Talk:List of roller derby leagues

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[edit] Alaska league

There is an Alaskan league called Rage City Rollergirls. I think it just started, but they came to a Denver Roller Dolls bout last weekend, so that's how I found out about them.--DLNorton 17:59, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Added. I also added, at the very bottom, a link to derbyroster.com, which is a more up-to-date list of amateur leagues. —mjb 17:38, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

The Alaska Roller Derby League started before the Rage City Rollergirls. The Founders and many of the current skaters that are part of the Rage City Rollergirls quit the Alaska Roller Derby League in Spring/Summer of 2007. 216.67.21.58 (talk) 23:24, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Dramaaaaa! :) —mjb (talk) 04:46, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] History and rationale

This article/list was originally part of the External Links section of the roller derby article, but the list was getting too long, and edits to it were making it difficult to keep track of other changes to the roller derby article. So, in accordance with the WP:SPINOUT and WP:SIZE guidelines, the list was split into this separate article in June 2006.

WP:LINKS and WP:NOT#LINK discourage the creation of lists of external links. Ordinarily, rather than listing and linking to so many sites, the use of a single link to the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) is encouraged. However, the ODP can only list active web sites, and its roller derby section isn't very well maintained. More importantly, this list of leagues needs to include those that don't have Web sites.

The main rationale for having a list of leagues is for the value it provides to the researcher, primarily to assist with the verification and more in-depth investigation of claims made in the roller derby article about the history and growth of the sport; the list is a starting point for further research.

The main rationale for providing, in the list, links to leagues' Web sites is to provide a simple way to help verify their legitimacy, and to better enable research of those leagues. It is not for self-promotion of leagues, nor is it for boosting their Web sites' search engine rankings. Contrary to popular belief, effective January 2007, due to the use of nofollow, external links on Wikipedia no longer directly affect search engine rankings.[1] —mjb 18:45, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Guidelines and structure

Currently the list is set up according to the following guidelines:

  • No league is listed more than once — this is absolutely not negotiable.
  • No more than one link per league.
  • No mention or links to individual teams within leagues.
  • When there is a choice, a non-MySpace link is preferred.
  • When there is a choice, a link to a Wikipedia article, rather than an external Web site, is preferred.
  • The type of track, if known, is mentioned as tersely as possible — no need to say "flat track" 200+ times if only a few leagues are banked.
  • Membership in associations like WFTDA or OSDA is not mentioned — it's tracked elsewhere and is of little value.
  • A mention is made of whether each league is active or defunct.
  • A mention is made of whether each league is professional (paid) or amateur.
  • A mention is made of each league's gender inclusion (all-female, all-male, or co-ed).
  • The amateur, all-female league list, due to its size, is divided into geographic regions.
  • The amateur leagues are listed alphabetically by state/province, then city, then name.

Sections are used to differentiate between certain league characteristics, such as active vs. defunct, professional vs. amateur, and gender. This can be changed; suggestions for how to better organize things are welcome. —mjb 18:45, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Amateur much more popular than professional

The leagues listed as "amateur" leages are much more popular than the leagues listed as "professional," at least by google search results. I would presume that this correlation implies the amateur leages are much more notable. Perhaps we should switch the order to reflect this?

[edit] Pro

[edit] Am

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Fredsmith2 (talk • contribs) 12:38, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Someone (User:132.185.144.121) recently put active leagues ahead of defunct ones, too. I only had defunct first because it was relatively chronological, and because it put the most notable leagues of all (Roller Derby, Roller Games, IRSL) closer to the top, whereas now they're being pushed to the bottom. I don't think it really matters, though, as long as the changes don't lead to edit wars.

Also, just in case this was influencing the decision, according to WP:LINKS, external links on Wikipedia get rel="nofollow" attributes added, which tells search engines not to let the link influence search engine scores. So, being listed higher on the page, or being listed here at all, won't affect Google PageRank for each site. —mjb (talk) 18:49, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't influence me at all. I don't care which sites get google results, I just reported it. Fredsmith2 (talk) 04:06, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed order change

I'd like to reorder this page to the following sections, because the "Amateur" section is way too big, plus nobody breaks roller derby teams up into sections like "Midwestern USA" except for this Wikipedia article.

