Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Olympics/Archive 3

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Pictograms

Since the use of the official Olympic Games' pictograms is restricted, i have created a set of neutral pictograms for most of the Olympic and non-Olympic (recognized or demonstration) sports. I've uploaded them to Wikipedia Commons and group under a special category (see here) under a free-use licencing so that people can put them in articles if they wish, without restrictions. They are 300px-wide PNG files with transparent background and black-coloured figures.I'll create more if necessary to cover other sports. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 04:31, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't know about anybody else, but I am seriously impressed with the icons you created. Those would make great additions to the various sports pages. Not to sound pushy or unappreciative, but I think icons for the sports of the winter olympics would be nice too. Great job!! Perakhantu 06:42, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
I agree - that is some awesome work! I've got a couple of great ideas on how to use them too.... Andrwsc 06:44, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Thank you both. I'm glad you find them useful! That was my purpose. Perakhantu, of course i will create the Winter icons. I just started with the Summer ones because they're much bigger in quantity.Parutakupiu talk || contribs 17:46, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
As an example, I've added a pictogram to the article Roller hockey at the 1992 Summer Olympics resized to 50px and with a border (from a template which should be improved to have text wrapped around images).Parutakupiu talk || contribs 17:58, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
I love them, great job. I would definitely put those on the pages that do not have specific pictograms uploaded, or on other non-specific-year pages. On the pages like Swimming at the 2008 Summer Olympics however, the true pictogram should be included because they can be used fair-use. Maybe your pictograms would be best on templates, portals, etc, where the actual year ones cannot be used. Thank you, again. How did you go about making them, anyway? → JARED (t)  19:48, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
I'm currently in the middle of converting all the events and sports navigation boxes to use the standard template. Take a look at the bottom of Athletics at the 1908 Summer Olympics to see what it looks like now. In addition to adding the pictogram to the sport template, I also added the links to the list of medalist page(s). Andrwsc 19:57, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, Jared. I too thought that the Sport at Year Type Olympics articles needed the corresponding pictogram, but since i don't know which official year Games pictograms could or not be used on Wikipedia, i started creating these freely-usable ones. Thus, use them wherever needed: on articles and/or on templates/portals. I made them on a graphic editor using simple vector forms. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 21:37, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
After you've done so much work, I hate to made additional requests, but I have one or two. First, could you rename the images to something like "Olympic pictogram Athletics" and "Olympic pictogram Water polo"? (The case is significant.) I have an idea for a new template that would incorporate them, and it would be WAY easier to work with them if they had the same sport name as the corresponding "Sport at the xxxx Olympics" pages. Second, would it be possible to save them in SVG format instead of PNG? If not, I think I could do that for you. SVG is the preferred image format on Wikipedia for that kind of thing. Thanks!!! Andrwsc 22:17, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
What's your template idea? → JARED (t)  22:41, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
I think this will warrant a whole new discussion at the top level, but for a preview, check out User:Andrwsc/Test. After just finishing editing over 3000 "Nation at the xxx Olympics" articles to make sure that they are all at least stubbed (no more redlinks!) and using my new infobox with flag, medal count, country navigation, etc., my observation is that the results sections are dreadful to wade through unless there are only a handful of competitors. Take a look at United States at the 2004 Summer Olympics... It's complete, but I think the normal TOC mechanism is insufficient for browsing these articles. My idea is to use show/hide sections for each sport, and the pictograms would look great as part of the section headings. I'm still experimenting here - the idea would be to put all that html code inside a template so that you would write something like {{Olympic results section|Athletics|2004 Summer}} to generate all that stuff. Having each pictogram with a common name would allow me to automatically choose the right one from one of the template parameters. Comments welcome. Andrwsc 23:27, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Ouch! That's a fab idea! At least for those monstruous win-all delegations like USA, Russia, China... The concept is noteworthy, indeed, Andrwsc. I'm already changing the names and converting to .SVG so you can start pumping up that template. My applauses! Parutakupiu talk || contribs 23:44, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, I like that. It seems like it'd be difficult, though, and I'm not exactly sure where you'd put it. What types of pages would it be "implimented" on? → JARED (t)  23:55, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
This idea would be implemented on each of the "Nation at the xxxx Olympics" pages, in what is usually called the "Results by event" section. Andrwsc 00:06, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
I think i understand your idea, Andrwsc. What you want is the images names to be "Olympic pictogram Sport" where Sport is the same as in the articles "Sport at XXXX Olympics", right? The thing is don't know how to rename uploaded files... Do i have to re-upload them? Can you help me? Parutakupiu talk || contribs 22:53, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
To be honest, I don't know! I've never uploaded any images, so I'm not sure if there is an equivalent "move page" function. Andrwsc 23:27, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
I've figured it out. I'll have to re-upload and "name-change" tag the old ones. Thanks anyway, Andrwsc. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 23:38, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
See here for the Summer Games sports and here for the Winter sports. These are/should be the exact names of the sports, so use those. I think the only one we had problems with was what to name the Canoe/Kayak articles. Currently we have Canoe only, but that's a whole other discussion. → JARED (t)  22:59, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Stating the obvious, I'm sure, but I think these icons would look great on the "sport in the summer olympics" pages. I was thinking of having them of relatively large size. Perakhantu 23:08, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, that's what I was thinking too. On a near-blank page like Archery at the Summer Olympics. → JARED (t)  23:19, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Alright, i've created a complete set of pictograms for the Summer sports (including the "old" ones like cricket, croquet, lacrosse, etc...); i've changed the filename for "Olympic pictogram Sport" - as Andrwsc requested - and re-uploaded them (see here). So, if anyone has used the old filenames in articles or templates, it's better to change to these ones, since i've tagged the former for deletion. Next: Winter pictograms! Parutakupiu talk || contribs 22:16, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

As you can see, i created icons for Canoeing's two disciplines - flatwater and slalom. Do you think i was too specific with this sport while not with others? Do you believe i should, for example, create specific icons for rhytmics gymnastics and trampoline? Comment, please. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 19:21, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

It's hard for me to say, mostly because I'm not the one putting the hard work into making them. But if you don't mind, I think that all of the sports on the Olympic sports page should have their own picture, if you get to doing it. It is kind of all-encompassing in regards to past and present sports and disciplines. So I say, if you can, go for it! → JARED (t)  00:07, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
You're right. Anyway, it doesn't take me much time to do them so i guess it's better that all can be represented. Thanks, Jared. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 00:33, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Like I already requested on your commons talk page I'd like to see these type of pictogrammes for mainly every possible sport, I already gave you some of the most important examples there as well. If it is (at least that's what you are saying) not too much work to do them, I would love to see some sports split up in seperate disciplines like the rhythmic, artistic and trampoline in gymnastics. But like Jared already said, you are the one that creates them and invest your free time in creating them. We can request what we want, but when you don't like to do it, we can't complain about it. At least, don't hurry, we can wait, take the time you need for it. SportsAddicted | discuss 01:10, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, one issue is that we tend to put multiple disciplines together on the same "Sport at the year Olympics" pages. For example, Canoeing at the 2004 Summer Olympics shows medalists for both disciplines (which all have their own event result pages, of course), Wrestling at the 2004 Summer Olympics combines Greco-Roman and Freestyle, Cycling at the 2004 Summer Olympics has all three disciplines, etc. On my "to do list" is to clean up the massive Gymnastics at the 2004 Summer Olympics by splitting into multiple event pages too.
I'm not discouraging the creation of discipline-specific pictograms if you desire to use them on those pages — in fact, I think it will look great! — but we do need to have a single "Olympic pictogram Sport.png" file for template use. That means that we should probably alias the flatwater canoeing image to "Olympic pictogram Canoeing.png", for example. Andrwsc 01:19, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
It doesn't really matter whether you have multiple pictogrammes for a sport available. You can add the flatwater pictogram at the flatwater section, while the slalom pictogram can be placed in the slalom section. In this case it doesn't really matter if the results are split in two or more results pages, or that they are all combined on one results page with two or more different pictogrammes placed. I agree with Andrew when it comes to also having a separate pictogram for the sport only (not a specific discipline). SportsAddicted | discuss 02:10, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
I agree completely with both of you on the matter of having specific pictograms for every discipline... but also on the matter of a single sport-related pictogram for template use, like Andrwsc said. Therefore, i'll upload a copy of Image:Olympic pictogram Canoeing (flatwater).png with the name "Olympic pictogram Canoeing" to solve this issue, while i'll create the other discipline-specific icons. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 02:49, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Said... and done! Andrwsc, here you have Image:Olympic pictogram Canoeing.png. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 02:58, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Great!! Check out User:Andrwsc/Test, where I followed Jared's lead and tried a mock up of United States at the 2004 Summer Olympics with the new templates. The end result uses two templates: "Olympic sport header" to render the pictogram with the title, and "Olympic sport section" for the hide/show section. Do you think this is good enough to "go live"? If so, I can use AutoWikiBrowser to quickly make the substitutions on one of the previous years so that we can get some more feedback. Andrwsc 03:35, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
As i commented before: it's FAB! Well done! Go ahead! Parutakupiu talk || contribs 03:51, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Looks good Andrwsc, although the size of the images may be a little bigger in my opinion, not much, but just a little. SportsAddicted | discuss 10:58, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Just a quick note to say that I haven't forgotten about this, but I want to wait until the dust settles a bit on the changes currently going on with the common.css and common.js pages (affecting the underlying "NavFrame" etc. classes). I also want to get some opinion on any potential pitfalls about using those classes in this way. Andrwsc 17:14, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

NEW ENTRY – I've started with the Winter sports pictograms. I've done all but skating and skiing because of their many disciplines which require specific and pretty variable icons. So, as of now, we have biathlon, bobsleigh, curling, ice hockey, luge and skeleton‘s own "little black dummies" :P (see here). Oh! and i've also made icons for the cycling, gymnastics and volleyball disciplines — "it's a rap" for the current and former Summer sports! Parutakupiu talk || contribs 05:24, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Impressive. You've done a good job on these pictograms. Just a few comments: I don't know if it would be a good idea to have pictograms for the demonstration sports. For one thing, many of them don't even have their own "Sport at the Winter/Summer Olympics". Some sports would be rather difficult to produce pictograms for anyway. Budo for example comprises of many sports, not just one. Not to rain on your parade or anything, but IMHO, I think having pictograms for just the current and past sports is fine. Another thing I want to point out is having a pictogram (large format) on each of the olympic sport pages. See Baseball at the Summer Olympics. I know, I know, I should have put up a test page, but I have no idea how... so if any of you got upset you can delete the pic. But, do any of you like this format? The vast majority (if not all) of these pages have no pictures at all, and I think the pictograms would make great visual additions to the pages. Any comments? Perakhantu 20:31, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, i made the demonstration sports' pictograms because i created the article (and other linked pages) for the roller hockey in Barcelona'92 and thought it should have one, even though it's not an Olympic sport and only once it was a demo sport at any Olympics. Anyway, i haven't done any others so far, so if i think its unnecessary i won't proceed on doing more (the same goes for the Winter sports) and will just keep on current and past sports. About your other suggestion, i've already done that with the roller hockey page but with a smaller thumb and on the left - as an intro pic - as you can see here. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 04:41, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Carrying on Perakhantu's idea of putting bigger-sized pictograms of each sport on the respective article – should we do it? If yes, we must count with some articles which do not have an introductory text long enough to properly wrap around the image - see Baseball at the Summer Olympics and Diving at the Summer Olympics for examples. This could be avoided if one came up with a different formating solution, but i kinda like the one in the baseball article... Parutakupiu talk || contribs 22:55, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, I just went with what you had on the Roller hockey page. I kinda liked the large format of the icon on the baseball page, but then started thinking that these are indeed icons, and having them 100 pixel size should be fine. I see that you have done the other pages as well. Good work. Overall, I think this is a good format to have. I was also thinking of adding them to each "sport at the XXXX Summer/Winter Olympics". Having the 100 pixel icons on each of the pages would make them look better, since so many of them have no pictures at all. What do you think?
As a side note, now that you've uploaded these icons, the use of these things will be everywhere, and not just in the Olympics either. I see that some have been used in pages for a sport festival in the Philippines. You should be proud of creating such useful icons! Perakhantu 09:19, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, i like this 100px-wide left-floating option too - not too small nor too big. If you want to put them also on the "sport at the XXXX Summer/Winter Olympics" pages... by all means, go for it! It's A LOT of work but if you feel up to it, why not? I'm one wikipedian who likes image-containing articles ;)
I uploaded them for olympic-related usage as main purpose, but i also made them as neutral as possible so they wouldn't be limited to this field. I'm glad they're having good use. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 19:17, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

IOC designations

People's Republic of China, IR Iran, Lao PDR is the IOC designations code. However, i'm really question why the article in Olympic only use China, Iran and Laos. Why?

