This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 15 | ← | Archive 20 | Archive 21 | Archive 22 | Archive 23 | Archive 24 | Archive 25 |
A couple of weeks ago, User:Pricejb did a major rewrite of the opening of this high profile featured article. I personally prefer the old intro but won't change it if others prefer the new one. Could you comment here. -- I@n 14:36, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
JH 17:21, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
Everyone agrees about the fame/infamy of the Bodyline series and the outstanding quality of the Invincibles series. The forgotten 1902 series is indeed the one that should be highlighted and so should 1894/95. What appals myself and many other cricket supporters is the predictable inclusion of Botham at the expense of all else. For every person who says "Botham's Ashes" there are ten more who say "Brearley's Ashes" and a hundred more who will tell you that the two teams in 1981 were mediocre.
And this is where JH hits the nail on the head. Before any Ashes series is described as notable it should pass the minimum qualification of two strong teams who were both capable of taking on the best of the rest. In 1981, neither of them could begin to compete against West Indies: though India and New Zealand both could. But then New Zealand had Richard Hadlee: now he was a great all-rounder. 2005 was the first time since 1972 that England and Australia have both been world-class teams. Australia was a post-Packer rabble for a decade after 1977 until Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh arrived. England has only recently arrested a near-terminal decline that began with Denness and reached rock-bottom under Atherton.
There are numerous Ashes series from 1882 to 1972 that should be described as notable. 1926 and 1953 were both great England victories against powerful opponents. 1930 was notable for Australia with Bradman the difference between two very strong teams. And so on. -- BlackJack | talk page 06:29, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
Is there a primer on the meaning of Team, Squad, Side, Roster, etc? --whatever terms people use for whatever they are.
Is there a general term such as Club for the organizer of a team (whatever its called?
Captain: is there some stable meaning since 1744, perhaps always meaning a team member whose role is distinct from organizing the team?
Game, Match, Event, Competition, Tour
Jack, These are examples of terms that seem to me poorly handled by a glossary. Maybe that is because they are ordinary language words used by those who follow many team sports, resisting development of specialized use by the particular sport. For example, squad has certain connotations in northeastern England, common among E-speakers in that region regarding many or all sports and also cooperation by people in business and the military. Unless internationally agreed laws of cricket adopt some technical meaning of the word, there will be no meaning common among people speaking about cricket. (That is a made up example.) wallowing in abstraction, P64 20:43, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
This may have been mentioned before, and if so apologies, but it's just struck me that older domestic-only players get a much better Infobox than newer ones, since {{ Infobox Old Cricketer}} contains considerably more information than {{ Infobox Cricketer (Career)}} - name, country, batting/bowling styles and first/last appearances are all in the former but not the latter. The "Career" Infobox is good as a secondary box (eg Graeme Hick) but rather less satisfactory as a primary one.
I'm aware of the recent discussion regarding parser functions etc, but I'm afraid it's a bit above my head, and I worry slightly about making filling in Infoboxes any more technical than it has to be. That being so, I've knocked together {{ Infobox Recent cricketer}}, which is based on {{ Infobox Historic cricketer}} but with FC and List A columns replacing Test and FC; I think this box could be more useful for players with a significant domestic career but no international matches. "Debut" and "Last appearance" apply to the combination of FC and List A games - ie, the first and last "top-line" games the cricketer played.
I've used this new box experimentally for Ravinder Senghera. Any thoughts would be very welcome. Loganberry ( Talk) 14:12, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
Visiting Category:Cricket historians and writers, I revised the biography of Harold de Axxx by capitalizing 'De' in all of the category tags. That does not change the listing of his biography in any category but it puts every listing in proper alphabetical order, which is not case sensitive. That is, every category tag such as
[[Category:Cricket people|de Axxx, Harold]]
must be revised to
[[Category:Cricket people|De Axxx, Harold]]
-- P64 03:04, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
FYI: There are cricket bits in one biography that I wrote yesterday and two that I expanded recently, all related to the first professional baseball team, Cincinnati Red Stockings. Namely: Alfred T. Goshorn (4th paragraph), Harry Wright (2nd-3rd paragraphs), George Wright (baseball) (2nd-3rd paragraphs). Samuel Wright, named in the biographies of his sons, played in the first Canada-USA, 1844. Harry Wright, at least, later played in that series. -- P64 03:18, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
Could someone please have a look at John Anton to see whether I've got the idea? I hope so, but to be honest I'm getting a little bit disheartened, as the section title indicates.
As I indicate on my own userpage, I don't make any claims to being a great editor or to not making mistakes, and one of the things I'm not very good at is getting all the technical bits and bobs correct; I really do find that quite hard. I whole-heartedly agree with the need to cite verifiable sources, but keeping up with the ever-changing standards and guidelines of which section headings to use, where to put them, how to format footnotes, etc etc, is often just too much for me.
