very few* standards or criteria for anything chess-related; ProjChess seems to float without them. In 20 years, if WP survives, that will be totally different. {But I probably won't live to see it. I would like to see some presentation consistency during my lifetime, *sigh!*}]) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 09:23, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Lax standards for chess articles in general (particularly biographies) is why I stopped editing them years ago. But of course, if we want standards, we have to set them ourselves... Cobblet (talk) 09:49, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

OMG! (I've [finally] discovered someone who feels as I do! An absence of presentation standards has dragged down my motivation too. [Am not so active w/ BLPs, but am interested to know what standards you feel are most missing there; could you explain on my User talk perhaps? Thx.]) "We have to set them ourselves". Agreed. But it takes more than one or two people. And there hasn't been the appetite necessary for that kind of collaboration. (At least since my time on the WP, 3 years.) Sincere, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 10:16, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

I think even ECO does that type of thing. (E.g. Vol C Ed. 3 drops a lot of lines given in Ed. 2, but never failing to give the latest & greatest, in many openings I've looked up. It's a pain for *me* to have to keep both volumes and consult both books, but that's because I usually want thorough coverage when I'm looking up, which is probably a different objective than what is for the Wikipedia. But perhaps that objective for chess openings articles hasn't been defined specifically before, i.e., what is the target for depth and breadth of coverage? And wouldn't it require an individual or team to have *all* openings articles in their review lense, for comparative consistency re same? A big project. And currently without definition. A single article could stand up as a model, however. Budapest Gambit might be a good candidate for that model!?) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 20:05, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Good questions. I might make a separate thread on the subject since I'm planning to write the Modern Benoni article. Just to clarify though, are you OK with me deleting the Halloween Gambit page? Cobblet (talk) 22:29, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Um, not me. I've stayed out of content issues re Halloween (single exception adding the Schiller line). An opinion to delete in light of the recent eruption from the IP looks too much like selective treatment stemming from that eruption. I wouldn't be in favor of delete unless an equal standard were applied to other opening articles with similar issues, and those issues haven't been defined or reached consensus from what I can see, there is no standard in operation here so I don't see basis for acting on one which doesn't exist. However the issue and criteria are defined, there will probably be several articles, if not a lot, that meet said criteria, not just Halloween. I guess this discussion was not what I thought it was for, so I'm bowing out at this point and will leave to others. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 00:28, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Two good, contrasting examples there I would say. The Budapest Gambit article is very well constructed and perhaps doesn’t go too far overboard with any individual lines, but there are a lot of lines (i.e. the breadth of coverage is extensive, but not so much the depth). I think if the consensus was to remain informative to a point (e.g. a sample line, occasional pointers to positional and tactical aims/nuances etc.) then this is a pretty good model. Probably, my own preference to strip opening articles down to a lesser degree of detail would be difficult to achieve now that the horse has bolted – and in this instance, we’d upset at least three respected editors, even if trimming back were an easy task, which of course it’s not. So ... if for argument’s sake we decided that the Budapest Gambit is a good model, then we can probably agree that the Benoni Defense article is not. Taking for example the section on 'Old Benoni', we are told it is 1.d4 c5, but that it may transpose to a Czech Benoni (really? Why not to a Modern Benoni also? Or a Benko Gambit? Or a Blumenfeld Gambit? Or a Schmid Benoni? … etc.). But there are some independent variations (What are they then?). It was played in an old Alekhine game (why no details?). It’s also sometimes named after Blackburne, as he’s the first player known to have used it successfully (really? Must look at the in-line reference for that one – oh, it’s a link to Chessgames.com, where there is nothing to back up the statement and even if there was, it would be the word of a random kibitzer!). Clearly a lot of work needed there, just to make some sense of it, even more if you want to bring it up to a good standard. To return to the central point, I'd be interested to hear the views of others – mainly, whether they think the Budapest article is too extensive, about right, or otherwise? Brittle heaven (talk) 00:54, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

I'll just summarize my own opinion again: rather heavy emphasis on side variations and untested analysis which needs to be removed, but otherwise all right; main issue is outdated sources, not length. Cobblet (talk) 01:42, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

What an interestingly subjective discussion you guys are having. Did you even look at my analysis? Censoring is all this is ~ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.205.68.46 (talk) 04:57, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Also Cobblet, in response to the lines I could not have a response on, I have solved those lines eons ago. You say

"4.Nxe5?! is the Halloween Gambit. After 4...Nxe5 5.d4 Black retains the better chances by returning the piece with 5...Nc6 6.d5 Bb4! 7.dxc6 Nxe4 8.Qd4 Qe7 9.Be3 0-0 10.Bd3 Bxc3 11.bxc3 Bd6 12.cxb7 Bxb7 13.0-0 Rfe8 14.Rab1 Bc6 and "White has no compensation for his poor pawn structure" (Kaufman)." First of all, cxb7 is a mistake the move is my brilliant cxd7!! and then bxd7 Qe4!! QxQ BxQ Rb8 OOO and now whites active attack against the queenside pawns and his quickly activated king easily hold the balance Houdini give 0.00 on my supercomputer. Also the line 5...Ng6 6.e5 Ng8 7.Bc4 d5! 8.Bxd5 N8e7 9.Bg5 Qd7 and now Be4! Nf5 which is not even CLOSE to a clear advantage. White just plays Qd3 and the position is highly complex and dangerous. I have beaten houdini myself in blitz with this line. I will send you a free copy of my analysis if you would like to see all the lines. This would be on the article now if i was not being censored.166.205.68.46 (talk) 05:12, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Is there a typo somewhere in the 5...Nc6 line? (Because 11...Bd6 is given but not possible; and if that's a typo and 11...Nd6 was meant then 12.cxd7 Bxd7 13.Qe4 doesn't work due to 13...Nxe4 of course.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 05:46, 19 August 2013 (UTC) p.s. Are you making your own definition of supercomputer!?

That's interesting, User:166.205.68.46. That's also all original research, and Wikipedia explicitly doesn't publish that, as you're probably aware. Nobody's trying to "censor" you: if you're looking for a place to publish your own opening analysis, there are reputable opening publications such as the New In Chess Yearbook or Chess Informant who would no doubt be pleased to accept your work. And if you published there, and your lines held up to practical tests at the GM level, we'd gladly reconsider mentioning your lines.

And by the way, I did see your first line on your site, and while it probably is an improvement over Kaufman, it's also hardly what White would want out of the opening. Regarding your second line, beating Houdini in blitz is all well and good, but now you're basically telling me to trust your analysis with a supercomputer even though you're beating said supercomputer in blitz. It's a strange double standard you have, I must say. You have a 2300 USCF, don't you? Why don't you play, say, the American Open later this year, and publish a couple of annotated GM crushes in Chess Life? Cobblet (talk) 12:51, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Wish I could but I stopped competitive chess thats why my rating stopped going up. Also you are correct blitz or taking my word for it is not really relevant sorry about that. I already know that wikipedia does not accept original work. I did not understand wikipedia and was only upset that there was unsourced analysis there and krabbes website and then I was told my website was not a reliable source. At this point I dont care since I will never contribute to wikipedia anymore. I will probably have to publish it one day. Its sad that all my hard work on gambits just sits here collecting dust. Just understand Kaufman is only one GM there are others who are friends of mine who would not necessarily agree. Correspondence chess is held to a higher standard as well. I agree the endgame is not what white wants but all that matters is that he can hold it. The truth of the position is all that matters in theory. Also, the Qd7 lines in my analysis were also in the UCO pdf where wind analyses it. They had several moves after Nf5 and I believe Qd3 was also mentioned but no analysis given. I have a copy of the pdf which has disappeared from the internet. I can even host it on my site would that make it WP:RS? After all you guys had a link to the article. I was not mentioning any line that was not already there. That also got me annoyed that the article ignored the opinions of its own sources. Also it seemed to push POV on an unsourced line. The lines were in my free ebook one my blog which is all updated now for the Qd3 line. Interestingly the line I think is the strongest is my own little secret line which is c6 instead of Qd7(after Bg5) However, I have analysed those down to the endgames and was not able to crack whites position. Even c6 after bxd5 was really complex. Although after Be6 white has Bxe6 with a fortress that has fared out ok in computer test matches. More interesting was OO where black plays what I found to be best play from there Qd7 Ne4 OOO c3 Be7 Qe2 Nh6 and h3 where my analysis becomes a gruesome battle for the f-file. Its still unclear although black holds lots of promise in these lines. No refutation yet though. I think that POV exists even on the GM level. I personally avoid it until I know for certain. I said it was playable. I have no idea if its sound however I can guarantee it is not "refuted". My opinion is that it is sound on a human level. Humans will probably never be good enough at chess to play these lines correctly even if such a refutation existed since it exponentially gets more complicated every move. That is a mathematical fact. Just look at tablebases. Interestingly, my last couple tournaments was the North American Open. Both years I desperately tried to play the Halloween but nobody played e5. I kept getting c5 where I played the wing gambit. I did draw 3 GMs though and actually had a shot at first being up a pawn last round against FM Lee (a lucky pairing) but I just offered a draw to secure the U2300 since I knew nobody would catch me. A win would have tied for first with the GMs so in retrospect I probably should have just won my game. Now I think fishing pole might be something I have a better shot at getting. I found that to be playable and improved on every single Brian Wall line. I found refutations and refuted my own refutations. Also the PINSKI Qg7 line is not even clear albeit wild to play. I could not find a quick refutation though. For example, after Qd4 Qe7 Qxg7 I thought that Nxc3 Be3 Ne4 c3 Rf8 cb4 Qb4 Kd1 dc6 f3 Be6! wins. But I looked again and found that instead of f3 white has a3 trying to play Qd4 with a trade of queens where the ending is not totally out of resources for white to play for draws. More interestingly was the insane Ke2 after Qxb4+ where f6 is the best there Kf3! dc6 Rd1 Be6 Rd4 Ng5+ Kg3 Qa5 and Kh4!! with Be2 black finds it hard to castle and the white king will escape eventually. All my test games white survived although I would not recommend it. It just highlights how hard it is to beat any line. Funny thing is, on the page it says after Qxg7 Nc3 Be3 Nd5 which is not really that good for black. Because c3 Rf4 cb4 ne3 fe3 qb4 and kf2 where black has absolutely nothing. Also there is fe3 qe3 but now be2 and rd1 and again black is hard pressed to get castled or to win. Of course thats not really a big deal since we already know that white gets the ending in the main line after be3 OO bd3 nc3 bc3 bd6 cd7 bd7 qe4 qe4 rb8 ooo and again not only does whites attack on the queenside pawns and active king hold but I am pretty sure it makes the doubled pawns insignifigant. Besides he can even push c4 and c5. He will get his king out quickly with kb2. If there is a refutation its in the bowels of one of the main lines and I am sure only Caissa herself knows as of now.166.205.68.46 (talk) 16:04, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Also I am pretty sure you could just have noticed the typo. I meant nxc3 after bd3 Ihardlythinkso. Bd6 is possible it was on b4 and after bd3 he took on c3 with his knight and then retreated to d6 as was suggested earlier. Also I am not making my own definition of supercomputer there is no need to be rude. I am running a network with 16 processors so yeah its a supercomputer. Its called a cluster. I have houdini 3 and rybka although a majority of the work was done before those engines existed. Now the computer only aids in verifying and cleaning up the lines. 166.205.68.31 (talk) 17:51, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

For the record, the main line in Qd7 goes like this:

9. Bg5 Qd7 10. Be4 Nf5 11. Qd3 Nxd4 (11... h6 12.Be3 unclear (12. Bd2!?)) 12. O-O-O c5 (12... Bc5 13. Kb1!?) 13. f4! h6 (13... Rb8 14. Nd5 (14. Rhe1!?)) 14. e6 Nxe6 15. Qc4 Bd6 16. Nb5 Nd4 17.Rxd4 cxd4 18. Bf5 Qc6 19. Qxc6+ bxc6 20. Nxd6+ Kf8 21. Bxg6 Be6 22. Bxf7= My database contains much more in depth explanation. Houdini lost several games trying to play Rb8 where his position kept deteriorating. I have analysed it pretty deep so I am familiar with the tactics. Some people think the main line is better because Brause had trouble with Bb4 after Ng8. So that goes like this: Nxe5 Nxe5 d4 Ng6 e5 Ng8 Bc4 Bb4 Qf3 Bxc3+ bxc3 Qe7 h4!! This move is an improvement over O-O for its simplicity in getting equality. O-O and Qe3 etc were interesting but I was not able to decide on a concrete plan. So instead I mapped out h4! With some truly amazing lines. Its all on my site. Really, almost every single line in the Halloween that had trouble I saved. Another was Ne5 Ne5 d4 Nc6 d5 Ne5 f4 Ng6 e5 Ng8 and many people think white is winning after d6 but in reality, black has cxd6 exd6 Qf6 Nb5 Nxf4 where I was not able find much except for a few difficult endings for white. So I made two massive improvements. The first is after Qf6 Qe2+ Qe6 Nb5 and the endgame is ok for white. However my completely original line that I created deviates before that. So after e5 Ng8 you play Qe2! with some exceptional play in all lines. There was another line too that went Ne5 Ne5 d4 Ng6 e5 Ng8 Bc4 d6 Qf3 Qd7 O-O dxe5 dxe5 nxe5 and Qe3 forces a draw however white can also play Re1 Bd6 Bf4 f6 and I have a novelty here that gets white a massive attack instead of the main line where black had a better ending. My line went, Bb5 c6 rd1! Qc7 Qg3 and all hell breaks loose. I really could go on forever I know the lines by heart. 166.205.68.31 (talk) 19:19, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

ICC

The articles Peter Svidler and Levon Aronian (possibly along with others) mention the ICC accounts of these two players. Is it proper to include this type of information in such articles? Incidentally, the Svidler page also duplicates it in the "External links" section, for which it may be more suited. What do you think? Best, Toccata quarta (talk) 08:49, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Seems unencyclopedic to include it IMO (even in EL sec). I'm not sure the player would want the info avail to the entire English-speaking world either; just to those players on the playsite, perhaps. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 09:42, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Unnecessary, since chess players aren't gamers. If Aronian and Svidler played a blitz match on ICC, commentators and spectators would likely still refer to them by their real names, not by their handles. Plus, unlike many online games, multiple chess servers exist and many chess players have different handles on different servers. Delete. Cobblet (talk) 08:53, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

Merge?

I think List of The Master Game episodes should be merged into The Master Game. I don't have the time to pursue it though. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 19:48, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Not necessarily. If the article gets expanded later on it's probably better to have the list of episodes separated out. Cobblet (talk) 08:46, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

Rochelle Ballantyne

Rochelle Ballantyne says "...potential for being the world's first female African-American chess Master and grandmaster." That at least needs a reference. But also, does it violate wp:POV or wp:ball? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 20:12, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Send to WP:AfD - we can add her back when she becomes a GM. Are we seriously keeping articles for every chess prodigy in existence?... Cobblet (talk) 21:21, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

It definitely violates WP:BALL. Toccata quarta (talk) 13:15, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

I'll take that part out. Other changes or deletion may be needed. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 22:36, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Incidentally, she isn't a chess prodigy; at her current age, being under 2000 is nothing exceptional. The article on Peter Lalić (2000+) didn't get much love at AfD. Toccata quarta (talk) 03:08, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

Two new articles

• FIDE Online Arena - the service just started and there are no secondary sources. Does it need its own article?
• House of Staunton - there are some secondary sources about it that aren't referenced in the article. Does it meet wp:GNG? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 23:32, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

No and no. WP:SPIP. Cobblet (talk) 00:21, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

FIDE Online Arena the current article is inaccuarate and contains errors. There is only a test site until October; there are many more activities besides playing chess, there are no chess variants. I changed the article containing only information taken from the FIDE announcement, but this material was removed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.47.49.205 (talk) 18:12, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

FIDE Online Arena I would like to discuss this with the person who removed the text, so that a mutually satisfactory solution can be found. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.47.49.205 (talk) 18:18, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Bug In The Mobile Version of The Chess Diagram module

I've filed a bugreport here (as well as the proposed fix), but I'm not sure whether that was the right place to do it. If I was mistaken, please instruct me on how to file such bug reports.

--Exizt (talk) 13:14, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Chess traps and WP:GNG

Can anyone please explain how any of the traps in Category:Chess traps satisfy WP:GNG and merit their own article? My opinion is that they should all be merged into List of chess traps, with some general references given. I'll do it next weekend if nobody has an opinion on the issue. Cobblet (talk) 21:17, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Noah's Ark Trap and Tarrasch Trap don't meet WP:GNG? You have a very different understanding of the guideline than I do. What problem are you trying to solve? Quale (talk) 23:47, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

The problem I see is that judging from our present standards (i.e. no standards at all), all the traps listed in Giddins's 101 Chess Opening Traps (Gambit, 1998) could potentially have their own article. Or even all the traps in Mueller and Knaak's 1000 Opening Traps. Who here has actually heard of the Vienna Game, Würzburger Trap? Or the Ruy Lopez, Marshall Attack, Rombaua Trap? I agree that the two you listed are somewhat more notable than the rest, but I would argue that neither have received "more than a trivial mention." I don't see why they need to be separated from, say, an article on the Open Spanish or the Deferred Steinitz (both of which would definitely merit a stand-alone article, IMO). Cobblet (talk) 00:30, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

To illustrate my point, compare Budapest Gambit#Kieninger trap with Budapest Gambit, Kieninger Trap. Right now the two are practically identical in content—only the latter reads more like a game guide. I frankly don't see what we'd lose by deleting the latter article right now. Does anyone foresee how an encyclopedic discussion of this trap could be expanded to the point where keeping it as a section within Budapest Gambit would no longer be appropriate? Cobblet (talk) 06:55, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

To speak to your first points, all the traps in that book probably do not warrant separate articles because they fail WP:GNG for lack of non-trivial coverage. For one thing, all the traps in Category:Chess traps have names. The number of named chess traps is quite modest, and I suspect that most of Gidding's traps do not have names. (I don't have Gidding's book, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about this point). In my opinion you have an exaggerated sense of danger here. Category:Chess traps has existed since 2005, and eight years later it has no where near 101 pages in it. In fact there are 16 traps in the category, with only one page, the Rombaua Trap, added since 2009. At the current rate of growth it will take over 20 years for the category to reach 100 pages. The Rombaua Trap page may certainly need attention or possibly deletion, but that can be managed on that page itself. Again, what is the problem you are trying to solve?

• You are correct—in fact I believe none of the traps in Giddins's book have names. However, I see no reason why a trap, or any opening line for that matter, must have a name in order to satisfy WP:GNG. We have Sicilian Defence, Dragon Variation, Yugoslav Attack, 9.Bc4 for example, which satisfies WP:GNG in spades. I'll address your comments in full below. Cobblet (talk) 06:18, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

The Noah's Ark and Tarrasch Traps are extremely well known in the chess world, and since you surely know that I find your grudging admission that they are "somewhat more famous" to be disappointing. Frankly qualifying that statement with "somewhat" simply seems not forthcoming. They aren't the only well-known traps, as the Lasker, Rubinstein, Kieninger, and Elephant traps are also quite famous, although the names aren't familiar to everyone. I'm surprised that you say that the Noah's Ark and Tarrasch traps have only trivial coverage, but I guess that's just an honest difference in judgment.

• I don't dispute that the Noah's Ark Trap is well known. I would dispute that either Tarrasch Trap is well known—I've read that article multiple times over the years, precisely because I keep forgetting what they are. I have a friend (master-strength, no less) who told me he once did the same. I searched on Google Books and did find a lot of old books that mention the Tarrasch Trap by name, so I trust your assessment. Please excuse my lack of a proper education in the classics :-) That the other traps you mentioned are famous despite very few people knowing their names—I can find you many books that give the "Elephant Trap" without supplying the name, for instance; and I caught someone in the Rubinstein Trap in a tournament game years ago, showed the game to many friends, and nobody has ever said to me "Ah, that's the Rubinstein trap! What do you mean, you've never heard it called that way?"—reinforces the notion that traps need not have names in order to be notable. "More than a trivial mention" is the key to satisfying WP:N, IMO. Cobblet (talk) 06:18, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

It's good that you suggest that Tarrasch Trap would have to be merged to a spun-off page rather than to Ruy Lopez, as merging to the latter would be unworkable. I think splitting the Ruy Lopez page would be an excellent idea for reasons not connected with chess opening traps, as the page is rather unwieldy now. Unfortunately Ruy Lopez, Open Defense wouldn't be enough on its own, as the pieces that are left would still leave the main page unwieldy. (It's still worth doing, of course, even if it doesn't fix every ill of the parent page.) I worked on the Ruy Lopez page but could not think of a good solution. If you have ideas how to make this work better, I encourage it. All the same, you are suggesting merging to two pages that don't exist (there are two Tarrasch Traps, and only one is in the Open Defense). Create those pages first and then we can discuss whether the merge is a good idea.