Note: This need explaination, as IOC designations also use in other article like Asian Games, as currently i'm refer to what the Olympic page do. Thank you

--Aleenf1 04:36, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Mostly for simplicity, but also for consistency. In most cases, the main Wikipedia article uses the common short name (e.g. Iran and Laos), so it is unnecessary for the Olympic articles to deviate from this. In all cases, the full designation is extremely awkward to use on results pages, medal tables, etc. because the names can be very long. However, through the use of standard templates, every nation name is wikilinked to the nation's article, and usually the full name is spelled out in the first sentence of the article's introductory paragraph. That ought to be satisfactory. Andrwsc 06:16, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Also, check out the conversation (or lack thereof) earlier on this talk page, under the "USSR, or Soviet Union?" thread. I tried to get some consensus on what short names to use, but there was ZERO response. You can see what I went ahead with (from the list of flags.) Andrwsc 22:19, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Does anyone know whether there has been a voting or something similar in the past deciding that we should use names like China and Chinese Taipei instead of People's Republic of China and Taiwan or Chinese Taipei (Taiwan)? This problem, with mainly Chinese Taipei is becoming bigger and bigger at 2006 Asian Games and it's talk page. User Aleenf1 who spoke above about this issue already decided not to take part in the article and its subpages anymore due to this issue. Some people are really focussed on adding Taiwan to any Chinese Taipei related stuff, while others are saying this should not be the case. Looking at what is common on Wikipedia and what is said above here it should be Chinese Taipei. In my opinion it should be Chinese Taipei as well, but as long as we don't have anything to show them not to do it like they're doing now we will face the same problem over and over again. So...does anyone know where I can find a discussion about this subject before that tells us to use Chinese Taipei, China, Laos, Iran, South Korea etc.? Thanks, SportsAddicted | discuss 11:07, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
At one point, I think we tried. See here and here. Andrwsc was the one who started the both of these threads, but they didn't get much response. I really don't think we need to get a big straw poll going here, though, because personally, I think the shorter the better. The most common name is what should be used. As far as Taiwan, I saw we should use Chinese Taipei just because it is common enough for people to know about it, and it is what is used by the Republic of China for international events. Many articles use "Republic of China at the ...," and I think that should be changed. But again, just getting the opinions of those who look at this page is good enough. We're the ones who take care of the pages, after all. → JARED (t)  14:29, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, indeed not too many responses. The thing here is that there are now several, mostly Taiwanese people who are disliking the fact that the IOC uses the name Chinese Taipei and they want to change that into Taiwan entirely over Wikipedia. However there seems to be some sort of a consensus now where they agree with having a note at the bottom of the page. Let's hope it's a consensus indeed, although I don't think it's necessary to have a note telling that Chinese Taipei is in fact Taiwan, because when they are clicking on Chinese Taipei they will find out what Chinese Taipei exactly is. Anyways, thanks for your help and if anyone wants to give their opinion, feel free to join at Talk:2006 Asian Games. SportsAddicted | discuss 15:47, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Current situation

(moving indent levels back first) I'll restate my position, not because I'm trying to impose it on everybody, but because I've edited several thousand Olympic pages and have had to deal with many different situations, so I think my experiences are useful.

This issue arises because a handful of nations are designated with their full official names by the IOC, not their common-use names. Thankfully, we use Australia instead of "Commonwealth of Australia", Greece, instead of "Hellenic Republic", and so on. However, the IOC now uses "Islamic Republic of Iran", "Libyan Arab Jamahiriya", etc. (Actually, this last one is interesting because it is not actually the official name for Libya - "Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" is!)

Each nation's name is used primarily in two places - in sport result listings, and on the nation's set of articles for each Olympics (i.e. the "Nation at the year Olympics" pages). I feel that it is extremely unwieldly to use the "full" name for most nations in both places. The result would be an awkward article title, but more importantly, lists of nations in results tables would be badly formatted.

I should repeat again that the name we choose for each nation is used by many templates to automatically format things like lists of nations, headings in the nation's Olympics infobox, etc. The current solution we have is to encode the common-use name for the nation in the appropriate Country_IOC_alias_xxx template, where xxx is the country code for the nation. For example, {{Country IOC alias IRI}} returns "Iran", which means that:

  • {{flagIOC|IRI|2004 Summer}} renders Iran Iran (where the wikilink is automatically generated to Iran at the 2004 Summer Olympics)
  • {{Infobox Olympics Iran}} uses "Iran at the Olympic Games" in the automatically generated title
  • If we want to capture the full name of "Islamic Republic of Iran", then that's typically done on the first line introduction of the appropriate "Iran at the xxxx Olympics" articles.
  • If we really need to render a more precise name of the nation, then the name= parameter to the flagIOC templates can be used
  • If we really need a more precise name for the "Nation at the year Olympics" article, then we can create a redirect from the auto-generated link. This is currently the approach taken on the Great Britain articles, where "Great Britain" is the name returned by {{Country IOC alias GBR}}. This creates automatic links to Great Britain at the 2004 Summer Olympics (for example). Some editors insist that the main article ought to be Great Britain and Northern Ireland at the 2004 Summer Olympics, so the auto-generated link is a redirect to that.

I think there are a couple of principles which ought to guide us here:

  1. consistency with the main article for the nation in Wikipedia
  2. consistency with the IOC name
  3. allowances for names which might be politically incorrect, despite what Wikipedia uses.

I have created a complete list of all nations where there are differences between:

  • what we're using for the Wikipedia Olympic pages, with links to the most recent summer Games appearance so you can see how the nation's name is handled in the infobox and in the introductory paragraph of the article
  • the IOC's official designation for the nation. I've wikilinked the name so you can see where it goes. If it differs from the main article name, it is usually a redirect or it is an article on the geographic region
  • the main article (non-Olympic) for the nation on Wikipedia

These fall into a few different categories:

Category 1

First are the list of nations whose common-use name should uncontroversially be used for the Olympic articles. In each case, the main Wikipedia article uses the common-use name, and I see no compelling reason for the Olympic article to be different. Also, in many of these cases, the current IOC designation has not always been used for all Games. (For example, "Iran" was just "Iran" from 1948-1988. I feel it is important to use "Iran at the xxxx Olympics" for all years. See Category:Iran at the Olympics for the full set.)

Wikipedia Olympic usage official IOC designation main Wikipedia article
Brunei Brunei Brunei Darussalam Brunei
Hong Kong Hong Kong Hong Kong, China Hong Kong
Iran Iran Islamic Republic of Iran Iran
Laos Laos Lao People's Democratic Republic Laos
Libya Libya Libyan Arab Jamahiriya Libya
Moldova Moldova Republic of Moldova Moldova
Russia Russia Russian Federation Russia
Syria Syria Syrian Arab Republic Syria
Tanzania Tanzania United Republic of Tanzania Tanzania
United States United States United States of America United States

There is one more nation that ought to be in this category. but currently is not:

Wikipedia Olympic usage official IOC designation main Wikipedia article
Micronesia Micronesia Federated States of Micronesia Federated States of Micronesia

I would prefer to shorten this to "Micronesia" if we have consensus. I see that single-word name used on part of the IOC website too. I typically use the name= parameter of the {{FlagIOC}} template to render this as FS Micronesia FS Micronesia, which retains the long name for the article. I also put this nation under "M" in alphabetic-order list of nations. Alternately, using "FS Micronesia" for {{Country IOC alias FSM}} would be acceptable (as per category 4 names below).

Updated
{{Country IOC alias FSM}} now returns simply "Micronesia", and all other related changes have been made. Andrwsc 07:25, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Category 2

The next category are nations whose main Wikipedia article uses the full name because the common-use name is used to refer to a geographic region instead (and therefore, serves as a sort of disambiguation page). In each case, I think the IOC designation still makes the most sense for the Olympic articles.

Wikipedia Olympic usage official IOC designation main Wikipedia article
Congo Congo Congo Republic of the Congo
Great Britain Great Britain Great Britain United Kingdom
Ireland Ireland Ireland Republic of Ireland
South Korea South Korea Korea South Korea
Palestine Palestine Palestine Palestinian National Authority
Virgin Islands Virgin Islands Virgin Islands U.S. Virgin Islands

For PLE, I would prefer to use "Palestine" as the IOC does, but I can see some political sensitivity around that, so I am ok with the current usage.

Category 3

The next category are nations where I felt the common-use name was the most appropriate choice, because it was widely known and/or the official designation was awkward to use.

Wikipedia Olympic usage official IOC designation main Wikipedia article
China China People's Republic of China People's Republic of China
East Germany East Germany German Democratic Republic German Democratic Republic
West Germany West Germany Federal Republic of Germany West Germany
North Yemen North Yemen Yemen Arab Republic Yemen Arab Republic
South Yemen South Yemen Yemen Democratic Republic People's Democratic Republic of Yemen

I would not object to using "PR China" for CHN (and making it a category 4 name, as per next section) if there was a big objection to the current Olympic usage. I would object to using any other longer name.

As for the two Germanys and two Yemens, I would oppose any change to them. I can't see any other solution that would work as well as the current one.

You might ask about the two Koreas - they are listed in category 2 and 4 for different reasons. I would not object to moving them both here (as "South Korea" and "North Korea" instead of "Korea" and "DPR Korea"), if there was strong support for that.

Updated
Koreas have been updated to as described. Andrwsc 01:40, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Category 4

Next are nations where I chose to retain the official name, but in abbreviated form. In each case, there was an existing redirect page from the abbreviated form (in a non-Olympic sense) to the main article, so I felt that the abbreviation was valid and well-known.

Wikipedia Olympic usage official IOC designation main Wikipedia article Redirect page
DR Congo DR Congo Democratic Republic of the Congo Democratic Republic of the Congo DR Congo
North Korea North Korea Democratic People's Republic of Korea North Korea DPR Korea
FYR Macedonia FYR Macedonia Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia Republic of Macedonia FYR Macedonia

For PRK, I would support using "North Korea" instead of "DPR Korea" (which would make it a category 3 name). This might mean changing KOR to use "South Korea" (and moving it from category 2 to category 3), which I am not fond of doing, but would not strenously object to.

For MKD, I see that there have been lots of renaming wars over those articles already, so I don't think we can simply use "Macedonia" (as a category 2 name). I think "FYR Macedonia" is the best compromise.

Miscellaneous

Wikipedia Olympic usage official IOC designation main Wikipedia article Comments
Timor-Leste Timor-Leste Timor-Leste East Timor Perhaps the main Wikipedia article ought to use the nation's preferred name instead of the English translation (see Côte d'Ivoire for an example of that).
Soviet Union Soviet Union U.S.S.R. Soviet Union I tried to get a discussion going about what to use, but nobody joined. I settled on "USSR" as per IOC usage. I would not object to a change to "Soviet Union" if we had a big discussion on it.
Bahamas Bahamas Bahamas The Bahamas could change to "The Bahamas" if desired. See "The Gambia" below.
Gambia Gambia Gambia The Gambia We should be consistent with respect to GAM and BAH about whether "The" should be in the title or not.
Update
I have changed {{Country IOC alias GAM}} to "Gambia", and made all other related changes. Andrwsc 23:10, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Comment on China & Taiwan

As for Taiwan, I am sympathetic to the political situation, but I believe the current situation is the best NPOV solution that also respects the Taiwanese position:

  1. Use TPE ("Chinese Taipei") for 1984 and later Games, as per IOC usage
  2. Use ROC ("Republic of China") for 1932-1976, as per official reports from those Games
  3. I put both infoboxes on every TPE page (e.g. look at Chinese Taipei Chinese Taipei) so that readers can see both the TPE Olympic flag and the ROC national flag, and readers can see the full set of Olympic Games in which Taiwanese athletes competed.
  4. There was already a fairly detailed description of the naming controversy on all the Chinese Taipei pages; I feel this is wholly sufficient to describe the situation. Changing article names and/or pretending that "Chinese Taipei" doesn't exist is un-encyclopaedic, in my opinion.
As for Taiwan (Chinese Taipei), we have a running compromise in the 2006 Asian Games pages (both main and individual sports pages} where we have a footnote describing what Chinese Taipei is while retaining Chinese Taipei in the tables including the flag. Perhaps this should be considered as the permanent solution for all post-1983 references to Taiwan. As for pre-1976, wasn't there one or two Olympics where Taiwan competed under that name under the Olympic code TAI? I don't remember for sure. As for pre-1949, to label that as having anything to do with Taiwan is absurd because the ROC was China and prior to 1945, Taiwan was a part of Japan. It is possible (though I don't know for sure) that there may have been Taiwanese athletes competing under the Japanese flag. Something for investigation to be sure. Ludahai 03:01, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
I like the footnotes. As for the rest of it, I'm not sure there is a good solution for us; I'd love suggestions as to how to make things less bad. The RoC definitely competed as "Taiwan" in 1964 (that's the year I'm working on right now, not sure about other years) at the least. I think using "Republic of China" for everything pre-1984 works because that was the full name of the state, massive shift in geographical boundary notwithstanding. The IOC has used four different designations for the NOC corresponding to the Republic of China: "China", "Republic of China", "Taiwan", and "Chinese Taipei". -- Jonel | Speak 03:57, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
I thought that the introductory paragraph at Chinese Taipei at the 2004 Summer Olympics was pretty good at explaining the situation in a NPOV way, so I replicated it when I created stubs for all the missing TPE articles (e.g. Chinese Taipei at the 1988 Winter Olympics. Of course, that intro is only a single click away from any reference to "TPE" on result pages, etc. Therefore, I would only use the footnote at the highest level article for each Games (i.e. in the "Participating nations" section of "xxxx Summer/Winter Olympics". I think it would be unnecessary, and distracting, to include it on every page where a TPE reference appears. The same rationale applies to Unified Team and United Team of Germany, to name some similar examples of uncommon "nation names".
As for the older appearances, I think using "ROC" and "Republic of China" for all pre-1984 appearances works well. Any country codes prior than 1972 were somewhat haphazard anyway. "RCF" was used in 1960, "TWN" in 1964 and 1968, and "ROC" for 1972 and 1976 Winter. In the same way that we use "NED" for all appearances by the Netherlands, regardless of what was actually used at each specific Games (in addition to "HOL" through 1988, there was also "PBA", "NET", "OLA" and "NLD" in the pre-standard years), I think "ROC" is the best choice for that NOC. Andrwsc 23:29, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Summary

As you can see, I have given this a LOT of thought. I believe the current situation has good arguments to support each of the decisions we took. There are a handful of potential changes, and they are noted in my comments above. Hopefully I can spur some more discussion on this! Andrwsc 19:32, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Discussion

Jared's take

Pretty much, I agree with almost all that you said. You hit the key points of the current designations and your views basically aligned with mine.