What I can do well is limited, but I think it's of some use: I can write short, readable biographical articles about cricketers with (usually!) excellent grammar, spelling and punctuation. They wouldn't make Wisden features, but as far as they go I don't think I've done too bad a job. I've been motivated enough to put in who knows how many hundred hours' work on the subject... but am I letting the side down by admitting that I simply can't summon up anything like the same enthusiasm for the matter of whether a section heading says "External links" or "References"? Loganberry ( Talk) 00:04, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
Is it just me or do I smell copyvio addtions? Blnguyen | BLabberiNg 00:06, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
Gene Nygaard insists on indexing him by Singh again..... Blnguyen | BLabberiNg 03:31, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
Slightly obscure New Zealand Test player. Just one cap. But... is he still alive? Or not? Cricketarchive [2] says he died in 2005. Cricinfo [3] has him 89 years old and still accumulating the days. Googling him didn't help, as far as I could see. My instinct is to follow cricketarchive, which I did when expanding his substub bio. But maybe some NZ wikipedian can find out more. Johnlp 20:54, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
As per comments above (somewhere), Wisden is far from infallible and with obits quite often catches up in later years. In 1994 it published a whole obit section of "People What we Missed" that included at least one of its own Cricketers of the Year 42 years late! Johnlp 21:05, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
Re the link provided by JHall [5] : 1905 says "Last Test to be played to a finish if necessary. It was not until 1912 that the necessity arose when the last test at The Oval took four days". The idea is that if the last Test could alter the result of a series, it would be played to a finish. This situation came up in 1909. Australia was 2-1 up going into the last Test and that match ended in a draw. Does it mean that the rule did not apply to the 1909 matches ? Tintin ( talk) 13:51, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
Please see Talk:John Warr. "He has the worst Test bowling average of anyone to have played for England." was inserted. I removed it per WP:LIVING, but I found one potentially reliable resource... but I know nothing about cricket, and understanding it is out of my not-even-laymen's perspective, as I detail on his talk page. Can someone please comment? TransUtopian 16:20, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
He does indeed have the worst test bowling average for England. [6] Andrew nixon 16:47, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
Last hour I wrote the stub Position (team sports), which is a great step forward from nothing at all. It was quite a challenge simply finding some of the various articles for various sports and the current version certainly needs expansion by linking to more team sports.
Now I have belatedly rediscovered the two articles on baseball or cricket batting order --which is collective, the assignment of an entire team to a complete set of batting positions. I see that the basic arrangement of Position (team sports) should probably be revised by or with someone who can answer the following questions about cricket. And I'll decide what to do about the article on batting position.
(back to the left) Thanks for the comment. I suppose
batting order (cricket) will suffer some revision.
Throughout the sporting sections of Wikipedia, there is a tendency to cover high-level play. I hope it's understood that rules commonly depart from the official and tactics commonly depart from the professional, where many articles cover the official and professional only. But those variations should be covered if it can be done deftly.
The set of nine fielding positions in baseball is now stable (although players may exchange positions) and a numerical code 1 to 9 for fielding positions is used to identify the players in official scoring. 130-150 years ago, batting positions 1 to 9 were used, probably direct from cricket scoring. For example, '1' means caught by the pitcher; long ago it meant caught by the first batter. I suppose they did a lot of erasing in case of a later surprise in the batting order. - P64 03:05, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
Some of you may have noticed my recent spurt of activity on creating/updating pages for all the non-test teams. I've started to think that an infobox for them could be useful on each page, based on the infobox for the test teams, featuring details such as the flag, ICC membership level, ICC membership year, ICC region, division of the World Cricket League and division for their regional competition, etc. I've looked at coding such an info-box, but I'm at a loss! Any thoughts from anyone? Andrew nixon 13:51, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
Great stuff. A couple of comments: do you have to define a font? It is a bit jarring in, for example, the classic skin. (I have only just noticed that {{ Infobox Test team}} does the same - which shows how often I edit those articles! - and have the same concerns). Secondly, should draws/ties be added to the win/loss record? -- ALoan (Talk) 10:40, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
A few months ago I added this article about a rather old but brilliant card game some of you may know about. It would be good if other fans could look it over and amend it. Is it appropriate for the cricket portal? (ie can we put the little cricket ball picture etc?) I know it could easily be part of card games as well, but I've found that 'Army' is far more likely to appeal to cricket fans than to card sharks! Sumitrahman 16:31, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
I noticed that there doesn't seem to be anything about the University Match, ie Oxford v Cambridge. I was thinking of writing a short piece, but I'm unsure of what would be the best title, whether I should provide any alternative titles with redirects, what links to it I should introduce within other articles (if any), and what categories it should have. Any suggestions? JH 16:11, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
Quite right: "Varsity" is rugby, "University" is cricket. I also think University Match (cricket) is a good title. The match has a very long history of course and cricket was played at both universities in the 18th century. I can help with early references if needed. -- BlackJack | talk page 18:57, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
Now created as The University Match (cricket), with redirects from The Varsity Match (cricket) and Oxford v Cambridge (cricket). Corrections or extensions welcome. The highest score and most wickets stats are from Cricketarchive, which doesn't break them down by opponent for individual player records, so I had to filter the lists, and hope I didn't miss anyone. JH 17:09, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
I've been having a disagreement with BlackJack about the correct name of W. G. Grace's article.