Let me know what you think of the following organization:

  1. Women's Flat Track Derby Association leagues
  2. Old School Roller Derby Association leagues
  3. Unaffiliated banked track leagues
  4. Unaffiliated coed and male leagues
  5. Other amatuer unaffiliated leagues
  6. Defunct amatuer leagues
  7. Active professional leagues
  8. Defunct professional leagues

If there's no objection, then I'll make the changes. Fredsmith2 (talk) 04:05, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. That's more than just rearranging; it's adding info about WFTDA and OSDA membership, which I deliberately excluded so as not to indulge anyone's assumption that membership in those associations indicates anything that makes them more deserving of being highlighted in some way. Membership is treated by some (especially leagues who have rivals due to splits) as a badge of honor, but it doesn't yet represent a certification of legitimacy, quality, professionalism, "major league"-ness, or athleticism …especially for certain leagues that were grandfathered in and IMHO don't deserve to be exalted or treated any differently than any other. There definitely have been and probably still are leagues that want to be members but are stymied due to politics. So I'd much rather let the membership remain tracked elsewhere, which it already is — on the WFTDA article, on the league articles (for those leagues that have articles), and on derbyroster.com, which is linked to in the External links section.
Also, WFTDA and OSDA membership is not, in theory, mutually exclusive. A league could join both and have an OSDA-sanctioned bout one day and a WFTDA-sanctioned one the next. In fact I think there's one league that announced its intention to do that. I don't remember which one, and I don't know if they'll actually follow through, but still, it's a possibility.
Similarly, banked and flat track are not mutually exclusive. Arizona's Renegade Rollergirls are (or were) skating on both types of tracks.
As for getting rid of the US regions, I don't care, although if you don't put in some kind of divisions (like by state), you'll end up with a huge list in one section. The derbyroster.com list does it by state or province, and it looks fine.
And I'd like to propose a new section: junior leagues! —mjb (talk) 07:13, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
It seems that eventually this page probably will be replaced by categories, assuming that roller derby leagues are notable to warrant their own pages. And if roller derby leagues aren't notable to warrant their own pages, they probably aren't notable enough to warrant a link to their website either, so I'm going to assume they are notable, which means this whole list eventually gets replaced by categories.
In the interim with my idea, there would be no problem listing a roller derby league in two sections, which should resolve your mutual exclusivity concern. The order I proposed roughly corresponds with how much Wikipedia-able information they have about them, which makes more sense to me than chronologically.
It seems that you would favor breaking the USA section into states, which I think would be progress in this page, as the current format makes it extremely hard to find anything without just searching for specific text on the page. Fredsmith2 (talk) 09:33, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
I don't favor it; I'm indifferent. I don't think it's "extremely hard to find anything", but if you really feel it is, then go ahead and break it up by states. I think it will be a wash since it's just going to add to the length of the article to have all those extra headings.
I don't want to predict the future or get into whether leagues are notable (it's safer to assume they all are than to bias the researcher toward just those that have the most Google-able press on a particular day); and I don't want to speculate on what ramifications relative notability has on how they are linked and categorized. In fact that's precisely my objection to association membership as a category: it implies that such membership is a factor for notability, and is important for the researcher to know, whereas we shouldn't be making that judgment for the reader. You could argue that the order in which active/defunct and amateur/professional and women/mixed are listed has the same implications, I suppose, but with the exception of amateur/professional (which may not be a worthwhile distinction), I'm not convinced it matters as much, which is why I didn't object to moving defunct leagues to the end.
Rationale is covered in a previous topic, but I'll expound on it here. The point of the list is mainly to provide the main roller derby article and history of roller derby sub-article with a single place where all the leagues can be mentioned and reviewed at once, regardless of whether they have their own articles or web sites, and regardless of whether they've been mentioned in the main article prose or have had their notability agreed upon. The list also reduces the temptation for leagues to self-promote in the other articles. Linking to their sites, which is something we can only do for recently active leagues, is a shortcut to provide the researcher with a starting point for verifying the legitimacy of the entry. Besides, not linking to currently active leagues just increases the maintenance burden since people would be coming in and adding their league links anyway. So linking is a red herring.
Re: chronology, although it's not a timeline per se, I do think of the list as documenting the sport's growth throughout its history, along the way dispelling the impression one might get from other sources that Seltzer's Roller Derby and Griffith's Roller Games were the only organizations that existed or mattered prior to the current explosion. Again, it gives the reader a starting point for further research, without prejudging the importance of the listed items. I'd like to have dates for when all the currently active leagues started, but that's a lot of work to dig up.
So, the list isn't really standalone, but rather is a sub-article and supplement to others, providing some details in a format that's convenient for researchers and saves us from having to find ways to mention all those leagues and dates and gender restrictions and track types in prose. Listing a league twice for any reason would be giving undue favor to that league, in my opinion. I don't support that at all. —mjb (talk) 11:27, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] WFTDA and OSDA

