Talk:World Chess Championship

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Peer review World Chess Championship has had a peer review by Wikipedia editors which is now archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article.
Former FA This article is a former featured article candidate. Please view its sub-page to see why the nomination failed. For older candidates, please check the archive.
This page is part of a WikiProject to improve Wikipedia's articles related to chess.
Please participate by editing this article or portal or visiting the project page or its discussion page.

World Chess Champion and world chess champion currently point to different articles which should probably be merged. -- BenRG 09:43, 7 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I've shuffled things around a bit - it's better now, I think. --Camembert
I agree, its much better, and the reader gets a better feeling for the reality of how the idea of World Chess Champion evolved. I question one thing...the use of the word "official". It suggests a governing body. I would argue that the first official chess champion was Botvinnik, and that before FIDE all champions were simply consensus champions. I feel that the first player to definately gain concensus was Paul Morphy, and that after his retirement no concensus was reached until the 1886 match Steinitz won.
Now, all this said, I admit that the article does explain its use of the word "official" and I don't have a concrete suggestion at this time for any changes.-- ChessPlayer

I think the material on the other championships (Women's, Seniors, etc) should be moved to their own pages, and I volunteer to move them soon. ChessPlayer 21:26, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The opening paragraph had the following:

Some still consider Garry Kasparov to be the world champion, despite having lost to Kramnik, as he remains the highest-ranked player on the ELO list.

I have removed this. I do not think that anybody (apart from the misinformed) believes Kasparov to still be champion. As I've said in my edit (and as should in any case be clear from the article) being number one on the rating list and being world champion are different things. Kasparov has not played in the FIDE championships since the 1993 PCA breakaway, and he lost the title which that breakaway created to Kramnik in their 2000 match, hence he holds no championship title. I certainly don't think Kasparov would claim to be champion himself, and there's no reason for other people to make that claim either. I've taken this out once before, but it was put back in. If somebody wants to put it in again, I'd like to know exactly who believes Kasparov is still champion and why they believe it.

Bobby Fischer, who hasn't played a competitive game of chess since 1992, is the still, theoretically, 'undefeated world champion'.

I have also removed this. Originally, I had edited it to read "is self-styled 'undefeated world champion'", but on reflection, I don't see why Fischer is deserving of such prominent mention in the first paragraph like this. The opening paragraph should give the reader a very quick intro to the subject, which here, I think, means saying what the championship is and who currently holds it. The fact is that virtually nobody (apart perhaps from Fischer himself) considers Fischer to be world champion--hardly surprising given that he's played just 30 games in over 30 years, and those against a player hardly at the top of world chess (Spassky in '92 was far from his peak)--so I don't believe he needs to be mentioned in the opening paragraph (of course, it's fine to explain it all in detail in the body of the article itself). I mean, one could also argue that Alekhine, who won the title back from Euwe in 1937 and then never lost it, is "undefeated world champion", but as he died in 1946, I think such a claim would be a bit silly :)

I've also made a few other changes which I hope don't need explanation (the manner of Alekhine's death and 2004 being FIDE Year of Tigran Petrosian aren't really pertinent to the subject of the world chess championship), but if they do, I'll be happy to provide. --Camembert

ChessPlayer asked in an edit summary: "is Qadhafi the sponsor, or the nation of Libya?" I'm not sure there's a great deal of difference between the two in practice, but according to the FIDE website [1] it is Qaddafi himself. It says "FIDE has a pleasure to announce the dates and venue of the World Chess Championship 2004 - Tripoli, the capital of Libya, from June 18 till July 13, 2004 under the patronage of the Leader of the Libyan Jamahirya, H.E. Moammar Al Gathafi, who also provides the prize fund for the Championship." --Camembert 00:51, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, agree with you about Alekhine's death/year of Petrosian being irrelevant, and that the Fischer/Spassky rematch should perhaps only be mentioned within the actual body of it rather than in the introduction. I've been trying to fill the gap from 1948 to 75, covering Botivinnik's reign and then the "Game of the Century" - which is where I've stopped short so far... The Karpov/Kasparov epic certainly needs to be mentioned too. - Mack

Heavy rewrite, much expansion. --Etaonish 19:36, May 27, 2004 (UTC)

In the the section on the women's world champions, should an aside be added to mention Judit Polgar - as perhaps the strongest women player of all time?