For a long time, it's been called W. G. Grace. Yesterday, Jack moved it to W G Grace and I moved it back. Then today he moved it to William Gilbert "WG" Grace, and I moved it back again.
We had a long discussion about this in /archive10 and agreed that either W. G. Grace or WG Grace was acceptable, but that W G Grace wasn't. ( William Gilbert "WG" Grace can't be the right name, surely). Note, however, that the encyclopaedia-wide guideline, WP:NAMEPEOPLE, only allows W. G. Grace. Even if we do allow WG Grace too, WP:RfA/Jguk makes it clear that it's not permitted for an editor to change from an acceptable style that he happens not to like, even to another acceptable style, because that leads to edit wars.
Even though we had the previous discussion, Jack seems to ignore its conclusions and goes on a "remove-dots" blitz from time to time, often ending up with one of the formats which we explicitly rejected. I know he hates dots after initials, but I think this is out of order. But I wanted to bring this before the cricket community to get a reality check on my thinking, and see if it's me that's out of order. So what do other people think?
Stephen Turner ( Talk) 09:45, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
Loganberry's view seems to me to be the most sensible: don't change what's already done, ensure there are redirects where there could be confusion (which is a good policy anyway) and always set up redirects to the alternative when creating a new article. In practice, there can't be too many instances yet where cricketers are better known by initials than by formal or informal first names (less than 20, I'd reckon). But they are likely to increase in number as people such as Hill are discovered and then covered. Johnlp 19:30, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
My view on this is that its wrong for an editor to move an article name from a style which is has been accepted by consensus to a style which is his personal preference. Such changes should be reverted. The two accepted styles from my reading of past discussions on this are either with dots and spaces or with no dots and no spaces. ie W. G. Grace or WG Grace (the former is preferred but both are acceptable). Anything else is out of order. -- I@n 07:40, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
(back to the left) There are three issues. (1) edit wars. (2) findability using Go and Search. (3) linkability. I suppose you previously discussed all three. By linkability, I mean both the cost to editors (time & trouble) and the cost to readers when redlinks are left to them.
Unfortunately, findability may be impossible to learn reliably except by experiment and it may change at any time. Does anyone know that even two article/redirects are generally sufficient? Given W. G. Grace and WG Grace, one a redirect to the other, what happens to the reader who searches for W.G. Grace?
For this particular player (who is not the issue, I suppose), why not William Gilbert Grace with multiple redirects?
The prose introduction should be "William Gilbert Grace (date - daet), or WG Grace . . .", perhaps with some adverb instead of or. -- P64 16:15, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
In an effort to break out of the loop we seem to be in and to move on, can I ask whether we have any news on the questions thrown up in earlier discussion on these two cricketers? It would be nice to think we can resolve some issues on this talk page. ;-o Johnlp 17:39, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
In the article on Jack Hobbs we find:
He is generally regarded as the greatest English batsman of all time.
While in the one on Herbert Sutcliffe we have:
(Sutcliffe)... was arguably the greatest opening batsman in cricket history...
So the Hobbs piece implies that Hobbs > Sutcliffe, but the Sutcliffe piece implies the reverse. Even making allowances for the qualifications "generally regarded" and "arguably", it's hard to reconcile the two. Personally, I would tend to put the WG of the 1870s ahead of both of them.
I suggest amending both of these claims, to read:
Many regard him as the greatest English batsman of all time.
(Sutcliffe)... was one of the greatest opening batsman in cricket history...
(Back to the left margin.) I've now hopefully edited the Hobbs piece to avoid POV (as well as breaking it up into sections). I'll leave Sutcliffe to someone else. JH 17:45, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
When updating Mark Vermeulen's article to mention his 10 year ban from English cricket, I noticed that Template:Zimbabwe abbr does not appear to exist despite it being linked to by around 70 or 80 pages. Is there a reason why this template does not exist? Even if there is, something needs to be done to get rid of the red links on the 70 or 80 pages. Also, I don't seem to be able to get the reference to appear at the end, can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong? jguk 17:58, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
Similar templates could also be applied to the flag and adjective (i.e. English etc) reducing the four parameters down to just one. An optional second parameter can be included to handle instances where a cricketer has played for more than one country. This system also ensures that the abbrieviation is consistent over every cricketer. BTW which do people prefer. The abbrieviation in all caps or first letter capital only. josh ( talk) 16:27, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
Someone (an IP address, followed by three edits from User:Dar2020) posted a "detailed analysis of Hick's career" to his article today, and while there's a lot of good points to it, it could do with some citations and general POV clean-up (It's a little bit too sympathetic). See diff. So does anyone feel up to helping me with this, or guide Dar2020 in the intricate ways of Wikipedia? Sam Vimes | Address me 16:13, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
Hello. Just a quick note that I have expanded the Sehwag bio and put it up for review. It does cover his international career with a proper account, so now would be a good time to lay down a marker for a general style for writing bios on modern cricketers. Being a very mathematically oriented person, I have tended to be very statistical based in my analysis, and have tried to avoid making generalisations about his playing style , whcih is due to my tendency to not put in any technique analysis which cannot be verified statistically and because comments about his style could amount to "sourced POV" - anyway please have a look - we have had two FAs on cricketers before, one was about a schoolboy cricketer who did a sextuple century and another was a player from before the ODI era. Thanks, Blnguyen | BLabberiNg 04:08, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
Someone has prodded Causes of death of English national cricket captains. Is there anyone here who is in favour of deletion ? Tintin ( talk) 07:03, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
I've removed the note about possible deletion (it said I could if I disagreed with it, so I presume that's ok). I started the list and would like to see it completed over time. There is some interesting information in there that is not readily available elsewhere. In particular, note how suicide is a common method of death for cricketers post-retirement - something which continues to this day, jguk 18:01, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
