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[edit] Sports Article Laws

• It is better to improve an existing biography of a retired, backup catcher, than to create a new biography of a retired, backup catcher. If the catcher needs an article, someone else will add it. At which point you can fix it.
  • As the number of new articles on retired, backup catchers approaches zero, the quality of existing articles approaches one. When Sport McAllister has a perfect article, Wikipedia will be complete.
• If you must create a new bio of an athlete who played before the dawn of the interweb, please have enough information to write a decent article. Give me an hour of Googling, and I can turn Jorge Toca into something passable, but unless I devote a week to reading microfiche at the public library, Grover Lowdermilk will always be a stat-chart in prose form (see next law).
• Wikipedia is not a collection of indiscriminate information. This includes any statistics without a context. Don't tell me that Zach Miner had 59 strikeouts for his community college team unless you're prepared to tell me why I should care. Don't add a season or career stat-line unless that season or career is monumentally important. Don't include year-by-year charts unless you want the article to look like this.
  • A paragraph of statistics is just a chart with conjunctions and prepositions.
• No one is the greatest anything. Accept it, and move on.
• The likelihood of a moron seeking out an article is directly proportional to the number of times that article is vandalized. Not all sports fans are idiots, but many idiots are sports fans. That means we're forced to waste a lot more time dealing with vandals than, say, literature people. I've reverted more vandalism on J.J. Redick in a weekend than every editor in the history of Edmund Spenser.

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