Talk:List of female tennis players

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Clearly, the TOC cannot link to the N and O internal links due to the combination of the two letters under one header. Belathus 10:40, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

I've fixed it. You could've done it yourself. Be bold in editing pages. -- Smjg 15:21, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Players in bold font

There are many players in bold font who do not quite meet the criteria stated at the top of the page. Should the criteria be changed, in which case some more players should be in bold font, or should the names of players in bold font who do not match the criteria be changed to ordinary font? Coyets 14:52, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

The criteria should not change IMO.--Svetovid 15:56, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Criteria for inclusion?

I found this page in a very uneven condition with some players that have never been in the WTA Top 200 included, a random mixture of inclusions and exclusions between Nos. 101-200, and a significant minority of current Top 100 players omitted. For the sake of consistency and avoidance of bias, I have updated it to the inclusion of all current WTA Top 200-listed players and propose that each week that the WTA Top 200 rankings are updated, any new entries (previously ranked outside the Top 200) should be added if not already present. I have not removed players that have never been ranked in the Top 200 however, since for one thing there is no common agreement to this criterion to date - it is merely my tentative proposal, in the realisation that to get to the WTA Top 200 these days in what has become a very, very competitive sport players have to be seriously good and committed, and that many players ranked between 101-200 are of interest as future Top 100 players or at least for still being able to put up a strong fight and cause occasional upsets against Top 100 players.

Since there are no retrospective records of the WTA world rankings available on the Internet except for annual ones at a particular time of each year, it is going to be impossible to apply the same standards with consistency retrospectively. However, I would suggest that it might be worth considering going through the annual lists at some point and fishing out all Top-100-listed players for at least the past 20 years or so, depending on how far back the lists go, since their names are likely to be remembered by anyone who has followed tennis with even a moderate level of interest.

I think this page can be a very useful first port of call if consistent standards are upheld when it comes to selecting articles that need writing or expanding. Philip Graves (talk) 11:26, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

PS: I have covered the Top 100 players in the annual snapshot of the rankings for the years from 1989 to 1999 inclusive in a major edit today; the records on the Internet do not go back much earlier than 1989, but I want to take things forward to cover 2000-2007 later since some of those players will have dropped out of the Top 200 by today and been missed out of the list. Philip Graves (talk) 13:48, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

PPS: Page now includes (by design at least) not only all players in the current WTA Top 200 but also all players listed in the WTA Top 100 annual snapshots for the years 1989 to 2007 inclusive, all listed in the WTA Top 200 annual snapshots for the years from approx. 2004 to 2007, and all who were in fact in the WTA Top 200 at some point in the last few years but not at the time of the snapshots and who are still today in the Top 350 (this achieved by checking their highest rankings on WTA records - sometimes players may have been significantly within the Top 200 between two annual snapshots but outside it at the snapshots, and some of these can today still be found lower in the rankings; the logical next step would be to search further and deeper in today's ranking lists for others still active in the lower rankings today who were formerly in the Top 200 but missed out on it at the time of the snapshots, though I suspect there are not too many of these around since if a former Top 200 player slips below the Top 350, then in many cases she may decide that she is not going to make professional tennis pay any longer and move on to something else, so it may be like looking for needles in a haystack). Philip Graves (talk) 18:13, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Update: I have added a provisional notice of criteria for inclusion at the top of the actual page since too many people are wasting time by inserting spurious data that only has to be deleted again. There are some recently added entries such as Anastasia Sevastova (currently No. 226) that do not meet these criteria yet, but in her case I believe it quite likely that she will do fairly soon so perhaps we should give her a year to make it before pre-emptively taking her out again. But I would suggest that in future current players that have not yet made it to the Top 200 should be removed as soon as they are added by someone, unless they have won a WTA doubles tournament. Philip Graves (talk) 10:35, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Either someone satisfies the criteria or she doesn't. No one should be on the list based on a probability that she will satisfy the criteria at some point in the future. Criteria, no matter how carefully drafted, are not going to prevent people from adding players (or others) that don't meet the criteria. People are not going to understand the criteria, are not going to know where to look to see if a candidate satisfies the criteria, don't care about the criteria, or will add names just because they think it's cute to do so. Tennis expert (talk) 17:08, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Agree to a point, and can understand your cynicism, especially in view of the amount of junk you've had to sift out lately. But I think you've done a great job simplifying the wording on the main page to make the criteria crystal clear to any reader, and I think that at the very least the criteria notice as it now stands should act as a deterrent to people who don't know where to look or want to sneak someone in unnoticed just to be clever or to because they like her - it can't hurt to let these people know that there are those of us who take the page seriously as an objective, neutral Wikipedia document. Regarding Sevastova, again I agree with you in principle, and I wouldn't be bothered at all if she was taken out until she makes the grade. Looking at her rapid rise over the past eighteen months, it seems a dead cert but for an injury or accident that she will soon, and it's for this reason alone that I thought it might not be worth the effort of removing her only to reinstate her probably within a few weeks. But certainly I agree with you that there's no point in applying exceptions to criteria simply because someone almost meets them and another user wanted that person in the list pre-emptively!Philip Graves (talk) 08:56, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] More Advanced Player Data from French Wikipedia

The French version of Wikipedia is in a very advanced condition when it comes to its records of past WTA players and their highest rankings, surpassing the information available at the ITF and WTA sites, and appears to have been expertly compiled, though sources are not apparently stated. The equivalent to this article on the French site is here: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_de_joueuses_de_tennis Although the arrangement by country on that page is not ideal, the links to articles on it could be very useful for writing at least stubs with essential statistics etc. on the many famous names of the past 37 years or so who do not yet have articles on the English wikipedia. Philip Graves (talk) 12:28, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Suspect entries to consider for deletion

Any suspect entries of which no records of competitive play on the main WTA or ITF circuits exist may be posted here and discussed for deletion.

Someone just deleted 'Catherine Anderson (USA)' without explanation and this was reverted because no explanation was provided. I decided to investigate. Apparently she competes regularly on the seniors tour but there are no records of her having competed on the main tour on the available ITF and WTA records online, which is not to suggest necessarily that she never did, since she was born in the mid-1940s and may have competed at the main professional level longer ago than the online records cover. The entry was added on 22:11, 2 November 2007 by an anonymous user - records indicate that this is the only post to Wikipedia ever made by this one user, which might suggest a personal interest in getting her recognised on the list. Personally I am not convinced that she should be on the list since no records of her having any ITF or WTA history outside the seniors can be found, and success on the seniors tour alone is not an acceptable criterion for notability in my opinion. So perhaps the deletion was justified. However, I don't have any reference books on players from long ago or detailed knowledge of these eras, so I'll leave her on for now pending any further information forthcoming about her history, although I'm sceptical currently.

I think she should be deleted. I could find no record of her competing on the main amateur or professional tours. Tennis expert (talk) 10:26, 2 March 2008 (UTC)ยจ

Agreed, and done (three weeks later) Philip Graves (talk) 19:19, 22 March 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Disambiguation pages needed for the following players

Zhang Shuai (Chinese player who has risen fast into the Top 200 in the past year or two) - this currently links to a Chinese football player instead. I don't know how to move the existing page for the football player to Zhang Shuai (football) while retaining its edit history, though I could recreate Zhang Shuai as a disambiguation page once that was done. Anyone knowing how to do this, help would be appreciated so we can get the tennis player's page going under Zhang Shuai (tennis) linked from the disambiguation page. Philip Graves (talk) 19:24, 22 March 2008 (UTC)