Incidentally, I've just seen this. It seems the page has at least one other fan! jguk 18:05, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
In my articles I've been creating on the non test nations, I've been pretty much making all of them stubs. Some of them are clearly stubs, no more than a paragraph. But I've seen some articles shorter than some of what I've called stubs without a stub tag on them. So is there any particular guideline on how long an article should be before it ceases to be a stub? Andrew nixon 18:08, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
You will all be pleased to know that we now have articles or stubs for every single team that is a member of the International Cricket Council, and the three teams that used to be members. At some point, I'll expand some of the articles, and add some articles on prospective ICC members, but for now I'm going to fill in the red links on {{ National women's cricket teams}}. We're currently missing articles on four of the test teams there, which is a major oversight in my opinion. Andrew nixon 20:53, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
Do we really need a succession of 5 navigation templates at the foot of his article? -- ALoan (Talk) 23:33, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
I've removed a huge chunk of material from Hick's article on the grounds that it was very largely an essay containing chunks of POV and original research, but have told the editor in question ( Dar2020) that I would mention that here in case others felt I'd been too hasty. This diff shows what I removed; the only intermediate edit was the addition of the {{ Englishmen with 100 or more ODI caps}} template by Twisted-chinaman; I have of course retained that. Loganberry ( Talk) 01:10, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
I do not feel I can do much more for the article Indian cricket team. It's already GA, PISA and been Peer Reviewed. I just request people to give it a quick copyedit and review it before it goes up for FAC. I'm also wondering as to how many citations are required in this page, because it really has very few citations. Most things on the page are obvious but considering the people who vote in FACs are sometimes not from cricketing nations, I don't know how many I should put up. Thanks. Nobleeagle (Talk) 01:56, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
I had the opportunity to check a few books when I went home for lunch. Bowen says that "Indians were known to take part in matches in 1840". But some books give a slightly older reference :
There is a nice article on early Indian cricket here. Tintin ( talk) 09:59, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
Talk:Bill_O'Reilly#New_Vote_on_Disambiguation_page Tintin ( talk) 07:42, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
Just to let you all know that I've now completed the red-links in {{ National women's cricket teams}}. We now have stubs at the least for all women's national teams (that I know of). I've also expanded on some of the articles that were already there, and some still need expansion, especially Australian women's cricket team and Indian women's cricket team. Andrew nixon 09:17, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
I believe England is the first country to have its cricket-bio-stub type reach "needs to be split" proportions, so the question arises, on what axis to create subcategories? On the basis of the existing permanent categories, splitting by county, by form of international cricket (or maybe just a single merged type for internationalists?), or by historical era all look to be viable. I've blanket-proposed a split on one-or-other of these bases here; please comment if you have any thoughts. Alai 13:45, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
(returning to left) Actually what WP:BIO says is "a fully professional league, or a competition of equivalent standing in a non-league sport such as swimming, or at the highest level in mainly amateur sports or other competitive activites that are themselves considered notable". I don't think it's at all unreasonable to include amateur first-class cricketers in that.
As for the other question: I don't pretend to be a great writer, but I can do a reasonable bio of a good cricketer (say Brian Brain) in about a day, and of course with those cricketers for whom little information is available (eg Norman Jolly) it takes considerably less time. There are just short of 500 men who have played for Worcestershire at f-c or List A level (see User:Loganberry/Worcs for the full list). Even if no-one else ever wrote an article on one of them, and allowing for wikibreaks and suchlike, I think I could have something on all of them in a couple of years or so. I don't think that's a ridiculous aspiration.
Personally I'd be sorry to see any sort of harsher notability standards; I think the ones we have now are about right. I think anyone who has played f-c (or List A) cricket is pretty much by definition notable. Loganberry ( Talk) 20:46, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
In any case, I wonder if we should set ourselves a target of having at least on FA on a current player for each major cricket country by March next year. That way be can try to get an FA on the main page to coincide with the WC next year, choosing a player from a matching country to those which are playing in the final, semifinal, etc. Blnguyen | BLabberiNg 03:34, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
Maybe not the best place to ask, but someone might know. I'm going to be writing a quick article on the early 20th Century Dutch cricketer Carst Posthuma [9] and his cricinfo profile contains three photos, all of which are marked with "We have been unable to ascertain copyright details for this picture." The one I'd like to use is this one which does have a date on it ( 12 August 1901). The way I understand copyright on photos is that when the author is unknown, it expires 70 years after the date the photograph was taken. So am I right, and is it safe to upload this image, and if so what tag should I put on it? Andrew nixon 13:56, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 15 | ← | Archive 20 | Archive 21 | Archive 22 | Archive 23 | Archive 24 | Archive 25 |
A couple of weeks ago, User:Pricejb did a major rewrite of the opening of this high profile featured article. I personally prefer the old intro but won't change it if others prefer the new one. Could you comment here. -- I@n 14:36, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
JH 17:21, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
Everyone agrees about the fame/infamy of the Bodyline series and the outstanding quality of the Invincibles series. The forgotten 1902 series is indeed the one that should be highlighted and so should 1894/95. What appals myself and many other cricket supporters is the predictable inclusion of Botham at the expense of all else. For every person who says "Botham's Ashes" there are ten more who say "Brearley's Ashes" and a hundred more who will tell you that the two teams in 1981 were mediocre.