My theory is that the IOC is usually the best source. If there is ever confusion about something, the IOC should be the source to clear that up. In some cases, the IOC will use NOC names that are true to the name of the country, but are obnoxiously long or unnecessary; usually the shortened version (used by most WP pages now) is best at carrying across the point that this is the NOC we're talking about. So in sum, the IOC's names should be followed closely, and only should be deviated from if a shortened name would carry across the same effect.

I'll go over everything that you brought up again, but with my takes:

Category 1
  • As far as this category, everything you said is good. Short and sweet and too the point is usually best, as is in this case.
  • That said, I would make FS Micronesia just simply Micronesia. Again, it just makes sense.
Category 2
  • PLE should be made just Palestine. The IOC designates that, so why should we add extra?
  • See my thoughts about the Koreas below.
  • Everything else is fine.
Category 3
  • Everything is good; I'd object to PR China because again it is unnecessary.
Category 4
  • As for DR Congo, I don't think anything else could be done to shorten this (because of the Rep. of Congo), except for what is already in place, so I'm fine with this.
  • As for Korea, see below.
  • As for FYR Macedonia, I say go with Macedonia. The actual political name of the nation is Republic of Macedonia, and we've been shortening all the other ones, so I don't see why we shouldn't shorten this one.
Miscellaneous
  • Something bugs me about having an abbreviation in the name. Using USSR would be like saying USA at the ... ... it just doesn't seem right. I'd support having Soviet Union.
  • For Bahamas and Gambia, get rid of the "The." it is, to me, unnecessary in the Olympics context, plus, the IOC doesn't use "The."
Taiwan
  • If splitting them is the only option, I guess that's fine. It just seems like the only reason a nation should have two separate pages (3 in the case of Germany) is if the nation split itself, but I see that for political reasons, this had to be done. There's just no ____ at the Summer Olympics page where both designations are shown as related, which may present a problem when this is made. How should it be designated?
Korea (North and South)
  • Here's my theory: going for simple (like I've stressed above), North Korea and South Korea seem like the best options. But going with IOC designations, it is a similar case to Congo and DR Congo. I would say that North Korea and South Korea are a pair, and if one is objected, both are. Therefore, I would say keep it as the IOC designations of Korea for South Korea, and use DPR Korea for North Korea. It seems most logical.

That's pretty much it. Feel free to branch off of my views for your discussion. Don't feel like you have to write as much as we did, either, because we were just trying to get our views out there. You just have to say what and to what extent you support something. → JARED (t)  21:27, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree with all said by Jared as this is exactly how I feel about these naming conventions. When it comes to those he wasn't sure about, this is my opinion. I would go for Chinese Taipei since the IOC started to use that name and Republic of China before that time. For the Korea's I prefer North Korea and South Korea, as this makes more sense in my opinion. SportsAddicted | discuss 23:29, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

More sections!

"Micronesia", "Palestine", "China", "Congo" and "DR Congo", "North Korea" and "South Korea" following German convention, "Great Britain" by itself everywhere, status quo on Germanys and Yemens, "Macedonia", "Soviet Union", "Bahamas", and "Gambia" are my takes on those issues. Clearly, redirects need to be sprayed liberally.

As for the Republic of China, I'd say this is a pretty simple case of real-world politics screwing over the poor free encyclopedia. Doesn't help that the IOC medals database refers to the nation as "Chinese Taipei" for the 1960 medal ([1]). Or that the official report in 1932 refers to the nation as "China" (see page 19) and the one in 1964 refers to the nation as "Taiwan" (see page 9). Regardless, since 1984 seems to be the first contemporary use of "Chinese Taipei", and using RoC throughout would be somewhat disingenuous, I agree that the current situation is best. Again, liberal spraying of redirects.

Russia is an interesting case. The IOC treats the "Russia" of the pre-Soviet era as a separate entity from the "Russian Federation" of the post-Soviet era, whereas we currently conflate the two. Mayhap we should (re-)consider that? -- Jonel | Speak 23:52, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I am ok with all those changes (and non-changes, as appropriate). I can start making the changes in a few days, to allow for some more discussion. Four of us agreeing is a great start!
When I created all the "Republic of China at the xxxx Olympics" stubs, I contemplated several options about how to represent it. Certainly, I think the official reports of the specific Games should take some priority over the IOC's retroactive use of TPE for pre-1984 medals. I thought the best solution was to use ROC for 1932-1976 and TPE for 1984-current, with two sets of articles linked together through the infoboxes. Complicating matters is that ROC referred to mainland China for the 1932, 1936 and probably the 1948 Games, so one could make the case for showing those appearances in an "Other appearances" section of {{Infobox Olympics China}}, but I decided against opening that can of worms.
As for RUS/RU1, I really think that we should use the same code for both eras, much the same way GER was used for two periods of history. Andrwsc 00:20, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Sort order?

I have started to make some of these changes, as it appears we have some consensus. One question - how should the pair of Koreas, Germanys, Yemens, etc. be sorted in the list of participating nations and in the navigation boxes? Should I put North Korea and South Korea together under "K", or under "N" and "S" respectively? The Germanys are currently under "E" and "W", but I have to edit all those templates anyway and if we want to change the sort order, I can make all the changes together. Andrwsc 21:37, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Well it depends how we're going to do Korea. I guess it really doesn't matter to me. North Korea and South Korea are fine, as long as its both of them. Plus it matches the germanies and yemens. I think they should be placed according to the main name, like put them both in the K's. It makes the most sense, becuase we're just using North and South as helpful locators. → JARED (t)  12:13, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
I'm about half-way finished moving the Korean articles to "North Korea at the..." and "South Korea at the...". Still some cleanup left for today. Right now they're sorted under K (because I put "DPR Korea" after "Korea" when the previous names were used) so I'll leave them that way. But, right now the Germanys are under "E" and "W", so I shall move them under "G" for consistency. Also, I think that means "United Team of Germany" (1956-1964) ought to go under "G" as well, not "U" as is the case now. Andrwsc 17:05, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Competitors by sport table

Now that we have graphics for the Summer Olympic sports, i had this idea to create a table, in the "Country at the XXXX Season Olympics" pages, where all the competitors would be sorted by their sport. You can see what i'm talking here. The images and numbers are called through this template (very basic), but the table has to be set by the editor, considering the number of sports and consequently the number of rows and columns — this issue would be discussed. I tried to code the table itself, but the wiki scripting language just doesn't suffice. What do you think? Parutakupiu talk || contribs 21:43, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Stablepedia

Beginning cross-post.

See Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team#Stablepedia. If you wish to comment, please comment there. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 02:29, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

End cross-post. Please do not comment more in this section.

Olympic Template

I've been gone for a few days, but I WOULD REALLY LIKE TO KNOW why the olympic template that lists the years of each summer and winter olympic games, as well as wikilinks to "sports", "medal counts", "NOC's", "medalists", and "symbols" was changed. And more importantly, why wasn't this up for discussion on this page? I LIKED the previous template, and I don't see any advantage of this one other than the colored wikilinks (which of course could have been incorperated into the previous template). Please respond. Perakhantu 05:35, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Hey Perakhantu. Coincidentally, the template was changed first by Tompw within a matter of seciond before my edit to change it, which I found funny. But anyway, my motivation to change it was that without the image being able to be there, which (I though) completed the template, it seemed like an ugly jumble of links. I was meaning to make a change ever since the image was taken off in June. Anyhow, I never even thought to bring it here. User:Tompw, User:Andrwsc, and I were all there about the same time of the edit. I personally wanted it to match all the others, using Template:navigation but I gave in on that, and it was sort of compromised as the template that's there now. Andrwsc changed the colors to match the other Olympics templates.
So I still think this is up for discussion. If you don't like the design (which wouldn't matter to me) then say so or suggest an alternate. Discussion is good! → JARED (t)  15:14, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, I think having the main pages such as Athens 2004, Torino 2006, Bejing 2008 and Vancouver 2010 linked at the bottom of the template should have been kept. These are pages that get the most traffic and having easily noticed wikilinks are a good idea. The rest of the template has kind of grown on me, I guess.
I put those links back into {{Olympic Games}}, but still retaining the rest of the current visual style. Hopefully this version is a "keeper" then. Andrwsc 05:11, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Another thing I've noticed, is that the sport templates have changed. The worst one I've seen is the olympic baseball template (which can be seen at the bottom of the Baseball at the Summer Olympics page.) All those "demonstration sport" statements clutters up the template. It looks really ugly. What happened to the sport templates that had the demonstration years below the official years? That looked great. It segregated the template into two parts with the official years on top and the demonstration years on the bottom. I know that the medalists wikilinks and sport icons have been added to the templates, but isn't there someway of incorperating the previous version of the sport templates into the current ones? Perakhantu 20:45, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, those changes were mine. I thought it was important to use the standard navigation box templates consistently. That meant that the multi-color formatting had to go, as one consequence. I think they all look pretty good, with the exception of {{Olympic Games Baseball}}, because the sport unfortunately was a demo on seven occasions. (See Wikipedia:WikiProject Sports Olympics/Templates for an easy way to view the whole set.) I will see what I can do to improve that one. I do like the single chronological list instead of two sections, however. Do you have any concerns over any other sport templates? Andrwsc 21:52, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Ok, so why DID you find it important to use the standard navigation template in this case? I guess, we'll just have to disagree on this one. Frankly, I find the new template... ugly. It looked much better before. Taking the new template into account, there doesn't seem to be any other particular sport template that stands out as needing clean-up. Anyway, there are plenty of things to work on in the olympic pages, so I won't fight it. (shrug)Perakhantu 22:16, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, I guess there were a few reasons. First, I saw the work (still ongoing) to standardize on navigation box functionality Wikipedia-wide by updating common.css and common.js. One example is the hide/show behaviour that I wanted on those huge templates like {{NOCin2004SummerOlympics}}. Another example is that editors no longer need to fiddle with the layout by putting <br> around the template calls, etc. to make them look good. Back-to-back navigation boxes are cleanly rendered now. Second, I thought it was essential to have consistent visual appearance within the Olympic nav boxes, so that meant things like a common color scheme, box width, font size, use of bullets instead of pipes as separators, etc. Third, I guess I liked the "new" style and found the old ones ugly! Different tastes, I guess. I never liked the multi-color style; it looked cluttered to my eyes. Anyway, I'm still open to suggestions for improvement, but I do believe we need to fall within the scope of what can be done with {{NavigationBox}} and {{Dynamic navigation box}}. Andrwsc 00:18, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

