Request for Comment: Where do Chronological Summaries fit in Wikipedia
Closing per request at
WP:ANRFC. My read of this discussion informs me that there isn't really a problem here with these types of articles. First, the articles for the Olympic Games for a given venue are already quite long, and splitting off a larger chunk of content makes some editorial sense than what would make sense for the main article. There is indeed a lot of redundancy between these types articles, but there is some value in differing organizational systems (i.e. for chronology in this case) for large amounts of information on events, medals awards, and records. There may be gaps that violate
WP:NPOV, but when they are noticed, we can fix these gaps just as we do for any other article.
I, JethroBTdrop me a line14:38, 9 January 2015 (UTC)reply
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Where do "Chronological summaries" fit in Wikipedia? Are they encyclopedic? Should they be written?
The articles in this category place information from existing articles on Olympic Games into chronological order by day. Some of these were named as "YYYY Summer/Winter Olympics Highlights". Previous Articles for Deletion discussions (
1,
2) raised issues multiple issues. The information in the "highlights" already exists in articles for their respective Olympic Games and/or in sport specific pages (ex.
2008_Summer_Olympics,
Athletics at the 2008 Summer Olympics). The highlights articles may represent
Redundant Forks. They may also represent a problem with
Neutral Point of View as they inherently select a limited number of events or pieces of information and present them as more notable/important than others. Along these lines, the articles may also be
original research. Some of these articles were updated during their respective Olympic Games, and were said to violate policy on
What Wikipedia is not. The articles were also said to be contrary to the
WP:MOS. They were also criticized as there was no long-term historical perspective to be gained from a per-day organization. Users in favor of keeping these articles argued that they were "useful", but required cleanup rather than deletion. The move from "Highlights" to "Chronological Summary" may have addressed the NPOV issue.
Becky Sayles (
talk)
22:05, 4 November 2014 (UTC)reply
Comment - I had never noticed these articles before, but I actually found them kind of interesting to go through. Yes they repeat a lot of info from the main pages, but they bring it to life in a way that many of our readers may enjoy. It's a bit like the discussion we had over at Tennis Project and tennis talk pages on Day by Day summaries of the 4 major tennis tournaments. Examples being we have an
Australian Open article, we have a
2010 Australian Open article, and we also have a
2010 Australian Open – Day-by-day summaries article. Sometimes the day-by-day articles fit on the yearly article page and sometime they don't, but consensus was to keep. Heck the 2010 Australian Open article also forks into "2010 Australian Open – Men's Singles", "2010 Australian Open – Women's Singles", "2010 Australian Open – Wheelchair Men's Singles", etc, etc. So the fact wikipedia also has chronological summaries of the Olympics, and that editors want to keep them, doesn't really surprise me at all. As far as some events being presented as more notable than others...well it's a fact that some events ARE more notable than others. That's for consensus and
WikiProject Olympics to agree on, as they have a better handle on what's more important.
Fyunck(click) (
talk)
08:44, 6 November 2014 (UTC)reply
I don't think redundancy is a main problem I think the pages are not redundant with your example
2008 Summer Olympics, because it goes much more into detail. It's a timeline overview that is hard to find otherwise. You have to visit all the different sport pages to get the info, that makes these pages valuable. It's the same with pages like
List of 2012 Summer Olympics medal winners. They are also redundant but are valuable because they list the information in another way. And there is so much redundant on Wikipedia. I think the info of every medal is on about 10 different pages. Take for instance the gold medal of the 2012 women's road race. It's listed on:
I think what was meant by Neutral Point of View was in that same article,
Chronological summary of the 2008 Summer Olympics, if you take for instance "Day 10: August 18".... yes there's a chart for all the gold winners, but the prose only talks about one weightlifting, one table tennis and four athletic events, when there were 18 gold medals given out. Someone (or many someones) had to make a subjective decision on what to include in that prose summary. I'm thinking that is what @
Becky Sayles: was getting at with her NPoV.