And this is where JH hits the nail on the head. Before any Ashes series is described as notable it should pass the minimum qualification of two strong teams who were both capable of taking on the best of the rest. In 1981, neither of them could begin to compete against West Indies: though India and New Zealand both could. But then New Zealand had Richard Hadlee: now he was a great all-rounder. 2005 was the first time since 1972 that England and Australia have both been world-class teams. Australia was a post-Packer rabble for a decade after 1977 until Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh arrived. England has only recently arrested a near-terminal decline that began with Denness and reached rock-bottom under Atherton.
There are numerous Ashes series from 1882 to 1972 that should be described as notable. 1926 and 1953 were both great England victories against powerful opponents. 1930 was notable for Australia with Bradman the difference between two very strong teams. And so on. -- BlackJack | talk page 06:29, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
Is there a primer on the meaning of Team, Squad, Side, Roster, etc? --whatever terms people use for whatever they are.
Is there a general term such as Club for the organizer of a team (whatever its called?
Captain: is there some stable meaning since 1744, perhaps always meaning a team member whose role is distinct from organizing the team?
Game, Match, Event, Competition, Tour
Jack, These are examples of terms that seem to me poorly handled by a glossary. Maybe that is because they are ordinary language words used by those who follow many team sports, resisting development of specialized use by the particular sport. For example, squad has certain connotations in northeastern England, common among E-speakers in that region regarding many or all sports and also cooperation by people in business and the military. Unless internationally agreed laws of cricket adopt some technical meaning of the word, there will be no meaning common among people speaking about cricket. (That is a made up example.) wallowing in abstraction, P64 20:43, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
This may have been mentioned before, and if so apologies, but it's just struck me that older domestic-only players get a much better Infobox than newer ones, since {{ Infobox Old Cricketer}} contains considerably more information than {{ Infobox Cricketer (Career)}} - name, country, batting/bowling styles and first/last appearances are all in the former but not the latter. The "Career" Infobox is good as a secondary box (eg Graeme Hick) but rather less satisfactory as a primary one.
I'm aware of the recent discussion regarding parser functions etc, but I'm afraid it's a bit above my head, and I worry slightly about making filling in Infoboxes any more technical than it has to be. That being so, I've knocked together {{ Infobox Recent cricketer}}, which is based on {{ Infobox Historic cricketer}} but with FC and List A columns replacing Test and FC; I think this box could be more useful for players with a significant domestic career but no international matches. "Debut" and "Last appearance" apply to the combination of FC and List A games - ie, the first and last "top-line" games the cricketer played.
I've used this new box experimentally for Ravinder Senghera. Any thoughts would be very welcome. Loganberry ( Talk) 14:12, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
Visiting Category:Cricket historians and writers, I revised the biography of Harold de Axxx by capitalizing 'De' in all of the category tags. That does not change the listing of his biography in any category but it puts every listing in proper alphabetical order, which is not case sensitive. That is, every category tag such as
[[Category:Cricket people|de Axxx, Harold]]
must be revised to
[[Category:Cricket people|De Axxx, Harold]]
-- P64 03:04, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
FYI: There are cricket bits in one biography that I wrote yesterday and two that I expanded recently, all related to the first professional baseball team, Cincinnati Red Stockings. Namely: Alfred T. Goshorn (4th paragraph), Harry Wright (2nd-3rd paragraphs), George Wright (baseball) (2nd-3rd paragraphs). Samuel Wright, named in the biographies of his sons, played in the first Canada-USA, 1844. Harry Wright, at least, later played in that series. -- P64 03:18, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
Could someone please have a look at John Anton to see whether I've got the idea? I hope so, but to be honest I'm getting a little bit disheartened, as the section title indicates.
As I indicate on my own userpage, I don't make any claims to being a great editor or to not making mistakes, and one of the things I'm not very good at is getting all the technical bits and bobs correct; I really do find that quite hard. I whole-heartedly agree with the need to cite verifiable sources, but keeping up with the ever-changing standards and guidelines of which section headings to use, where to put them, how to format footnotes, etc etc, is often just too much for me.