(sigh) It seems like I'm beating a dead horse here. Andrswc, what is your reasoning on having the medalists list inside the sport template? I mean Diving at the Summer Olympics looks good with having the see also statement above the medal table. I know there are other pages that include the sport template, but couldn't we have the same see also above those medal tables too? Perakhantu 06:53, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, sure! My motivation was that the "List of Olympic medalists in...." articles weren't readily accessible (except for a handful of sports, where they had been added in the "See also" section of the main "Sport at the Olympics" article only), but putting them in all the navigation boxes instantly added them to all the "Sport at the year Olympics" pages too. I feel that that is an important link to have on every sport page, so our options are:
  1. leave the links in the navigation boxes
  2. remove them, but add a "See also" section to every sport page (main + years)
I do think it is inconsistent to have both links on those pages for some but not all sports, so we need to have consistent presentation either way. If you feel strongly about it, be WP:BOLD and make the changes, but please make sure that they are all consistent! Andrwsc 07:56, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Ok here is what I'm going to do. I'm going to go into each "sport at the XXXX Summer Olympics" pages and delete (if I find any) event templates on those main sport pages. I will also add a see also section for "List of Olympic medalists in XXXX", so the sport template will eventually won't have that section in it. And then adding in the pictograms would greatly enhance these pages (long ways to go, I know). As for the details link, I think that is still up for dicussion, and I'm guessing that Andrwsc would want to do that part. So for the people seeing the "see also" sections popping up, please don't delete them. I slowly slogging my way through this. Perakhantu 06:26, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
Sounds like a reasonable plan. Might I suggest you look at Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser to help you "slog" through the articles? It's a pretty useful tool for making repetitive similar edits like this. Hope this helps, Andrwsc 06:55, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Olympic & Asian Games Infoboxes

((pulling this out into a separate topic since it's not related to the "Olympic Template" topic) Andrwsc

can someone help me make a template for the Asian Games? like the one used in the satellite pages of the Olympics. Like this one: Template:Infobox Olympics Philippines thanks a lot! --RebSkii 19:26, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

That template is based on the parent template {{Infobox Country Olympics}} created by Andrwsc. If you want support on making an Asiad infobox, ask him.Parutakupiu talk || contribs 19:53, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Before explain how the current template works, please let me first explain my motivation for the Olympics infoboxes and the rationale for their use.
You'll note that every "main page" for each Olympic Games has a "Participating nations" section with links to individual pages for each nation (of the form "Nation at the xxxx Olympics"). These pages are also linked to from many results pages through the use of the {{flagIOCathlete}} and related templates. One of my goals is to make sure this is used on ALL Olympic pages so that we get consistent flag rendering, consistent links to the nation pages, etc. There are over 3000 of these nation pages, and I think I created about 1200 stubs when I installed the infoboxes on all of them. There are zero redlinked "Nation at the xxxx Olympics" articles.
There had been some large discrepancies in the layout of those pages. I think the common infobox format helps significantly with a common appearance. For example, the medal summary is in the same place, the flags are all the same width, links to all other pages for the same nation are put in a common section, etc.
So, with this in mind, what is your intent with the Asian Games? I think it would be inconsistent to put an infobox on a single nation's pages, for example. I think you need to set up the "infrastructure" to support the infobox before putting it on any nation pages. For example, I would work on the list of nations at each games and you would have to create all the "Nation at the xxxx Asian Games" pages (even if stubbed) if you want the same degree of infobox detail as the Olympic one.
Now, the Olympics infoboxes are implemented in three places. First, the "root" {{Infobox Country Olympics}} template is where all of the visual appearance is handled. This ensures complete consistency on all the pages. There is a LOT of variable parameter usage in that template, and much of it is specific to the rest of the template system used for Olympic articles. For example, the flag is rendered by a call to the appropriate "Country flag IOC alias xxx" template, which returns the specific flag for the Games year. I think the simplest thing would be to just make the flag a simple parameter.
The second place where the infobox is implemented is in a specific template for each nation (e.g. {{Infobox Olympics Philippines}}) The idea with this level of template is that common sections for all pages of the same nation (espcially the list of summerappearances and winterappearances) is written once. Individual Games parameters (such as gold, silver and bronze) are "passed through".
This leads to the third place in which the infobox is implemented. On the specific "Nation at the xxxx Olympics" article, the template is called with actual values for gold, competitors, etc. This renders the middle section of the template, which is Games-specific (and in a slightly different color). If a games= value is not specified, the infobox is drawn with the current flag and with no middle section. This would be seen on the overview articles, such as Philippines at the Summer Olympics. Again, there is a lot of intelligence to this section in the parent {{Infobox Country Olympics}} template so that (for example), if a flagbearer is specified, the heading links to the Opening Ceremonies article -- if it exists. Another example is that the link to the "xxxx Olympics medal count" page is automatically created.
So, my advice for the Asian Games is to not try to implement all the features of the Olympics box, especially because the infrastructure isn't there. When all the medal count pages etc. are created, then those features can be added. I can help create a simpler version of the box that contains the flag, the medal count, and possibly the list of past appearances. I think it would work best (for now) as a single generic template with all the parameters specified on the "Nation at the 2006 Asian Games" pages (for example), rather than trying to duplicate the complex structure I used for the Olympics boxes. It was a necessity with 3000+ pages to edit, but until the Asian Games gets that "mass", it is not worth it. Hope this helps, Andrwsc 20:13, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
i agree, that is very complex. so, can you help me make the simpler one? i understand that we are backlogged with "NOC at the 2006 Asian Games" articles, but we're on the way to finishing it up. thanks for your help. am i'm hoping that we can have a consistent and a "simpler" way of having an NOC infobox for the Asiad thanks again. --RebSkii 21:10, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, I'll see what I can do, but it make take a few days. We're having a new baby tomorrow, so I will be on a wikibreak until the end of the week, perhaps. Andrwsc 21:29, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
thank you so much Andrwsc. i will wait for that or you can put the toolboxes in my talkpage and i'll be the one to make all of them. thanks again! --RebSkii 17:54, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Article building using templates

Hi everyone, I started on this Wikiproject a couple of years ago, I then disappeared (well, worked on other areas of WP) and have just had a read of these talk pages again the last few days. Wikipedia's templating features have become very advanced since then so I wanted to throw an idea around:

Now before you say "too much work!" this could actually make things easier! Article G could be a template, and transcluded into articles D, E and F. The same information would only need to be written once, and would then appear in multiple articles. If each transcluded article took the form of a whole section, it would be editable by the usual section "edit" links and no-one would even notice (unless they went to edit the whole page). Formatting changes or disambiguation of names would only need to be done once. Noinclude tags could be used so that the articles can be individually viewed as their own article as well as a subsection of other articles.

I can do up an example of this later if anyone is interested as to how it would work, if there is interest. -- Chuq 01:02, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Many times this suggestion of pairing "nation/sport" has come across my mind... but it flew away as fast as it approached and i never really had a deep thought about it. An example would be cool. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 01:59, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
I had never though of this, but I don't see why we couldn't do this... I'd be "too much work," but it is possibly something that may be for the better. I'd like to see a working example (i.e. one with each of the pages above, A-G and links between them, etc. Don't go overboard, I just want to see how it'd work). I'd like to see it in action! → JARED (t)  02:25, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
I will try to do up an example over the next day or so then :) -- Chuq 02:55, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
My initial thought is that the "G" pages would only be helpful for a small handful of "D" pages that are too long and need to be split up. I do not think that it should be the default organization for the vast majority of the 3000+ "D" pages we have. Many nations send a relatively small number of athletes to each Games, and if the entire set of results can be captured on a single article neatly, then there is no reason to split it further. Similarly, the "F" pages would be helpful only for "B" pages that are too long, and to be honest, the "B" pages are collectively in the worst shape of any on that list.
My next thought was that I think we have a LOT of work to do with completing the "base" articles before introducing another level of articles. I fear that the "F" and "G" articles will be very incomplete, perhaps only implemented completely for a very small number of the 3017 nation appearances, and therefore, resulting in inconsistent layout of those articles.
I think our current job should be to complete what we have now. My current assessment is as follows:
  • A. (year) - all complete, although some could use more detail, especially in the "Highlights" section
  • B. (nation) - terrible shape! Only 48 articles of a possible 230 for the summer Games have bene started, and the vast majority are little more than stub status, with some statistics from 1896-1900 and that's all. The winter Games articles are even worse, with only 3 complete of a possible 105!
  • C. (sport) - all exist, but most need some work. I would like to see the following sections implemented at a minimum on all of these pages: For individual sports: all-time medal table, table of events per Games, list of "top" multiple medalists. For team sports, all-time medal table and a table of national appearances.
  • D. (nation/year) - all exist now, although I'm guessing that I created over 1000 stubs, so there's obviously an enormous amount of work to do. At a minimum, we should strive to complete the following information per page: number of competitors and sports (in infobox) and complete list of medalists. A conservative guess is that only a few hundred pages at most are at this level of completion.
  • E. (sport/year) - many still don't exist. (This is where I plan to work on next.) At a minimum they need a medal summary, and a medal table for multi-event sports. When complete, each event ought to have its own article as well.
I don't mean to put a damper on your proposal, but I don't think we should start another set of articles until we've made more progress on what we've already started. Andrwsc 05:54, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Andrwsc: you have a knack to enlighten us :D The way you've put things... there's no doubt that there is still a lot of work to do, indeed. Neverthless, we can always see an example of his proposal just to have an idea of Chuq's intention. Nothing serious for now. Anyways, have you people seen my recent posts above? — Here and here. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 06:31, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, absolutely! I've already added those six winter pictograms to the appropriate navigation boxes! As for the competitor summary, it's a neat idea, but I haven't thought hard enough about how to respond to your proposal... Andrwsc 06:51, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Ok - take a look at:
User:Chuq/Paintball at the 1996 Summer Olympics
User:Chuq/Australia at the 1996 Summer Olympics
See what you think! -- Chuq 12:04, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Hmm, there's some interesting ideas there! However, I do feel that "Results by nation" is not a good idea for any of the "Sport at the year Olympics" pages. "Results by event" is clearly the most logical way to go for those articles. I also think that there should only be a single "Results by xxxx" grouping per article - take a look at Brazil at the 2004 Summer Olympics to see what happens when a page has multiple groupings. (It has results by date and by event.) Not only do they easily fall internally inconsistent, but it is a mess for a reader to navigate. Andrwsc 00:22, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
It might be me but... those two examples don't exist already in the "Country at the YYYY Season Olympics" pages? I mean the "Results by sport" section. Isn't pretty much what we have already? Parutakupiu talk || contribs 04:32, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
They do exist (well, except for Paintball at the 1996 Summer Olympics, I hope no-one creates that!) - but edit the page and take a look at the code. You will find an article, User:Chuq/Australia in Paintball at the 1996 Summer Olympics, which is included in both - and when one is changed, the other is also changed. Andrwsc raises a fair point in that it won't be useful in all cases, but it is just a concept I thought I would introduce here, as it may have potential! Also note that the "User:Chuq/" prefix is solely so that these test pages dont get mistaken for "real" pages.
Not to confuse things, but I just made another change (about 5 minutes ago). User:Chuq/Australia in Paintball at the 1996 Summer Olympics now works as a stand alone article. When included, it is just the bare content - when viewed separately, it adds a header, and categories, and changes the section name, to appear as a real article. -- Chuq 06:11, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
can i make a suggestion? re: E. sport/nation/year, instead of having "NOC at Sport Year Summer/Winter Olympics" why not just make a general article for each NOC and the Sports Team/Athletes, that can be titled "NOC national sport team" for team sports or "NOC national sport athletes" for individual sports. for example, there is an article called Japan national baseball team which can be linked to the standings table of "Baseball at the Year Summer Olympics" article. another example in the Boxing at the 2006 Asian Games medal table, Uzbekistan is linked to Uzbekistan national amateur boxing athletes. i believe this would be simpler and easier than having an article created for each Olympics like creating Timor Leste in Boxing at the 2008 Summer Olympics while we can consolidate all the info of a particular sport for each NOC in one article. there was a previous discussion in village pump (sorry i can't seem to find it) about the growing consensus regarding the quality of WP articles rather than quantity. RebSkii 18:14, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

IOC usage vs Wikipedia's inventions

While the IOC uses "USSR", not "Soviet Union" in the majority of its publications, including official reports by the organizers, Wikipedia seems to have now completely settled upon using "Soviet Union" instead. Even "URS", which is a shortcut for the French "URSS" (English:"USSR") now corresponds to the "Soviet Union". I thought, that using "Soviet Union" in category and article names and the IOC designation "USSR" inside the Olympic articles was a compromise. It's now clear, that I was wrong.