Yes, I think that's an excellent idea. The prestige of the title is less than it would be if Judit participated. (In fact, it is also too bad that Susan Polgar doesn't compete.) There is some sentiment that there shouldn't even be a women's world championship, because it implies that open competition is unfair, as if women are apt to be mentally weaker than men just because they are apt to be physically smaller. Judit's scorn for the women's title is in any case worthy of note, whether the controversy gets any play in the article or not. --Fritzlein 06:50, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Just to note that FIDE is currently plagiarising this page on the 2004 championship website at [2] - I've listed the page on Wikipedia:Copies of Wikipedia content (low degree of compliance) and sent FIDE an email to try and get them to comply with the GFDL. --Camembert

Odd...it's using an old version.--Etaonish 23:28, Jun 24, 2004 (UTC)

It's based on a slightly old version, but I think they've also cut a few bits and rearranged some of the sentences slightly (though not enough to make it anything other than a derivative of our version, clearly). --Camembert

Contents

[edit] Pictures

How to do it? One thought is to place thumbnails throughout, but then it looks like this:

(removed now)

Suggestions?--Etaonish 18:16, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)

  • Hmmm, the pictures do dominate rather. I suppose that there are two obvious solutions (and probably a much better one that's not obvious): reduce the number of photos, or reduce the size of the thumbnails (I mean, those are pretty scary thumbs...). Of the two, the latter would presumably be less painful. You must have thought of this, and have decided against it; why? What am I missing? I don't know anything about the mechanics of Wikipedia thumbnails; how easy is it to change their size? Mel Etitis 19:58, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)
    • Strangely, these *are* thumbnails already. I'm not sure how to make thumbnails smaller either. I believe I saw it somewhere on Wiki but I can't find that part of the site anymore.--Etaonish 23:59, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)
      • Never mind, I found it.--Etaonish 00:26, Jan 23, 2005 (UTC)
  • Finally fixed up everything. I might do women's later.--Etaonish 01:38, Jan 23, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] "Greatest of all time"

Short version: I don't think the "greatest of all time" section should be in this article. Lets split it off to something like greatest chess player of all time. Objections?

Longer version: The question of who was the greatest player (or "strongest player", which may or may not be a different thing) of all time is often discussed; it's something many chess players and fans have ideas about, and, as such, it's probably a subject which is worth us tackling. I don't think we can actually answer the question "who is the greatest player of all time" and be neutral about it (for this reason, I don't like the list currently in the article: such lists will always just be a matter of opinion and it's wrong of us to push one particular list forward), but I do think we can talk about others' efforts to answer the question, and about what sort of things one might consider when trying to answer it.

So I think it's something we can write about. What I don't understand is why we're writing about it in an article on the world chess championship. I don't think there's really much of a relationship between the subjects. Of course, many of the candidates for "greatest ever" will have also been champions, but there's no reason to believe that the greatest ever must have been a champion. We even say ourselves in the first paragraph of the article that the champion is not necessarily the "highest-rated" (one measure of "strongest") in the world.