What I can do well is limited, but I think it's of some use: I can write short, readable biographical articles about cricketers with (usually!) excellent grammar, spelling and punctuation. They wouldn't make Wisden features, but as far as they go I don't think I've done too bad a job. I've been motivated enough to put in who knows how many hundred hours' work on the subject... but am I letting the side down by admitting that I simply can't summon up anything like the same enthusiasm for the matter of whether a section heading says "External links" or "References"? Loganberry ( Talk) 00:04, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
Is it just me or do I smell copyvio addtions? Blnguyen | BLabberiNg 00:06, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
Gene Nygaard insists on indexing him by Singh again..... Blnguyen | BLabberiNg 03:31, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
Slightly obscure New Zealand Test player. Just one cap. But... is he still alive? Or not? Cricketarchive [2] says he died in 2005. Cricinfo [3] has him 89 years old and still accumulating the days. Googling him didn't help, as far as I could see. My instinct is to follow cricketarchive, which I did when expanding his substub bio. But maybe some NZ wikipedian can find out more. Johnlp 20:54, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
As per comments above (somewhere), Wisden is far from infallible and with obits quite often catches up in later years. In 1994 it published a whole obit section of "People What we Missed" that included at least one of its own Cricketers of the Year 42 years late! Johnlp 21:05, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
Re the link provided by JHall [5] : 1905 says "Last Test to be played to a finish if necessary. It was not until 1912 that the necessity arose when the last test at The Oval took four days". The idea is that if the last Test could alter the result of a series, it would be played to a finish. This situation came up in 1909. Australia was 2-1 up going into the last Test and that match ended in a draw. Does it mean that the rule did not apply to the 1909 matches ? Tintin ( talk) 13:51, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
Please see Talk:John Warr. "He has the worst Test bowling average of anyone to have played for England." was inserted. I removed it per WP:LIVING, but I found one potentially reliable resource... but I know nothing about cricket, and understanding it is out of my not-even-laymen's perspective, as I detail on his talk page. Can someone please comment? TransUtopian 16:20, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
He does indeed have the worst test bowling average for England. [6] Andrew nixon 16:47, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
Last hour I wrote the stub Position (team sports), which is a great step forward from nothing at all. It was quite a challenge simply finding some of the various articles for various sports and the current version certainly needs expansion by linking to more team sports.
Now I have belatedly rediscovered the two articles on baseball or cricket batting order --which is collective, the assignment of an entire team to a complete set of batting positions. I see that the basic arrangement of Position (team sports) should probably be revised by or with someone who can answer the following questions about cricket. And I'll decide what to do about the article on batting position.
(back to the left) Thanks for the comment. I suppose
batting order (cricket) will suffer some revision.
Throughout the sporting sections of Wikipedia, there is a tendency to cover high-level play. I hope it's understood that rules commonly depart from the official and tactics commonly depart from the professional, where many articles cover the official and professional only. But those variations should be covered if it can be done deftly.
The set of nine fielding positions in baseball is now stable (although players may exchange positions) and a numerical code 1 to 9 for fielding positions is used to identify the players in official scoring. 130-150 years ago, batting positions 1 to 9 were used, probably direct from cricket scoring. For example, '1' means caught by the pitcher; long ago it meant caught by the first batter. I suppose they did a lot of erasing in case of a later surprise in the batting order. - P64 03:05, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
Some of you may have noticed my recent spurt of activity on creating/updating pages for all the non-test teams. I've started to think that an infobox for them could be useful on each page, based on the infobox for the test teams, featuring details such as the flag, ICC membership level, ICC membership year, ICC region, division of the World Cricket League and division for their regional competition, etc. I've looked at coding such an info-box, but I'm at a loss! Any thoughts from anyone? Andrew nixon 13:51, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
Great stuff. A couple of comments: do you have to define a font? It is a bit jarring in, for example, the classic skin. (I have only just noticed that {{ Infobox Test team}} does the same - which shows how often I edit those articles! - and have the same concerns). Secondly, should draws/ties be added to the win/loss record? -- ALoan (Talk) 10:40, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
A few months ago I added this article about a rather old but brilliant card game some of you may know about. It would be good if other fans could look it over and amend it. Is it appropriate for the cricket portal? (ie can we put the little cricket ball picture etc?) I know it could easily be part of card games as well, but I've found that 'Army' is far more likely to appeal to cricket fans than to card sharks! Sumitrahman 16:31, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
I noticed that there doesn't seem to be anything about the University Match, ie Oxford v Cambridge. I was thinking of writing a short piece, but I'm unsure of what would be the best title, whether I should provide any alternative titles with redirects, what links to it I should introduce within other articles (if any), and what categories it should have. Any suggestions? JH 16:11, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
Quite right: "Varsity" is rugby, "University" is cricket. I also think University Match (cricket) is a good title. The match has a very long history of course and cricket was played at both universities in the 18th century. I can help with early references if needed. -- BlackJack | talk page 18:57, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
Now created as The University Match (cricket), with redirects from The Varsity Match (cricket) and Oxford v Cambridge (cricket). Corrections or extensions welcome. The highest score and most wickets stats are from Cricketarchive, which doesn't break them down by opponent for individual player records, so I had to filter the lists, and hope I didn't miss anyone. JH 17:09, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
I've been having a disagreement with BlackJack about the correct name of W. G. Grace's article.
For a long time, it's been called W. G. Grace. Yesterday, Jack moved it to W G Grace and I moved it back. Then today he moved it to William Gilbert "WG" Grace, and I moved it back again.