Well, if you, guys, keep things going this way, then I'll consider starting to use "USSR" in category and article names to balance your POV. Cmapm 23:07, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

What's the POV issue here? As per the lengthy discussion above on this page, we're trying to arrive at a set of names that are appropriate for Wikipedia Olympic articles. The arguments in favor of "Soviet Union" are that it matches the name of the main article for the nation, and it avoids using an abbreviation in the article name (similar to the choice of "United States at the Olympics" instead of "USA at the Olympics"). The argument in favor of "USSR" is that it more closely aligns with Olympic report usage. (Although, to be precise, only two official reports used "USSR" as written, the other 16 used "U.S.S.R.".) Are there other arguments to those three?
In any case, I'd still like to know why you think "Soviet Union" usage has POV implications, and what your suggestions would be? When I last tried to raise this issue a few months ago, there was deafening silence. At least this time there were three other people (now four) to weigh in with an opinion. Andrwsc 23:22, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Some prefer to use "Soviet Union", while others prefer to use "USSR", from this I conclude, that both have two distinct POVs on this issue. Wikipedia should equally represent both of them IMHO. I should add to your arguments, that the IOC also always uses "U.S.S.R" (or "USSR"? don't remember) at its official website in medal stats tables. I didn't dig into the "USA" usage, but it seems, that the IOC prefers "United States" or "United States of America" - hence I see no problems with this name.
I should immediately reply on that discussion if I knew of it. But even now I'm writing quite a long article on a completely different subject :) So, please, could you excuse me, if next time I come with too late reply? Cmapm 00:38, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
No worries! I didn't mean to imply there was a time limit on discussion! I just didn't realize it was a sensitive issue. From my perspective, "Soviet Union" is much more widely used in Wikipedia, and didn't seem controversial to me. Very few of the articles mentioned at Wikipedia:WikiProject Soviet Union use "USSR" (or "U.S.S.R.") in the name. I still fail to see what is POV about the name. To me, they are both reasonable abbreviations of the proper full name. One does not strike me as any more or less neutral than the other. "Soviet Union" just seems to be a better choice for Wikipedia article names, for pretty much the same reasons as found on Talk:Soviet Union#Title etc. Andrwsc 00:54, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
More common? E.g. Britannica prefers the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" (abbreviating it "U.S.S.R.") [2]. Anyway, it's important, in which context the name is more common. In Olympic documents, footage, etc. "USSR"/"U.S.S.R." is much more common, than "Soviet Union". And after reading, watching official coverage and documents, folks come into the Wikipedia and see "Soviet Union" in the majority of Olympic-related stats...Cmapm 10:53, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
If you really insist on "USSR" instead of "Soviet Union" (and I think you are the only one here who cares and/or wants it that way), can you please make the hundreds of other edits required to implement that change? Making the change to {{Country IOC alias URS}} is only the first step. There are category name changes (e.g. from Category:Soviet Union at the Olympics to Category:USSR at the Olympics), navigation box changes, and hundreds of article edits. Redirect pages are handy in the interim period, but they should not be relied upon for the long-term solution. Thanks. Andrwsc 17:56, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
Standardize 'em all? :-) Why can't two names coexist inside articles? Quite a lot of the categories with "Soviet Union" name (e.g. subcats of Category:Olympic competitors for the Soviet Union) were created by me. Because Wikipedia's rules say we should better avoid abbreviations in category/article names and "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" would be too long for that. But I'm speaking on the recent change in the URS alias, which automatically changes, for instance, all "total medal count" tables, where "USSR" was since their creation and for a long time! I expected strong sourced reasoning behind that change, because the IOC also uses "USSR" in those tables. I see that "reasoning" in the recent "URS alias" change - "the majority of us think so". No more comments from me. Cmapm 11:15, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
Cmapm, it was great for you to have stood up for your opinions! You had a very logical, reasonable argument for using USSR. Unfortunately, most of life revolves around "majority rules" and this situation was no different. You've been editing WP long enough to know that. I see that you are an avid supported of the Soviet Union, and that's great, and I hope you understand where we're coming from. A majority of the people here agree with Andrwsc's ideas below about the "details" link he wants on the sub pages. Although I disagree, I'll live with it because most people think it will be for the better. And I'm staying with the project.
I hope I speak for everyone when I say that your opinions are very valuable! A discussion would be pointless without someone opposing something. Thanks for getting involved and I hope you choose to stay with the project! → JARED (t)  20:36, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Medal summary table formatting

I'd like to get some opinion on a potential change to the layout of the medal summary tables found on the "Sport at the year Olympics" pages. Right now, the standard format looks like:

Event Gold Silver Bronze
50 m freestyle United States Gary Hall Jr.
United States (USA)		 21.93 Croatia Duje Draganja
Croatia (CRO)		 21.94 South Africa Roland Schoeman
South Africa (RSA)		 22.02
100 m freestyle Netherlands Pieter van den Hoogenband
Netherlands (NED)		 48.17 South Africa Roland Mark Schoeman
South Africa (RSA)		 48.23 Australia Ian Thorpe
Australia (AUS)		 48.56
200 m freestyle Australia Ian Thorpe
Australia (AUS)		 1:44.71 Netherlands Pieter van den Hoogenband
Netherlands (NED)		 1:45.23 United States Michael Phelps
United States (USA)		 1:45.32

Our intent is that this table is the "gateway" to the detailed results for each event, using the wikilink on the event name in the first column of the table. One of the things that has always stuck in the back of my mind is that it may not be totally obvious to newcomers that there is a whole "layer" of information beneath this article and clicking on the event name is how to find it. Therefore, I thought we might want to make it a bit more explicit. Borrowing a formatting idea that I've seen on some other sport pages, I thought we could add a "details" link in the first column, like this:

Event Gold Silver Bronze
50 m freestyle
details		 United States Gary Hall Jr.
United States (USA)		 21.93 Croatia Duje Draganja
Croatia (CRO)		 21.94 South Africa Roland Schoeman
South Africa (RSA)		 22.02
100 m freestyle
details		 Netherlands Pieter van den Hoogenband
Netherlands (NED)		 48.17 South Africa Roland Mark Schoeman
South Africa (RSA)		 48.23 Australia Ian Thorpe
Australia (AUS)		 48.56
200 m freestyle
details		 Australia Ian Thorpe
Australia (AUS)		 1:44.71 Netherlands Pieter van den Hoogenband
Netherlands (NED)		 1:45.23 United States Michael Phelps
United States (USA)		 1:45.32

What do you think? Andrwsc 04:52, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Took the words out of my mouth. This was exactly what I was thinking of proposing. It would let the reader know that there are more details about each of the events. I really like this. Plus it would most certainly do away with the event templates that are found on certain pages. The event templates certainly should exist, but not on the "sport at the XXXX Olympics" pages. Athletics at the 2004 Summer Olympics is an example. With details added into the medal tables, the event template at the bottom of the page would be completely unnecessary. Perakhantu 08:04, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
Maybe tomorrow I'll try to update Athletics at the 2004 Summer Olympics to see what it looks like. We can always revert back if there is violent opposition. Andrwsc 08:43, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
I say: go ahead. Don't see any cons that would create tension over that change. And if those huge super-coloured event templates happen to be replaced, the better! Parutakupiu talk || contribs 18:20, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
At the risk of starting a divergent topic, I must say that I'm not a big fan of those navigational templates either. The multi-colors and the multiple titles (e.g. do we really need yet another link to "Athens, Greece" etc. on each sport template?) really make them look cluttered and ugly, in my opinion. I would be in favor of a simple list, located at the top right of the individual event pages, in a style similar to what is suggested at Wikipedia:Article series. I like the simplicity and placement of templates like {{Style}}. Andrwsc 18:37, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree. That list would look much cleaner, aesthetic and its vertical axis would distinguish it from all the other horizontal templates. It's a matter of testing. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 18:46, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Sorry I'm a little late joining in here. Here's what I think: First, I'm not too big on the "details" link. I'd go for it, but it seems that it's a little unnecessary for the table. I can see where you're coming from, but, again, the other template that you brought up takes care of that. Which leads me to say that I do like those event per sport per year templates. The colors and nice, IMO, and it's a quick way to navigate between those sub sport pages which are big enough to have their own page. {{Style}} seems like an alternative, but if anything should be salvaged from the templates that Jonel created, it should be the coloration and the basic set-up. Maybe I'll make a test template if I get a chance...one that could be used across all of the sports and sub-sports pages in each year. For now, though, I think everything is viable. → JARED (t)  20:50, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

I guess we have different tastes! No disrespect to Jonel, because I know how much work has gone into them, but I have several problems with those templates. First, the color scheme is a poor choice. The bluish shade for men and pinkish shade for women in templates like {{AthleticsAt2004SummerOlympics}} is a form of gender stereotype that could be offensive to some people. To me, it's just tacky. I see that some years have a different scheme (e.g. {{AthleticsAt1964SummerOlympics}} and {{AthleticsAt1896SummerOlympics}}) but I would still say that there is no strong reason to have three or four shades of color in a single navbox. Second, the titles of these templates often go overboard; they don't need the extra header rows to repeat the link to the main Games page and host city, or to state "Games of the x Olympiad". A single title and link to the main "Sport at the year Olympics" article to totally sufficient, in my opinion. Lastly, I do not like the inconsistency of these templates. In addition to the color differences mentioned above, there are also size differences. For example, {{FigureskatingAt1908SummerOlympics}} is vertically oriented, but placed at the bottom of articles, where horizontally oriented navigation boxes are usually used.
I think the right solution is to have a "parent" template that defines the basic structure, color, location, etc. and then per-sport/Games templates would be derived from those. That is the approach I took with the infoboxes on the "Nation at the year Games" articles. All the layout details are defined in one spot ({{Infobox Country Olympics}}) with parameters to define the details. Some of those parameters are specified in a per-nation template (e.g. {{Infobox Olympics Greece}} and the rest are specified on the individual articles.
With that in mind, perhaps we need to agree on the visual details first and then work from there. Andrwsc 08:08, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
I'd just like to note that I didn't design those templates, I've just been using a format I picked up somewhere else (specifically, {{SwimmingAt2004SummerOlympics}} -- going through the history of that template is quite interesting). I definitely agree that blue/pink is not wise; all of the 1964 templates I've created recently have been blue/blue. I'd certainly have no problem making them the same shade of blue. The extra title lines are indeed extraneous and could be eliminated. As for the size differences, those are an artifact of the fact that sports have different numbers of events. The figure skating one has three lines because it had men's, women's, and mixed events. Since it only had 1 or 2 of each, it looks vertical. If there were 8 events in each group, it would be as horizontal as the others.
All that said, as long as there's an easy way to navigate between events, I'm happy with pretty much any display characteristics. -- Jonel | Speak 15:01, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
Wow, there certainly were some style differences on that swimming template! I think this precisely makes my point that we need a "parent" template to hold all the style decisions (such as our current use of {{Dynamic navigation box}} or {{NavigationBox}} for the current bottom-of-page navigation boxes such as {{NOCin2004SummerOlympics}}, {{EventsAt2004SummerOlympics}}, and {{Olympic Games Swimming}}).
I recognize that the size and shape differences of the current event boxes are due to the differences in number and type of events, but I also think it is possible to use a scheme that looks similar across a wide variety of cases. For example, instead of:


The 1908 Summer Olympics in London
Games of the IV Olympiad
Figure skating at the 1908 Summer Olympics

individual | special figures

individual

mixed pairs
we could have:
Figure skating at the 1908 Summer Olympics
Men's individual • Men's special figures • Women's individual • Pairs
I'm not necessarily advocating the use of {{NavigationBox}} for these boxes, but I just used it to make my point about consistency.
I do think that we need to decide upon a format we want to see for these boxes. I've already stated my personal opinion, about a vertical "series box" in the upper right hand corner, because I think this style "scales" easily from sports with a handful events to the current athletics and swimming programs. I also think a vertical format is easier to read with respect to lists of event names. I find horizontal formats to be difficult to read sometimes when you see a big mass of text. (I think they work great for lists of years, of course, since they are all similar list items.)
When I created all the infoboxes for the "Nation at the year Olympics" pages, I just got WP:BOLD and forged ahead. About 4000 edits later nobody complained! However, in this case, I think it might be better to get a discussion going first. ;) Andrwsc 17:52, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
With every reply you make, Andrwsc i'm even more decided to support you on your vertical event list template! Your arguments are very pertinent and i do believe it will benefit those pages both in aesthetics and acessibility. You have my support. Just one doubt: the "details" links you suggested would still apply? I wouldn't see much sense in that afterwards. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 20:28, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
I think what is being proposed here is that the event template would only be used inside the events themselves, while the details links would be used on the main sport page. For example, the details links would be used in here: Athletics at the 1900 Summer Olympics. The event template would be used in here: Athletics at the 1900 Summer Olympics - Men's 400 metre hurdles. By the way Andrwsc, the current event template at the bottom of that 400 meter hurdles page would be changed so that there won't be any color and the heading The 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris Games of the II Olympiad would be removed, correct? Perakhantu 07:06, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
Oh, ok. That seems right. Thanks for clearing me on this issue. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 18:43, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm not part of the project, but I have changed many tables, including some related to the Olympics (e.g. Shooting at the 1996 Summer Olympics). I noticed the use of a template on Shooting at the 2004 Summer Olympics which led me here. Some thoughts I had (comparing the above two pages):

  1. Instead of a flag icon, country name and country code/abbreviation, you could make use of the standard Wikipedia:Country referencing templates, where {{USA}} would result in a flagicon and a wikilinked country name, e.g. Flag of United States United States. Putting this on a new line below the athlete name (or in adjacent column) makes for a clean look as well as simpler editing.
  2. You could consider reducing the font-size ever so slightly, perhaps to 95%?