So I do think this is a subject we can talk about, but I don't think this article is the place to do it. I propose, therefore, that we move it to a new article called greatest chess player of all time or similar. Then we can give the subject the proper treatment it deserves, not limiting ourselves to just a handful of players, and bringing in outside sources like Keene and Divinsky's (rather dopey, but relevant) book, Warriors of the Mind, which ranks players through the ages in order (it's not sensible to mention the book in this article, since it considers players who were never champion). Objections? --Camembert 00:08, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Well, it's a couple of months later, and no objections are forthcoming, so I'm going to move that section of the article out to greatest chess player of all time and edit it somewhat. --Camembert 16:39, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Women's World Chess Championship

This page is getting too long. I propose creating a separate page, Women's World Chess Championship. Rocksong 01:44, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Done. Rocksong 03:56, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

There is still an external link to 'dozens of positions from Women's WCC games (the wtharvey one). Shouldn't that be relocated? Marvol 16:15, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Current Situation

I've added a "current situation" section. There (if I get time) I will summarise the current situation with the 2005 world cup and the recently announced 8 player World Championship in Mexico. Perhaps this needs a separate article, e.g. "World Championship 2007 Cycle", but with the title still split this gets a bit problematic. I'm open to suggestions on how best to do this. Rocksong 05:05, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Hi, I think you're getting carried away with the deal here. You removed large chunks of the text, including important citations, split the article into I don't know how many pieces, got all the priorities badly (the article is about the championship not the whole cyle!) by cutting out such an event as San Luis (which was a revolution in the FIDE championships) and including some two paragraphs on unimportant information about qualifying into the 2007 tournament. As I said, this page is about the championship, and should keep the spirit of pre-1993 championships by focusing entirely on the championship match / tournament. As in the tournament after Alhekine's deaths, there is no need to dedicate more than a sentence, maybe two, to say how players qualified. Each cycle has somewhat different rules, especially with an organization behind it who would trive to keep the fairest situation in place (or indeed favor a nation), politics and keeping the game interesting.
This is a featured article and such changes are too big to be done on personal initiative. Wiki is about building something right as a community, not articles made personal. Citing WP:BOLD - don't be reckless!: "... making large-scale changes to Featured articles, which are recognized as Wikipedia's best articles for their completeness, accuracy, and neutrality, is often a bad idea."
I think the best thing to do with you is leave you get off this editing spree of yours and stick the pieces back in place when you're done. Something good enough should surface out of all this. But make sure you detail your edit summaries. "Tidying up" is not the correct term for deleting a whole section!

└VodkaJazz/talk┐ 12:37, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

I disagree. I was cleaning up an article which was messy. Wikipedia also says to be bold in doing changes! First, the introduction. Wikipedia guidelines are that the introduction should be brief, 2 or 3 paragraphs at most. So I trimmed it, especially when it contained detail which was deeper in the article anyway. Second, yes I removed 2 citations, but they were redundant - one of them was even in Russian! The chessbase citation covered it all. Third, there is already a detailed article on the San Luis tournament, so the detail you put in (like Topalov's score) does not belong in the main article. Fourth, the women's championship clearly reads like a separate article, and I have no regrets about moving it. In fact a split was suggested more than 2 years ago. Fifth, I think the "Chaos 1993-" section deserved to be split because it was getting too long. I think a "Current Situation" heading is useful.

To summarise, I don't regret any of those changes, and I contend that all 5 changes improved the article.

Also, I'm going to have to undo your last change, because a lot of women chessplayers' pages point to that section and it will take a few days to change them all. So as a temporary measure, the Women's championship section will need to stay.

There is one critcism I partly agree with: I agree that the details on the 2007 cycle look a bit out of place, but I think they deserve to be somewhere and don't know where else. But I'll shorten it (remove all the "dot" points) and leave in the citations. Rocksong 03:04, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Streamline the modern section

The article moves at a good pace, but once we get past 1993 it bogs down in too many details, IMHO. Here are some thoughts on streamlining it: The Prague Agreement was a hot topic when the article was first written, but it is now just a footnote in the history of the world championship. I think it occupies far too much space in the article. I propose removing most of it to a separate article Prague Agreement. In fact the article has too much on recent stuff in general. There are already separate pages for FIDE World Chess Championship 2004 and FIDE World Chess Championship 2005. Probably the same could be done for other recent events, allowing the "Chaos" section to be streamlined (i.e. shortened) considerably. (But since my last big edit caused some angst, I'll pause and wait at least a few days for any feedback). Rocksong 12:53, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