Fyunck(click) (
talk)
10:15, 6 November 2014 (UTC)reply
I think there are several ways to look at this. First, it does match
WP:N, because I have seen day-by-day summaries of Olympics in reliable sources many times. Second, although some of the information is contained elsewhere, it is not included in the main Olympics article and per
WP:SPLITTING it should not be included there, so a separate article is warranted in that respect. Because it is not intended to duplicate full information from the main article
WP:REDUNDANTFORK does not apply here. Third, the last argument against,
WP:NOTDIARY, does not apply here, because all events listed are notable, it are not trivial results. If these results were trivial, the same argument could be made for all subarticles for the Olympics. As long as it has good inclusion criteria and is not biased towards specific sports, there is a place for these kinds of articles in my opinion. CRwikiCAtalk16:07, 6 November 2014 (UTC)reply
I don't consider this duplication or a fork any more than
History of Ghana is a fork of
Ghana. These articles have most in common with articles like
July 2012 in sports. I think they are unusual and certainly no one seems to have had a go at what a "good article" (or "featured list"?) version of these would look like. That kind of conversation would tease out the problems and benefits of such styles of article more than the bare bones timeline format that currently dominates. I think these articles sufficiently align with the scope that
"Wikipedia combines many features of...almanacs". In my opinion, like many parts of Wikipedia, the problem is the implementation, not the topic itself. Pages like
Great Britain at the 2010 Winter Paralympics have helped define how nation pages work. Chronologies are still waiting for a bright spark to make a big effort.
SFB18:28, 6 November 2014 (UTC)reply
As for the OP's concerns, these articles could be considered like any other legitimate "timeline" list article. Such lists are not redundant as it gathers elements from various other articles. And I fail to see how any such timeline list can be POV or OR just because it lists certain events and not others. The same could be said about
Timeline of New Zealand history,
Timeline of Scottish history, and many others timeline lists. You cannot list everything.
Zzyzx11 (
talk)
07:46, 8 November 2014 (UTC)reply
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Request for Comment: Where do Chronological Summaries fit in Wikipedia
Closing per request at
WP:ANRFC. My read of this discussion informs me that there isn't really a problem here with these types of articles. First, the articles for the Olympic Games for a given venue are already quite long, and splitting off a larger chunk of content makes some editorial sense than what would make sense for the main article. There is indeed a lot of redundancy between these types articles, but there is some value in differing organizational systems (i.e. for chronology in this case) for large amounts of information on events, medals awards, and records. There may be gaps that violate
WP:NPOV, but when they are noticed, we can fix these gaps just as we do for any other article.
I, JethroBTdrop me a line14:38, 9 January 2015 (UTC)reply
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Where do "Chronological summaries" fit in Wikipedia? Are they encyclopedic? Should they be written?
The articles in this category place information from existing articles on Olympic Games into chronological order by day. Some of these were named as "YYYY Summer/Winter Olympics Highlights". Previous Articles for Deletion discussions (
1,
2) raised issues multiple issues. The information in the "highlights" already exists in articles for their respective Olympic Games and/or in sport specific pages (ex.
2008_Summer_Olympics,
Athletics at the 2008 Summer Olympics). The highlights articles may represent
Redundant Forks. They may also represent a problem with
Neutral Point of View as they inherently select a limited number of events or pieces of information and present them as more notable/important than others. Along these lines, the articles may also be
original research. Some of these articles were updated during their respective Olympic Games, and were said to violate policy on
What Wikipedia is not. The articles were also said to be contrary to the
WP:MOS. They were also criticized as there was no long-term historical perspective to be gained from a per-day organization. Users in favor of keeping these articles argued that they were "useful", but required cleanup rather than deletion. The move from "Highlights" to "Chronological Summary" may have addressed the NPOV issue.