We had a long discussion about this in /archive10 and agreed that either W. G. Grace or WG Grace was acceptable, but that W G Grace wasn't. ( William Gilbert "WG" Grace can't be the right name, surely). Note, however, that the encyclopaedia-wide guideline, WP:NAMEPEOPLE, only allows W. G. Grace. Even if we do allow WG Grace too, WP:RfA/Jguk makes it clear that it's not permitted for an editor to change from an acceptable style that he happens not to like, even to another acceptable style, because that leads to edit wars.
Even though we had the previous discussion, Jack seems to ignore its conclusions and goes on a "remove-dots" blitz from time to time, often ending up with one of the formats which we explicitly rejected. I know he hates dots after initials, but I think this is out of order. But I wanted to bring this before the cricket community to get a reality check on my thinking, and see if it's me that's out of order. So what do other people think?
Stephen Turner ( Talk) 09:45, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
Loganberry's view seems to me to be the most sensible: don't change what's already done, ensure there are redirects where there could be confusion (which is a good policy anyway) and always set up redirects to the alternative when creating a new article. In practice, there can't be too many instances yet where cricketers are better known by initials than by formal or informal first names (less than 20, I'd reckon). But they are likely to increase in number as people such as Hill are discovered and then covered. Johnlp 19:30, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
My view on this is that its wrong for an editor to move an article name from a style which is has been accepted by consensus to a style which is his personal preference. Such changes should be reverted. The two accepted styles from my reading of past discussions on this are either with dots and spaces or with no dots and no spaces. ie W. G. Grace or WG Grace (the former is preferred but both are acceptable). Anything else is out of order. -- I@n 07:40, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
(back to the left) There are three issues. (1) edit wars. (2) findability using Go and Search. (3) linkability. I suppose you previously discussed all three. By linkability, I mean both the cost to editors (time & trouble) and the cost to readers when redlinks are left to them.
Unfortunately, findability may be impossible to learn reliably except by experiment and it may change at any time. Does anyone know that even two article/redirects are generally sufficient? Given W. G. Grace and WG Grace, one a redirect to the other, what happens to the reader who searches for W.G. Grace?
For this particular player (who is not the issue, I suppose), why not William Gilbert Grace with multiple redirects?
The prose introduction should be "William Gilbert Grace (date - daet), or WG Grace . . .", perhaps with some adverb instead of or. -- P64 16:15, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
In an effort to break out of the loop we seem to be in and to move on, can I ask whether we have any news on the questions thrown up in earlier discussion on these two cricketers? It would be nice to think we can resolve some issues on this talk page. ;-o Johnlp 17:39, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
In the article on Jack Hobbs we find:
He is generally regarded as the greatest English batsman of all time.
While in the one on Herbert Sutcliffe we have:
(Sutcliffe)... was arguably the greatest opening batsman in cricket history...
So the Hobbs piece implies that Hobbs > Sutcliffe, but the Sutcliffe piece implies the reverse. Even making allowances for the qualifications "generally regarded" and "arguably", it's hard to reconcile the two. Personally, I would tend to put the WG of the 1870s ahead of both of them.
I suggest amending both of these claims, to read:
Many regard him as the greatest English batsman of all time.
(Sutcliffe)... was one of the greatest opening batsman in cricket history...
(Back to the left margin.) I've now hopefully edited the Hobbs piece to avoid POV (as well as breaking it up into sections). I'll leave Sutcliffe to someone else. JH 17:45, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
When updating Mark Vermeulen's article to mention his 10 year ban from English cricket, I noticed that Template:Zimbabwe abbr does not appear to exist despite it being linked to by around 70 or 80 pages. Is there a reason why this template does not exist? Even if there is, something needs to be done to get rid of the red links on the 70 or 80 pages. Also, I don't seem to be able to get the reference to appear at the end, can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong? jguk 17:58, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
Similar templates could also be applied to the flag and adjective (i.e. English etc) reducing the four parameters down to just one. An optional second parameter can be included to handle instances where a cricketer has played for more than one country. This system also ensures that the abbrieviation is consistent over every cricketer. BTW which do people prefer. The abbrieviation in all caps or first letter capital only. josh ( talk) 16:27, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
Someone (an IP address, followed by three edits from User:Dar2020) posted a "detailed analysis of Hick's career" to his article today, and while there's a lot of good points to it, it could do with some citations and general POV clean-up (It's a little bit too sympathetic). See diff. So does anyone feel up to helping me with this, or guide Dar2020 in the intricate ways of Wikipedia? Sam Vimes | Address me 16:13, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
Hello. Just a quick note that I have expanded the Sehwag bio and put it up for review. It does cover his international career with a proper account, so now would be a good time to lay down a marker for a general style for writing bios on modern cricketers. Being a very mathematically oriented person, I have tended to be very statistical based in my analysis, and have tried to avoid making generalisations about his playing style , whcih is due to my tendency to not put in any technique analysis which cannot be verified statistically and because comments about his style could amount to "sourced POV" - anyway please have a look - we have had two FAs on cricketers before, one was about a schoolboy cricketer who did a sextuple century and another was a player from before the ODI era. Thanks, Blnguyen | BLabberiNg 04:08, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