I agree, a good idea. --Ioannes Pragensis 13:11, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
Uhm, a bit more than one day later (but I wasn't a member of Wikipedia back then :P), but I wholeheartedly agree with these proposed changes. All these details about Kasparov playing Ponomariov, no, playing Kasimdzanov, no, not playing at all... these are minor footnotes. They are interesting however IMO for a separate (future?) article on the schism and reunification in the chess world.
There are more things I don't particularly like when reading this article; at times it seems to cut corners (to the point of being sunjective) as in the remarks about the style of play of Lasker "He did not play the best move, but..." - I doubt somebody can be WCC for 27 years without at least sometimes playing the best move - or about Capablanca 'Capablanca was the last and greatest of the "natural" players: he prepared little for his games, but won them brilliantly. He possessed an astonishing insight into positions simply by glancing at them.'
  • Who are these famed "natural" players?
  • Did he really prepare little for his games? His biography states that he got a job at the Cuban Foreign Office where he had to do little else but play chess.
  • He 'won his games brilliantly' is about as subjective as it can get.
  • What is the evidence for his 'astonishing' insight into positions 'simply by glancing at them'? I think every great chessplayer has this ability. See every big simultaneous exhibition.
I would actually prefer to see these descriptions removed altogether - they anyway belong at the players' bios pages, if at all anywhere. It is inconsistent that later great champions like Smyslov, Petrosian and Spassky get no mention whatsover about what styles they played or what Great Gifts they possessed, contributing more to the imbalance in this article.
If I could get some feedback on this I would be grateful, and I might try my hand at my first wiki'ing of Wikipedia. Marvol 17:56, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
What I think happened is that this article began as an overview essay, with lots of colourful description, and often not much detail. This part - up to 1993 - seems to be largely untouched in later edits. My opinion is that, as Wikipedia has evolved into quite a decent resource, that this earlier section needs to be edited to be more "encyclopedic": more detail, less POV language. So yes, I would welcome the edits you suggest. As for the clutter of information on later matches - I've created a page on the 2000 Kasparov-Kramnik match (and added a link today), and plan pages on the other matches in this period. As indicated back in May, I also planned a page on Prague Agreement, but have been kinda busy since then. Rocksong 01:13, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
OK the idea for separate pages on the other matches sounds good. On the other hand, a more detailed overview of what happened during the 'chaos' period might be a good idea... that is where all the little stuff that is now cluttering up the last bit can just move to. I will try to find some time to make some edits, viz, removing the POV (had to look that one up ;-) ) but also adding extra info about the post-WWII champions. For instance, don't you think it should be mentioned that the Soviets dominated that area (briefly interrupted by Fischer)? Also a more neutral description of each champion's style would be nice. There is an interview with Kramnik that I think is highly interesting and relevant in that matter. Marvol 14:50, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Chessworld.net World champions page

Hi there

The Chessworld.net world champions page at:-

http://www.chessworld.net/chessclubs/statistics_pgn_worldchamps.asp

Not only has high quality articles on the left in plain html, but also dynamically generated database pages for the Games links - which also link to virtual player homepages detailing interesting player statistics.

The Chessworld.net database has 1.6 million games and runs on its own seperate server. It has the community backing of hundreds of annotators and several dedicated moderators. Games are being annotated each day. The Chessworld.net community has thousands of members and is one of the largest online chess communities on the Internet.

On the particular World champions page, there is also high quality content articles such as the article on Steinitz. I have personally spent many weeks researching this, and putting in key quality games to demonstrate player career achievements. Also there are even some annotated games with diagrams.

Please can the World champion summary page be reinstated.