• Sorry, I said the Deferred Steinitz when I meant the Old Steinitz. In any case, you've convinced me to change my mind on that particular article. Cobblet (talk) 06:18, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

As far as the Wurzburger trap goes, anyone who has read The Oxford Companion to Chess might have heard about it, as it's on page 451 of the 2nd edition. The Oxford Companion isn't a specialist work on chess traps or even on chess openings, but a general encyclopedia on chess. I'm sure Hooper and Whyld would have preferred to have had unlimited space for their encyclopedia, but that's a perk afforded Wikipedia that a dead tree publication in 1992 did not have. Few chess traps are mentioned in the limited space available in the book (less than 500 pages), suggesting that the traps selected for the work are notable. In general I would say that nearly everything in the Oxford Companion is worthy of coverage in Wikipedia, with the exception of some obscure names for opening variations found in the appendix. Most of the entries in the text itself (not the appendix) deserve articles on their own. The primary exceptions are again minor opening variations. For example, the Charousek Gambit should definitely be mentioned at Rudolf Charousek and might be mentioned at Falkbeer Countergambit if it is thought important enough in that context, but it doesn't merit a page of its own because Oxford merely defines it without saying anything else about it.

• Those of you who are following this discussion and know of the Würzburger Trap because you've happened to read the Oxford Companion or a very old edition of MCO from cover to cover, please feel free to poke fun at my ignorance :-) For the rest of us, here's the actual entry:

  Würzburger Trap, 628 in the Vienna Gambit, named around 1930 after the Berlin banker Max Würzburger, who spent much of the 1930s in Paris. Black's bishop on c2 is trapped (5...Qh4+ is probably an error).

  To me, this is exactly the sort of "trivial mention" WP:N is talking about. No mention of who he played it against or if he even played it at all—did Würzburger even play chess? Nor are we given a source that might answer such questions. Predictably, googling "Würzburger Trap" only turns up sites that quote the Companion essentially verbatim. Likewise, a search on Edward Winter's site turns up nothing. While I don't doubt much of the content in the Companion merits coverage on Wikipedia, I'd also assert that many entries, particularly minnows like this one, definitely don't deserve stand-alone articles. Cobblet (talk) 06:18, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

As for your second points, the standalone Kieninger Trap article certainly isn't essential, but it has some practical advantages. For one, it affords greater space to explain what's happening. I'm afraid that I'm boggled that you consider this "game guide" like material, as it is a simple explanation of what's going on and why. To use your logic no Wikipedia chess page should ever explain why any move is made or not made, as that makes the page a "game guide". Instead we can just list reams of variations without giving the non-chess specialist reader any help to understand what's going on at all. The only difference between this explanation and the overwhelming detail of much of the Budapest Gambit page is that a beginner or non-specialist would have some hope to follow what's going on in the standalone page. The second advantage of a standalone page is that it is easier to put in a category. There is a pretty good alternative, however, which is to create a redirect and then put the redirect in the category. If all the pages in the category were deleted we could simply rely on List of chess traps instead. Although there are advantages to categories and lists, it is not essential to have both. Quale (talk) 02:14, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your detailed reply. In light of your comments I've taken a more careful look at Category:Chess traps. I believe Italian Game, Blackburne Shilling Gambit; Légal Trap; and Ruy Lopez, Tarrasch Trap would likely satisfy WP:N and can stay. The others should either be merged into List of chess traps or the article of their parent opening, because most of these list the Companion or a similar reference book as the lone reference. My problem is that IMO, this is not "significant coverage" per WP:N; and if it is, there are likely hundreds of traps that also meet WP:N.

After all, there are dozens of books on chess traps. Most of these books cover at least a hundred traps—some cover many more than that. They're not dry lists either—each trap gets some sort of explanation/analysis. If a short entry from the Companion like the one I quoted above counts as "more than a trivial mention", surely the type of coverage in these books also counts as "significant." Plus, it's hardly uncommon for one trap to be covered in several of these books. It follows, then, that there are likely hundreds of traps that receive "significant coverage" from multiple independent, reliable sources, easily satisfying WP:GNG. I think this is absurd: a lone entry in the Companion does not automatically make any chess topic notable enough to deserve its own article. So most of the articles in Category:Chess traps should be merged.

Why do I care so much about merging these articles? Because there are other opening articles like Greco Defence; Giuoco Piano, Jerome Gambit; Irish Gambit; and Four Knights Game, Halloween Gambit; that fail to satisfy WP:N, for exactly the same reason: a lack of "significant coverage", IMO, and I'd like to merge them into Open Game or Italian Game or Four Knights Game at some point. If there are people here who'd like to have a discussion on what exactly ought to constitute "significant coverage" for a chess opening, I'd be happy to get into that in a separate topic. Let me make it clear once again that my intention isn't to delete content, it's to make sure only openings satisfying WP:N get their own article.

WRT Budapest Gambit, Kieninger Trap, I'm afraid you've completely misconstrued my meaning, so I'll try to clarify what I meant to say. My only specific complaint about that article would be the line "note that Black's queen pins White's e-pawn against its king, so 9.exd3 is illegal since it would put White's king in check" which IMO is definitely instruction, not information. Hence my saying it reads more like a game guide. My general complaint about that article, and the reason why I'd like to see it merged, is that virtually everything else in the article is also covered under Budapest Gambit#Kieninger trap and Budapest Gambit#On the way till 10...d6, and in a tone more appropriate for an encyclopedia, to boot. I see no need for "greater space to explain what's happening", as you put it: it's already all there. I think we could treat most of the other opening traps in a similar fashion, and leave the ones that aren't amenable to such treatment in List of chess traps.

WRT your last point: we could also mention the Kieninger trap and other such articles in List of chess traps and link from there to Budapest Gambit#Kieninger trap, for example. Cobblet (talk) 06:18, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

I've only just started poking around the chess articles, but it does seem like it would be useful for this WikiProject to put forth its own notability criteria for openings in general (not just traps). I feel ill-equipped to take a stab at it myself; would either of you be up for coming up with a draft that could then be applied to all the articles rather than this seemingly difficult back-and-forth referencing individual examples. If what I'm suggesting has already been tried, I apologize; I didn't dig through the talk page archives here. --Rhododendrites (talk) 06:48, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Sorry about the long delay replying to you—I haven't had much time for Wikipedia in the last few days, but also I hoped that this discussion would attract other comment. It's unlikely that we will agree on the core issue, so the opinion of a few other people will probably be necessary to give this a definite resolution. You aren't alone in suggesting that the chess trap articles should be merged or deleted, so there are other editors who agree with you even if they haven't spoken up here. (If you look in the talk page archives I think you will find at least one prior discussion about this. I advocated keeping the articles just as I have here, but there was no strong consensus developed either way.) I won't reply to everything you wrote because my initial points still stand, but I do have just a few more things to say.

You miss the point when you compare inclusion in a book on chess traps to a short entry in the Oxford Companion. No matter how extensive the analysis in a specialist work, inclusion in the Companion is a much stronger indication of notability by the nature of the editorial process used to select the items for a general reference. The specialist works will be much more all inclusive, while in contrast the printed general reference will be much more selective. The Companion includes the topics that Hooper & Whyld thought most important to provide an overview of chess. Books by Giddings and Chernev and others include all the chess traps they could find to fill a book.

References are thin for many of the articles, although I think most of that can be remedied. (To be fair, my "horrible outcomes haven't been demonstrated in the eight years that we've had these articles" can certainly be turned around here. Since they've been here for eight years, why aren't they better cited?) Two pages with more than the Companion as a reference are Magnus Smith Trap (an interesting note from My 60 Memorable Games, although here it's fair to point out that Fischer doesn't refer to it as the Magnus Smith and there's no reason to believe that he would have recognized that name) and Siberian Trap (where again the name is a possible issue, although Burgess does use it).

Concerns about a single sentence in an article (your complaint about Kieninger Trap) are generally best handled just by just editing the article. That doesn't require achieving consensus about an entire category. It might still be good to merge the page, but you can fix that problem right now. (I don't necessarily agree that it is a problem in this case, but I haven't given it much thought.)

I appreciate both your chess knowledge and enthusiasm for improving chess coverage in Wikipedia, and your willingness to take on difficult tasks. While I agree that bad content should be removed (Kingston Defence was a success in that area), my opinion is that at this time we can make the greatest improvement to chess coverage in Wikipedia by adding more good content (or even great content, if we can manage it), rather than removing what we have. I'm a little surprised that you are directing your energies to removing or merging articles, rather than improving them or creating new ones. (I think you have some good chess knowledge to share with Wikipedia, and I would think that you would want to add that new content rather than just rearranging what other editors have written. I haven't added much new of value in years, but others have done a lot more.) Along those lines I also don't agree that merging irregular chess opening pages is a good idea. That's a whole other long discussion we can have if you like, but in addition to the same sort of arguments I've made here there is the limited number of irregular openings (only 13, and until the rules of chess are changed so that White has more than 20 possible opening moves there won't ever be any more) and the fact that the openings don't share any useful context other than the fact that they are rarely played chess openings. You don't learn anything more about 1.h3 to have 1.Nh3 discussed on the same page. I'm afraid that all this seems to me to be not helpful to make Wikipedia better. Nothing is stopping you from creating a great page on the Open Defense to the Ruy right now without having to merge anything at all. Quale (talk) 00:16, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Five years ago, I rewrote our articles on the Sicilian, Nimzo and French. Reorganized that Ruy Lopez article you keep bringing up, as well—if you don't like it the way it is now, you should've seen the mess it was in before. I'm working on something in my sandbox right now—it isn't quite ready yet, but almost. Saying that I'm "directing my energies to removing or merging articles, rather than improving them or creating new ones" is a little unfair.

One of the reasons I stopped in the first place was this question: what is the point of me trying to write a well-balanced article on the French when we allow entire articles on 1.e4 e6 2.d4 f5 to stand? For me at least, it's been very encouraging that that article was finally deleted earlier this year. But this is the real reason why I brought up the chess traps: if you allow entire articles on trivial opening lines to stand (and that's what most opening traps are), there's no point in anybody trying to write a balanced article on an opening that's actually important, because clearly any trivial line that's ever been played (or even just analyzed—see the ongoing discussion on the Halloween Gambit) is going to have to be included in the discussion. User:Rhododendrites's unhappy with me deleting a cited mention of the Katalymov Variation (1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 dxe4 4.Nxe4 Qd5) of the Rubinstein French, for example, even though it's played thirty and fifteen times less frequently than the two moves that are covered in the article, and there are two other moves in that position after White's fourth move (five and two times more frequently played than 4...Qd5, respectively) that aren't mentioned either, and rightly so. If we had a separate article on the Rubinstein possibly all five moves could be pointed out: but there's no way a general overview of the French should have to.

To say there are a "limited number of irregular openings" is a fallacy. How are all twenty of White's opening moves any more noteworthy than Black's twenty legal responses to 1.e4 or 1.d4? (Since White usually plays both d4 and e4 against something like 1...Na6, they really just transpose.) Should we have articles on all of them as well? (I'm rather surprised we don't, but I'm definitely not going to complain.) It's amusing you should mention 1.h3 as an example of an opening you can't learn more about by discussing a different opening move on the same page, because that was actually Basman's tongue-in-cheek "improvement" over 1.g4. That would be a logical merge, IMO. And it would be also be logical to have an article on irregular chess opening that talks about why moves like 1.Nh3 and 1.a4 are rare, but that doesn't change my opinion that neither move deserves an article on its own. There's virtually nothing to learn about 1.Nh3 in the first place—the essence of non-notability, isn't it?

Of course, I'm sure some crackpot has published a pamphlet on 1.Nh3 at some point (I suspect it's happened more than once, actually), but it doesn't make any sense to me that we have an article on that but not the Soltis Variation in the Yugoslav Dragon (1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 g6 6.Be3 Bg7 7.f3 0-0 8.Qd2 Nc6 9.Bc4 Bd7 10.0-0-0 Rc8 11.Bb3 Ne5 12.h4 h5), which has not only been played nearly a thousand times at master level but even had a 240-page book written on it—and that was almost 20 years ago: if Mayer rewrote that book today it might be double in size.

By the way, I wouldn't put nearly as much faith into Hooper and Whyld's judgment as you do. I was trying find out more on Kaarle Ojanen for the article I'm working on, but they don't have an entry for him. Instead of learning about someone who became an IM in 1952 (making him one of the very first players to earn that title) and a correspondence IM later as well, we get to learn about a banker from Berlin who may or may not have played chess. Wunderbar, ja! Cobblet (talk) 13:57, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

To be clear, Talk:French_Defence#.22Non-notable.22_lines my comment on the French Defence page was not a complaint at what you had removed but a question of what the standards are, because I didn't see consistency outside subjective judgment. The more I read on this page, I see that there's a lot of thought that has gone into such decisions, but it's still not clear what an agreeable standard would be (as you point out). I still think trying to delineate a notability criteria specific to this wikiproject would be productive -- and if consensus can be reached here, project-endorsed notability guidelines tend to hold considerable weight when it comes to editing/deletion discussions. --Rhododendrites (talk) 16:43, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Regarding the Ruy article, I consider myself mostly responsible for the current state of that page, both the good and the bad. (There is plenty of bad, especially the lack of inline cites, but I didn't know any better in 2005.) Before I worked on it it looked like this on 14 July 2005. There are a few other edits mixed in, but the 31 October 2005 version represents mostly my updates, and the article organization today is hardly changed from that eight-year-old page. Your 26 February 2006 edit was a much needed and appreciated improvement, but I see it as incremental rather than radical.

Since an irregular opening is a rare or unusual initial move by White, by definition there can be at most 19 of them (20 − 1, although in fact there are 13). There are a large number of irregular defenses, but any of those that is significant can be covered as a variation in the page on the main opening. Not coincidentally, that is the general practice we follow today. There are some exceptions, such as Ruy Lopez, Hopkins Gambit, but the fact that that page should be deleted has nothing to do with the existence of thirteen articles on irregular opening moves. As suggested earlier by either Bubba73 or Brittle heaven, the proximate blame for insertion of insignificant and bad chess opening variations or creation of entire articles on the same is poor citing practices in our chess opening articles. As demonstrated by my 2005 and 2006 work on Ruy Lopez I'm certainly as much to blame for this as anyone, but the solution to the problem is to improve citation in our chess opening articles and ruthlessly weed out uncited and poorly cited material on crap variations. This is much easier to do in a well-cited page such as Modern Benoni.

1.Nh3 is not like an irregular defense because it is not a variation of any other opening. Putting it at irregular chess opening is not useful because that page provides no useful context. As I said before, discussing 1.h3 and 1.Nh3 on the same page is of no benefit to the reader because they don't share anything other than being rare and weak ways to open a game. You aren't the first person to suggest merging these articles, but it isn't a very good idea because it provides no benefit and actually makes some things worse. For example, it's easier to include a diagram in an individual article than to put 13 diagrams in irregular chess opening. Some people really seem to break out in hives at the sight of any short article, and immediately insist on merging it into something else. I do not understand this. Some articles are going to be short and should be short. Look at a paper encyclopedia some time for examples. Perhaps some of the problem is that you seem to view chess only through the lens of a pragmatic tournament player, when the world of chess encompasses a lot more. Not everything of interest or value in the world of chess is found in an opening repertoire book by Gambit or NIC.

All of White's 20 ways to open a game deserve an article because they are significant in being the only opening moves to a chess game. Because of this, they all also have fairly widely known names, which is not only an indication of their significance but as a practical matter gives us something to use as a page title. All of Black's 20 responses aren't significant enough to warrant individual articles because those that are not recognized as a major defense are either completely insignificant or can be discussed in the article on the White opening. They are also not significant because there are 400 possible positions after Black's first move, and not coincidentally most of them do not have widely known names. As a general rule, classifying something into 20 slots with widely known names is more significant than making 400 distinctions, most of them with no agreed upon names. (This is so obvious that I shouldn't have to point it out, and I really don't understand why you continue to make the argument that Black's 400 defenses have the same status as White's 20 opening moves.) In fact we don't have and never have had articles on 400 insignificant chess openings. But you continue to insist we must take action because terrible things could happen, even though those terrible things simply haven't ever happened even after a decade.

Regarding your article contributions, I value them a great deal. My actual concern is your repeated "I quit working on chess articles because I was offended by the existence of some articles that I think should be merged or deleted", and "I won't improve any chess opening articles until my demands are met to merge or delete these articles I don't like". If you think the Soltis Variation deserves an article, you should start it. (As should anyone else, of course.) I really really really don't understand how the existence of Mieses Opening or Tarrasch Trap makes your task impossible or even harder, but you won't stop complaining about it. It's your seeming insistence on so many preconditions and that everything be your way before you will contribute that I find disappointing. And I find this disappointing only because you really know chess and you have contributed and can contribute a lot, and I would be happy to have Wikipedia benefit from your work. Now you've demonstrated your talents with the really nice Modern Benoni article, and we are richer for it.