This article should have the list of WFTDA league and OSDA separated and possibly broken down by State/Territory. --8bitJake (talk) 22:52, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

What purpose would mentioning membership in WFTDA or OSDA serve? I don't see the value in having that info here. It's already on the WFTDA and OSDA articles, and is more easily maintained there. I commented twice about this, above, and also expressed some concern about the WFTDA/OSDA affiliations being misleading. Anyway, have you seen http://www.derbyroster.com/ (linked to at the bottom of the list)? It has what you want.
Re: state/territory, for the USA I did actually have it split up by state (without headings) inside each general region, but another editor felt it was better to alphabetize by city within each region, so that's why it is the way it is at the moment. Again, see the discussion above. Whether we keep or get rid of US regions, and whether we sort by state or city or both, it all just seems like a wash to me. We all have our favorite system but none seems any better than the other. —mjb (talk) 11:08, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

They are directly competing in several markets and there is some strife and stress between the two in a couple of places. I would like to do is to put a note like the banked tracked notes after each list to mark who is WFTDA, WFTDA Rules and OSDA.--8bitJake (talk) 17:45, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I still don't see the research benefit of having that info here, rather than just in the WFTDA and OSDA articles. It really seems like a maintenance headache to try to keep up with it. It's hard enough just maintaining a simple list of leagues and their locales. But I've registered my objections already. I won't stand in the way if you're committed to maintaining the data. —mjb (talk) 23:16, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The Arizona Banked Track

The article incorrectly states that the banked track in Arizona was purchased from the Renegade Rollergirls when in fact the Corpus Christi Rolling Thunder purchased the track from the Arizona Derby Dames. Recnet (talk) 19:55, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Recent edits about OSDA

There have been some back and forth edits regarding the following statement in line 297:

"An attempt an an OSDA League that was aborted due to bully tactics and intimidation efforts from a local WFTDA League."

Let's try to avoid an edit war by finding a way to state the facts in an encyclopedic way and attach a citation which supports the facts stated. - Michael J Swassing (talk) 14:20, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

It’s POV. We don’t have any other leagues dissing other leagues on this page. You can say what at you want on your blog but you have to keep Wikipedia NON POINT OF VIEW. --8bitJake (talk) 17:45, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Edits

Ok.
So I am awakening from my ignorance and attempting to place 'just the facts' here.
SO... How do I place the facts?
The facts are:
The Green Country Roller Girls have ONE RINK. It is located in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma (not Tulsa), Tulsa COUNTY maybe, but not City proper. (THIS is a very basic fact)
Myself (an announcer/coach for their League) and several girls left that league due to wild mismanagement of personnel and harrassment situations that LUCKILY FOR THEM, never went to court.
We went to Sand Springs, Oklahoma. Tulsa County. And started our own league.
Sand Springs was TWO CITIES away from Broken Arrow.
Once they discovered where we were, they started showing up en masse.
I'm talking the whole team.
Our league had Tuesday nights to meet at the Sand Springs rink for social skate night, as we didn't have enough girls to afford renting the rink for practice yet.
So that was the night the WHOLE Team of Green Country Roller Girls would show up.
They would get on the floor, in herd-mode, and skate aggressively around 'our girls'.
When our girls would go to a rink in Tulsa Proper, a neutral rink, their girls would try to cut our girls off, kick their skates out from under them, etc.
This was done without a drop of retaliation on our part.
We wanted to do derby... not drama. That's why we left their league in the first place.
They would not leave us alone.
We finally found a location even FARTHER away... I'm talking it was a 45 minute drive from Sand Springs AWAY from Broken Arrow.
So then they started contacting our girls directly (e-mails and MySpace)... they offered them 'custom positions' such as 'The Assassin' or some idiocy like this.
At this point, our girls were NOW having to drive about 45 minutes for practice and being offered positions with a league that WOULDN'T require this drive. *shrugs* We couldn't beat these offers and we hadn't told our girs WHY we broke off at this point, they just knew we were being harrassed... some were new enough to not have been harrassed, we lost them to these offers.

