Talk:Wisden Cricketers of the Year

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Featured list star Wisden Cricketers of the Year is a featured list, which means it has been identified as one of the best lists produced by the Wikipedia community. If you can update or improve it, please do.
cricket ball
Cricket Portal
Click here for information about how the WikiProject assesses notability
Wisden Cricketers of the Year is part of WikiProject Cricket which aims to expand and organise information better in articles related to the sport of cricket. Please participate by visiting the project page for more details.
Featured list FL This article has been rated as FL-Class on the quality scale.
High This article has been rated as high-importance on the importance scale.

Contents

[edit] 2007 announced?

Exactly when were the Wisden Cricketers for the year 2007 announced? The Cricket World cup is still in progress right now. If anyone knows the answer to my question, please reply.

On publication of the 2007 Wisden Cricketers' Almanack]. Johnlp 07:36, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Yep. I wasn't relying on an announcement, but on my copy of the 2007 Wisden, which arrived on Saturday. (I think Amazon slightly jumped the gun, as I don't think it's been formally published quite yet.) If the 2007 selection needs an individual citation, then presumably the same applies for all the earlier years as well! JH (talk page) 08:51, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sachin Tendulkar

One of the greatest cricketers of all time has not made the Wisden list even once. What a crock! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.229.198.97 (talk) 22:47, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Um... except when he did in 1997. With a couple of exceptions long ago, you can't win the award more than once anyway. Loganberry (Talk) 23:03, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Nationalities

I've had to include some players under Welsh flags. I think they're defensible. Generally, players are given the flag of the country they played for (thus Hick + Greig=England) but non internationals are more tricky; I've given them their country of birth. --Dweller (talk) 10:12, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Fair 'nuff. The Rambling Man (talk) 10:13, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
I have made a number of other judgement calls. All have been explained in the notes. In cases of doubt, I've so far managed to get clarity from the country relevant to the player's exploits in the season for which he was recognised. Happy for anyone to dispute. --Dweller (talk) 10:44, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
Well I think a caveat statement is in order, something like "Test cricketers nationality reflect the team they played for while non-internationals birth nationality is shown..."... The Rambling Man (talk) 10:48, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
Yup. + "Where nationality is questionable or changed during the course of a player's career, it has been derived from teams represented during / preceding the season for which the award was made" ? --Dweller (talk) 11:03, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
Sounds good. The Rambling Man (talk) 11:04, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

I think you've adopted a sensible way of doing it. Further possible footnotes for country of birth include: Ranji (India), Freddie Brown (Peru!), Colin Cowdrey (India), Ted Dexter (Italy), Dermot Reeve (Hong Kong), Nssser Hussain (India), Adam Hollioake (Australia). However I think all that the first and the last two in that list were indisputedly English. JH (talk page) 17:05, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

I've added footnotes about countries of birth where I know them. I've left Welsh-born England players with just a footnote rather than a flag (Turnbull, Walters, Watkin, Simon Jones). Don Shepherd gets a Welsh flag as a non-international, which is fine. But there are a couple of anomalies: David Green is English (brought up in Timperley, school in Manchester) but was born when (if I recall correctly) his mother was evacuated in 1939 to north Wales for her confinement; conversely, Welsh-speaking Matthew Maynard was born in Oldham... I've added footnotes to both, and to Alan Jones, whose representative game for England in 1970 was later decided not to be of Test status. Johnlp (talk) 21:21, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Lead image

Not sure about the fair use of that Wisden dust jacket, but anyway, surely the most appropriate image possible is Image:John Wisden.jpg, as both a winner and the founder of Wisden? --Dweller (talk) 11:12, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] What's going on?