When you attack the Oxford Companion for not having an article on an IM and Finnish champion, well that's really weak sauce and sounds desperate. You can do better than that. I've already written more about this than I should have, as the more I write the less likely other people are likely to contribute their ideas. Unfortunately I wrote enough in this thread to inflict tldr; on most editors long ago. Also at this point it's probably clear that I'm finding continued repetition of the same points to be likely to just make me write even crankier things. I don't want to do that, because I respect your opinions even when I don't agree with them and I don't want to get so pissy as to suggest otherwise. In this case I think that some of your arguments have merit, although I don't agree for the reasons I've given. I should just leave it at that. I like your work, and I don't want to do anything to discourage you to contribute. Quale (talk) 07:07, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Chess variant game names

The current state on WP is that chess variant game names with word "chess" in them have that word predominantly lower-case, but editor User:Samboy has quoted MOS here saying this is not correct, so I'm taking the opportunity to request discussion and try to get to a resolution of it. (If upper-case is correct, it will affect many variant article names, plus all the intra-article text that refers to game names.) There is quite an inconsistency on WP regarding this, I guess my intent is to improve that. Not really sure about discussion here, or at Talk:MOS, I've opened the latter here: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Board game names. Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 05:32, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

Games are invented or created, not composed. See the first sentence of Capablanca chess or any other chess variant. So that section of the MOS does not apply and the word "chess" in variant names should remain uncapitalized. Cobblet (talk) 08:39, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

I know games are "inventions", but Samboy by his edit and comments feels the MOS, which uses "composition", covers inventions. I agree "compositions" is an odd word to use if it covers inventions, but I'm not sure Samboy is hands-down wrong, since 1) the language in the MOS might be unintended semantic omission (i.e. was poorly written but intended to cover games), and 2) there is apparently is no positive MOS specific to titles for games. I'd like 100% confidence upper or lower case "chess" before asking for a MOS change to include that specificity. Samboy further feels WP should reflect how inventors refer to their games, e.g. Omega Chess, and Freeling refers to Grand chess as "Grand Chess" as Samboy has pointed out. (Do you think that's right? When is capitalization of "Chess" correct in the name for WP, never? If that is what you think, what is reason? Is your reason because lower-case is the default if no specific MOS title guideline exists? Or what reason.) Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 11:35, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

I was only addressing the original issue at hand (Samboy's assertion that games are compositions.) See my comments below. Cobblet (talk) 20:56, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

I think this issue is more complex that first appears too. For example, "FRC" stands for "Fischer Random Chess". In Gligoric's 2002 book, he repeatedly refers to the game name as "Fischerandom Chess". Do you think WP should instead present those names "Fischer random chess" and "Fischerandom chess"? Ihardlythinkso (talk) 11:41, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

Let's follow Gligoric's lead. Of course, since this is a non-standard name for Chess960, use of the term should be avoided as much as possible. Cobblet (talk) 20:56, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

Please check out Samboy's revert of my changes here. (I invited him to discuss on Talk:Capablanca chess and at his User talk, but he is semi-retired and apparently does not want to be on WP if he can help it, until 2014 judging by his recent edit sums. He opened a thread at Talk:Capablanca chess#WP:MOS and Titles where he left his argument, but it looks so far like he isn't discussing it because he already made clear in edit sums he felt inconvenienced by coming back on the WP to correct my changes, writing "Ugh", etc.) I'd like to get to a definitive answer if he is right or not. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 11:57, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

And what if sources disagree with lower-case? Take for example Alice chess. The game is represented "Alice Chess" in 1) The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants (Pritchard), 2) The Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants (Pritchard, Ed. Beasley), 3) Popular Chess Variants (Pritchard), 4) New Rules for Classic Games (Schmittberger), and 5) Variant Chess article by George Jelliss here. (Not just the article titles but in the body of each of those sources; not at beginning of sentences but in mid-sentences.) So, the WP article is currently going its own way by lower-case, but is that right? - since it isn't consistent at all with the sources on that game. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 12:18, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

Per the third sentence in Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters, we should follow the most common capitalization style used in secondary sources, which may be different from the inventor's preference. If there are few or no sources that use "Alice chess" then we shouldn't use it either. Cobblet (talk) 20:56, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

The logic here is confusing. For example, if the guide is "what's in sources", then why is MOS specifying how to title compositions? (Why don't they just use what is in sources?) Also, some chess variant articles have limited sources, maybe even only one, slim pickings is the nature of the beast with chess variants, so there won't be a pattern to draw on, so it seems there should be a MOS-like standard as they have for compositions, re what is right or desired grammatically. (So that is what am trying to resolve. There doesn't seem to be a clear basis to know what is correct or not, and I'd like to get to definitive answer. Otherwise if one editor reverts another, a complex discussion ensues, like this one, and it shouldn't be as complex as that since the issue may repeat through hundreds of WP articles and texts.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 23:22, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

That's what the fourth sentence of Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters is there for. The three sentences preceding it apply to most cases, including this one. If there are "slim pickings" for secondary sources then it should be asked whether the article satisfies WP:V at all. Cobblet (talk) 00:44, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

I can count to four, but I don't see what fourth sentence you are talking about, can you specify it here, and also how it applies to what I asked? (Thanks.) Regarding "it should be asked whether the article satisfies WP:V at all", that question has been asked and already satisfied as far as I'm concerned, but that's a different issue really. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 01:57, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't know why I'm being so obscure. "There are exceptions for specific cases discussed hereafter" is the line I was referring to. So if chess variants aren't compositions (to make an analogy, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is a composition, but the electric guitar is an invention) then only the first paragraph applies - follow whatever convention already exists among the sources. Cobblet (talk) 02:04, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

So are you saying if there is only one source for a given chess variant, WP should cap or not cap based on that source? Also the question I asked above ... why does the MOS find it necessary to elaborate about composition titles, why doesn't MOS simply defer to the first three sentences you pointed out? Last, it's clear User:Samboy disagrees about games not falling under compositions. I can see how there might be disagreement about that, as game inventions and the compositions named at the MOS do share creative process, and game inventions are even considered "artwork" in patent vernacular, so there is some semantic confusion admissable here and that is why I've asked for definitive answer at the MOS thread. (I would have been satisfied to see you & User:Samboy reach a consensus thru discussion, but he doesn't appear willing to discuss his edit changes.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 02:39, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Because the titles of books (chess books, even) and other works are often published in all-upper or all-lower case, so we need a convention to adhere to. Are game inventions really considered artwork by the USPTO? That's interesting to know. Still, I don't see how anyone could argue that chess variants are "compositions" if not a single article of ours describes a chess variant as having been "composed". Have you found a counterexample? Cobblet (talk) 02:50, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Also, what if there *are* multiple WP:RSs for a variant, but the sources are inconsistent in how they express the game name -- what then? (There should be a guide, rather than a "negative guide" like "since MOS has nothing specific about it, we shouldn't capitalize" when I don't know if that is a fair conclusion, unless there is something already in the MOS like that which I'm unware, that says what the default form should be when not specifically covered by any MOS.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 00:05, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Per my comment above, the MOS is very specific about what to do in situations it doesn't explicitly cover. And I'd interpret that third sentence to mean that if a phrase is not consistently capitalized by outside sources, it should not be treated as a proper name by Wikipedia. Cobblet (talk) 00:44, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

OK, I see that now. I agree with the your contrapositive interpretation too (that if it *isn't* consistently cap'd in sources, etc.). That still seems to leave it up to a judgment call however, if "consistently" doesn't necessarily mean 100 percent. (Does it to you?) Say I have 5 sources and 4 have it cap'd and 1 doens't, is it being "consistently" cap'd in those sources? (If you don't think 100% is required, and 4 vs 1 is enough, then what if there are 4 sources and 3 cap it and 1 does not? Or if you say 4 vs 1 is not enough, what if there are 6 sources and 5 cap it and 1 does not?) The word "consistently" isn't qualified or quantified for us so in the end it's subjective. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 02:17, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

In the end, every aspect of writing a Wikipedia article is a judgment call to some extent—otherwise we wouldn't need human editors at all. If I were the one examining the sources I'd be taking their quality into consideration as well, for example. Since I'm sure we've lost everyone by now, I'm going to stop. Cobblet (talk) 02:39, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Here is another view of this: Pritchard's The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants and The Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants are in most cases the best WP:RS for chess variants, and there are 1,450 of them in ECV, and more in CECV. The "chess" is capitalized in all the variant game names that have the word "chess" in them. OK. (What does this mean? It means that Pritchard decided game names are in cap's, including word "chess" if that word occurs in the game name. [What else would it mean if not that?]) Let's say a new game almost made the CECV before publication, but didn't get there in time, but was published somewhere else instead. Had it made the CECV, it would have been a cap'd name. But it was published somewhere else, and perhaps "chess" wasn't cap'd there. And now the latter is the only source. And let's say we have hundreds of chess variant articles on WP and all names are cap'ing "chess" ala the Pritchard sources.

I guess my point is, Pritchard cap'd "chess" in variant game names, based on idea that game names are proper nouns, and, if WP is going to take on standard different from that (i.e. "what's in reliable sources"), then we are set up to have a real inconsistent-looking mess, and over what? Over lack of a standard like Pritchard imposed. We shouldn't do that, IMO. MOS should have the balls to declare "game names are proper nouns". I think that is why User:Samboy drew off that part of the MOS that he did. The only alternative is a mess, and Pritchard wisely decided for his books, not to allow such a mess. The WP encyclopedia is a big "book". There should be an equal consistency vis a vis game names. (And why again, does MOS have a specific section on "compositions"? If I would take a guess about why, I would say they do that to circumvent the situation, that some reliable sources misprint the name of compositions, using lower-case, and MOS does not want that junk to appear in the WP, so circumvents it by providing a specific section about compositions that overrides the "what is in sources" in the first three sentences you pointed out. So likewise, I have described why we need the same thing for game names, to protect consistency in the event some post-ECV/CECV variant reliable publishers do the wrong thing and "consistently" print the proper noun names in lower case. (Your argument is to include that in the WP if they do; my argument is that leads to a mess, and the compositions MOS section probably is there because the MOS writers thought the same thing vis a vis composition titles [i.e. how to protect against a mess].) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 03:27, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

On that basis I'd like to ask the MOS people to specifically mention "game inventions" in the compositions section as being inclusive. (Creating a whole new section seems unnecessary to me, but that would be second choice.) Does anyone disagree? Thanks for input. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 03:39, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Sure. I guess this would apply to video games as well. Cobblet (talk) 04:10, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I think so (I guess so) ... and table games, card games, dice games, tile games ... where there's an identifiable inventor. (Outside board games isn't my niche, so am somewhat uncomfortable generalizing. Maybe the MOS people can help w/ that!? Me thinks video games are likely commercialized so there's intellectual property stuff going on and cap'ing is always good due to proper noun etc., but I don't pretend the issue is all straightforward and walk in the park. [For example what about chess variants or games that don't have identifiable inventors, for example Pritchard says "Bughouse Chess" is an existing synonym for Bughouse, or games Fanorona or Senet -- are those unknown-inventor game names cap'd when in mid-sentence because they are titles and proper nouns?! I really do not intend to go there ... I think it's an interesting Q but would just complicate things; I'll just stick to board and possibly other-type games having identifiable inventors.]) Any further inputs are appreciated of course. Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 08:04, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

If you are hoping that the "MOS people can help", I fear you will be disappointed. They will be more than happy to dictate, but I don't always consider that to be helpful. I would like to follow our best sources (in the judgment of those like you who have some knowledge of chess variants), but that's not how the MOS people operate as they are completely unconcerned with real-world practices. If you don't care which way it goes and just want a standard to follow, then WT:MOS may be fruitful. Quale (talk) 02:27, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Zeman Attack

A new article, Zeman Attack, has no references except a link to a website. I think it should be deleted. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 15:20, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Yup, looks like someone's trying to be complete with the queen moves, even the non-notable ones. Qg4 (attacking g7) is anyway rather pointless UNTIL g7 becomes undefended (e.g. 1.e4 e5 2.Bc4 Bc5 3.Qg4) Double sharp (talk) 16:49, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Shall we PROD it? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 17:09, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Well, it is gone now. I didn't get around to PRODing it. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 17:44, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Jack Collins

There are articles Jack Collins (chess player) and John W. Collins - we don't need both. The first article is a new one and it is flagged as a possible copyright violation. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 02:09, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

The first one was deleted and made a redirect. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 14:18, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Nelson Mariano III

I'm pretty sure this article doesn't meet WP:GNG. Toccata quarta (talk) 05:44, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

And on a related note, Nelson Mariano II needs a lot of cleanup. Toccata quarta (talk) 06:15, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Done some editing on the article and put in my sandbox in case of deletion. Allenjambalaya (talk) 15:03, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Modern Benoni

I'm pleased to say that almost five years after User:Hushpuckena requested it on the main page, an article on the Modern Benoni has finally been created. My goal is to send it to WP:GAN, so I would appreciate any help in polishing up the article. Cobblet (talk) 07:54, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Great stuff. I've put a few brief comments on the Modern Benoni talk page, based on a quick read through. Brittle heaven (talk) 12:53, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Or, or, or...

Does anyone consider the "or or or" format of the article World Chess Championship 2014 proper? I can't help but feel that it violates WP:BALL and WP:NOTNEWS. It's comparable to the live ratings insanity on the Carlsen page a few months back. Toccata quarta (talk) 04:26, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

The finalists at the World Cup will be known in a couple of days, so that'll sort itself out soon enough. And I don't think it's WP:BALL to point out only three players can finish second in the Grand Prix, or who the Wch finalists are. IMO, let's save ourselves the trouble of a potential edit war over something that's pretty harmless and just leave it be. Cobblet (talk) 04:42, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Placement of notation template in articles

Right now it seems all our chess opening articles place Template:Algebraic notation next to the TOC. However, chess notation is usually used in the very first sentence—"The Sicilian Defence is the chess opening that begins with the moves 1.e4 c5", etc. So should we place the template before the lead paragraph instead?

I understand that some people might prefer it next to the TOC as it uses up some of that white space, while putting it above the lead generates more of it, but I think the extra white space is less visually distracting than the fact that the tops of the TOC and template boxes don't line up for some reason. If you'd like a comparison, take a look at Modern Benoni versus User:Cobblet/sandbox.

I suppose one way to reduce the amount of white space Template:Algebraic notation generates would be to have the text on one line rather than two, like in the "section" variant of that template. But even in its current form I would prefer placing the box above the lead. After all, the whole point of including the box is to warn the reader, and I think that placing the box such that it does its job properly should take priority over aesthetic concerns. Let me know what you think. Cobblet (talk) 17:44, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Putting the algebraic notation box at the top also pushes down the diagram on the right. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 18:08, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

It might be desirable to have the top of the infobox line up with the top of the first paragraph (although now that I look more closely at Modern Benoni, the lineup isn't perfect either.) But for the sake of comparison, I switched the order of the two in the code. How's it look now? Cobblet (talk) 18:21, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

There is a difference between your two comparables, in that the article at Modern Benoni has the Wikipedia article name in big font heading up the article, whereas your sandbox version doesn't have that title. So if your idea were implemented the first thing vertically down from the article title, would be the notation box. I really think that is over-emphasizing the notation box, that it is better to have the first sentence of the lead introducing the subject as the next thing, instead. The notation box adjacent to the TOC in openings articles not only exploits unused space without pushing the entire article down, but the notation box in that location has a "sticky-out" position that makes it hard to visually miss. The aim of having the notation box occur prior to any move notation the lead might contain, I think is an overly-logical way of addressing the situation and sort of presupposes people access data like machines in strictly top-down sequence. IMO the location of the notation box adjacent to the TOC, due to its "sticky-out" position, easily gains the attention of any reader not familiar with move notation that occurs in the lead -- the reader might be looking for help to interpret the notation if they are unfamiliar, and there is the notation box in an attention-getting "sticky-out" location for them to see. (The only problem might be for really long leads, where the TOC is shoved down far or even off the page. But I'm not aware of any openings articles with leads that long.) In summary, IMO the proposed location after article title and before the article lead sentence draws attention away from the content of the article by drawing attention to the notation box first, that location also pushes the entire article vertically down reducing the amount of article content on the page, the box next to TOC is very apparent for any reader who might need it, and the idea the notation box constitutes a "warning" and must appear before any notation occurs is an overly-logical over-reaction to balancing the objectives regarding the notation box in openings articles. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 21:52, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes it does: "User:Cobblet/sandbox" is the title "in big font". If the purpose of the box is to warn the reader, is it a bad thing to make it hard to miss? And what are the other "objectives regarding the notation box" that we have to "balance"? In any case, I find it more distracting out-of-alignment next to the TOC than above the lead.

I wouldn't mind it nearly as much if there were just some way of aligning the top of the notation box with the top of the TOC. But after playing around the template syntax a little bit I see that's not so easy to achieve. Oh well, not a big deal then, particularly if other people believe that I'm "over-logically over-reacting" here... Cobblet (talk) 22:24, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes it does: "User:Cobblet/sandbox" is the title "in big font". That's not what I meant, perhaps I didn't explain right ... It's not font size that makes the comparisons different, but absence/presence of the article subject title "Modern Benoni". (If that title is absent the notation box can't detract from it. And detracting from the title "User:Cobblet/sandbox" doesn't really siphon away anything, since it isn't a meaningful title subject name, just a technical computer file name.) Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 04:02, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Is it a bad thing to make it hard to miss? That argument sort of presupposes that the easier to notice, the better. But that certainly is not true. (For e.g., if we could make the notation box "flashing", then it would certainly be harder to miss, wouldn't it. But that would be a bad choice. That's why balanced objectives is called for.) The objectives include noticability, but that is not the only objective from past discussions. It was generally agreed that getting the notation box away from the lead image, especially when the lead image was a person image in a biography article, was a good thing, so as not to detract from the lead image. It was felt that even adjacent to the TOC, robbed attention and was distracting from person lead images, whereas next-to-TOC was less distracting re diagrams as lead images in openings articles. (Putting the notation box above a lead diagram in openings articles, took the prime spot away from the diagram title.) The whole thing about moving the notation box to section(s) where it is needed in biography articles was a good innovation that gave one administrator fits since it violated "hatbox" conventions for non-chess articles, but in my own view was the most perfect application of "Ingore all rules" there can ever be. There is more dialogue on notation box relocation development in an earlier thread at WT:CHESS, and a painful dialogue between this editor and the aforementioned admin at Talk:Algebraic notation if you're interested. My view about "over-reaction" was re the evaluative criteria you listed for the proposed new location, nothing personal, and was just this editor's opinion. Back when the current plan was developed I thought it was a pretty good consensus effort, there were adjustments along the way. I added my own thoughts too. For example like you, I'd prefer the box be level with the top-of-TOC, but am unaware how to code a half vertical step down (if that would even work); and the lower-than-TOC position doesn't bug me like it does you, higher-than-TOC position alternative is most certainly worse. (Perhaps there's a way to code it flush, I don't know how.) I could very easily make the article-level box slender like the section box as you suggested, but that plan would still have the negative aspects mentioned earlier IMO, only a bit less negative, plus I think it would just "look weird". But I can easily make that option in 5 minutes if consensus wants that. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 00:17, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

All I meant to say is, I find the box less distracting above the lead than out of alignment with the TOC. It's just my own opinion. I think I see why you can't get it to align easily—if you leave out the break, the software aligns the text inside the box with the top of the TOC, so the border of the box ends up above it. It would be great if there was a way to make it not do that.

By the way, I read some of the discussion you mentioned, but I didn't catch why we switched from hatnotes to boxes in the first place. Cobblet (talk) 00:36, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

I thought the hatnote was fine so I thought the reasons for switching from hatnotes to the bulky box were stupid, but some people really wanted to do it although I don't remember why. All I can recall is that someone, I think not even a member of the chess project, insisted on removing the chess notation hatnotes for reasons I did not understand. You might be able to find something about it in the WT:CHESS archives. Some time later we had a separate and fairly lengthy discussion about box positioning. I didn't care much about it at the time, but I am OK with other people working to make little improvements even in areas that don't concern me very much. Now that we have the box in the dead space to the right of the TOC I've gotten used to it, and I prefer it to having the box at the top of the article for the reasons that Ihardlythinkso enumerated. Quale (talk) 01:02, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

FYI I've asked at the Village Pump about spacing down half a line [6]. Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 01:09, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. And thanks for clarifying the history, Quale—now I understand it got converted to a side box as a result of this discussion. I guess people want to reserve hatnotes strictly for disambiguation purposes, which is fair enough, but I would've preferred a hatnote myself as well. If we can't fix the alignment issue, I can live with the status quo. Cobblet (talk) 01:24, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

I can't recall if this has been mentioned before, but an alternative system that would be very discreet, and yet would offer the uninformed newcomer an obvious way forward, would be to simply wikilink the article's first 1.d4 (or 1.e4 or whatever), to the Chess notation article. Maybe I'm overlooking something, but the bulky box does tend to wreck the symmetry/order of some pages. Brittle heaven (talk) 02:09, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

I think it is better to have it at the side of the ToC than at the top. With it at the top, you have to go down more to start the lead section, and less of the lead section is on your screen. Most people going into technical chess articles (openings, endings, tactics, etc) already know algebraic notation. Biographies are more likely to be read by a non-chessplayer, and there we have been generally moving the box to the first section that contains notation. And general-interest articles such as chess, rules of chess, Outline of chess, and history of chess avoid it altogether. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 02:43, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Re: the hatnote vs. box thing Cobblet mentions above, I think you're right that it was a "hatnotes mustn't be used for this" argument. But hatnotes are used for things other than disambiguation, such as explaining non-Western name order found in Asian names among others. I still think that argument is weak, but I also think that the hatnote was easy to overlook, so the box might actually be better for that reason. As far as linking the first move goes (Brittle heaven's suggestion) I'm not sure that would work all that well. Most chess opening articles link the moves to Wikibooks:Chess Opening Theory, so the link is already used up. I've always disliked those Wikibooks links intensely as I think they add less than nothing to the articles, but Wikipedia is not about what I dislike. We have discussed employing a brief parenthetical mention that the moves are given in algebraic notation just before first use, but the hatnote was introduced to try to improve on that old practice so it might be a step backwards. Quale (talk) 04:49, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, I could sense that my idea was far too simple. I must have been to wikibooks at some point, but never felt any need to revisit! Brittle heaven (talk) 11:34, 28 August 2013 (UTC) —Actually, given that the non-savvy newcomer is most likely to click on the thing they need explaining, it would be far more logical for the appropriate wikibook to carry the notation explanation/link, than for it to clutter the main article, where probably 99% of users need no such assistance. Brittle heaven (talk) 11:46, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

There are times when an explanation of algebraic notation is needed, but there are no moves that can link to Wikibooks. (For two examples of this, see article Judit Polgár.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 12:35, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

I'm entirely in favour of scrapping all links to Wikibooks. I haven't looked at all the pages, but it seems like the chess theory project over there has been inactive for years now. We've also used {{wikibooks}} at the end of some pages (e.g. Sicilian Defence#Further reading to direct the reader to a relevant Wikibooks page, and we could make that a universal practice for chess openings, if people think such a link is valuable. I do like Brittle heaven's suggestion very much. Does anyone else? Cobblet (talk) 08:43, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

I like it too. Quale (talk) 22:53, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Getting notation box out of articles is a good thing; not clear though what the replacing link plan is exactly. (The devil/details thing.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 01:10, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

The proposal is to remove all instances where Template:Algebraic notation is currently placed next to the TOC, and wikilink the very first instance of algebraic notation in the article to Chess notation. I'll suggest some examples:

• The Sicilian Defence is a chess opening that begins with the moves 1.e4 c5.
• (From Chess strategy#Space) In this diagram from the Nimzo-Indian Defense, Black attacks four squares on White's side of the board (d4, e4, f4, and g4).