Becky Sayles (
talk)
22:05, 4 November 2014 (UTC)reply
Comment - I had never noticed these articles before, but I actually found them kind of interesting to go through. Yes they repeat a lot of info from the main pages, but they bring it to life in a way that many of our readers may enjoy. It's a bit like the discussion we had over at Tennis Project and tennis talk pages on Day by Day summaries of the 4 major tennis tournaments. Examples being we have an
Australian Open article, we have a
2010 Australian Open article, and we also have a
2010 Australian Open – Day-by-day summaries article. Sometimes the day-by-day articles fit on the yearly article page and sometime they don't, but consensus was to keep. Heck the 2010 Australian Open article also forks into "2010 Australian Open – Men's Singles", "2010 Australian Open – Women's Singles", "2010 Australian Open – Wheelchair Men's Singles", etc, etc. So the fact wikipedia also has chronological summaries of the Olympics, and that editors want to keep them, doesn't really surprise me at all. As far as some events being presented as more notable than others...well it's a fact that some events ARE more notable than others. That's for consensus and
WikiProject Olympics to agree on, as they have a better handle on what's more important.
Fyunck(click) (
talk)
08:44, 6 November 2014 (UTC)reply
I don't think redundancy is a main problem I think the pages are not redundant with your example
2008 Summer Olympics, because it goes much more into detail. It's a timeline overview that is hard to find otherwise. You have to visit all the different sport pages to get the info, that makes these pages valuable. It's the same with pages like
List of 2012 Summer Olympics medal winners. They are also redundant but are valuable because they list the information in another way. And there is so much redundant on Wikipedia. I think the info of every medal is on about 10 different pages. Take for instance the gold medal of the 2012 women's road race. It's listed on:
I think what was meant by Neutral Point of View was in that same article,
Chronological summary of the 2008 Summer Olympics, if you take for instance "Day 10: August 18".... yes there's a chart for all the gold winners, but the prose only talks about one weightlifting, one table tennis and four athletic events, when there were 18 gold medals given out. Someone (or many someones) had to make a subjective decision on what to include in that prose summary. I'm thinking that is what @
Becky Sayles: was getting at with her NPoV.
Fyunck(click) (
talk)
10:15, 6 November 2014 (UTC)reply
I think there are several ways to look at this. First, it does match
WP:N, because I have seen day-by-day summaries of Olympics in reliable sources many times. Second, although some of the information is contained elsewhere, it is not included in the main Olympics article and per
WP:SPLITTING it should not be included there, so a separate article is warranted in that respect. Because it is not intended to duplicate full information from the main article
WP:REDUNDANTFORK does not apply here. Third, the last argument against,
WP:NOTDIARY, does not apply here, because all events listed are notable, it are not trivial results. If these results were trivial, the same argument could be made for all subarticles for the Olympics. As long as it has good inclusion criteria and is not biased towards specific sports, there is a place for these kinds of articles in my opinion. CRwikiCAtalk16:07, 6 November 2014 (UTC)reply
I don't consider this duplication or a fork any more than
History of Ghana is a fork of
Ghana. These articles have most in common with articles like
July 2012 in sports. I think they are unusual and certainly no one seems to have had a go at what a "good article" (or "featured list"?) version of these would look like. That kind of conversation would tease out the problems and benefits of such styles of article more than the bare bones timeline format that currently dominates. I think these articles sufficiently align with the scope that
"Wikipedia combines many features of...almanacs". In my opinion, like many parts of Wikipedia, the problem is the implementation, not the topic itself. Pages like
Great Britain at the 2010 Winter Paralympics have helped define how nation pages work. Chronologies are still waiting for a bright spark to make a big effort.
SFB18:28, 6 November 2014 (UTC)reply
As for the OP's concerns, these articles could be considered like any other legitimate "timeline" list article. Such lists are not redundant as it gathers elements from various other articles. And I fail to see how any such timeline list can be POV or OR just because it lists certain events and not others. The same could be said about
Timeline of New Zealand history,
Timeline of Scottish history, and many others timeline lists. You cannot list everything.
Zzyzx11 (
talk)
07:46, 8 November 2014 (UTC)reply
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.