So why has all the nationality information, and most of the references, suddenly disappeared? Whether temporary or permanent, it would have been nice to be warned. (Incidentally, there's one drawback with referencing Wisden stuff that's online at Cricinfo - you have to create an account with them before you can read it, and although it is free it means that access is not instant and also that some people may have qualms about signing up. So where possible I think that the reference should also cite the print version of the article.) JH (talk page) 09:11, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Nationality information presented using those flags was considered to be in contravention of MOSFLAG (which it was) and the associated notes didn't make sense without the flags. This has been discussed at the FLC in case you weren't aware of what was going on. Sorry if things have moved more rapidly than you'd have liked. There was also some issue with the selection of a player's natural country (e.g. Wales) should they not have played for a Test nation. It was a bit of a minefield.... The Rambling Man (talk) 09:14, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the explanation. It's a bit of a shock to discover that flags have suddenly gone from being almost essential if it's to be a featured list to being deprecated. (That's not intended as a criticism of you. I know it's not your doing.) JH (talk page) 16:55, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Please do feel free to chip in at Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/Wisden Cricketers of the Year --Dweller (talk) 09:28, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll certainly have a look there. JH (talk page) 16:55, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
Having put in some work last night on this according to the decisions that were in force then, I come back today to find it has all been swept away. Would have been nice to have had some warning or some input, then I needn't have wasted my time. It's obviously an improvement to put the list in a table, but apart from that I'm not sure what progress has been made from the list that was de-listed. The picture of Wisden the man instead of Wisden the book is less appropriate: he wasn't a proper COTY - see Tintin's note elsewhere - and he was dead before the practice of choosing COTYs was instituted by the book and its editors.
It strikes me there's a basic choice here. You either leave it much as it is but perhaps rename it to "List of Wisden Cricketers of the Year" to reflect the fact that it is just that: a list. Or we try to add more value to it, in which case my view would be that the team the cricketer played for in the preceding season and the deeds that led to them being chosen would be the best "extra" information we could add.
But shouldn't we have a proper discussion about this kind of thing here before pressing on in whatever direction the prevailing wind takes us? Johnlp (talk) 14:13, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
I think if there was an award for wasted time then I'd receive it! Anyway, having re-read MOSFLAG, they had to go, it was that simple. I've also added several explicit references which weren't there beforehand. As for the image, well if it's that big a deal then we can replace it back with the Wisden front cover although a decent fair use rationale would be required. I'm not averse to renaming the list but I think adding the team they played for the preceding season is going to need thought - county or country or both? Also, deeds that led to them being chosen would bloat the list out of control and would require quotes from the Wisdens of each year (which I don't have access to but someone else might?) - anything else would be WP:OR. I agree that it ought to have been discussed and I apologise but I felt that since I'd taken the lead in trying to regain featured status and made the majority of the changes (and after all, they can all be undone via the history) it wasn't unreasonable to start responding to the comments at the FLC. The Rambling Man (talk) 08:22, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
Also, deeds that led to them being chosen would bloat the list out of control and would require quotes from the Wisdens of each year (which I don't have access to but someone else might?) Agreed with your first point. As to the second, anyone who has signed up for the Wisden archive on Cricinfo has access to every CoY article that has ever appeared in Wisden. JH (talk page) 09:11, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
Yes, fair enough. The Rambling Man (talk) 09:27, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
A huge number of CoY pen portraits do not explicitly explain the reasons for the man's choice, particularly in earlier Wisdens. The trend has often been to do a more general biog, woven in with a few highlights of the previous season if you're lucky. So while I think it's an excellent idea in principle, I'd oppose this for practical reasons and on policy grounds that abstractions from lengthy pen portraits as the grounds on which players were selected would inevitably end up as OR in many cases. Shame, cos like I say, it's a doozy of an idea. --Dweller (talk) 09:37, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
So assuming that the disappearence of the flags is acceptable as they contravened MOSFLAG, and assuming adding snyopses for each of the 600 or so chaps would bloat the list, are we now left with simply the lead image issue? The Rambling Man (talk) 09:38, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
For me, yes. I'm not too fussed either way, so long as the fair use is sorted on the book image. Wisden's picture deserves some kind of prominence - ie not in the right hand column alongside the winners' table. Is there room for two images in the Lead? --Dweller (talk) 10:00, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
Sorry to be grumpy earlier. I think there is a case for a probably separate article, maybe less of a list, that gives a bit more information, and in most cases it's fairly simple to say what the honoured cricketer actually achieved during the previous twelvemonth. In any case, I have the last 86 years of Wisden on my shelves (minus a couple of the war years), so I can do references for at least those directly from the pages. I may give it a tryout in my sandbox: if I do, I'll post a link here so others can have a look (and maybe help). I do have a couple of comments which I'll put into the FLC review and only briefly mention here: one is the Wisden pic, which I think is wrong because Wisden the man wasn't a cricketer of the year; the other is the use of the word "Winner" which seems to me inappropriate. I'll expand in the other place if I get time in the next few hours. Johnlp (talk) 19:08, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I've done a bit of copyediting on the intro, which I thought was a little verbose in places. I've also made a change to reflect that there were no rather than merely few f-c matches played in England during WW1, after checking the matches listed for each season on CricketArchive to make sure that I was right about that. JH (talk page) 19:34, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Cool, good work. The Rambling Man (talk) 19:37, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Possibly slightly misleading text?

As mentioned above, it is correct that the First World War "prevented any first-class cricket being played in England". However, it's not strictly true to say that the Second World War "caused the same issue", since there was a little first-class cricket in 1945. The first match was England v Australian Services at Lord's, starting on 19th May: after VE day, but before the war as a whole was over. Pedantic, I know! Loganberry (Talk) 15:33, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I did wonder whether to change it, but thought it would get a bit fiddly. It depends a bit what precisely "the same issue" refers to. I think it's reasonable to take it as meaning a shortage of worthy candidates for the honour of CoY. JH (talk page) 17:01, 16 April 2008 (UTC)