For cases such as game fragments in biographies, where most of the article does not use chess notation but one section uses it extensively, I could see a case for continuing to use the "section" variant of the template—since people reading such an article are less likely to be familiar with notation, it might be helpful to provide a more obvious warning. But I don't have a strong opinion either way in this case. Cobblet (talk) 01:39, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

If there are no further comments, I'll be implementing this change to all articles in Category:chess openings this weekend. Cobblet (talk) 23:36, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

I'm unsure. For one thing, it will be a lot of work to change them. Secondly, with it next to the ToC it stands out well and doesn't take up any space. On the other hand, it is in the tradition of linking the first use of something. However, those links usually go to an article about the thing highlighted. These would go to an explanation of notation rather than an article about 1.e4. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 23:53, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

I think we need to get an opinion from someone outside this project - someone who is very familiar with what Wikipedia should use for something like that. Could ask at the Village Pump. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 00:00, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Nigel Short

For your information, this article has now been the target of WP:COI once more. Your comments on the matter are welcome. Thanks, Toccata quarta (talk) 03:18, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

If his record against world champions isn't commented upon in the rest of the article, it shouldn't appear unsourced in the lead. Such details shouldn't appear in the lead anyway. I suggest moving the paragraph in question to "Tournament and match results" and citing the database results and his DVD. Cobblet (talk) 04:53, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Merging Irregular chess opening to Flank opening

Because the former article is currently a stub and I don't see how it could be improved. Please comment at Talk:Flank opening. Cobblet (talk) 07:52, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Ruy Lopez, Marshall Attack, Rombaua Trap at Afd

I see from the WT:CHESS archives that I'm not the only person to notice this article is a hoax. Let's get rid of it. Cobblet (talk) 04:04, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

Three articles at WP:GAN

Namely Chess in Armenia, Chess handicap and Modern Benoni. Cobblet (talk) 09:53, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Algebraic notation box - reduced width when adjacent to TOCs

I've shortened the notation box width for when used adjacent to TOCs (by making it 3-lined instead of 2-lined), so it has a better chance to fit between Infoboxes and unusually wide TOCs (e.g. articles Ruy Lopez, Modern Benoni). Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 07:58, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

The new version isn't working right for me. For one thing, it is 5 lines instead of 3. Secondly, on the Modern Benoni article, it overlaps with the ToC. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 23:55, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

On my laptop screen it's four lines in Modern Benoni. Cobblet (talk) 00:35, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Bubba, could you see if Ruy Lopez is okay now? (I made a change. If Ruy Lopez is still wrong let me know I will revert to the earlier 2-line version.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 02:41, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

It is not overlaping the ToC box now. It is taking 5 lines. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 03:06, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

It is taking 5 lines in the Ruy Lopez article? (Please ignore the Modern Benoni article for the moment.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 03:20, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

I've added a little more width. How many lines in Ruy Lopez now? (The differences we see might be dependent on browser default font size.) Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 09:48, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

On my screen they are now four lines. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 15:46, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

I've added a little more width again. How many lines in Ruy Lopez now? (If not 3, I'll revert back to the original wide box.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 23:03, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Update: Okay I see now that the number of text lines in notation boxes will be a function of the default font size set in one's browser. (I use Firefox with default [Arial] font size 15, I'm thinking you have a larger size set, what size is your default font set to? [In Firefox, Tools → Options → Content → Fonts & Colors.]) Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 13:30, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

Quick reply - it is still four lines for me in Thunderbird bot three in IE. I do have a relatively large default font set. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 00:08, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

My firefox default font is 16-point New Times Roman. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 00:49, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for that info. I made a change whereby I've removed the graphic from the notation boxes. (My rationale for removing it is that the graphic has a fixed size for the "1.e4" representation, and that size likely won't match the size of the rest of the box text depending on whatever font size a user has as default in their browser setting. So a substantial difference in size probably makes the notation box look funny due to the size mismatch. Removing the graphic also makes all notation boxes less wide, which is a good thing.) If the change isn't liked, just let me know and I'll revert it. Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 06:23, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

Deep Blue and scheduling of games

There is a discussion on Talk:Deep Blue (chess computer) regarding recent edits related to the game scheduling. Any feedback is welcome. isaacl (talk) 03:54, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Raymond Keene

What do you think about the recent edits at this article? Is it really proper to reference such a sensitive WP:BLP issue with a blog? Best, Toccata quarta (talk) 17:25, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Not really. I think all of the recent plagiarization accusations could be sourced to the Chessbase article. Sasata (talk) 18:01, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Also, the new stuff is not far from a repeat of the material already on there, so there needs to be some pruning. Brittle heaven (talk) 21:52, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Absolutely. This article has serious WP:BLP issues right now, and suffers from WP:UNDUE weight and imbalance problems. (In the entire article the plagiarism claims chapter is the only one with subsections, greatly distorting the layout and TOC for the article.) I know that Keene is strongly disliked by many people and the article can reflect that, but it's primarily a hit piece now. The editor who added the negative material recently had done this back in 2009 as well, and there is some discussion on his talk page about issues with those earlier edits. I cleaned some of it up back then, but I don't have the time or stomach to try to fix the article right now. I hope someone else can work on it soon, but if not I will get to it when I can. Quale (talk) 17:27, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

There continue to be WP:BLP issues at Raymond Keene. I trimmed some of the plagiarism claims that clearly don't pass the muster for bios of living people, but it still needs more pruning. Issues include undue weight, a blog used extensively as a source, and repetition of the same claims noted by Brittle heaven. Quale (talk) 10:56, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

Comparison of top chess players throughout history

I'm struggling to see the point of this new enormous table which swamps the article. The author says it is to compare players that have had Elo ratings. Yet these are players of different eras, whose peaks may have occurred pre-1970. For example, his weighted ranking (whatever that is) shows that Henrique Mecking is higher ranked than Botvinnik, and that Ehlvest and Keres are of more or less equal importance. Surely this is why Sonas and Elo and others introduced retrospective ratings, so that some comparison could be made of players at their peaks? Am I missing something? Brittle heaven (talk) 12:44, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Apologies to User Toccata Quarta, who has already indicated similar reservations on the article talk page. Brittle heaven (talk) 13:03, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Hi guys, I saw you have deleted the table I have introduced.

I'm new to wiki and not familiar with exact rules hear, forgive me if I sound a bit rude. Your points regarding Botvinnik, Ehlvest and Keres are fair to indicate, but in the article I have indicated that this is only based on all official fide listings since 1970. It's a pitty that we don't have them since Morphy's time or even since time when chess is created in India, but we should analyze what we have. If we believe ELO ratings, and as elo indicated they are relatively true for players within the same era. Than the wheighted ratings of top 6 is more fair to compare players than the peak rating which you have in the same article. If you discard this table, before that you have to discard all other rating based evaluations because they are unfair even more. How you estimate peak of Botvinnik in this case , or peak of Alekhine, peak of Morphy? I'm concerned why you are discarding the table which does compare with solely offical based numbers (nothing more was added). And it's more realistic than anything else you have their rating based. The table I have includes many greatest players (53) which is truly official, many players which might be considered as good players haven't included because dispite their fame they never cross top 6 in official fide ratings. Also chess is growing every year. Also there is some fair having recent players in top (which is a consequence) because chess teory and everything related to chess is continuously growing and enlarging, I would not fail to tell that if Steinitz, Botvinnik leaves nowdays with their play and strength, everyone from 2700 family will easily get advantage over them from debut and eventually win. So recent players are much better in terms of chess sport strength. So even from that perspective the table is fair. If you are chess lover like me, I think you would consider the table more seriously. I welcome any suggestions improvements on it's development and grow or reduce in terms of wiki rules. But let's try to get an advantage from the work I have done. Easiest thing is just have it delete, but noone gets advantage from it.Frunzedz (talk) 18:00, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi User:Frunzedz. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, which means that its contents must rely on previously published information. Wikipedia does not publish original research. I understand your concern that using Elo ratings to compare players across different historical eras is a flawed method. The article acknowledges this point and goes on to present several previously published methods of solving this problem. However, we cannot publish the "unique metric" you have created on the page, because it has not been previously published in a reliable source. Should you do so, we would be happy to consider adding it into the article some time in the future.

P.S. to other editors: I think we should remove the bottom table as well, and the player quotes should be heavily trimmed. In my opinion the only lists noteworthy enough to include are Fischer's, Anand's and Chess Informant's; the others can either be deleted, or in cases where one player is singled out as "greatest of all time", moved to that player's page. Cobblet (talk) 18:46, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks User:Cobblet for explanation. Let me try to understand this (by asking some questions) and try to explain the table which I have introduced. I agree the point about 'weighted metric' which has no previous appearnce, it's just my try to formalize statistics, this is that's why I welcomed suggestions and now I understand the point - let's remove that column from the table. The table introduces all the players having included in top six, and gives some statistical data based on offical fide listings. Nothing new is introduced. You want reliable source, I think official fide listing since 2000 can be accessed in fide official site, for some old fide ratings I will provide reference later. It's just that number of official ratings is about 100. The work I have done is just collected this statistics about top 6. I think we can find such statistics in wiki for almost every sport. May be not rating based just championship based, etc. This article is called comparing top chess players ? What can be more fair than just including the statistics. The table is sortable so that people could see players sorted by different category. What I want is just some formalization of ELO's formulation about ELO ratings based on official statistics. Another questoin, where can be found reliable source for the table - Table of top 21 rated players ever, with date their best ratings were first achieved. I understand this official FIDE data collected in one table and sorted by peak value. Table I have introduced is nothing more than extended version of this table (excluded weighted metric which is nothing more than summary of all times player appeared in top six by place giving higher points for lower place, but ok let's just remove it, and sort based number of times player appeared in top six by default). So my suggestion is edit table and remove the column of weighted metric and just have another statistical data. Do you see any violation of wiki rules now ? Frunzedz (talk) 21:31, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

But to arbitrarily limit the table to the top 6 (rather than the top 3, top 5, top 10, top 20, top 25, top 50, or top 100...) reflects a selective judgment on your part and introduces bias into the article. Unless you can demonstrate that it is common in chess literature and journalism to focus attention on the top six players on the FIDE rating list, this is a violation of WP:NPOV.

To be fair, the other table you mentioned violates NPOV for exactly the same reason: it is wrong to arbitrarily limit the number of peak ratings listed to 21, since this has the effect of unfairly highlighting Kamsky's career and diminishing that of whoever #22 would be. My suggestion would be to limit that table to only the players who have achieved a 2800 rating, because this is considered a newsworthy event whenever it happens: Google "Topalov 2800" for example. Cobblet (talk) 21:55, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

The limit comes from availability of information. Since the first Fide ratings published includes top 6 players only (see http://www.chess.com/blog/goldendog/bits-of-old-fide-ratings-lists-1970-1996), I can provide some other sources as well. About 2800. Since rating inflation appears each year it's not fair to compare based on rating absolute value, I think (continuing arpad ELO's point) Frunzedz (talk) 22:21, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

But that's hardly a good reason, even if the more complete list does not exist (and I suspect it does): why not top 3 or top 5 then? And your last point is absolutely true, but again, it is not Wikipedia's job to tell its readers what is fair, but what others say is fair, and what is done. Cobblet (talk) 22:28, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

At least 2 sources started to list top six players - http://chess.eusa.ed.ac.uk/Chess/Trivia/AlltimeList.html, http://www.chess.com/blog/goldendog/bits-of-old-fide-ratings-lists-1970-1996 which I used initially. I remind also some old public magazines which do list top 6. Having top 10 would require match wider list, and hard maintainible. Anyway any number what have been asked the same question. Frunzedz (talk) 22:45, 1 October 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Frunzedz (talk • contribs) 22:38, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Let's have a look at a passage that you added to the article:

"Weighted ranking computed by this table are unique metric by which all time chess players (having ELO rating) could be compared. Weighted ranking computed by the summary of all coefficents. Coefficents given per each listing with the following grades used - 6 points for each 1st place ranking, 5 - 2nd place, 4 - 3rd place, 3 - 4th place, 2 - 5th place, 1 - 6th place."

"Unique metric" is an admission of WP:OR. Please review that page. If you fail to understand it, please re-read it. Toccata quarta (talk) 04:03, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes we have agreed on that, and I suggested to remove that column (and any comment related to it), but keep other data which is truly statistical for top 6 players of all time since 1970 when official fide ratings published - nothing more. And we were discussing that many sources list top 6 that's why table have top 6 as well. Frunzedz (talk) 04:58, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

You have yet to give me a good reason why the table should feature all the players in the top 6 rather than fewer players (and as it turns out, the full historical FIDE rating lists are extremely easy to find), and why a larger table would be better than the list at List of FIDE chess world number ones#Player statistics, which only lists information for players ranked #1 at some point. Again, Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of statistics. Also your idea of counting the number of appearances on published lists is deeply flawed, since not only has FIDE changed its rules on how long an inactive player can remain on the list (under the current rules, Fischer would have been delisted after 1973), but the lists have been published increasingly frequently over time, so your list makes it seem as if Topalov was in the top 6 longer than Karpov, which is patent nonsense. Cobblet (talk) 06:54, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Counting mounths is also not better, because for example Bobby Fischer haven't played a single game over 3 years 1972-1975, but it's counted as he was world number one, and your list lists it higher than Carlsen who has played almost every super tournament in that period. We can dispute infinitely (probably)... you have your opinion, I have mine.... Both are subjective obviously. I got tired bringing up arguments, whatever I will bring up is disputable (or nonsense for you !) and your arguments are as well disputable for me. Let's save time. Can you please tell me the rules hear: If I don't agree with you, what's the solution ? Should I give up by some reason, or am I supposed to dispute infinitely, or there is something better which I can do? Frunzedz (talk) 07:59, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

The first sentence of the article states, "This article presents a number of methodologies that have been suggested for the task of comparing the greatest chess players in history." It is not a place for publishing statistics on players who once appeared in the top 6 of a FIDE rating list. You used chess.com as a source, and nothing is stopping you from going back there, creating your own account, and publishing your list, complete with the methodology you came up with. But it is not suitable content for Wikipedia. Cobblet (talk) 09:40, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I don't want to be personal, but seems like I can't. Do you really think that if player has not been world number 1 by rating it's not great player? or it's not worthing to compare with number ones ? Even if yes, this is just your subjective opinion. Considering your suggestions to me what todo outside of wiki - please keep them with yourself, I don't need them. Somehow you consider yourself judge about what should appear in this article (or moreover in wikipedia overall). Why wouldn't you just write your name at the end of this article (as well some others who have added those tables)? Because it's your prefered methods to compare chess players. You are making it subjective by declining real statistical data and instead keeping other statistical data according to your preference (or your thinking what should appear in wiki). Is this article place where you publish players individual best results with first achieved date in terms of rating ? That's what this table suggests - Table of top 21 rated players ever, with date their best ratings were first achieved. Frunzedz (talk) 10:34, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Fair enough—the assertion in the article that "one way to compare players of different eras is to compare their Elo ratings" is unsupported by third-party sources (indeed, it is contradicted by Elo's own opinion) and is an example of WP:OR in the same way your table would be, so I have removed it completely. You are right in insisting that we be consistent in applying our own policies. Cobblet (talk) 10:58, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

notable?

New article on Ken Smith (chess) - notable enough? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 05:15, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes, especially considering his achievements in poker as well, although for that reason the article should be moved to Kenneth Ray Smith. Cobblet (talk) 05:53, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

I am inclined to say yes as well. There is some non-trivial coverage on him in the 1972 San Antonio tournament book that Smith participated in (finishing last, but scoring a few points, such as a draw against Keres, against top international players). Combined with the achievements in Poker that Cobblet mentioned I think notability is OK. Sjakkalle (Check!) 17:45, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Video of Capablanca speaking English

This Chessbase article from March links to a Nederland 24 (Dutch Public Broadcasting) video of Capablanca being interviewed in English on the then-upcoming World Chess Championship 1935. Euwe is also interviewed, speaking Dutch. (Anyone who wants to hear how to pronounce "Euwe", here's your chance!) Apparently there's a wealth of chess-related video on the site, even if it's mostly in Dutch—there's a video of Euwe and Botvinnik playing blindfold blitz chess, for example. Cobblet (talk) 05:53, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I couldn't access it there, but it is also on YouTube. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 16:44, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

ICCF Denmark

Is ICCF Denmark needed? It is basically a list of people, and only two of them have articles. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 00:20, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

It appears that a long time ago, somebody started to fix all the redlinks in ICCF national member federations but soon gave up. A handful of these have been expanded since (I saw the US and Finland ones were) but the rest ought to be either redirected to the relevant "Chess in <country>" article or simply deleted if that article doesn't exist, as is the case with Denmark. Cobblet (talk) 00:31, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

I can't see any point in keeping it. Too many red links to suggest any real worth or importance, particularly after being in existence for many years. Also, there is no equivalent article on the Danish Wikipedia and the only reference given is to a dead link. Brittle heaven (talk) 11:42, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

There are probably quite a few similar articles in the same situation. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 16:21, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Chess games on Wikidata

Hi! I guess the members of this wikiproject might be interested in the following discussion on whether or not include chess games in Wikidata: [7] --DixonD (talk) 12:40, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

upper and lower case

In Queen's Gambit Accepted, an editor changed a lot of things to lower case. I reverted the edit, but he changed them back, citing the MoS. Someone please look at this. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 20:01, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

• I have reverted him twice now, and will stop now before I am accused of edit warring. The WP:MOSCAPS policy that Primergrey is citing is quite clear here in the WP:NAMECAPS section: "Proper names of specific places, persons, terms, etc. are capitalized in accordance with standard usage". Standard usage in chess literature for openings, as well as "White" and "Black" being used as nouns is to treat them as proper nouns that are capitalised. In contrast when "white" and "black" are being used as adjectives they are not capitalised. Sjakkalle (Check!) 20:44, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

All is well. Cobblet (talk) 21:02, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Sjakkalle, as long as this is being discussed, are we sure the adjective-vs.-noun criterion is the rule that works how we want? Perhaps. But is it so simple and straightforward? Can you look at these examples and confirm for me which you think is better ...

1. "Joel Benjamin was White in that game." (vs) "Joel Benjamin was white in that game."
2. "Joel Benjamin took White in that game." (vs) "Joel Benjamin took white in that game."
3. "I have Black next round." (vs) "I have black next round."
4. "The White move 1.e4 [...]" (vs) "The white move 1.e4 [...]"
5. "The best White idea in the position was Ne5." (vs) "The best white idea in the position was Ne5."
6. "Timman quickly countered White's plan." (vs) "Timman quickly countered white's plan."
7. "The White opening 1.f4 [...]" (vs) "The white opening 1.f4 [...]"

(In #6, doesn't "White's" modify word "plan" thereby it is an adjective?)

Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 19:09, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Actually, in the first three cases "was", "took" and "have" are copula verbs, so "white" is an adjective and should remain uncapitalized. "Took" and "have" are colloquialisms of course and should be avoided on Wikipedia; but even "Topalov played black" is likely correct—compare the expression "to play dead", where "dead" is clearly not a noun. I haven't extensively checked the literature to see whether everyone does what I've just said, but a quick Google search of 'site:theweekinchess.com "was white"' shows that at least Mark Crowther adheres to that convention. In cases 4, 5 and 7 the latter is undoubtedly correct in my mind, but in my own writing I prefer "White's move 1.e4" and "White's best idea" to avoid any disagreement over the correct capitalization (and yes, it is a bit clearer.) In #6, clearly a player's name is being replaced ("Timman quickly countered Karpov's plan") and capitalization is necessary. Cobblet (talk) 19:20, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Why is a proper name like "Karpov" the determining subsitution? What if the other player was unknown, or an unnamed computer program, or a team of players with no label or title? Isn't your subsitution and conclusion therefore arbitrary? Ihardlythinkso (talk) 20:04, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

It need not be a proper name: in that situation "White's" is replacing a noun or a noun phrase ("the Latvian radio listeners'"), so it is a noun; hence the capitalization. My conclusion is no more arbitrary than the convention itself is in the first place. (You see why this bugs copyeditors who aren't familiar with chess literature!) Cobblet (talk) 20:12, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

"Topalov played black" is likely correct—compare the expression "to play dead", where "dead" is clearly not a noun. Again, you're picking and choosing your own substitution. Why can't the substitution be instead "to play Frankenstein"? Or "to play Santa Claus"? It seems to me that this is arbitrarily picking a substitution that is lower-case and then drawing a conclusion from it. While another conclusion can and would be drawn from a different and equally valid substitution. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 20:12, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

No, because in your two cases the meaning of the word "played" has changed: it is no longer a copula or linking verb, but a transitive verb. "Topalov played black" means "Topalov played with the black pieces", but "Topalov played Frankenstein" means "Topalov played against Frankenstein." Cobblet (talk) 20:19, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Some cases may require a few moments of thought, but I think Cobblet's answer is accurate. I also agree that the possessive "White's move" is slightly preferable to "white move", not just to avoid capitalization controversy but also because it seems a bit clearer. Sjakkalle (Check!) 19:35, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

I know sentences can always be rewritten and reconstructed so that a clear reference to player is created. But that is often not how players talk or write, and as a result there are many cases in articles how players talk and write. (And in many cases, like "The White opening ..." vs "The white opening" it is perfectly encyclopedic without rewriting or reconstructing.) Rewriting or reconstructing doesn't confirm or solve the issue re noun-vs.-adjective criteria, it just side-steps or dodges the criteria whether valid rule or not. If side-stepping or dodging the issue is the "rule", then we shouldn't be talking about "adjective-vs.-noun" criteria as rule. The reason I have added to this topic discussion is because the talk is about application of "noun-vs.-adjective" as the criterion or rule we s/b using for determining. Thus my examples. Saying we should dodge the issue is tantamount to saying we should delete this thread and back up to where we were before it (i.e. confusion and inconsistency). Ihardlythinkso (talk) 19:43, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Nobody is suggesting that we dodge the issue, so for every case you have provided I have given you what I believe to be the correct capitalization. That being said, any potentially disputable capitalization of "White" and "Black" is distracting to the reader and is best avoided whenever possible. Cobblet (talk) 19:54, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

To be clear, I think the decapitalized version is correct for #2 to #5 and #7, the reference is to the color of the pieces, therefore the decapitalized adjective is right. For #1, I believe that both "White" and "white" are acceptable, but that they give slightly different meanings. "Joel Benjamin was White" means Joel Benjamin was the player who is referred to as "White". "Joel Benjamin was white" means he was playing with the white pieces. Sjakkalle (Check!) 20:05, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

I appreciate both you guys' followups. I need to digest all the feedback details (will take time). (I got As in English, but never heard of a 'copula' verb, for e.g.! I think the WP:CHESS criterion re White-vs-white s/b simple enough so any Project members can reasonably easily apply. So I'd like to review and summarize in time, if I can. Thx again for your inputs to my examples.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 20:25, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome. I hope other editors will take note of this discussion, because I hope it will clear up any confusion over the issue. A strong grasp of grammar is essential for formal writing. Cobblet (talk) 21:11, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, both. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 21:46, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

I am loathe to criticize the conduct of two of our finest and most tireless contributors, and it's no secret that the MoS is one of the most commonly misquoted and incorrectly applied Wikipedia policies; but when a well-meaning but inexperienced editor does a copyedit, could we please have a look at the actual changes before summarily reverting them? To inadvertently throw out good fixes along with bad ones not only implies an assumption of bad faith on our part, but is detrimental to the quality of the 'pedia. Cobblet (talk) 00:55, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I realized that I was reverting everything, but there were a lot of cases of changing to lower case, so I thought it would be easiest to undo the whole revision. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 01:15, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

This has happened before. The last time this nonsense came up it was User:SMcCandlish. And I agree with Bubba73. When a user makes an edit with many bad changes and a few good ones, I don't feel obligated to take heroic measures to try to rescue the small amount of satisfactory edits. Revert it and let the original editor fix his work. Quale (talk) 04:27, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Agree w/ Bubba and Quale (and disagree w/ Cobblet). To pick through would put an unnecessary and unfair burden on the clean-up editor. The adding editor s/ be encouraged to take responsibility and back up and re-do. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 18:47, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm not really editing here any more, I just logged in because someone e-mailed me that I've been mentioned by name recently in an blame-casting way, and upon seeing it, I feel like responding, because it was unnecessarily personalizing. Some of you should seriously think twice before you again "personalize" any style-related issues, on talk pages or in edit summaries, by finger-pointing at specific editors and/or by using hostile characterizations like "nonsense"; you may find out the hard way that WP:ARBATC#All parties reminded and WP:ARBATC#Enforcement by block can be used by zealot admins to sanction you severely for it. (I resigned from editing WP over this matter, actually, as I was falsely accused of doing this and unjustly topic-banned from all style discussion for a month, only to find that I had no effective recourse against this lone-wolf administrative abuse by an admin who harassed me for three months.) "Rouge admins" aside, WP:ARBCOM, WP:AE and WP:ANI have, starting in early 2013, gotten suddenly very serious about bringing a rain of shit down on people who, in style debates in particular, keep talking about the alleged characteristics of the editor and their intent instead of the validity and utility of the edits in a neutral and collegial manner.

Anyway, you need to separate in your mind three different issues, because they are in no way related.

1. Blanket "clobber it all!" reverting is a heavy-handed tactic, and explicity advised against by WP:REVERT, etc. It has a very strong tendency to piss people off and to lead to protracted pointless disputes that get heated beyond reason. If you do not have the time to dig through an edit of that well-meaning user's rather minimal magnitude, especially given that "the decapitalized version is correct for #2 to #5 and #7", etc., then you need to flag the edit you disagree with as a new talk page discussion and ask others to look into it, not just undo it yourself, as you do not have the attention span to exercise the kind of critical judgement and editorial care required to handle such editorial responsibility. Likely not your fault; we all have real lives, and few people can devote enormous amounts of time to such editing. However, some people can, and on major topics like chess they usually will, as evidenced by this very thread, in which the good vs. questionable edits by that editor have been sifted through in great detail, but after he/she was unnecessarily treated like vandal and then repeatedly antagonized here with wording that definitely transgresses WP:CIVIL and arguably WP:NPA, too. Why is your time and energy mystically worth more than another's? Chess-specialist editors are the ones insisting (to many other editors, quite unreasonably) on some weird exception to English grammar rules, so the onus is firmly and entirely on chess-focused editors to work around normal-English-using editors perfectly rational expectations, not the other way around. Sheesh. You are not princesses, so put your damned tiaras away and behave like adults for a change, not children playing make-believe.
2. You do not have consensus or authority to force other editors to use your non-standard capitalization, simply because chess writers like it.
   1. There is no broad consensus agreeing with [some] chess fans that things like "White" should be capitalized on Wikipedia, and MOS says not to do this sort of thing for a reason. Wikiprojects do not trump general site-wide guidelines. Specialists in any and all avocational or professional areas have a strong tendency to "big-note" things in their field by capitalizing them as a form of emphasis (technical, hobbyist, industry-specific and marketing-oriented writing are all notorious for it), and MOS actually explicitly says not to do this, across the board, at WP:MOS itself and again at the WP:MOSCAPS subpage, and has said so for years with virtually no controversy except from a highly disruptive crew of about a dozen editors in one zoological subfield. The short version is that if every field got to capitalize on WP everything they like to capitalize in their own specialist publications, virtually everything on WP would be capitalized, and WP would look like it was written by illiterates or Germans (the German language capitalizes all nouns, as English used to do, too, until the transition from what we now call Early Modern English to Modern English, partway through the Victorian era, with the practice almost totally abandoned in mainstream, formal English before 1900).
   2. All the arguments for such capitalization have been examined in detail and totally shredded. There no defensible rationale for it on Wikipedia. See the WP:SSF essay for a rather harsh deconstruction of all of the supposed reasons for trying to force any particular topical field's in-house style (e.g. chess publications) on a general purpose encyclopedia; they're simply logcally bankrupt ideas as applied to Wikipedia. It's been several years now, and no one has been able to clearly refute a single point made by that essay, and it raises about 50 of them. Game over. Drop the stick. Move on. The fact that most non-chess people and even some chess people disagree with your aggressive penchant for capitalization of in-game terms on Wikipedia, and your aggressive, snobby, snotty proselytization of this capitalization, does not make their position "nonsense", it simply means they have a difference of opinion (which they've more than adequately backed up) and they greatly outnumber you. SSF spells out really good reasons for that opposition, while your camp's arguments mostly amount to a WP:ILIKEIT stance and a sore misinterpretation of WP's "follow the sources" position (which means follow the sources on facts, not follow your preferred sources' formatting and grammar choices; WP derives it style from what mainstream sources on English writing say to do, modulo what makes sense for WP's unique needs, not what some specialist field does when their preference conflicts with normal practice and confuses our readers). Your behavior on this issue is also a clear WP:OWN problem. Chess fans do not have a magical right to control the wording and style of chess-related articles. WP:CHESS is simply some editors who agree that they want to work on chess articles, nothing more (just a "group of editors", in WP:CONSENSUS's exact words) and have no more authority than any other editor on the system. Wikiprojects really, really need to get this through their dense collective heads (and I say that as the creator of several projects! >;-) The undeniable fact that lots of people do not agree with the chess capitalization stuff, even aside from MOS having a generalized rule against that sort of thing, is the very reason some of you are so tired of the issue coming up that you fly off the handle about it and bite people's virtual faces off. Step back and think about this with heads. This undeniable fact is a clear, self-proving demonstration that you do not in fact have Wikipedia consensus to force other editors to capitalize your way. Please re-read that sentence until it sinks in. It cannot be escaped. The appropriate response is to try to reach a community-wide consensus at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style to undo the rule against using capitalization as a form of emphasis; good luck with that, or finally stop WP:BATTLEGROUNDing over it. The fact that you all know that MOS isn't going to budge on this is why you're engaging in these WP:OWN tactics that you hope no one will call you on. It's well past time to let the vast majority of Wikipedia editors write the way people normally write in the English language, not how you prefer to write on chess-specific websites for chess-player convenience.
   3. They're not proper names. One important subset of this matter is that use of "White" and "Black" or "the Queen's Gambit", capitalized like that, in chess writing is emphatically not an example of the establishment and use of proper names, but of specialists capitalizing certain important and conventional things to emphasize them because they like to do so as a reading aid. Period. If you think it's proper-naming, you need to take a linguistics class. Seriously, most of you have no idea what you're talking about at all on this; just the fact that a substantial portion of the above material is a bunch of confused noise about whether something should be capitalized based on whether it's a noun or an adjective demonstrates this clearly. (Hint: proper names are always capitalized in English regardless what grammatical role they're playing, i.e. what "part of speech" they are in elementary school terms – we don't write "Texas" but then switch to "texan" or "texas-related"! Some languages, including Spanish and French, do this, but not English.) "George Washington" is a proper name. "Final Fantasy IV" is a proper name. "The Chicago Bears" is proper name. "Azerbaijan" is a proper name. "Azerbaijani" is proper name in derived adjectival form. Learn this, know it, feel it. Simple designation of one of two or more items or sets of generic game equipment or of generic competitors, sides or positions in a game, is not a proper name. We do not capitalize stripes and solids in pool, nor the neutral position, offensive referee's position and defensive referee's position in collegiate wrestling, nor offense/offensive and defense/defensive in any form of football or similar game, nor serving and receiving in tennis, etc., etc., etc., ad nausem, throughout the entire world of sports and games. The same goes for specific sequences of moves like "the queen's gambit". Yes, we all know chess books like to capitalize this. Football books like to capitalize well-known plays, but we do not do it here. Skater mags capitalize skateboarding tricks, but we do not do it here. I can spit out examples like this all day long. Types of shots in billiards are often capitalized in pool and snooker publications, but we do not do it here. Shall I can continue? As far as I can determine, the only camp on Wikipedia who still persist in the patent delusion that the terminology used in their game is a special snowflake unlike all the other terms in all the other games in the history of the world, are certain chess editors who pretend they cannot understand that Wikipedia is not a chess specialist publication and does not have any sane reason to force chess subculture quirks on people who are not among the 0.01% of WP readers who are hardcore chess aficionados. Even the card games projects who were doing this have dropped that "nonsense" (how do you like your preferences being called that?); see the usage at, e.g. Texas Hold'em, where no one is trying to capitalize things like "royal flush", "ace", "spades" and "the turn" any longer. It's just you. It's the very definition of WP:TE, a shining, stellar textbook case of doggedly persistent, disruptive, possessive, filibustering obstructionism. Get over yourselves and your petty "we're going to win at all costs because we're Right" obsession that is distracting you from actually making the encyclopedia better for people other than you, meanwhile making it very, very hard for other people to do so on these articles either and hounding them away with hostility. Having a preference to capitalize here is not "nonsense" and it's not fair to you to call it that; it's simply based on incorrect assumptions and interpretations of linguistic facts, of the purpose of capitalization of such terms in specialist publication, of how WP operates in regard to style vs. facts in external sources, how consensus works here, what wikiprojects are and how much authority they have (hint: zero), etc. Arriving here initially from chess circles with a preferences for capitalizing because you're used to it isn't "obsessive", either. It's to be expected. Going on a years-long hateful warpath about it is really, really damned obsessive however. Preferring not to capitalize here isn't "nonsense" either, they way some of you labelled it. It's following site-wide consensus at MOS to refrain from abusing capitalization for emphasis, to write plain English, to not violate WP:NPOV by forcing weird style quirks from one minority sector onto all editors, and to not violate the KISS principle and principle of least astonishment, i.e. to abide by the consensus to avoid confusing our majority, non-specialist readers. NB: This all goes far beyond sports and games. For example, the majority of music and pop-culture magazines capitalize the names of genres of music and film/television, but we do not do it here, because we know it's grammatically dicey and it leads to too many problems, rampant capitalization of all sorts of other things chief among them. There was a time only a few years ago when there was seriously a proposal on the table here to capitalize things like Armadillo. I shit you not. I don't mean the article title, I mean in constructions like "He ran over an Armadillo and a Dog the same day". Allowing one topic area to abuse capitalization (or hyphenation or whatever), to appease tendentious editors, who won't stop beating the dead horse or agree to just drop it, leads to editorial chaos again and again in short order. This happens inevitably because, say, 1 out of 10 people who read Wikipedia want to change something it or add something to it now and again, and 1 out of 50 want to become at least semi-regular editors, but maybe only 1 out of 1000 are linguists, professional editors, English teachers, or other grammarians by training and deep experience. Consequently, lack of grammatical and stylistic expertise (for a general audience, not the hobbyist publications you focus on as chess nuts) combined with an earnest desire to follow perceived Wikipedia writing norms, leads to people seeing Important Things Capitalized Because They're Important in articles withing the scope of some "capitalize or die!" camp's, and they start doing it elsewhere, mimicking the pseudo-convention they've run across. It's happened here again and again for years. Enough already.
3. BRD can be a valid approach, but it was certainly not taken here. All the above said, WP:BRD is also a well-established process, and a revert is not necessarily totally unjustifiable, if one somehow accepts the notion that whether or not to capitalize "White" and "Black" in chess articles is actually an unsettled matter, that somehow chess is utterly exempt from MOS (it's not; there is no such thing as a "local consensus", e.g. at a wikiproject or an article talk page, that trumps a broader site-wide consensus – this has not only be affirmatively decided by ARBCOM on the basis of WP:CONSENSUS and other policies as then written, this "wikicaselaw" was explicitly codified as new policy at WP:LOCALCONSENSUS, several years ago. But let's just pretend for a moment that a case can be made that lower-casing these words might actually have been questionable. BRD could be cited, and the change reverted, even perhaps at the cost of the unquestionably good parts of the complex edit. It just has to be done with the message that the revert is provisional, that good faith was assumed, that the edit raised questions that need to be resolved on the talk page, and that the editor is asked to explain the edit and its rationales. But that didn't happen here. Some chess editors feel they have the right to act with righteous retribution, and dismissive assumptions that anyone who isn't aware of or who disagrees with their "convention" is necessarily stupid or a chess-hating troll. The message you actually sent was, basically, "go fuck yourself and your nonsense, and while we're ranting go fuck SMcCandlish too (now that we don't think he's here to defend himself any more), and fuck anyone else who dares to mess with our pages and contradicts our God-given Holy Style Rules of Chess." It's extremely off-putting to any well-meaning reader-editor who expects, and edits to help ensure, that WP articles with follow basic English grammar rules, not oddball, made-up preferences no one but chess fans follow in their own rarefied books. It makes you like unhinged, obsessive jerks who are not here to write an encyclopedia, but to hijack it to advance some weird agenda. It's totally unreasonable to react with blatant, flippant, even jaded and eye-rolling dismissive hostility to people who cannot sanely be expected to have somehow guessed that you are pushing a style convention from specialist publications, despite MOS saying not to capitalize like this. If could be too harsh to say "you should be ashamed of yourselves", but you definitely need to rethink your approach here, both behaviorally and goal-wise. If that and the rest seem "personalizing" to you, a) you deserve it, and at least two of you know I definitely mean you, and b) I don't work here any more, so I don't care, and you are not newbies so you're not immune to be bitten or trouted. I really don't like being finger-pointed at, behind my back, as some kind of editorial "nonsense"-monger, by people trying to push illegitimate agendas that violate consensus and multiple guidelines and policies, and to have this happen in the course of your verbally abusing another editor and trying to make your obsessive soapbox matter his/her problem instead of yours. You're being grossly tendentious, disruptive and dickish, and you damned well know it. Ultimately, if it's really so important to you to capitalize these words that you'd threaten to go on editorial strike or quit the project over it, as a few zoological editors once did, you're sorely, sorely confused about why you are here at all, and need to read WP:NOTHERE, WP:5THWHEEL and WP:DIVA. Also, anyone who responds with "TL;DR" and keeps on being a tendentious twit on this issue needs to go find another hobby, because anyone who cannot handle 6 or 7 paragraphs of very clearly written text is simply not competent to work on an encyclopedia-editing project, sorry.