Someone has prodded Causes of death of English national cricket captains. Is there anyone here who is in favour of deletion ? Tintin ( talk) 07:03, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
I've removed the note about possible deletion (it said I could if I disagreed with it, so I presume that's ok). I started the list and would like to see it completed over time. There is some interesting information in there that is not readily available elsewhere. In particular, note how suicide is a common method of death for cricketers post-retirement - something which continues to this day, jguk 18:01, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
Incidentally, I've just seen this. It seems the page has at least one other fan! jguk 18:05, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
In my articles I've been creating on the non test nations, I've been pretty much making all of them stubs. Some of them are clearly stubs, no more than a paragraph. But I've seen some articles shorter than some of what I've called stubs without a stub tag on them. So is there any particular guideline on how long an article should be before it ceases to be a stub? Andrew nixon 18:08, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
You will all be pleased to know that we now have articles or stubs for every single team that is a member of the International Cricket Council, and the three teams that used to be members. At some point, I'll expand some of the articles, and add some articles on prospective ICC members, but for now I'm going to fill in the red links on {{ National women's cricket teams}}. We're currently missing articles on four of the test teams there, which is a major oversight in my opinion. Andrew nixon 20:53, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
Do we really need a succession of 5 navigation templates at the foot of his article? -- ALoan (Talk) 23:33, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
I've removed a huge chunk of material from Hick's article on the grounds that it was very largely an essay containing chunks of POV and original research, but have told the editor in question ( Dar2020) that I would mention that here in case others felt I'd been too hasty. This diff shows what I removed; the only intermediate edit was the addition of the {{ Englishmen with 100 or more ODI caps}} template by Twisted-chinaman; I have of course retained that. Loganberry ( Talk) 01:10, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
I do not feel I can do much more for the article Indian cricket team. It's already GA, PISA and been Peer Reviewed. I just request people to give it a quick copyedit and review it before it goes up for FAC. I'm also wondering as to how many citations are required in this page, because it really has very few citations. Most things on the page are obvious but considering the people who vote in FACs are sometimes not from cricketing nations, I don't know how many I should put up. Thanks. Nobleeagle (Talk) 01:56, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
I had the opportunity to check a few books when I went home for lunch. Bowen says that "Indians were known to take part in matches in 1840". But some books give a slightly older reference :
There is a nice article on early Indian cricket here. Tintin ( talk) 09:59, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
Talk:Bill_O'Reilly#New_Vote_on_Disambiguation_page Tintin ( talk) 07:42, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
Just to let you all know that I've now completed the red-links in {{ National women's cricket teams}}. We now have stubs at the least for all women's national teams (that I know of). I've also expanded on some of the articles that were already there, and some still need expansion, especially Australian women's cricket team and Indian women's cricket team. Andrew nixon 09:17, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
I believe England is the first country to have its cricket-bio-stub type reach "needs to be split" proportions, so the question arises, on what axis to create subcategories? On the basis of the existing permanent categories, splitting by county, by form of international cricket (or maybe just a single merged type for internationalists?), or by historical era all look to be viable. I've blanket-proposed a split on one-or-other of these bases here; please comment if you have any thoughts. Alai 13:45, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
(returning to left) Actually what WP:BIO says is "a fully professional league, or a competition of equivalent standing in a non-league sport such as swimming, or at the highest level in mainly amateur sports or other competitive activites that are themselves considered notable". I don't think it's at all unreasonable to include amateur first-class cricketers in that.
As for the other question: I don't pretend to be a great writer, but I can do a reasonable bio of a good cricketer (say Brian Brain) in about a day, and of course with those cricketers for whom little information is available (eg Norman Jolly) it takes considerably less time. There are just short of 500 men who have played for Worcestershire at f-c or List A level (see User:Loganberry/Worcs for the full list). Even if no-one else ever wrote an article on one of them, and allowing for wikibreaks and suchlike, I think I could have something on all of them in a couple of years or so. I don't think that's a ridiculous aspiration.
Personally I'd be sorry to see any sort of harsher notability standards; I think the ones we have now are about right. I think anyone who has played f-c (or List A) cricket is pretty much by definition notable. Loganberry ( Talk) 20:46, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
In any case, I wonder if we should set ourselves a target of having at least on FA on a current player for each major cricket country by March next year. That way be can try to get an FA on the main page to coincide with the WC next year, choosing a player from a matching country to those which are playing in the final, semifinal, etc. Blnguyen | BLabberiNg 03:34, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
Maybe not the best place to ask, but someone might know. I'm going to be writing a quick article on the early 20th Century Dutch cricketer Carst Posthuma [9] and his cricinfo profile contains three photos, all of which are marked with "We have been unable to ascertain copyright details for this picture." The one I'd like to use is this one which does have a date on it ( 12 August 1901). The way I understand copyright on photos is that when the author is unknown, it expires 70 years after the date the photograph was taken. So am I right, and is it safe to upload this image, and if so what tag should I put on it? Andrew nixon 13:56, 28 September 2006 (UTC)