Deon Steyn 11:10, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

We are using standard templates for these tables, namely {{flagIOC}} and related templates. They have several advantages over the non-Olympic templates:
  1. the wikilink is to the appropriate "Nation at the year Olympics" article, which is significantly more useful than a link to the nation's main article
  2. the flag is automatically chosen as per the specific Games instance. This is helpful for historic flags (e.g. US 48 stars, German Empire, etc.) It is sometimes quite difficult to find the right template call for historic flags but it is handled completely transparently by the flagIOC templates (assuming that the Games paramater is correct, such as "1912 Summer" for example)
  3. the flagIOC series of templates use the IOC country code, not the ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code. This makes it significantly easier for editors writing new pages from official results (esp. since 1972), where the codes are used prominently. How would they know that Algeria is {{DZA}} instead of ALG as they see it in the results listings?
Also, how does reducing the font size help? What problem are you trying to solve? Andrwsc 18:02, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

UPDATE: Hi all! What's the situation of this proposal? I'd really like to see the vertical event box that Andrwsc suggested being applied, as I've created new event pages and a template like that would come in handy. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 20:12, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

New Olympic infobox

Hey all. This discussion has made me think about our existing template {{Olympics infobox}}. The problems I have with it are that the logos are totally ramdomly named and are in totally different formats, some have extra links in the fields, some don't, and its only use is basically on the main Olympics page. It should be able to be used across all Olympics pages right? So right now I'm pretty much doing a complete overhaul on the existing template, making it useful, convenient, and all the information would be built into the template. The only thing the user would need to know is the year of the games, the season, and possibly the sport (I haven't gotten there yet).

Anyway, regardless of whether this goes through or not, could someone with oodles of free time on their hands go to the Olympic games IOC page and upload each Olympic logo again, under a common name such as Year Summer/Winter Olympics logo.jpg (ex. 2006 Winter Olympics logo.jpg). I'm not sure whether .jpg would be the best format, but since I think all of the logos (the IOC website calls them "emblems") are in the .jpg format, that'd be easiest. (What do you think?) The Games that don't have "emblems," just use the IOC's "poster" for those games. Then just speedy all the other images already on WP.

Thanks to anyone who is up to doing this! → JARED (t)  16:49, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

What are you up to? :) I'm a bit concerned about your idea of including this infobox on ALL olympics pages - i hope it won't clutter up some already content-filled pages. But i'll wait for an example. As for the Olympic emblems, there's indeed a need to standardize the image files 'cause we have PNG, JPG, GIF and even SVG! And most of them with different filenames... I could do that task, if anyone doesn't come forward. You'd want them all in JPG format?
I'd have to upload them to en Wikipedia (not Commons), right? And the existent logos? What would be of them? Parutakupiu talk || contribs 20:21, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
I really haven't finished it yet, so I'm not even sure what'll come of it, but I'm sure it'll be better, whether it is put on "ALL" pages or not! :)
As for the images, I'd think .jpg would be fine. That's what they all are on the IOC page, I think. Regardless, they all need to be the same format for my evil plan to work! And, yeah, go ahead and upload 'em to the en wiki. I would just put {{Redundant image}} on the old image pages.
But some of the images on IOC website are not better than some emblems on Wikipedia. For example, i don't think i should replace PNG or even SVG files with those JPG ones from IOC. I could upload the IOC ones... and not tag the existent ones, for now. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 20:46, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Sure! → JARED (t)  20:50, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Ok, then ;) (you're welcome) Parutakupiu talk || contribs 22:30, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, the "dirty" job is done - see here. I've regreted going for the JPG instead of PNG when i saw Tokyo and Sapporo's red sun all "wavy", but i'm not going back for that. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 00:27, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
I applaud the effort to standardize the visual appearance of those boxes, but what did you have in mind when you said "It should be able to be used across all Olympics pages right?" I strongly believe that infoboxes built on {{Olympics infobox}} should only appear on the main "Year Summer/Winter Olympics" pages. I do not think they belong on any of the next level sport or nation pages, for example. The information contained in those boxes (e.g. opening/closing ceremony information, "Officially opened by", etc.) really only applies to the Games as a whole and would be inappropriate on other pages. Or am I misreading your intent? Andrwsc 08:12, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
I review myself on Andrwsc's point, that's why i revealed my "concern" with that idea... but i lent Jared the benefit of doubt, even though i tend to agree that that infobox makes sense only at the main Olympic Games article. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 20:11, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, my plan pretty much fell through anyway, it didn't seem plausible. I totally agree Andrwsc, that the info on the box should only be on the main page, and I was trying to make it so that it would only appear when it was there, but that would have gone overboard. Anyway, here's what I've come up with. It's basically the same template, only all the information has been transposed onto one template (series) so that the only info needed to get the same thing as what is on each games "home page" now is the year and the season.
Now, the whole idea may seem unnecessary now, because my original intentions weren't going to work (as I initially found out) but on the plus side, I think they would still be useful because
        1. it wouldn't clutter up the top of the page
        2. the whole thing led to a common logo name
        3. and it would be easy and convenient for people to put it up on new pages (assuming, that the info is already entered on the page.
If worse comes to worst and this doesn't go over well, the plus that comes from it is that I've placed everything onto one set of pages, if anyone ever needed to quickly reference it. → JARED (t)  20:30, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
... Even if it won't be used, i'm really awed by the code you used to automatically get the Olympiad roman number out of the Olympic year ;) Parutakupiu talk || contribs 20:45, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
I liked that, too. I was surprized that it actually worked when I went to test it. It was simple in theory, but it was a nightmare putting together. lol. → JARED (t)  00:54, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Medalists dynamic box

I've been a bit absent from here, but i've been working on a new thing which i think might interest you. I've made a two-version template (actually two very similar templates) which can display all the Olympic medalists of a certain country, per medal type. Here is where you might say "ALL?! You're crazy! Do you know how many medals the United States have?!", lol. Yes... in the case of "big" countries like the US, Soviet Union, China, etc., it might be an herculean task, but there are loads of countries who don't have such records and listing their medalists would be simple. To find out more about this take a look - HERE - and then post your comments here! Parutakupiu talk || contribs 03:09, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

It looks good; I'm just not sure of your intentions for the template(s). I think you would want to put them on Nation at the Olympics, Nation at the XXXX season Olympics,...and possibly at each medalist's page (but that may be overboard). Overall, I think I like first template better because it looks neater. The second one might be nicer, yes, for larger nations, but would each medalist be listed for as many times as they won? I'm also not sure of the ease of using the template for huge nations, like the US. Maybe an example... Good work though so far! → JARED (t)  21:21, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
I believe they could fit at the "Nation at the Season Olympics" because the template header will only show either "Summer" or "Winter". Moreover, for countries with "tons" of medals it'll be heavy to join all Olympic medalists from both seasons. I also thought putting it on the medalists' pages but i'm not so sure now because there are A LOT of medalists without personal articles, especially from weak-performing countries. I also like the first template too (tidier) and it only implies a unique entry for an athlete, even if he won more than one medal of a kind. In the second template, the inclusion of the years would oblige repeting athletes who won the same medal in different Olympics. Yet, i quite like the "year parameter" - even with these cons - but i'm ok with your preferences. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 23:40, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

{{NationsinOlympics}}

I just discovered this template, leading me to a whole slew of pages I had no idea existed. Do we want to have Nation at the Olympics pages, discounting season? I think it's interesting, but I'm not sure about it. I didn't realize they were there, and I wasn't sure if anyone else did or not, so I thought I'd bring it up. → JARED (t)  21:33, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Not only that, but notice the use of a whole new parallel infobox template ({{Infobox Country at the Olympics}})!! User:Nyttend seems to be doing this work outside of the scope of this WikiProject.
So much for my vision of a CONSISTENT visual appearance to these pages. What a waste of my time. I give up. I'm outta here. Good luck, everybody! Andrwsc 21:43, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
What that heck! Besides being totally redundant, that user can't even claim he/she didn't know, since that template's a perfect copy of Andrwsc's infobox!!! Andrwsc, please don't abandon this. Your work is too important and valuable on this project for it to be the same without you. Please, reconsider. I do admire your tremendous work :) Parutakupiu talk || contribs 22:37, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Has anyone gone to User talk:Nyttend to ask them why they're creating an alternate system? The use may be newer, but they seem to listen to reason so they may not even know about this WikiProject. Everybody remember to take a breath and assume good faith in your fellow editors, please. :) -- nae'blis 22:55, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Ok, notwithstanding my knee jerk reaction at the apparent case of "not invented here syndrome" demonstrated by these new pages and templates, I do think there is a lot of merit in having "Nation at the Olympics" as the main summary article for each nation. Of the 233 NOCs that we need pages for, only 105 have ever appeared at least once at the Winter Games. Also, the large majority of those nations could easily use a single page to describe their entire Olympic history, including both Summer and Winter. My estimate is that only about 20 nations will really need to have to use separate Summer and Winter pages. Therefore, I believe that the default structure ought to be a single page for most nations, with a split into separate Summer and Winter articles only when there is enough content to warrant it.
I would still like to see these new pages, and especially the new infobox, be reconciled into our existing structure and templates, but I'm not going to do that. It's time for a wikibreak for me, possibly for a long time. Good luck! Andrwsc 23:00, 11 December 2006 (UTC)


Mea culpa. I admit i was a bit harsh on my reaction too but i almost went desperate just by seeing Andrwsc hitting the door. For what you've done here (thousands of edits!), you - more than anyone - deserve a break from anything wiki. Just promise you come back fresh to help us ;)
I'm not angry at User:Nyttend... but it's strange that he made a perfect copy of that infobox and won't know of this project, i guess. However, after thinking a bit, i agree with Andrwsc with the validity of those pages for NOC's which don't have much of an Olympic history. But perhaps we should reach our goals on the current work before starting on that, i don't know. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 23:31, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, just assume good faith now, and then someone should try to figure out what the heck he/she is doing. Maybe I will when I find the time. But it's definitely another thing to think about! I'll have to think before I can make a call on this. → JARED (t)  01:36, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, I initiated contact, and I hope I came across as diplomatically as possible. (did I do a good job?) If any of you have anything to add to his talk page, please do. I have some serious concerns about this as well. The pages that have already been created and extensive edited by Andrwsc are very well done, and have been made such a way, that basically you just have to add the info from the offical reports. I hope we won't have an edit war on our hands. (crosses fingers) Perakhantu 07:52, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Wow, I read all this, and I'm so sorry for causing quite a mess. I had no idea that there would be a problem. I'll just give you a shortened version of what I left on Perakhantu's talk page. In short: seeing that there were already pages for Belarus and the USA at the Olympics, and that there was a long-dormant {{NationsinOlympics}}, I thought it might be useful to have more national summary pages (as Andrwsc said above), so I began putting some up. I was aware of Andrwsc's template; because I have almost no template experience, I took that template and sought to modify it to get it to show summer and winter and total medal counts, plus all the different years in which each country participated. Let me be clear: I am not seeking (nor have I ever) to compete with you or get in your way, and I am sorry for my encroachment. I created these pages as an introduction to each country's Olympic participation, using solely the various articles on the country's participation at each Olympics plus the IOC website. I am not especially interested in joining this wikiproject because I did this as a means of organising information better (like how people create "List of ___" articles), not because I'm interested in continued work on Olympic articles. If you prefer that only wikiproject members do major stuff for Olympic articles, I'm fine with getting out of the way :-) Nyttend 16:02, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

By the way, looking again at what all of you said: what I put together I drew, not from the official reports, but from pages like Cameroon at the 1972 Summer Olympics that Andrwsc created. Nyttend 16:17, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Hey Nyttend! I never intended for this to be a brawl or anything. I didn't even intend to point out an individual person for doing this. (If fact, the template, as you mentioned, has been around for some time.) I noted the "problem" here because we've always only had "Nation at the Summer Olympics" and "Nation at the Winter Olympics" pages, and it came as a surprise to me when I saw the ones I did ("Nation at the Olympics"). I appreciate your tidying skills, and definitely would encourage you to work with on Olympics articles—you need not be a member of this project! Here, though, we've found it more helpful if we discussed things here before implementing major changes, but, again, you had no idea, so it was an honest mistake.
My main concern, which has little to do with you, is whether these pages should be kept, scrapped, or what? We already have separate Summer/Winter pages for each nation, and combined pages might be nice, but I like I've said, I've never seen these before and I was confused. I think now, before other users continue editing them, we should make a decision on whether we should keep them or not. About 160 redlinks can be found for each the Summer/Winter Olympics in regards to nations, FYI. → JARED (t)  20:42, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, since I began creating 20+ complete summary pages having already seen some of the summer and winter summaries you mention, you should be able to guess what I think on having complete summaries :-) Incidentally, the reason I did the ones I did was that I wanted to get lots of countries done fast, and West African countries I figured had participated the least and won the fewest medals.
Anyway, I don't think it right to have a non-wikiproject member determining wikiproject policy, so I'll not attempt to get in your discussion. Nyttend 22:59, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Olympic Games FAR