I'm logging back off and leaving WP again, so feel free to whack away, fap fap fap, at whatever straw man you'll likely erect in response to this in my absence. The fact that I will come out of wikiretirement and return to this ethically foundering project to run logic and moral-high-ground circles around people who drag my (real) name through the mud, in their petty attempts to make aggressive but invalid points against other editors and shamelessly drive them away, should probably be interpreted as a strong indication that I'm a poor target for such tactics. I have enough friends here with my e-mail address that doing so is unlikely to go unnoticed and unaddressed. Let sleeping dogs lie, and expect to get barked at if you keep kicking them. Way more importantly, quit abusing the good faith and intentions of other editors just to run your tinpot fiefdom, and think about the good of the project and its readers instead of what you like for your oh-so-precious chess fan reasons. No one else gives a damn, seriously. You must understand this by now. You've been acting no better than the Pokemon fanwankers and other devotee in-crowds who keep trying to turn large swaths of Wikipedia into Trekkie-pedia and Soccer-pedia and Tolkien-pedia and Progressivism-pedia, and against whom the community has had to write new essays and guidelines against trivia, in-universe writing, etc. There's already one against what you're doing, at WP:Specialist style fallacy. This is not your encyclopedia and chess articles, they're all of ours. I may not work on WP directly any more, but I still depend on it as a utility, and I still will speak up when I have a stake in its future being more free of abuse by special interests. "Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time." — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 20:32, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Ha! You're a fine piece of work. Cobblet (talk) 21:12, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

He's still a childish, thin-skinned, pretentious twit. Wikipedia will certainly miss him. Quale (talk) 00:18, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

I liked the argument that body parts like "knees" aren't capitalized just like "human body" isn't capitalized (of which knees are a part), and similarly since "chess" isn't capitalized then neither s/ Queen's Gambit be. (Do ya think he still thinks that? If the article title went his way and got moved to "Queen's gambit", would that mean the acronymns are now "Qga" & "Qgd" "qga" & "qgd"?!) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 00:25, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

This is beside the point, but I would say that the acronyms "QGA", "QGD", "KID" and so forth are not appropriate on Wikipedia. Cobblet (talk) 08:11, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

They are in Glossary of chess, and the glossary is on WP. (Do you suggest to remove from the glossary?) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 10:43, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

No, just that one should not expect anyone to have to repeatedly consult said glossary while reading a chess article on Wikipedia. Cobblet (talk) 04:48, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

Out-of-context. 100 percent of the time any of those acronyms are used in chess articles, they are either pre-defined (longer names given first ala MoS), or wlink'd. (So no glossary consultation is needed, let alone "repeated" ones. (The only reason the topic of glossary was introduced, is that you suggested banishing those acronyms from WP, and I asked for clarification if that meant from the glossary as well.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 05:13, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

I meant to say that such acronyms are in my opinion inconsistent with writing in a formal encyclopedic tone, and unnecessary in a medium with no space constraints. I'm happy they appear in the glossary. Cobblet (talk) 06:14, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

OK, gotcha. (They're in common use in articles; perhaps you want to propose they be not used. For me, I think they are part of the chess lexicon [found in book titles, etc.] and along with longer-form specification and wlink's to respective articles can't be inappropriate. But whatever -- consensus may be different & I'll go w/ consensus; but we won't know consensus unless you make proposal, etc.) Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 11:22, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

I found in MOS that acronyms based on lower-case words are still in caps. (So I was wrong about "qga", etc. -- it'd still be QGA & QGD even if it were "queen's gambit accepted/declined".) Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 03:38, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

At last, this project gets bombarded with some waffle. Toccata quarta (talk) 05:25, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

First, I do not refer to any person as a "twit" on Wikipedia. There is no need to enter into a mud-slinging match if your view on the matter has all the objective merits. However, I understand that the posting, much of it a rant against the chess WikiProject, is outright provocative and will attract that sort of response. The style of the writing in SMcCandlish's post makes it difficult to glean what the substantial arguments are, but I think I identified one that probably deserves an answer. It is the assertion that terms such as "Queen's Gambit Declined" are not treated as proper names outside specialist chess literature, and that the capitalization is only a style convention used by specialists. That is incorrect. Mainstream literature (by this I mean literature that is not specialized into chess) discussing these terms are rare, but those that I found, such as Encyclopedia Britannica, also follow this capitalization. And for good reason, "Queen's Gambit Declined" is the name of a specific chess opening. "Queen's gambit declined" says that something was declined by a gambit belonging to the queen. So treating them as proper names appears standard even outside of chess literature, and normal English grammar for proper names is to capitalize each word in the name. This is analogous to writing "Royal Air Force" (the name of a specific air force, referring to the British one) instead of "royal air force" which could be any air force with ties to royalty. Sjakkalle (Check!) 12:57, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

I greatly respect that you do not refer to any person as a twit, but this individual is made a twit by his own actions on Wikipedia, not by what I write. Of course that suggests that there was no need for me to write it, and that is true. (Maybe writing it makes me a twit as well.) His arguments were refuted six years ago on Talk:Queen's Gambit, and neither the argument nor the arguer have become any more appealing in the years since. But you are of course right about the technical question, and your approach to the social challenge is more wise than mine as well. Quale (talk) 00:58, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

Having seen SMcCandlish's post for a few hours before I responded to it gives me an advantage. It is a little arrogant of me to be critical of those who react to it in a more forceful manner.

Still, in most cases of clear misbehavior (and accusing us of "clobber it all" mentality, implying that we are too stupid to understand English, and casting aspersions of us being "grossly tendentious, disruptive and dickish" are all examples of misbehavior), a minimally firm but formally polite response is often quite adequate. It makes it instantly clear to any casual outsider who is being disruptive if any characterizations are being made by one side only. Usually people who behave with rants and casting of aspersions here, behave that way elsewhere too, and that type of behavior slowly erodes their support within the community. At some point the remaining support is far too weak and uninspired for them to avoid severe sanctions when the history of all past behavior is brought up. Sjakkalle (Check!) 07:29, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

On our other favourite bug-a-boos

p.s. This issue has been a bug-a-boo. (p.s. There are many others, too, but let's not talk about them in this context, because the thread will get too long and it will give everyone a headache. For example, when do we capitalize 'Grandmaster', and when don't we? And is it 'Nimzo–Indian' or 'Nimzo-Indian' [and why?]? And does everyone agree we should use one notation in articles [abbreviated algebraic], and that "Black's push b7–b5" is consistent w/ that, but "b7-b5" is longhand notation and therefore introducing a second & different notation into the same article which is not the best way? And how about a final deal on '0-0-0' (vs) 'O-O-O'? And ditto for +5 −3 =2 (vs) +5 =2 −3. Ditto ½ (vs) .5 And how about picking one or two from 'versus / vs. / v. / vs / v' instead of using all of 'em? And ... [OK, I agree, quite enough!].) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 20:41, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

I agree that project-wide conventions should be established for such situations. Cobblet (talk) 21:11, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

I prefer ½ instead of .5 because (1) the result is either a whole point or has a half point. (You can't score 5.3.) And (2) few people speak that way, e.g. people rarely say "he scored seven point five points"; more likely they say "he scored seven and a half points". In the body of the article, I prefer "versus" (a period looks like the end of a sentence). In a diagram I prefer "vs.". I don't like a hyphen between the names of the two competitors because it can be confused with a hyphenated name - see an edit to wrong bishop within the last few days. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 22:04, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Re ½ (vs) .5, I agree obviously and there was a decent discussion on options here, I just think that convention oughta be added to the other edit conventions spelled out on the WP:CHESS project page. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 00:02, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Re 'versus / vs. / v. / vs / v', I agree "vs." is best, but IMO use of "versus" ought to be reserved for text intended for reading, e.g. "The top board would again feature man versus machine." In section names (TOCs) I don't like "versus" spelled out, that suggests reading text for meaning, when only a game identification is the purpose. (So either "–" or "vs." when referencing a game. Ditto for article names, where I'd prefer "vs.". I'm not sure about dispensing with "–", however, since so many sources use that, e.g. ECOs, Hooper/Whyld, etc.) Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 01:34, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

See the confusion at wrong bishop that was corrected 2 or 3 days ago. The source (BCE) says "Guretzky-Cornitz", and it looks just like "Euwe-Fine". Someone (it could have been me) thought that it was Guretzky vs. Cornitz when it is actually a hyphenated name. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 02:15, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes it was your blooper [8], but, I'm not sure that seldom-occurring confusion s/b the basis for editing convention (maybe it should!?). Reading is king: what the Project wants readers to see/read (no matter how confusing for editors to get there). Ihardlythinkso (talk) 03:17, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I am trying to think of the readers rather than the editors. I think it is clearer to read "versus" or "vs." than the hyphen, since the hyphen sometimes indicates a hyphenated name. And some readers won't know that the hyphen usually means "versus". Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 03:34, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Ihardlythinkso brought up seven issues to discuss. My opinion is that we should first try to follow WP:MOS as much as possible, and if it doesn't offer us any guidance, examine common practice in the chess literature. I haven't read any of the previous discussion I assume we've had on these issues (although I've noticed the monster in the closet, Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 129#Chess notation) and if my thoughts conflict with the general consensus please point them out. But these are my views anyway on the less complex issues (the algebraic notation discussion is tricky and I don't want to start it):

If there won't be discussion and consensus to put into WP:CHESS conventions along with 'White/white', then the kind of passion around '0-0-0 (vs) O-O-O', as shown by an earlier thread, along with commensurate reverts & re-reverts at articles based on personal preference, will just have a basis to continue indefinitely. Also there s/b one chess notation, not two, in an article. "Black will reroute his knight Nc6–b8–d7" clearly invokes MOS:NDASH where the endash translates to "to". (That example is no different in kind to the earlier example "Black will push his pawn b7–b5.") I don't see any active discussion yet, so there cannot be any new WP:CHESS conventions set without consensus, and limited participation means no consensus. Last, the view that these convention issues don't matter as long as each article is internally consistent, I think is faulty for at least three reasons (probably more) if you think about it. Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 19:05, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Chess titles

I believe chess titles should be treated in exactly the way we treat other titles such as "Doctor". Capitalize them only when used as an honorific and use lower case in all other situations: "The book was reviewed by International Master John Watson", but "The book was reviewed by the American international master John Watson", or "He beat Grandmasters Adianto and Paragua" but "He beat two grandmasters". And just as one does not usually write out "Miss" or "Mister", titles should be abbreviated when used as a honorific (IM, GMs in the previous examples). Cobblet (talk) 08:38, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Instead of self-constructions that make solutions look all-too-easy to apply (same as the 'White/white' issue), we should look at how these are actually used in articles. In articles there are countless uses of Grandmaster/grandmaster preceeded by a country identification, like this: "Fischer was next scheduled to play against Danish grandmaster Bent Larsen." And there are countless uses in chess BLPs beginning like this: "Levon Grigori Aronian is an Armenian chess Grandmaster." Back in February I asked talented WP writer-editor Khazar2 for his input, it's in his Talk Archive 7, so I'll copy/paste that dialogue here:

When should "Grandmaster" be cap'd, and when shouldn't it? ("A brilliant move by the Yugoslavian Grandmaster Svetozar Gligorich", vs. "A brilliant move by the Yugoslavian grandmaster Svetozar Gligorich"; "I want to introduce you folks to Grandmaster Nakamura" vs. "... to grandmaster Nakamura"; "After success in qualifying matches x, y, z, so_and_so was awarded the FIDE title of Grandmaster"; "There were several grandmasters attending the Mainz Open", etc. (It seems to me s/ be cap'd when referring specifically to the title itself, or used as title appended before a name, but otherwise, lower-case. Is that right?!) Thank u! Ihardlythinkso (talk) 02:38, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Good question. I'm not 100% sure about this, but a quick Google check suggests that the New York Times and BBC don't capitalize it in any instance: [9][10][11] I would follow their lead until someone points out a specific Wikipedia MOS guideline that demands otherwise. -- Khazar2 (talk) 02:47, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 18:40, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

It would appear that the usage I suggested is consistent with the usage you suggested to Khazar2, and that usage is also consistent with all but one of the search results Khazar2 found, so I wouldn't be so bold as to call it my own invention. I doubt in this case we'll find uniform consistency within the literature either (am I right in surmising from the entry on Michael Adams that the Oxford Companion always capitalizes titles without exception?), which is why I'm suggesting a method that is exactly analogous to other conventions surrounding honorifics and capitalization in English. If we've got military ranks listed on the table at the end of MOS:ABBR, I think it would be logical to add chess titles there as well.

Let me turn the question around: why should this Wikiproject adopt a standard on chess titles that's different from the convention applied to any other honorific in English? Cobblet (talk) 20:40, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I guess WP:JOBTITLE also applies here. If I read it correctly it suggests that we would write "Grandmaster Carlsen" but "Magnus Carlsen is a Norwegian grandmaster", which seems right to me. I don't think grandmaster should always be capitalized, but never capitalizing it might lead to irregularities especially when compared to lesser titles. Some such as FIDE Master and Candidate Master look odd when not capitalized (FIDE master and candidate master), and International Master, Woman International Master, and Woman Grandmaster are potentially ambiguous and confusing when not in caps. If we wrote "Irina Krush is a woman grandmaster", would our readers interpret that as Krush is a WGM or would they read it as saying that GM Krush is a woman? Probably it would be best to avoid those potentially ambiguous constructions and use a different wording. Quale (talk) 00:41, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

WP:JOBTITLE expresses exactly what I mean to say regarding capitalization. Thanks for pointing it out. I agree that the potentially ambiguous constructions you mentioned are to be avoided. Cobblet (talk) 00:53, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Although being a grandmaster is not really an occupation, I think WP:JOBTITLE is the closest analogy we have, so I agree with the others above me. Sjakkalle (Check!) 15:26, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

I think the same considerations apply to "World Champion" or "Russian Champion", where we might write "World Champion Anand" and "Anand is world champion", etc. Quale (talk) 00:32, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

So what about these (very common article) examples then?:

From the Bobby Fischer article (I'm wondering if absense/presence of definite article "the" is impacting):

1. "Fischer was next scheduled to play against Danish grandmaster Bent Larsen."
2. "The Soviet grandmaster Yuri Averbakh observed, 'In the struggle at the board this youth, [...].'"
3. "[...] Fischer was set to play against Soviet grandmaster and concert pianist Mark Taimanov in the quarter-finals."
4. "Dutch grandmaster Jan Timman calls Fischer's victory 'the story of a lonely hero [...].'"
5. "[...] Fischer stayed for extended periods in the San Francisco-area home of a friend, the Canadian grandmaster Peter Biyiasas."
6. "He resided in the same compound as the Filipino grandmaster Eugenio Torre, [...]."
7. "Serbian grandmaster Ljubomir Ljubojević called Fischer, 'A man without frontiers. [...]'"
8. "The U.S. grandmaster Robert Byrne labeled the phenomenon 'Fischer-fear'."

The "the" makes all the difference, as you suspected: capitalize 1, 3, 4 and 7. Replace "grandmaster" with "king" or "president" and ask yourself if you would capitalize the latter two words in the same position. I should comment though that there is no reason to refer to someone's nationality or chess title if neither has any direct relevance to the text: you don't expect an article on Stephen Hawking's career, for example, to refer to all the people around him as "Dr. Roger Penrose", "Mr. Robert Graves", "the English professor Fred Hoyle", "his Indian student Dr. Jayant Narlikar", etc. That Taimanov was a concert pianist is particularly irrelevant to his quarterfinal match against Fischer. Cobblet (talk) 08:35, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

The issue of good writing whether the national qualifiers like "Danish", or "concertmaster" should or shouldn't be appended is really a side issue and discussion of same only serves to take us off topic (i.e. when to cap or not cap Grandmaster/grandmaster). (BTW as long as you have brought up the poor writing of including those qualifiers, I now have to say that I as editor did not add any of those qualifiers in any of the examples listed. Neither did I add "concertmaster". But again, talking about it takes us off point.) I agree with all of your prescriptions above (that 1, 3, 4, and 7 s/b cap; 2, 5, 6, and 8 s/b lower-case). However, I have two Qs on my mind about these examples ... Q1) Does everyone see and agree then, that as far as cap vs. lower-case goes, we essentially have a critical difference between the following two sentences? "The Soviet grandmaster Yuri Averbakh observed, 'In the struggle at the board [...].'", and, "Soviet Grandmaster Yuri Averbakh observed, 'In the struggle at the board [...].'"? Q2) We've agreed what is correct is "The Soviet grandmaster Yuri Averbakh observed, 'In the struggle at the board [...].'" OK. But let's modify the sentence a bit. How? By using "GM" instead. So we have: "The Soviet GM Yuri Averbakh observed, 'In the struggle at the board [...].'" Is there anything wrong with that sentence? I presume there isn't. And is "GM" in that sentence "honorific". I presume it is. So if "GM" is honorific in that sentence, how could substitution of the word GM represents, suddenly make the substituted word not honorific (and therefore demand lower-case)?! (And I guess this raises a question too, you mentioned earlier if I remember, you felt "Grandmaster" and "grandmaster" s/ not be spelled out in articles and "GM" s/b used instead. Have you dropped that position? [Because if we are not to use "Grandmaster" or "grandmaster" in articles, then the whole discussion as to when to cap and when to use lower-case is of course irrelevant.]) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 23:00, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes, on second thought I realized abbreviations like "GM" would likely be unfamiliar to the general reader so I'm no longer convinced it's a good idea. I brought up the needlessness of mentioning titles because I agree that it would look strange if a page was full of capitalized titles like "Grandmaster": my point is that this should not be an issue because the titles themselves should be used sparingly. Cobblet (talk) 23:35, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

OK, that's great. But what about my Q1 & Q2? Ihardlythinkso (talk) 01:04, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

And what about this one, it isn't "honorific" use, but makes direct reference to the title as a title:

1. "[...] he finished tied for third with Borislav Ivkov, half a point behind tournament winners Ludek Pachman and Miguel Najdorf; this confirmed his status as a grandmaster."

And in many article introductions this pattern:

1. "Levon Grigori Aronian is an Armenian chess Grandmaster."

And these (are indefinite article "a" and definite article "the" impacting?):

1. "Garry Kimovich Kasparov is a Russian (formerly Soviet) chess grandmaster, a former World Chess Champion, writer [...]."
2. "Robert James "Bobby" Fischer was an American chess grandmaster and the eleventh World Chess Champion."

Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 01:47, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

No capitalization in the last four examples. In the last two examples "world chess champion" also should not be capitalized. Sorry, that's not right: in the third case "a former world chess champion" is correct because "world chess champion" is a common noun (it refers to world chess champions in general) but in the last case "World Chess Champion" is correct because it is a proper noun (it refers only to Fischer). Cobblet (talk) 08:35, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

This is confusing. Why does the Kasparov example have to be interpreted as a common noun? WP:JOBTITLE says: When the correct formal title is treated as a proper noun (e.g. King of France; it is correct to write Louis XVI was King of France [...]). So, presumably this is okay: "Louis XVI was a former King of France [...]". And if that is okay, then why isn't this okay: "Garry Kasparov is [...] a former World Chess Champion"? Ihardlythinkso (talk) 09:49, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

It isn't correct to write "Louis XVI was a former King of France" to express the meaning "Louis XVI was a former French king". I'll answer why this is so on your talk page tomorrow, but right now I need sleep. Cobblet (talk) 10:40, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

I need sleep too. I can see you're probably right. (Poor Kasparov ... He'll have "former world chess champion" in his article lead, while Fischer will have "eleventh World Chess Champion" in his. I agree this seems correct though.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 10:57, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure that's right. It seems to me (correct me if I'm not right) you are using a simple guideline: "Cap 'Grandmaster' and 'World Champion' only if they are used honorifically, and honorific use occurs only when immediately in front of a person's name, as that person's title." But what about cases where the title is being referred to as a title, e.g., "FIDE bestows to qualified candidates the title of Grandmaster." (The other alternative would be: "FIDE bestows to qualified candidates the title of grandmaster.") Ditto "World Champion". (Are you with me?) We need a more comprehensive guide than simply "honorific, appended before a name". (It is easy enough to construct simple cases as Quale did above, and think they explain a convention comprehensively, when they don't. [And when they don't, it leads to confused and inconsistent application in articles, which caused this thread sub-part to be opened originally. So if we leave the discussion to apparently simple conclusions that aren't comprehensive, we think we solved the problem, we didn't, and this whole discussion is wasted, we end up with continued inconsistent uses in articles without resolution, and we end up right back here again in future. That is why I like to rely on real-article examples, or if I make up examples, to illustrate how an over-simplified rule can be deceptive, by being inadequate in solving the original problems that caused a discussion to occur in the first place.]) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 23:47, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

In which of the previous four cases do you think capitalization of "grandmaster" and "world chess champion" should occur? Cobblet (talk) 00:04, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

Please, can we have logical order to this discussion, if we will have one? Do you or don't you grant that "Grandmaster" might be rightly capitalized when referring to the title as a title, in the example I've given? (Your questions are out of context, and I cannot answer them, without knowing your answers to my good-faith Qs above. This is not a contest of wits, or tricks or traps. If there's something illogical about my line of reasoning then just point it out.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 01:04, 6 October 2013 (UTC) p.s. Since you've dropped idea of using "GM" in place of the spelled out words, I presume using "GM" would also be an alternative editors could use, since it can simply be wiki-linked to the same article "Grandmaster" is wiki-linked to. So therefore it is not wrong to introduce question how GM compares with it substituted value "Grandmaster" or "grandmaster", and when substituted, where is the consistency re honorific or not. (I suppose by asking these questions I'm a trouble-maker who deserves to be blocked!?) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 01:04, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

Ok, I was only asking because I wanted to understand exactly what it was that you were confused over. I think my answers are consistent with WP:JOBTITLES, which everyone seems satisfied with as the guideline to use in this case. I don't want to clutter up this page with a two-person conversation, so I'll answer your previous questions in depth on your talk page. Cobblet (talk) 01:31, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

Here is another example of "Grandmaster" being referred to as a title (there are many more), from article Raymond Keene:

• "In 1976 he became the second Englishman, following Tony Miles, to be awarded the Grandmaster title."