Best wishes Tryfon Gavriel Fide 2165

My reasons for the removal were:
  • The link leads to a mere collection of links to pages about the champs - nothing special about the World Chess Championship as a whole, I think. (I do not judge eg. the mentioned Chessworld.net material about Steinitz, but if it should be linked from Wikipedia, it should be linked from the article about Steinitz, not from here.)
  • Tryfon Gavriel and other, who add links to Chessworld.net to many Wikipedia articles in recent time, violate WP:EL, because they are admins of the site.
Because of 3RR, I will not revert the link now, but let others think about its appropriatenes.--Ioannes Pragensis 17:11, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
I've removed the link because it has been spammed by several accounts/IPs. Wikipedia should not be used for promotion, and the link does not provide a unique resource as required by Wikipedia:External links. ―Wmahan. 07:33, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] World Champions According to Number of World Title Reigns

This was added by an anonymous user on 14-Oct-2006. I propose deleting it. I don't think it adds anything to the article, and it places the champions in a subjective order in a way books on the subject don't usually do. (IOW, it looks like Original Research). An argument could be made for moving it in the Greatest chess player of all time article, however. Rocksong 04:18, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

I agree. 24.241.226.16 07:16, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

OK, I'm removing it for the reasons above. Rocksong 03:00, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

I think it is an interesting table. It certainly isn't OR as it is entirely verifiable (restructuring verifiable data is not OR). Anyway, I can't be bothered with an argument so I have put it in Greatest chess player of all time as suggested. BlueValour 03:18, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

I quickly tire or arguments too. It's not so much the WP:OR angle; it's more that it clutters the article (which is already fairly long), and adds a subjective element. As it stands (with the table removed), the article describes the history of the world championship and makes no effort to rank the different champions. That's how I think it should stay. Rocksong 03:32,

17 October 2006 (UTC)

Hello, this table is very good especially in sports which had different organisations and multiple world title reigns.it clarifies any confusion about champions .This idea exists in some other sports in wikipedia [3],there helped me to understand champions status in wrestling in a simple way without drowninng in pages in confusion also one know different organisations and who got higher number of titles and most years (people like that) .this table is very objective and says for example that a champion like lasker which got seven titles and 27 years as champion is more valuable than a guy got the title in a knock-out event for one year . Kramnik after beating Topalov said "Now i am 3 times World Champion" this table illustrates this concept .thus, i strongly recommend it stays in World Chess Championship --Sonbirdo 07:24, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Err, not sure pro wrestling is a good example, but anyway... The information can be gleaned from reading the length of each champion's reign. I'd have less problem if the arrangement was chronological, or even better, being an additional column(s) (number of title defences) on the existing chronological tables of champions; though it gets a bit messy with the title splitting. Rocksong 07:48, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
Another thought: make the 4th column read "Championship matches", with one championship match (or tournament) per row. That takes a little work (multi-row table cells), but is not hard in principle. I'll have a go at it if I get the time. Rocksong 07:58, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

moving it in the Greatest chess player of all time article, is also not good solution .we talk about champions not greatest players ,i think champions like kasimdzhanov or khalifman not considered by many as one of the greatest so,i think World Chess Championship is the right place.Concerning the column u suggested it will be some confusion especially about knock-out events ,should we consider knock-out final as a match ,a player like Anand played long matches and knock-out final ,the number will be debated.years of reign is better than championship matches.anyway,thx Rocksong for discussion. --Sonbirdo 08:17, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Well, I'm for moving it back (length of article is not a problem; it is within the recommended length) so that makes it 2-2; I guess we need a casting vote from someone! :-) BlueValour 23:39, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Lots cut from post-1993

As foreshadowed some time ago, I've cut a lot from the post-1993 section, which had grown too much. I've tried to improve the flow so it's more or less one paragraph per championship. Note a lot of the details are duplicated in championship pages, such as FIDE World Chess Championship 2004 in particular. Rocksong 00:42, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

p.s. I still think it's too long, when compared to the rest of the article. But it's a start. Rocksong 00:54, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../w/o/r/Talk%7EWorld_Chess_Championship_0d3f.html"