Olympic Games has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. Sandy (Talk) 04:17, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

International Boxing Association

i used to have an impression that the International Boxing Association (IBA) is the same as Amateur International Boxing Association (AIBA). the latter's official website also calls itself International Boxing Association. the former according to the article is not amateur. i can't seem to find an article for AIBA. can anyone help me? coz i'm supposed to link AIBA to some boxing articles and i made a mistake linking to IBA. thanks. --RebSkii 19:58, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

From what I've read, here's the deal:
The International Boxing Association that you referred to in your comment (the one with the Wiki page) is a totally different association and has nothing to do with the one that governs boxing in the Olympics. The one you're referring to, the AIBA, actually once stood for Association Internationale de Boxe Amateur, but today, the word Amateur has been dropped. Hence, it is still abbreviated as AIBA, but it is called the International Boxing Association in English, and is most likely unrelated to the other one above. So if you want to link Olympics boxing pages to something, AIBA is what you want, and FYI, there's no Wiki page for it. → JARED (t)  20:17, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
i just made one, however, i titled it the wrong way Amateur International Boxing Association it should have been titled otherwise. and a disambiguation page should be made for this. i don't know how to do it, so if you or anyone here can help me, that would be very much appreciated. --RebSkii 17:41, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
the International Boxing Association (the amateur one) article has been moved as per an administrator's suggestion. thanks JP06035. --RebSkii 21:24, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Reconfigured categories and WP template

Hello, people. After creating another Olympics-related article (one redlink less!) I noticed that the project's template {{OlympicsWikiProject}} had a glitch on the category inclusion - it included the banner category on the template page only (correct) but it also "noincluded" the wikiproject category for the individual articles where it would be transcluded (wrong). I suppose it was meant to be put the <includeonly></includeonly> tags so that this latter category would appear on the articles pages themselves, as obvious. That's what I did. I also created a new subcategory - Category:WikiProject Sports Olympics articles where all the ones who have the project template would be directed. I'm still trying to devise something more out of this matter, though. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 01:18, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day Awards

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 19:07, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Diving events at the YYYY Summer Olympics

Hello all! How was your Christimas and New Year's celebrations? I hope they were great. And I see Andrwsc's back on the "job" so... welcome! :)

I just wanted to inform you that, in the past days, I've been creating the event-specific articles for the Olympic diving. I've started with 1912 (1904 and 1908 were already created but I want to change its structure to resemble the related pages) and have created every diving event page until 1960, so far. In parallel, the nations table at the main sport article (Diving at the Summer Olympics) is being updated with the participating nations and other figures and internal links were added in the events table, too.

If you want to have a look, go ahead and comment on my edits or make any suggestions as to improve them. On a general basis, the articles are all standardized, but some might differ on the display of certain info; I'll try to correct that towards the end. To improve guidance inside the different diving events' pages, I've created year-specific event vertical boxes, like Andrwsc suggested here but a decision wasn't made about it, so I was bold and headed on with it. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 18:37, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi Parutakupiu! And yes, I have been back at it again... ;)
I have noticed your work on the diving pages -- this is very good work! I do like your event navigation boxes too. I have a couple of suggestions... First, I think the "Participating nations" sections on the summary "Sport at the Olympics" pages would be more informative if the actual number of athletes for each nation were listed in those tables, rather than just an "X" for participated or blank/dash for not. Second, I noticed you are using {{cite web}} for the reference to the official reports which are PDF files on the AAF web site. I think that {{cite book}} is more appropriate. That template still has the url parameter to provide the web link, but those sources really are better classified as books instead of web pages. Look at how I formatted the reference at Canoeing at the 1924 Summer Olympics for an example. Also, starting in the 80s (I think), some of the official reports also have ISBN numbers, so "cite book" is definitely more appropriate for them. Hope this helps! Andrwsc 18:56, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks! Glad you liked it. As for your suggestions I agree with both and will implement tehm on the following edits I make ;) Good to have you back, again. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 19:43, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm sold on the vertical boxes. Let's see if I can get one of those to look nice for an athletics or swimming event... Good work. -- Jonel | Speak 00:44, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Well, 2 or 3 events for the Diving don't make the boxes actually that vertical :P But you'll see the nice and true appearance with the Athletics ;) Thanks! Parutakupiu talk || contribs 00:51, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Here are a couple of examples I made before the holidays to see which I liked. I used athletics because it is the largest sport by number of events, so would be close to the "worst case". See User:Andrwsc/Test2 for a very vertical format and User:Andrwsc/Test3 for one that puts men & women side by side. (I think that Parutakupiu might have noticed that one. ;) Andrwsc 00:54, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Indeed I did. I hope you don't mind, since you didn't have the chance to "officialy debut" that template before my patience to wait for a decision ended :P
For me it was right down obvious that this version - User:Andrwsc/Test3 - was the best: the list of events isn't repeated for each gender hence we get a smaller vertical box without the risk of overlapping sections below. ~~
No, of course not! I'm still not 100% sold on that style, however. I think the "men" and "women" strings might be a bit too close to each other, for example. I was planning to experiment with a few things, but got distracted by other stuff in the past couple of weeks! I think I'll still tinker with it though. Andrwsc 01:13, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
The largest athletics one is 1912, here's what that one looks like - User:Jonel/AthleticsAt1912SummerOlympics Test1. Used the same format as diving and Andrwsc's Test3 (women would just mean adding a column). That's 30 distinct events, which is the worst of any sport at any year, as far as I can tell. I played around with a couple more (#2 uses the format I've been using for recent templates; #3 is an ugly thing attempting to limit verbiage due to only men competing; #4 is trying to get the thing onto one screen by using types of events, but is both a) ugly as hell and b) not easy to scale to men/women), but I think this format's the best I've got. -- Jonel | Speak 01:18, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
@Andrwsc: I quite like, if not (a lot!) but that proximity detail also came across my mind and I even thought of how to solve that, but never got my hands on it. You work on that, and any changes you might do, please warn me so the diving templates I used are updated accordingly.
@Jonel: Now imagine that Test1 box double-sized because of another list just for women's events. I'm 100% supportive of User:Andrwsc/Test3. #4, though noteworthy, seems to clutter up the box when it's purpose is to help people navigating easily through a sport's events ;) Parutakupiu talk || contribs 01:27, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Like I said, #4 is ugly as hell! ;) -- Jonel | Speak 01:33, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, I agree that looks the best. I am convinced that these navigation boxes must be located at the top of event pages, because that way you can quickly jump from event to event without having to scroll to the bottom. (Similarly, that's one reason why I put the "Appearances" section in the nation infoboxes, so you could jump from year to year and get the quick details at the top of the page.) One consequence of being at the top means that it needs to co-exist with the intro paragraph, list of medalists, etc. and that means that it needs to have a fairly vertical format.
I made one quick edit to User:Andrwsc/Test3 to add spacing between the three columns of text and I think this might be good enough to make "standard". Andrwsc 01:35, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
(pull left) Since I haven't been here for a little bit, here's what I have to say: I like the diving templates, but I also like Andrwsc's #2, the entirely vertical one. Somnething is more appealing about that one, rather than having men and women right next to each other. I don't know, maybe it's just me. It just seems more neat, but the other is shorter. Also take into consideration that there really aren't that many events--even in recent times--for sports. Swimming and athletics are the biggies for summer, and even then they aren't that big. I advocate a straight column, but don't care either way. → JARED (t)  02:01, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
The main pro is not even the fact it becomes shorter this way, it's the guidance improvement in the box itself, where you don't have to scroll up-and-down to get to the event pages for men and women. I think this is what pushes me more into the "parallel gender" box type. I also like the other option but it's mostly on a aesthetic basisParutakupiu talk || contribs 02:16, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Another note - I updated User:Andrwsc/Test3 again to reflect what the event article names should be. Many existing pages need to be renamed for consistent use of case, etc. I thought I should do this in case anybody pulled this page as is to replace {{AthleticsAt2004SummerOlympics}}. Andrwsc 18:17, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Gosh, so many redlinks on that template... Now I know what you mean when you talked about closing the 2004 Games events' articles before the 2008 rush comes in. 18:24, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Just moved 'em all. Pain in the arse. -- Jonel | Speak 21:12, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for that! Andrwsc 21:46, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

UPDATE — I'll probably finish with creating the missing diving events pages in two or three days (avergage of one Games per day). After that, I'll retouch with extra info and assure consistency. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 22:09, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Olympic Games

Not to bring another issue into the mix, but that's exactly what I'm going to do (☺)! I have been handling the FARC of Olympic Games for a few weeks now, but it seems that the page hasn't gotten far. I've edited some sections and added a lot of sources, but many sections need re-writes. I began to outline some stuff that needs fixing on the talk page. Anyway, if anyone has any spare time, could you look at that article and maybe choose a section to fix up. I'd hate to lose it, but I have other responsibilities that hinder me from doing it by myself. → JARED (t)  20:23, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

As you know I'm currently working on the Diving at the Summer Olympics per-year events, but free time is what I have most now, and if it's a subject of the utmost importance I'll be glad to help, in any way possible. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 21:06, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
It's not the utmost importance, but I think it is a notable article-- one that the whole framework of this Wikiproject is built upon. But that should put no pressure on you; do as you wish. → JARED (t)  21:24, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

WR+OR tables

This new topic is about an idea I had when reading this:

One other comment, and this is for anybody, is what should we do with the "Records" section at the top of the page. I can see how it was useful for Wikipedia to show for the 2004 pages, but I'm not sure what we should do for all of the past "Swimming at the yyyy Summer Olympics" pages. Do we want to include the records in effect at that time, or should we just delete this small section altogether?
Andrwsc 22:17, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

I think we should leave that data, as I believe it's a good reference for the progression of both Olympic (OR) and World (WR) records (the latter at the time of the Olympics). What I figured was, basically, creating a template (User:Parutakupiu/Tests6) that holds simultaneously the WR and OR throughout the entire existence of an Olympic event. But, thanks to conditional statements, it will only show the current records at the time of a certain Olympiad, depending on a single parameter.

EXAMPLES:

Using the example of Swimming at the 2000 Summer Olympics - Men's 50 metre freestyle (the one tested on the template): it was first competed at the 1988 Summer Olympics but sooner than that, worldwide. Therefore, if we assign the value 1988 to the parameter gamesyear, the table will show the WR before those Games but nothing as the OR, since it's its Olympic debut:

  • {{User:Parutakupiu/Tests6|gamesyear=1988}}
World Record Flag of United States Tom Jager (USA) 22.23 Flag of United States Orlando (USA) 25 March 1988
Olympic Record New Olympic event

In the 1992 Summer Olympics, a OR already existed (from 1988) and the WR had changed since. So, if we assign the year 1992, we'll have:

  • {{User:Parutakupiu/Tests6|gamesyear=1992}}
World Record Flag of United States Tom Jager (USA) 21.81 Flag of United States Nashville (USA) 24 March 1990
Olympic Record United States Matt Biondi (USA) 22.14 Flag of South Korea Seoul (KOR) 24 September 1988

And for the following Summer Olympiads:

  • {{User:Parutakupiu/Tests6|gamesyear=1996}}
World Record Flag of United States Tom Jager (USA) 21.81 Flag of United States Nashville (USA) 24 March 1990
Olympic Record Unified Team Alexander Popov (EUN) 21.91 Flag of Spain Barcelona (ESP) 30 July 1992
  • {{User:Parutakupiu/Tests6|gamesyear=2000}}
World Record Flag of Russia Alexander Popov (RUS) 21.64 Flag of Russia Moscow (RUS) 16 June 2000
Olympic Record Unified Team Alexander Popov (EUN) 21.91 Flag of Spain Barcelona (ESP) 30 July 1992
  • {{User:Parutakupiu/Tests6|gamesyear=2004}}
World Record Flag of Russia Alexander Popov (RUS) 21.64 Flag of Russia Moscow (RUS) 16 June 2000
Olympic Record Unified Team Alexander Popov (EUN) 21.91 Flag of Spain Barcelona (ESP) 30 July 1992

Notice that I use the {{FlagIOCathlete}} template for the OR holders, and a similar non-template structure for the WR holders.

So this is what I thought up in order to preserve this data. I haven't foreseen if this can be easily adapted for other Olympic events, but I believe it can - with or without much more work. The thing is there would have to be one template per event.