Ihardlythinkso (talk) 04:42, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

• • Decapitalize. Cobblet (talk) 09:12, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Here's another from article Tony Miles:

• "He learned the game of chess early in life and made good progress nationally, taking the titles of British under-14 Champion and under-21 Champion in 1968[1] and 1971, respectively."
  • Capitalize "Under" as well, I think. Cobblet (talk) 09:12, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Ihardlythinkso (talk) 08:09, 7 October 2013 (UTC) From Grandmaster (chess) (first two lead sentences):

• "The title Grandmaster is awarded to chess players by the world chess organization FIDE. Apart from World Champion, Grandmaster is the highest title a chess player can attain." Ihardlythinkso (talk) 05:59, 8 October 2013 (UTC)
  • The capitalization is all correct here. Cobblet (talk) 09:12, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Hyphens and dashes in opening names

WP:NDASH is quite clear on when to use en dashes. In cases where the two words are independent elements and the meaning of the punctuation is "and", an en dash is indicated: Smith–Morra Gambit, Caro–Kann Defence, Richter–Veresov Attack (which means we need to move Richter-Veresov Attack and Vienna Game, Frankenstein-Dracula Variation). When this is not the case, a hyphen is used: Semi-Slav Defence, Nimzo-Indian Defence (short for Nimzowitsch's Indian Defence—"Nimzowitsch's" modifies "Indian" so the two are not independent), Neo-Grünfeld. Cobblet (talk) 08:38, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Do you have a source that "Nimzo-Indian" is short for "Nimzowitsch's Indian"? Why couldn't that name equally be a combination of two terms "Nimzowitsch Defence" and "Indian Defence"? I really think you show a pattern, here and elsewhere, to make your own substitution choices, and then draw conclusions from them. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 17:29, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I distinctly recall having said somewhere that "these are my views", and I don't know how to make it any clearer than that. No, I can't find a source that explicitly says that, but I have evidence that that is what the phrase was intended to mean when it was first invented. But let me point out one other thing first:

1. With words that are not player names, the term "Indian Defence" is never used to form a compound in the way you describe. The term "Caro–Kann Defence" means "Caro and Kann's Defence", or equivalently, "the defence attributed to Caro and Kann". But the term "Old Indian Defence" does not mean "the defence attributed to Old and Indian", which makes no sense; instead, the meaning here is "the old variation of the Indian Defence". "Old" and "Indian" are not independent elements: the latter is part of "Indian Defence", which the former modifies. This is even more obvious in the case of "King's Indian Defence" and "Queen's Indian Defence".
2. Edward Winter shows in item 3712 that the idea of blending the words Nimzowitsch and Indian first occurred in German: "Nimzoindisch" first appeared in print in 1931, while the first use of "Nimzo-Indian" dates to 1935 according to the OED. Back then, the Indian ("Indisch") was thought of as a single opening (and not a group of openings, as it is now), and when 3...Bb4 was first mentioned in print it was called ‘La “Variante de Nimzowitch”’ in French, not "La Défense de Nimzowitsch". Kmoch's quote in German in the last sentence of Winter's article also refers to it as a variation. This implies that when the German "Nimzoindisch" and the English "Nimzo-Indian" were coined, it was unlikely to have been meant as an amalgamation of "Nimzowitsch Defence" and "Indian Defence", as you suggested (which would be strange, since the former is the totally unrelated 1.e4 Nc6), but as a contraction of "Nimzowitsch's variation of the Indian Defence". That the unhyphenated blend "Nimzoindian" occasionally occurs in the older English literature (e.g. item 7677) is further evidence that the English and German terms are linguistically related. Cobblet (talk) 20:26, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I wasn't thinking "Nimzowitch" might refer to 1.e4 Nc6, rather some line of his in the QP opening. Anyway you've convinced me, thx for all that research. (I also found this at MOS:NDASH but don't know if it applies: Wrong: Franco–British rivalry; "Franco" is a combining form, not independent; use a hyphen: Franco-British rivalry.) Anyway I need to access a tool to do mass changes to undo all the damage I've done mistenly thinking Nimzo–Indian was correct. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 01:41, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

W/L/D records

I couldn't find any convention on Wikipedia for this, but I note that Template:Infobox boxer lists draws after wins and losses, and most articles on boxers seem to follow this convention in text and in headings. I haven't seen examples of them using the (+5 –2 =3) notation though. Checking the literature, Kasparov in My Great Predecessors (Everyman) seems to consistently list losses before draws (although he's the only person I've seen who doesn't use spaces—I take it we prefer to). It's surprisingly difficult to find examples of this notation in other books—I found one instance in Sanakoev's World Champion at the Third Attempt (Gambit 1999, p. 59) where it's losses before draws and one in Palliser's The Modern Benoni Revealed (Batsford 2005, p. 26) where it's draws before losses. That's three different conventions in three books by different publishers—not very helpful. But it does seem that listing losses before draws is a bit more common, both on Wikipedia and elsewhere. I suggest we stick to that. Cobblet (talk) 08:38, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Good work. I agree. The proposal is to actually add it to WP:CHESS conventions along with 'White/white' so there is a basis for keeping articles consistent over different editors' personal preferences. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 19:16, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I realize that's what we're aiming for. Cobblet (talk) 20:27, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I don't really like putting draws after losses. A draw is a result between a win and a loss, so the logical place for draws should be the middle, at least if using an abbreviated format instead of writing it out with words. Looking a bit wider than just chess, I think sports league tables in Europe tend to use a win-draw-loss format, while those in America use win-loss-draw. (Compare for example tables for football in England with those in in America). Not a very big issue though. Sjakkalle (Check!) 15:24, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

But this is not a "gray scale chart". A reader reading for meaning or pertinent information is interested in wins & losses, not draws. (Draws don't determine how a player did in a match. In addition there are matches where drawns don't count for anything, only wins, so in those cases drawns can be considered to not even exist and so have zero relevance. So on that basis putting the irrelevant draw count between the relevant win and relevant loss figures ends up unhelpful and even distracting and obscuring the pertinent information for a reader wanting quickly to ascertain the match result. The more important informations should appear first. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 19:08, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

If you want to emphasize the solidity of players such as Schlechter, Petrosian and Leko, the draw count may well be more interesting than the number of losses. It's a matter of personal opinion (you like using this argument, so I'll use it too!) which you think is more important. Cobblet (talk) 20:10, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

After all the talk about draws being the death of chess in the last decades, you argue that draw counts might be more interesting to some readers? Based on their interest in certain players' styles? OK that accounts for like 1% or less of readers, so we should set a convention based on that argument? And it isn't my opinion, it's Bobby Fischer's. (His advocacy for matches where drawns don't count. To make chess matches interesting again, and to give spectators what they are paying for.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 20:40, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

To be honest, the fact that it is very difficult to find instances of this notation even within specialist chess literature (you can try yourself as I did) suggests that the average reader is unlikely to understand what it means. I agree with the notion that Wikipedia pages should be made as accessible to the average reader as possible, and while writing about chess moves without using algebraic notation is virtually impossible, I think it's a bad idea to place an additional burden on readers by expecting them to know that "+" not only means "check" but also "win" in this case; that "−" means "loss"; and that "=" means "draw". Is it really so difficult to just write out the words? As for the order, whether written out or not, in view of Sjakkalle's point I'm going to go back on my previous opinion and suggest that either is acceptable as long as consistency is maintained within an article. Cobblet (talk) 17:03, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

The +=- notation is used in the Oxford Companion, which is a specialist encyclopedia on chess. I am probably guilty of using the shorthand notation myself (due to laziness), but I agree with you that writing out the result in words is probably best for a general purpose encyclopedia. Sjakkalle (Check!) 17:47, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

I disagree with the logic that using two different WLD orders is fine as long as consistent within an article. (Based on that logic, then what objection would there be allowing descriptive notation in addition to algebraic notation as long as the notation choice is consistent within an article? On what basis do you contend consistent across all articles is desirable for notation, but not for WLD records?) I also disagree with the the view (+ − =) or (+ = −) are too specialized for chess articles and should be replaced with words. We don't replace # with word "mate" or "checkmate". And we don't spell out "draw" to replace ½–½, or spell out "White wins" to replace 1–0. Is there really a solid distinction that permits accepting symbols for applications in one set of circumstance, but not another, other than personal preference? Ihardlythinkso (talk) 18:43, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Because to allow the use of descriptive notation would only place an additional burden on both readers without a chess background and readers with a chess background who were born after the last book in descriptive notation was published. (I'd be surprised if one such book has been published in the last thirty years.) It is absolutely reasonable to agree on one system on notation for Wikipedia. If you feel equally strongly about standardizing the order of wins/draws/losses when written out in words as you do about standardizing algebraic notation, I will point out that the former is then a guideline not on notation but on sentence structure, and I wonder if we are being unnecessarily prescriptive. YMMV.

That there is a difference in the prevalence between the +/-/= notation and symbols such as # or 1-0 is most clearly illustrated in Algebraic notation (chess), where the last two symbols are explained but the former notation is not. And I challenge you to find one example of a discussion of algebraic notation where the +/-/= notation is explained. (Is it even explained at all in the Oxford Companion? It isn't in the entry on "standard notation".) I'll also point out that symbols such as # and ½ are prescribed in the FIDE Handbook, while the +/-/= notation is not mentioned anywhere, as far as I can tell. Cobblet (talk) 20:10, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

[...] standardizing the order of wins/draws/losses [...] is then a guideline not on notation but on sentence structure, and I wonder if we are being unnecessarily prescriptive. No. It is simply in the interest of seeing consistency across chess articles. (Look in The Oxford Companion -- Hooper/Whyld use one order in all their encyclopedia entries that express WLD. If they used two orders scattered randomly through their book, that would have been unprofessional and messy, so they didn't do that. Ditto Encyclopedia Britannica if they are worth their salt. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 20:27, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Your personal opinion (Fischer was talking about match formats, not notation) is no more relevant to this discussion than the personal opinions of Sjakkalle and myself. I don't care very much about the issue of ordering draws and losses, and neither Sjakkalle nor anyone else seem to, so if you want a convention, we can have one. The real issue is whether we should be using the +/-/= notation at all: Sjakkalle and I have both expressed reservations about it. How do you feel about it now? Cobblet (talk) 22:06, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Let me clarify, I care more about that there is consistency re order (WLD OR WDL), just like The Oxford Companion has consistency re order and not a messy mix of orders throughout their encyclopedia, than whether the order is WLD or WDL. But an editor gave an argument "a draw is between a win and a loss so therefore it is logical that it should be in the middle" and I didn't want that to go unchallenged since I think wins & losses are more relevant to what readers are probably seeking and therefore we should give them that rather than making it more difficult to pick out. But I am fine with WDL order since Hooper/Whyld picked that order for their book. As far as spelling out the words instead of (+ − =), I prefer the compactness of the symbols, as the match record is just to give data, and introducing words suggests it's readable-for-meaning text akin to specifying "versus" were only "vs." is necessary in indentifying a game. As food for thought, the symbol definitions could be put in an article akin to Chess punctuation; or that article could be renamed and expanded; or the symbol definitions could be put in the Glossary of chess; or a template could be written something like {{WLD|5|2|3}} to produce (+5 −2 =3). (I kinda like that idea actually, for e.g. applying it on the first occurrence of WLD in an article to give indication how to interpret the symbols and so repeat underlining doesn't make a blight for the article. I also agree w/ Quale [below] that the symbols are so intuitive that Hooper/Whyld probably figured they didn't need explanation, so again a single use of the proposed WLD template seems to me to be the right balance. [I wouldn't know about it supporting visually impaired readers, however.]) Again these are just ideas, I'm willing to accept words instead of symbols if there is Proj consensus for that. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 22:45, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

I think Cobblet is right that the +W−L=D notation is not explained very often anywhere, although that might also suggest that it is thought to be pretty easy to understand even without explanation. I think writing 5 wins, 4 loses and 7 draws, and the like repeatedly in an article might be pretty tedious to read. It might just be me, but I can read +5 −4 =7 much more quickly than the expanded text. I am sympathetic to the concern that the notation isn't understandable to the general reader, so if the project decides that we should write it out I am fine with that. As long as wins come first, the WLD or WDL order is consistent within an article and a minus sign is used instead of a hyphen, I don't care whether the order is consistent across the entire project. If we decide we should standardize on the order, I will respect it. Quale (talk) 00:07, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

The template was at least a cute idea, but it makes me think: articles on players of other individual sports like tennis and boxing get nicely formatted tables at the end summarizing their tournament and match records. Why not for chess? At a stroke we'd eliminate the need for such a notation and the articles would look a lot cleaner as well. Cobblet (talk) 08:51, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

Notating draws

Definitely 8½ and not 8.5, since this is the convention used in every book I checked, and it also applies to game results: ½–½, not 0.5–0.5. (And use en dashes for game and match results, per NDASH.) Cobblet (talk) 08:38, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Agree, and per this discussion at Talk:Boris Spassky, where also I brought up MoS accessability issue with ½. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 17:57, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Definitely ½-½ over 0.5-0.5 for notating draws. No real preference when it comes to scores such as 8½ or 8.5. Perhaps the fraction notation is a trifle clearer, but I see decimals used e.g. on results tables, including the MSA area of the USCF website. Sjakkalle (Check!) 15:32, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

It's probably easier for them not to have to use special symbols when inputting large amounts of data, but Wikipedia doesn't appear to have this problem. Cobblet (talk) 22:15, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

I've thought that it's sometimes easier to get the numbers to align in a pleasing column in a crosstable if decimals are used, although that generally requires using .0 on some of the results. There is some ugliness in that as well, so probably it isn't a big concern and using the fractional notation would be as good or better. But I agree that 8.5 is never good in running text (it falsely suggests that 8.6 is a possible score), and 0.5−0.5 is an abomination. Quale (talk) 00:28, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

Versus v. vs v vs.

Per MOS:ABBR, the only correct abbreviation of versus is vs., except in legal contexts, where v. is used. But in game scores I strongly prefer using an en dash with no spaces rather than "vs." or a hyphen, per WP:NDASH: G. Kasparov–A. Karpov. Guretzky-Cornitz is fairly easy to distinguish from Guretzky–Cornitz, at least to my eyes. Virtually all print sources use either a hyphen or a dash, although the spacing differs from publisher to publisher. The reader who doesn't understand that a dash represents a game between two people is not likely to understand algebraic notation in the first place. Cobblet (talk) 08:38, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I've always found talking in general about conventions such as these unhelpful and misleading, since the devil is always in the details. For e.g., if you prefer endash on game scores, does that extend to section titles and article names? (Should Deep Blue versus Kasparov, 1996, Game 1 be instead Deep Blue–Kasparov, 1996, Game 1? Or Deep Blue vs. Kasparov, 1996, Game 1?) For me as already mentioned, I think "versus" in TOCs and article names is less good than "vs." or "–", since "versus" works best when reading for meaning whereas "vs." or "–" serve simply to identify a game. (So for e.g. the nine games identified in the TOC [i.e. section names] in article Draw by agreement are better off IMO as "vs." or "–" for easier visual access to that TOC info.) An article name like Queen and pawn versus queen endgame isn't identifying a game, but still might benefit from "vs." instead of "versus" to make the title less "narrative" and more normal recognition by players: Queen and pawn vs. queen endgame. Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 21:24, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

What are conventions if they are not general? You can rest assured that I always try to say exactly what I mean, and if I don't say something, it's usually because I don't mean to say it. The only case where I support going against the convention I proposed (and this applies to everything I say) is when common parlance overwhelmingly favours the alternative, such as in Kasparov versus the World, which was promoted by MSN and the media as such. So yes, I prefer Deep Blue–Kasparov, 1996, Game 1, unless popular usage for Game 1 itself (I agree that Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov is what the match is usually called) dictates otherwise. There are cases in other fields where the en dash is used in titles: Lincoln–Douglas debates and Roman–Syrian War are two examples I got from the MoS. Cobblet (talk) 21:38, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

What are conventions if they are not general? You misunderstand me. (Yes, the end result of an editing convention development discussion is or s/b a generally stated principle/rule/instruction, but that is the product of said discussion [its output] and I've seldom seen it helpful starting development discussions by immediately jumping to proposed solutions. Just because we say "hey, we are lacking an editing convention for xx" doesn't itself enumerate all the problems or examples we'd want a good convention to address. So jumping ahead of that to a "solution" can just cause a backwards-moving discussion if/when an inherent weakness is found in the proposed solution in the form of inherent exceptions it didn't take into account. [And the result then is a likely break-down of the discussion and nothing gets accomplished. [It's more fun and instantly gratifying to be the "hero" who instantly solves a problem. But when the solution faulters or has cracks, there's immediate loss of interest, the discussion stops, nothing gets done, and months later the whole scario just repeats with the same non-result. [For an example close to home, look at your fast proposal re algebriac notation box and what happened to it. When queried how you'd implement it, you then saw a reason to keep the current box in some applications. That was an example of an instant solution ending up causing backward-direction discussion. Then we saw the proposal fizzle and the discussion lose interest.] If you want to see another vivid illustration of what I mean, go see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Board and table games#Use of gender-neutral terms. (Some editors were all satisfied with generalities, "Hey, what's the problem? Just make it gener-neutral like the Mos says. Easy as pie." Well, ...) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 22:28, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I am being sincere when I say that these are my own opinions, and I am prepared to discuss and welcome discussion on anything I've said. I apologize that the issue with the algebraic notation box has stalled because I haven't bothered asking at the village pump yet. Cobblet (talk) 22:41, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I have no opinion on whether "versus" should be abbreviated to "vs." in article titles, but I support having a consistent standard applied to all chess-related article titles. Incidentally, my suggestion of having en dashes denote individual games provides a neat way of disambiguating between matches and games involving the same players. Cobblet (talk) 22:12, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

There already is "a consistent standard applied to all chess-related article titles", and it's the same one MOS applies to all other (non-legal) article titles, "X vs. Y". (WP:AT derives its style advice from MOS.) WP:Nobody cares, Cobblet, what personal-quirk way you "prefer" to abbreviate versus. Wikipedia isn't about you and how you want to do things to make chess seem special and different, or so you don't have to adapt your writing to Wikipedia a little since it's a completely different environment than a chess webboard. Nobody cares that your eyes and your fonts on your monitor using your browser (in this week's version) make "Guretzky-Cornitz" and "Guretzky–Cornitz" distinguishable; this is not true of everyone, and for people with vision issues your "fairly easy" is likely not good enough (note also, and this is crucial, that most screen readers for the blind do not distinguish these characters. If you don't like Wikipedia's way of doing "versus" situations in titles, then take that up at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. The legal field got a variance from "vs.", maybe you'll convince the community that one is needed here, too. (Good luck; I was a regular sports writer here, and I can tell you flat out that virtually no one is going to recognize "X–Y" as synonymous with "X vs. Y"; it must be a chess publication thing, which brings us to nobody cares that chess publications do a few things stylistically different; that's irrelevant here, because this is the world's most general-purpose encyclopedia for the largest conceivable audience). The last thing this notoriously standoffish and WP:OWNish project needs is another point on which it will be broadly seen as pushing an anti-MOS "rebellion" that violates WP:LOCALCONSENSUS policy. Feel free to call me a WP:DICK for harshing on you, but I'm on my way back out to re-re-edit this for a sweeter tone, I think you really know better than what you're proposing, and I have already spent too much time trying to slap some sense into an entire project overrun with tendentious, battlegrounding, hostile WP:SOAPBOXers and WP:ADVOCACY-pushers who have no regard for anything but their own precious interests, for me to care any more. I am intentionally being a bit of a rude ass on this because some of you people just are not getting it, not matter how many times the rest of the community tells you are doing Wikipedia wrong, and I'm at a loss for how to get the message across other than yelling it in your faces. Bye. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 21:02, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, I think we need a WP:OCD and WP:PATRONIZE if they don't exist already. Brittle heaven (talk) 23:56, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

I've witnessed several of his "contributions" to similar discussions at WT:MOS, and you probably won't be surprised to hear me say that his participation always lowered the level of debate and made consensus harder to reach. Fortunately I don't think that will be an issue here. His recent dyspeptic (and I must say very impressive) rants aside, I don't think he's likely to lay siege to this page and attempt to drown out all opposing viewpoints with his shouting the way he often has in the past. Quale (talk) 00:54, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Accessibility to the average reader does matter to me. No doubt that using "vs." instead of a dash would be clearer for them. Am I correct in characterizing User:Bubba73's preference as "versus" in the body of an article, and "vs." in all other situations: titles, headings, captions, perhaps even notes? And does anyone else have an opinion? Cobblet (talk) 22:25, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

I like Kramer–Kramer and have used it in several chess articles, but this and previous discussions on this point has convinced me that we shouldn't use the dash this way except perhaps under specific circumstances in tables. "Versus" is too profligate for captions and possibly the the other uses you mention, which leaves us with "vs." I think it might be OK to standardize on vs. in nearly all contexts, using versus in running text. It should be OK to use vs. in running text as well, but it looks too much like the end of a sentence to me. Quale (talk) 00:22, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

@Quale, but what about article titles that identify games?