This is all coming from a league that would have crumbled completely with this kind of organized resistance.
If the damn GCRG had put this much effort into running a decent league in the first place, we wouldn't have left!

So how the HELL do I place this kind of information utilizing a NPOV on Wikipedia.
I feel it is VITALLY important for new leagues starting up to be aware that there may be resistance from other local leagues, Derby is NOT the friendly "Let's Promote Derby Together" that we hoped it would be...
During this struggle, we discovered (from e-mails and myspace) that several other 'new' leagues were having similar issues with their local WFTDA Leagues.
This is an issue dealing with facts, that just so happens to be drama-city. That drama doesn't change the facts.
How would you recommend I place this on wikipedia without breaking the rules?
I read through the NPOV stuff, and personally, my original sentence was NICELY summed up. It remained fairly NPOV.
I still don't see what is wrong with it.

So... help me out.
Because I have some articles I plan on writing for another subject that fascinates me, Memetics, and it also involves dramatic, emotionally charged, text. Partly because memes are ranges of feelings and thoughts from emotions through to logic. I don't wanna be playing this game with those articles as well...

Help Me Mr. Popeil...
--randomblink (talk) 09:03, 23 April 2008

I'll just jump in and say I'm with the others on this; I don't support the edit you're trying to make.
See, rather than just listing T-Town Derby Girls as a defunct league, you're also trying to include an explanation of why it doesn't exist anymore. That, alone, is going beyond the purposes of this list. Such info isn't particularly notable on its own, nor is it relevant to supporting the roller derby/history of roller derby articles' claims, nor does it provide starting points for further research into the scope of the sport over the years.
Also, there are many other defunct leagues listed, especially from ages past, and I'm sure they've all had a great deal of drama and finger-pointing associated with their demise; the list isn't suffering any for not having that info.
Just as importantly, there are always two sides to every story, and Wikipedia is not the place to tell just one of them, especially if it's first-hand information. The explanation you're wanting to add represents the point of view of yourself, and maybe your whole league, but isn't what a neutral third party would write if they were to talk to everyone involved. Even if it was written as a summary of each side's claims, you'd be obligated to point to published sources of info for verification.
I definitely sympathize with your desire to use your experience with interleague drama constructively on Wikipedia, and I think you should stay on the lookout for ways in which the roller derby articles might be misleading or favoring one point of view over another. My own experience colors my reasoning for not wanting to see WFTDA or OSDA membership listed here, for example. But if you want to go as far as the agenda you laid out above, you have to use something other than Wikipedia as your venue. —mjb (talk) 04:31, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, when you're wrong, you're wrong. I have to agree. I started reading over all the NPOV articles. Discussions on what Wikipedia is, and isn't, and I agree. There is a venue for the information I am wanting to post, but... you're right. Wikipedia is not it. I do have to say, my respect for Wikipedia content went up about 30 notches due to the research I did concerning this post. What I was assuming was just Derby League people standing up for 'active' derby leagues, was really just Wikipedia people standing up for Wikipedia content. So forgive me for my continued attempts at putting this up here. This is NOT the place for it.

chuckle. Of course, on a side note. I would like to point out that Green Country Roller Girls have ONE Rink. That Rink is located in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Not Tulsa. I will be making that change 'in the interest of wikipedia' of course... lol. But every documentation for their league shows they are based OUT OF BROKEN ARROW. Not Tulsa. SO, whereas I don't get to point out their deplorable actions, I can at least set the record straight on their hometown affiliation. There is only one rink in Tulsa proper, and it does not want derby without some serious cash up front. SO, thank you all for the level-headedness, forgive me my passion, it was not Wikipedian at all. I am so ashamed. lol
Anyway, mjb, 8-BitJake, and Sassinger... thanks to you all.
Randomblink (talk) 13:59, 24 April 2008 (UTC)