What do you think? Parutakupiu talk || contribs 02:44, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

I definitely like having the records as they stood just prior to the event at the event article. I've been doing the Olympic record in prose for the 1912 athletics articles I've been doing recently, especially since so many of them were broken, usually more than once during an event. The format you've got there looks good to me. As for the number of events, many Olympic sports have no Olympic records -- swimming and athletics do, of course, and they're the ones with the most events, but really it's only those two, archery, cycling, shooting, weightlifting and speed skating that have official records ([3]). I think archery is the only one that has weird things happen with the records, so given enough legwork, that should work for most everything. -- Jonel | Speak 03:19, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
Yes, considering amount of sports with official records (even though athletics and swimming are the "heavyweights") it seems a reasonable job. I'll take care of that, if you people want it to go ahead. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 04:22, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
Gee, I seem to have a knack of starting whole new discussion threads from extra comments I throw into previous threads! Anyway, after reading your comments and thinking about it for a bit, here is what I think.
  1. The original list of records was on the 2004 pages when it was a current event, but now those pages have evolved into after-the-fact results lists. Therefore, we need to come up with a solution that works for all past Games articles too. I think what I found potentially confusing by just having the small table of records was that no context was given. I think perhaps all it needs is a sentence or two of prose text around the table — maybe something like: Prior to this competition, the existing world and Olympic records were: <then show the table, then another sentence like:> United States Mark Spitz (USA) broke both records in the heats and again in the final. (or whatever)
  2. One thing we really need is a complete list of Olympic records for those half-dozen or so sports that maintain them. There are a handful of records pages elsewhere on Wikipedia — see Category:Athletics records and Category:Swimming records. (There is also an expected List of Olympic records that is redlinked from {{Records}}.) These sets of pages are incomplete and desperately need better article names!! Anyway, whether it is a section in Swimming at the Summer Olympics or a separate List of Olympic records in swimming, I think we ought to get these tabulated soon.
  3. Parutakupiu, I think your meta-table is quite clever, but I think it might be overkill for this task. These tables ought to be "write once" Wiki markup that won't need future updating after each event article is written so I don't see why you need to use conditionals and other parser functions. Just a suggestion!
  4. I would make a change to the formatting. I think we should be consistent with our usage of the three letter IOC country codes for wikilinks to the "Nation at the year Olympics" articles. Therefore, I would spell out the nation in full for the location part of your tables (i.e. Moscow, Russia and Barcelona, Spain. I think I'd also drop the flag from that section too. There is a movement afoot in Wikipedia to eliminate flag icons (see WP:FLAGCRUFT). One administrator actually completely disabled the {{flagicon}} template for a short time before it was reversed. I do agree with some of the sentiment expressed there, but I also firmly believe that flag icons in the Olympic context are a well-known and firmly established presentation style even outside of Wikipedia. Therefore, I think we should stick to using the flagIOC templates for Olympic-specific instances but not introduce superfluous flag icons where they are redundant.
Andrwsc 17:07, 6 January 2007 (UTC)


Lol, you really dissect everything :P Perhaps you're right on the record-updating issue: it would be far easier to just write a non-templated record table on the event article itself. My idea was to simplify the display of this data by means of a template and a single parameter, as you can understand. Anyway, it was a "test" and I wanted to read comments about its validity to proceed, and then formatting suggestions, or be replaced by a better alternative.
For the record, in case anyone ever looks back at this section, here is a page on the beijing2008.cn website that has all the records: this page. └Jared┘┌talk┐  20:40, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Number of participants

I see that Jared has added a parameter to {{FlagIOC}} to render the number of competitors for each nation in parenthesis after the name, as seen on 2006 Winter Olympics. This is really useful, and I encourage anybody who wants to take up the challenge to help complete these numbers for all past Games, and to also add the numbers to the appropriate "Nation at the year Olympics" page (by using the "competitors=" parameter to the infobox, and "sports=" if possible). I realize this is about 3000 edits, but it is very useful information and would greatly help for the summary "Nation at the Olympics" articles to have this data too. Andrwsc 21:57, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

"X" or "•"?

One thing I noticed - and I believe should be standardized soon - is the way a sport or event was present or absent at a Season Olympics. In the Olympic sports tables, the sports included in the Olympic programme of the different Games are indicated with a bolded X (e.g. X); if it's absent, nothing is written on the cell. However, on some "Sport at the Season Olympics" articles, the event tables display either bolded enlarged dots (e.g. •) or simple X's, even on disciplines of the same sport (Swimming at the Summer Olympics and Synchronized swimming at the Summer Olympics), while others don't even have one event table yet (Water polo at the Summer Olympics). What type of mark should we use? X or •?

Deriving from this, I've turned the dots on the Diving at the Summer Olympics event table as links to the various diving events along Olympic history. Do you think I did well? If yes, could it be expanded to all other tables?

To finalize, as per Andrwsc suggestion:

«(...) I think the "Participating nations" sections on the summary "Sport at the Olympics" pages would be more informative if the actual number of athletes for each nation were listed in those tables, rather than just an "X" for participated or blank/dash for not (...)»

I've done that with the diving nations table (at least, since Andrwsc warned me). Then, I conclude we should do the same with the rest, even though some editors are still putting X's or dots.

Comments are appreciated. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 18:50, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

I prefer the bullet. The upper case X is not as aesthetically pleasing, in my opinion. The one thing I'm not completely sold on is the need to use it as a direct wikilink to the specific event page. Whatever character is used there, it's a somewhat hidden navigation method that may be useful for us keen WikiProject editors, but not natural or obvious to our audience of casual readers. If you really want to keep it, I won't delete it! But it certainly adds to the page size, and adds to the difficulty of maintaining the page, especially if you can imagine what the completed table at Athletics at the Summer Olympics will end up as. I think the cost outweighs the benefit. Andrwsc 19:50, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Even I wasn't really appealed by it, in aesthetical terms, but I didn't want to undo it before taking your opinions. But your arguments - which I incredibly didn't consider before now (!) - seem completely justified and I won't lose anymore time and work with it on future edits. Thanks, Andrwsc! You're a true help ;) Parutakupiu talk || contribs 19:58, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Bullets, certainly. As for the event links, they are useful in editing (such as when I want to open all instances of men's shot put events, for instance) but not so helpful for casual readers. As for nations, number of competitors is nice, so if you have it handy use it; if not, put a bullet and someone can come along later with numbers. -- Jonel | Speak 20:55, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
An idea I had that might help in your example would be to put all the event pages for the same event across multiple Games into a new category. For example, Athletics at the 2004 Summer Olympics - Men's shot put would be in both Category:Athletics events at the 2004 Summer Olympics and Category:Shot put at the Olympics (or whatever). That would help both in editing (e.g. use AWB on that category) and for reader browsing ("hey, I'm interested to see how the shot put changed over the years"). Andrwsc 21:38, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
FYI, the existing Diving pages already had such a Category:Diving at the Olympics; while I created the inexistant event pages of a Year Summer Olympics, I included them on this category. It's a matter of creating equal categories for those sports/disciplines which don't have it yet. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 22:15, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
No, what I was suggesting was in addition to that. Right now, we have (or should have), a category for "Sport at the Olympics", which contains the top-level summary page plus all the top-level per-Games pages. It also has subcategories of "Sport events at the year Olympics", each of which is populated by the per-event pages for those Games. Therefore, we have a tree-like hierarchy. What I'm proposing is to add a "perpendicular slice" across all Games for the same event. In your case, you would have all the men's springboard event pages from all Games in another category (say, Category:Diving at the Olympics - men's springboard). In other words, each per-event results page would be in two categories - one with all the other events in the same sport in the same Games, and the other with all the same event in other Games. I hope this is clearer! I don't know if it's actually useful or not, but it seemed like something potentially helpful, once we have a lot of the per-event pages complete. Andrwsc 22:26, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Oh, I'm sorry, I misunderstood you. Yes, I think that's a valuable addition to the Olympics category network. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 22:49, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Jeese, you guys are moving fast-paced! I have to catch up. OK, so yes, bullets. Now, to tackle some of the other stuff above.... → JARED (t)  21:27, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
I agree that it should be the bullet and not the big x. --Sue Anne 07:21, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

New template, take 1

I've created a new template at {{SummerOlympicSports}}. It's designed for use at the bottom of [[Sport at the Summer Olympics]] pages, and navigates between them similar to the {{EventsAtXXXXSummerOlympics}} series. There are a couple of issues I've thought of while creating it. First, ought we differentiate current vs. historical sports in the template? If so, how? Second, would separate templates for winter and summer be appropriate or should they be combined in one template? Thoughts on these questions, and any others you might come up with, would be nice. -- Jonel | Speak 01:27, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

I hadn't realized we didn't have a template like this... very useful. We should differentiate, maybe perhaps by fading the text color of those not current. But that may instead offer the opposite effect: highlighting those that are faded, which wouldn't be desirable. Maybe just don't include those that are not current, writing at the top "Current sports of the Summer Olympics" or similar. In regards to the separate templates, I'll have to think about that. → JARED (t)  02:14, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
How about this hypothesis - User:Parutakupiu/Sandbox? Parutakupiu talk || contribs 02:35, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Jonel, this is a great idea, and long overdue. I don't know why we haven't thought of it before! However, the first thing that struck me was that it really ought to include the winter sports too, and the past sports really need to be grouped into a different list. We have a great page at Olympic sports that could serve as the "parent" of this navigation box.
I put together {{OlympicSports}} to try to address both these issues. I wanted to use the standard {{Navbox generic}} template to handle the groups, as this appears to be a standard Wikipedia way of doing this, but the color of the group headings cannot be changed from that purple and I like our use of blue, so I simply used the underlying CSS classes to accomplish pretty much the same visual appearance.
Anyway, how does this look? Andrwsc 17:49, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Looks fine to me. All issues Jonel pointed out are solved on that template. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 18:59, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Yup. I like it. -- Jonel | Speak 19:42, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
How about making just two sections "SO" and "WO", with "past sports" highlighted; or saying in which of the two past sports were present in some other way? Cmapm 19:51, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

AFD notification

I have nominated the article 2004 Summer Olympics medals count by International Organization for deletion. You are invited to comment, at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2004 Summer Olympics medals count by International Organization. AecisBravado 00:14, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Participating nations

About a week ago, Jared added a third parameter to {{FlagIOC}} to show a number in parenthesis after the nation name. I had an idea to use that to add a "Participating nations" section to Weightlifting at the 2004 Summer Olympics, which I have just finished splitting into per-event articles. I rather like the result! It is informative, with numbers of athletes provided for 79 nations, without being an excessively large table or list. Perhaps we can adopt that as a standard section on the per-sport per-Games pages when this data is available. I will be adding it to some of the other 2004 pages in the next few days too. Andrwsc 20:52, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Indeed, it looks nice and especially informative. That data can be used also to replace the numerous X's at the main "Sport at the Season Olympics" pages' nations table (and vice-versa). Parutakupiu talk || contribs 00:21, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
I like it. I just switched it over to four columns so it filled up space better. → JARED (t)  01:43, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Discussion at MoS on flag icons

Please contribute to the discussion on flag icons at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Flag icons - manual of style entry?. (SEWilco 06:22, 16 January 2007 (UTC))

Another AFD

As per a request by Parutakupiu, I am trying to delete Bobsleigh at the 1960 Winter Olympics. An admin disagreed with my prod request, so now it's up for AFD. Please see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bobsleigh at the 1960 Winter Olympics if you want to comment. Andrwsc 17:39, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Possible AFD?

As it is stated on the lead of Rowing at the Summer Olympics, despite scheduled for competition, no rowing events were actually contested at the 1896 Summer Olympics, because of bad weather. The {{Olympic Games Rowing}} navbox also clears this by signaling 1896 as a noncompeting year for rowing. Still, there is an article for it - [[Rowing at the 1896 Summer Olympics]]. It think we should propose it for deletion like we did with Bobsleigh at the 1960 Winter Olympics. The article is very short (won't expand anymore) only stating the reason for the absence of competition and also which events were scheduled. Since the main sport page already does both things in the lead section and on the event table (if deleted, this year would become a linkless "gray" number but the events could stay), I think we should go for deletion. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 20:58, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

I say go for it. -- Jonel | Speak 21:16, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
Consider it deleted :) Parutakupiu talk || contribs 01:57, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Peer review/Olympic Committee of Portugal

Hello all. I requested a peer review for the article Olympic Committee of Portugal created entirely by me and I would be glad if anyone here could contribute. Thanks! Parutakupiu talk || contribs 05:02, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

I went a bit further and nominated it for GA, while the peer review is still on, but since the GAC list is huge (though reaching GA is simpler) I'd like people who have interest on the subject and wouldn't mind to evaluate the article to post more comments. I've been expanding the content and copyediting so there's some new little things. Thanks! Parutakupiu talk || contribs 19:50, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Fanny Blankers-Koen FAR

Fanny Blankers-Koen has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:15, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

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