@Cobblet, I think you've mis-summarized Bubba's preferences. (I think he likes "versus" in both article titles, and section names that identify games.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 01:11, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry if I did. I'll let him clarify. Cobblet (talk) 08:41, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

My preference is "versus" in the text and "vs." in diagram captions. I don't have much of an option in section titles (or article titles) - I think I've used both. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 05:15, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

FWIW, this says that "vs." is OK, depending on the context. It also says that the abbreviation is more casual, and if you are unsure - write it out. To me, an encyclopedia tends to be formal. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 05:29, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

And it says that "v." or "v" should only be used in legal context. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 05:51, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

And "Laws of chess" doesn't count as legal? Well, OK. </joke>. Sjakkalle (Check!) 17:31, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

0-0-0 vs. O-O-O

We s/ really get resolution on this. The view "it's not important" is fundamentally correct, but ignores the fact there is also irrational intense passion behind the issue. The view "just so consistent within an article" ignores the fact there occurs thereby unending edit reversions (warring) based on personal taste. If I'm not mistaken most articles are 0-0-0 already, and the related documenation explaining FIDE vs. PGN is also in place. Personally I think O-O-O looks old-fashioned and s/b reserved for games 1899 and before for "antique-look" and as convenient tip-off the game is a couple centuries old, and O-O-O takes up an inordinate amount of horizontal space, but that is my own irrelevant personal preference. Cobblet feels Oh, that should obviously be 0-0-0. So I'm suggesting we do this and add it to the limited other WT:CHESS conventions to get it over with and end the otherwise endless source of friction (and inconsistency). Ihardlythinkso (talk) 05:04, 7 October 2013 (UTC) p.s. The decision isn't "forever" obviously. (If the desire is to reverse at some point, how difficult is a mass change e.g., all "0-0-0"s → "O-O-O"s?) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 05:21, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

• I see little reason to deviate from what is the official albebraic notation described in the FIDE rules. Article C.13 clearly lists 0-0 over O-O. The chess books that I have, and that includes books from Gambit, Everyman, Mongoose, Random House, and Batsford, all use 0-0 over O-O. The O-O notation is mainly used in pgn files, but these are not truly algebraic notation despite the obvious and almost complete overlap. Sjakkalle (Check!) 05:34, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Two things are clear: 1) You haven't read the FIDE rules. 2) You didn't read my original post where I pointed out the flaws in the FIDE rules. No point in discussing the issue until those two things change. DrZukhar (talk) 05:39, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Oh, that's nice. Why not apologise for labelling Ihardlythinkso's edit vandalism? Toccata quarta (talk) 06:07, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

DrZukhar, your argument The greatest chess book of all time, My 60 Memorable Games", uses 'O' for example. was deficient in that that edition of that book employs English Descriptive Notation (an old-style notation and a good application for "O", IMO), but the modern algebraic reprint uses "0". If a project consensus is drawn re "O" vs. "0", your preference doesn't "win". (Sorry.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 06:24, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. DrZukhar wrote above: The greatest chess book of all time, My 60 Memorable Games", uses 'O' for example. That's true for my 1969 Simon & Schuster (original) edition, but that edition also uses the old-fashioned descriptive (e.g. 1.P-K4) notation. (Which is a good choice. So both old-fashioned typographies are together. Did DrZukhar fail to mention that for some reason!? I do not know what decent [non-bastardized] reprinted editions use, does anyone have one and can tell?) Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 06:28, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

The new official edition uses "0". Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 15:16, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for that. (I couldn't view any pages on Amazon.com.) Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 15:25, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

exd5 vs. e×d5

Oh. Could we also make this official!? (Why? Because Tony1 made a total nuisance of himself at Talk:Morphy versus the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard#Notation convention w/ his incessant baiting "But what about the sources?" mantra based on his tiny booklist and MOS obsession and admittedly not being a player, hello. [And thanks again to Double sharp for reverting the SOB after Tony & Guy Macon were harassing me for a potential block. This shit shows just how nasty the Pedia can be; oh sorry, am I not AGF'ing?! If anyone challenges what I say I can fucking make a convincing case of it, OK?]) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 06:49, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

• Again, little reason to deviate from FIDE's document on the laws of chess. In the appendix article C.9 states: "When a piece makes a capture, an x is inserted between...", so it is an "x" and not a cross/multiplication sign that is the standard algebraic notation. This is also the convention used in almost all chess literature. Some older literature, in particular German books, used the ":" notation (1.e4 d5 2.ed5: Qd5:), but it appears to be obsolete. Sjakkalle (Check!) 06:57, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Thank u. (I actually found "×" in several books in my library like Tony found, and it's pretty classy in those old books I must admit [fine-lined, delicate], but isn't standard by any means & didn't warrant a "fight".) Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 07:10, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Be very careful or you will be blocked. Tony (talk) 08:49, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Is that all you have to contribute, Tony? Here's what you wrote at the Morphy versus the Duke:

I suspect that chess notation has never undergone scrutiny with respect to the sources. We should be pleased to debate this thoroughly. It's at MoS central talk page. Tony (talk) 05:37, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Yet, short of re-posting your mini book list, you didn't participate in the discussion at MoS, however you did repeat to my attention several times including after said discussion had ended the following question, where you apparently didn't feel one question mark was enough and made them triplicate:

Hardly, what about the sources??? Tony (talk) 04:17, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

Here again is a chance for you to contribute something meaningful to a discussion of the topic. Perhaps Guy Macon can come in here to help you out by referring to me again as a "mole" that needs "whacking", as he did on your User talk!? Ihardlythinkso (talk) 12:59, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

The colon is not quite dead yet, just on its way out, I think. Nowadays I think you will more frequently see it used just like "x", so. 1.e4 d5 2.e:d5 Q:d5; I typically use this outside Wikipedia. But x is assuredly the standard. Double sharp (talk) 10:52, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Not only is "x" used by most specialist publications, it is also the character used by mainstream sources such as newspaper columns—I've been making a list of them over at User:Cobblet/Chess publications. Cobblet (talk) 13:59, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Evaluation symbols (+−, ±, ∞, etc.)

Thanks to everyone who's been participating in the discussion so far. We've talked about the best way of formatting Informant-style evaluation symbols before, but I don't know if we've ever discussed the issue of whether to use them in the first place. I for one feel we shouldn't, because it's safe to say that no reader who isn't familiar with chess literature will have any idea what they mean, and because I don't see any advantage in using them. We're not bound by space constraints, and there's at least one publisher (Everyman Chess) that also scrupulously avoids using these symbols in its books. Cobblet (talk) 08:04, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Miscellaneous notation issues

There are also a number of fairly trivial issues that were originally brought up at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 129#Chess notation but did not generate much controversy. I don't expect that to change, but for the sake of completeness, I'll mention them here:

1. For pawn promotion, the common notation d8=Q is recommended as being more intuitive to the non-specialist reader than the alternatives d8Q, d8(Q) and d8/Q (the first is FIDE's recommendation, the other two are rarer).
2. For en passant captures, the notation gxh6 e.p. (which is also FIDE's recommendation) is recommended.
3. The symbol "++" for double checks is discouraged as being unnecessary, and also because FIDE regards it as a valid alternative to # for checkmate.
4. Even if a game ends in checkmate, a result (1–0 or 0–1) should be given at the end of the game score.
5. Expressions such as "g-file", "f5-square" or "e-pawn" should always be hyphenated.

Cobblet (talk) 08:04, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Articles on chess titles - merge?

I propose that the articles National Master and Chess master be merged into Chess title. They deal with essentially the same subject matter. In addition, the article needs to be "globalized". For example, the title "Expert" to refer to a player slightly below master strength is purely a USCF thing. The term "Expert" is not really used in this sense outside of the US. MaxBrowne (talk) 00:13, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

I agree that the whole series of title articles needs to be looked at, including possible merges, and also in relation to the points that I flagged up on the Wikichess Project Page, which I will repeat here for convenience;

Chess title and FIDE title link back to each other and appear to contain some crossover/duplication. Would these be better combined into one article? Also, both articles focus on performance based titles while 'International Arbiter' and 'International Organizer' titles appear to have been ignored, even though they are both Chess and FIDE titles.

A few strands to consider, so no small task. Brittle heaven (talk) 12:37, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

I agree with merging National Master and Chess master into Chess title, and believe that the latter should also contain a summary-style section on FIDE titles. Cobblet (talk) 14:03, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

OK as per WP:BOLD I'm going to transfer the material from National Master to Chess title and set up a redirect. Might take a few edits on Chess title to make it flow coherently.MaxBrowne (talk) 15:02, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Tiger Lilov

His name is Valeri, not Tiger. But I cannot move the page because the title Valeri Lilov has been protected from creation. What to do? MrsHudson (talk) 14:31, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

An administrator should be able to help. But an article about this person was deleted before, see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Valeri Lilov (2nd nomination), so I don't know if there is justification for bringing it back. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 19:33, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

IM's usually get a short article, but we do have to be careful about our sources, and stick to neutral language and verifiable facts. Clearly he is a self-publicist. MaxBrowne (talk) 23:33, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

No reason, I AFD'ed the article. Good call, B73. This kid just wants a Wikipedia page and the other 2 AFD's and "salted" re-creation aren't stopping him. Speiss67 (talk) 20:34, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Pawn structure definitions are incomplete

Seems that there is progress being made! Thank you. Please see Talk:Backward_pawn Rook2pawn (talk) 13:13, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

Heads up (2)

One things: New article, found some mainstream relliable mediar source: Chess_on_Yahoo!_Games. Two things: Lets get some eyes and ears on the Tiger Lilov A.F.D., there is a mass sockpuppet attack going on from Lilov's supporters. Fishface gurl (talk) 23:31, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

That newspaper article is not a reliable source! None of the "facts" in the Wikipedia article are corroborated by it. If better sources aren't found the article should be deleted. Cobblet (talk) 23:36, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

This is a work in progress. No need to shout. I found some other sources. Please try to be more helpful and help construct, much love. Fishface gurl (talk) 23:58, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Dare I ask why chess.com doesn't have an article, just a redirect to a page that doesn't even mention it?

For some reason chess.com and wikipedia don't seem to get along, but it's an undeniable fact that chess.com is a hugely popular site with several million subscribers, and is one of the top 2000 sites on the whole internet in the Alexa rankings. That in itself surely qualifies it as notable? Disclaimer: I am not, nor have I ever been a member of chess.com. MaxBrowne (talk) 04:42, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

It used to have one, but I think it was deleted because of a lack of independent sources. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 04:50, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Chess.com (AfD discussion). One of the loudest voices in trying to get the page deleted was a longterm abusive sockpuppeteer, but other editors had concerns about the page as well. I think a well-written article with sources independent of the subject could demonstrate notability. Quale (talk) 05:13, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

IMO Chess.com should not redirect to List of Internet chess servers, that is confusing, and has led to quite a bit of confusion already. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 05:44, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Maybe the USCF site can be used as a source? Chess.com has grown considerably these last few years and has recently taken over the respected chessvibes site. (Not all chessvibes fans are happy about this). http://www.uschess.org/content/view/12379/319/ MaxBrowne (talk) 10:51, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Lack of reliable sources is the reason the site does not have an article here. Second of all, that site's claim to "8 million members" is a total lie and everyone that plays chess online knows it. Another thing is that that site has nothing to set itself apart from any other chess server online. Well, maybe one thing is that the site gets an extraordinary amount of negative reaction, such as this blog: by IM David Pruess. But the main thing is the lack of reliable independent sources. Fishface gurl (talk) 15:40, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Another reason that Chess.com gets such negative reaction is that it is so obviously a for-profit website founded and run by people that don't even play chess. The only thing that the chess.com management cares about is how much money they can make. Fishface gurl (talk) 07:36, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

The founders play at club level... but anyway I don't think this is particularly relevant. Clearly ICC and chessgames.com also have a profit motive, otherwise they wouldn't still exist. Chess.com is in fact the biggest chess site on the internet and it's absurd that it doesn't have a wikipedia page. And I'm not even a subscriber. I've started working on an article on my sandbox, I'll submit it when it's ready. It should go without saying that wiki will have no tolerance for single-purpose accounts bringing their drama from chess.com to chess.com's wiki page. MaxBrowne (talk) 07:55, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Well as long as you have Reliable third party sources for your article everything should be fine. Would you mind telling us what your sources are so far? Unless you get some reliable sources there will be no Chess.com wiki page. And it would be good if you dropped the pompous attitude. Fishface gurl (talk) 08:08, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm working on it... and a 10 day old account which has already managed to stir up a lot of drama and been logged twice on the Administrator's Noticeboard/Incidents probably isn't in the best position to decide what should or should not be included in wiki. MaxBrowne (talk) 08:53, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm not deciding. Reliable sources decide. Do you have any? Fishface gurl (talk) 09:16, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

I don't know of any non trivial sources. I don't think this site is important but Wikipedia would be a little better if it covered the site. To my understanding chess.com got a lot of casual users from Facebook rather then committed chess players. Chess players tend to use chessclub.com (ICC), chesscube.com, lichess.org, playchess.com, freechess.org among others. Regards, Sun Creator^(talk) 15:46, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Your first sentence is gibberish. What are you trying to say? Do you speak English? More importantly why do you think that "Wikipedia would be a little better if it covered the site" when there are no reliable sources that discuss the site? Should we do away with notability requirements now? Pompidou Centre (talk) 16:09, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

And uh, no, mere alleged size does not equal notability, and it is not an "undeniable fact" that chess.com has 8 million subscribers, etc. You'd think if the site was as popular as it claims to be *cough* that it would actually be covered in some reliable sources. The lack of mention in any reliable media speaks volumes as to how non-notable that site is. Another wierd thing is that Max Browne claims that he's never been a member of chess.com, yet he defends the owners there saying they are "club level" players. How would he know of that? Does he know these people personally? If he was not a member or had a personal connection to Chess.com how would he know anything about its owners being club level players? It's certainly not written in any reliable sources. What I am seeing here is that a handful of editors are lobbying that the notability requirements be set aside just so Chess.com can sneak an article into Wikipedia. Why is that? Pompidou Centre (talk) 16:16, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Why would Wikipedia be a little better if it covered the site? It's something chess people would have heard of and have an expectation of finding on Wikipedia, few could say the same of Chessence or Julius Brach. I don't see 'editors lobbying' but if they did it here on this talk page, it would be near meaningless anyway. Regards, Sun Creator^(talk) 20:34, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Aren't Chessence and Julius Brach covered in reliable sources? That is why they have articles and "Chess.com" doesn't. It is not what "chess people would have heard of" that decides what is covered her and what is not. The issue of WP:LOCALCONSENSUS militates against the inclusion of a "Chess.com" article. Policy is policy, irrespective of what one pov-pushing chess geek may argue for here. 166.248.150.128 (talk) 23:31, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Chessence told me it doesn't like being lumped together with Julius Brach. It received nearly twice the number of view hits last month as Brach received: [12] vs. [13]. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 05:46, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Comment. In any discussion about recreation and notability, only the opinions of established editors should be taken into account. Far too many new, single purpose accounts and probable sockpuppets here. Edit: Just to make it doubly clear, I will not engage with abusive single-purpose accounts or IP's. MaxBrowne (talk) 01:59, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Well, the main points you should be considering is that you still haven't responded to any of the questions posed to you in your "quest" to force a chess.com article where it does not belong, and in contravention of all wikipedia policies. You choose to focus on the speaker and not the content. However, this Pompidou does have some important questions. Remember also, be nicer to the newbies. On top of all this, I repeat my first question to you: Do you have any reliable sources for this article? Yes or no. Fishface gurl (talk) 18:05, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

You know what matters in any discussion about recreation and notability? Substantial coverage in reliable sources. Where is it? In addition, Max Browne's language saying it is "absurd" that Wikipedia does not have a Chess.com article, his wild personal attacks and allegations of sockpuppetry, and his willingness to flaunt the general notability guidelines just to get his pet article inserted all show that he is not coming from a Neutral point of view. 166.248.150.128 (talk) 23:31, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

@Fishface, Pompidou is probably not a newbie, more likely yet another User:Wiki brah sock. Quale (talk) 03:58, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Hm. If Fishface is a puppet, then it goes with Pompidou. Anyway. The WCF credits chess.com not with 8 million, but with 6 million, members: [14]. --Askedonty (talk) 12:48, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Oh, well. Erratum - in fact the two are two very different WCFs. --Askedonty (talk) 13:41, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

1. @MaxBrowne:: while I'm sure that opinion re: "established editors" is based on many experiences with sketchy sockpuppeters, WP:AGF is a pretty crucial rule. Wait until you can suspect an account of sockpuppetry before saying "ignore all newbies".

2. (more on topic): Why is there such hostility on this topic? It's true that you can't go by Chess.com's self-published statistics, and most people are going to base "notability" on what they themselves use or have heard of, but I'd encourage any of you beating the WP:N drum to visit ALL OF THE OTHER CHESS SERVER WP PAGES.

• ChessCube - 2 refs from ChessCube, its Alexa stats, a bunch of dead links, blurb about the site as a business, and mention on Susan Polgar's blogspot site. These 2 so-so sources will seem like a lot as the list goes on.
• Chess Live - 0 references.
• ChessWorld - 0 references.
• FIDE Online Arena - only ref is FIDE's (so 0)
• Free Internet Chess Server, Internet Chess Club, and World Chess Network are the best sourced (but even they're not stellar, e.g. all of the FICS refs are from freechess.org, ficsgames.org, or a post on one of the admins' personal websites)
• Playchess - 0 references.

So even the flimsy links people have dug up re: chess.com surpass what there is precedent for. It seems that anybody who would AfD Chess.com would be hypocritical not to also nominate at least Chess Live, ChessWorld, FIDE Online Arena, and Playchess. --Rhododendrites (talk) 01:35, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

See WP:Other stuff exists - arguably, these should all get deleted too.--Jasper Deng (talk) 02:52, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

The Mammoth book of Chess by Burgess discusses PlayChess, Internet Chess Club, and the ICCF website. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 03:06, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

TechCrunch looks like a good source for establishing chess.com's notability and I can probably find more. MaxBrowne (talk) 06:52, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Well, why didn't you just take the two seconds to search TechCrunch for Chess.com-related news before you posted that? If you did, you would have seen there is nothing substantial about Chess.com on TechCrunch. Furthermore, is TechCrunch even a reliable source in the first place? Max Browne's insistence on creating an article on Chess.com even with no non-trivial sources and in the face of so many people telling him sourcing does not exist smacks of either willful ignorance or a severe WP:COMPETENCE issue.

Also, concerning those other articles on chess sites, it is an invalid "other stuff exists" argument and all you are accomplishing is making people want to delete those other articles now.

Speaking of deletion, Max Browne probably should take into consideration that "Chess.com" has been deleted from Wikipedia at least four, maybe five times already. Fishface gurl (talk) 17:57, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

TechCrunch is not a reliable source for at least two reasons: 1. TechCrunch does not have any editorial selectivity. It writes about every new internet startup. Does that make every internet startup notable? No. TechCrunch's "story" on Chess.com from 2007 is little more than a promotional blurb. More importantly, 2. TechCrunch was later involved in a huge editorial scandal which revealed that its "stories" were little more than a blog with severe conflicts of interest as well as no editorial oversight. see this NY Times story. Fishface gurl (talk) 18:16, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Apparently, "Chess.com" shill MaxBrowne cannot handle any questioning or criticism of his bullheaded goal. Just see how he avoids all questions concerning his "project." Fishface gurl (talk) 05:51, 28 October 2013 (UTC)