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Izaak Appel

Appel was a strong Polish/Jewish player who "disappeared" while living in Lviv (or possibly Kyiv) following the 1941 Nazi invasion of Ukraine. He was almost certainly killed in 1941, but as is often the case the precise circumstances of his death are unknown. Currently we have a very unsatisfactory situation where his "disappearance" is sourced to a self-published Bill Wall page. Can we find something better? Gaige maybe? It would be better if we could say something like "Appel died in unknown circumstances following the 1941 Nazi invasion of Ukraine". MaxBrowne2 (talk) 01:32, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

Unfortunately all that Gaige says on page 12 of Chess Personalia is

Appel, Izaak         POL

   *    c1905

   †    c1941

Quale (talk) 02:40, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

Akira Watanabe (chess)

Would someone from WP:CHESS mind taking a look at Akira Watanabe (chess) and assessing the subject's notability (as chess player)? I'll ask something similar at WT:JAPAN given that the subject might possobily be notable for reasons other than chess, but the current focus of the article and claim of notability seem to be the subject's chess achievements. The article also appears to be a translation of the Japanese Wikipedia article ja:渡辺暁 (based on User talk:Ebefl#Ways to improve Akira Watanabe (chess)) but is lacking proper attribution per WP:TFOLWP. A lack of proper attribution cn most likely can be "fixed", but a lack of notability can't. For reference, the Japanese Wikipedia article does seem to be pretty much the same content-wise and is also basically only supported by a single WP:PRIMARY source (the other sources listed as "references" seem more like "explanatory notes").-- Marchjuly (talk) 21:51, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

I made a couple of quick searches but didn't find anything interesting. There is a book, "How to Play Chess Like Akira Watanabe", by John C. Murray, which I thought might be promising, but it is "independently published" (roughly equivalent to self-published). I also found an article in the Yale Bulletin about him, but it was from when he was a visiting scholar at Yale, and I would hesitate to call that "significant coverage". Bruce leverett (talk) 02:08, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

Hi Bruce leverett. Was wondering whether you or anyone else could take another crack at assessing whether there's really anything here per WP:BEFORE. The article hasn't been improved by its creator since my original post and I haven't been able to really find anything about this player on Google either related to chess. The corresponding article on Japanese Wikipedia also hasn't been recently improved; so, there's nothing to get from there. -- Marchjuly (talk) 21:33, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

I did not find anything new.

I didn't realize, when we discussed this in June, that he had won the national championship of Japan three times; you can see this in Japanese Chess Championship. This is criterion 3 of WP:NCHESS, although, of course, one can see from the FIDE ratings that the Japanese championship is not a very strong one. The Polish version of the page has a link to the complete results of a more recent Japanese championship, from 2010, in which he finished third; it is from the FIDE website.

The Polish version of the page has a link to an article by Alex Baburin on chess in Japan, but when I click the link I get "Forbidden", and a google search for Baburin chess Japan doesn't show anything. The same Polish version also has a link to an article by Watanabe about chess in Japan, from msoworld.com (published by Mind Sports Organization Worldwide, Inc.) Of course we shouldn't routinely cite autobiographical material, but it's interesting. He mentioned at the time that he had a "weekly column" on the internet about chess, in Japanese.

He has written three beginner's books (this is clearer in the Japanese version of the page). I think that if these were successful, that is, popular, books, they would meet criterion 5 (or even 6). I do not know how to evaluate how successful those books are (were). At least one of them was not self-published. Bruce leverett (talk) 01:25, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

Should Titled Players Who Cheated Online Have it Mentioned on Their Wiki Page?

Someone added: "In 2024, Malak Ismayil’s account was banned on Chess.com under the website’s Fair Play Policy." They linked to her chess.com page, where her account is closed. I am removing it for there being no independent sources, but I'd like a second opinion. Malak Ismayil - Wikipedia Bres2 (talk) 03:11, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Only with proper secondary sourcing. Good call. I am not ready to allow someone's career to be destroyed based solely on the actions of a chess.com admin. Marcus Markup (talk) 08:49, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Juan Manuel Bellón López

I find it incredible that anyone would consider a 5 time Spanish national champion and ten-time national representative of any sport non-notable, or allege that they're only known because of their wife or daughter, but here we are, and now we are in danger of a pile-on by clueless deletionists. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 08:58, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Queen versus rook endgame

I thought it was a bit odd that we didn't have a standalone article on Q vs R, so I spent today procrastinating by writing one based on the first few sources I thought of looking up (Nunn, Müller and Lamprecht, Averbakh Chess Endings: Essential Knowledge – though the last one is old enough that it entertainingly says absolutely nothing about the third-rank defense, so it wasn't very helpful). Probably it could stand to have more about Q vs R+P (which is better covered in Dvoretsky), but I should stop procrastinating. :D Double sharp (talk) 15:37, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

Medal Table

I have noticed that @Vajrayudhan has been adding medal tables for Chess Olympiad, World Team Chess Championship and other chess ones for only Indian chess players. See Gukesh Dommaraju, Surya Shekhar Ganguly etc.

Can I confirm if there has been any consensus amongst the chess community on wiki if we should add such medals to the medal table? For example if we use Olympiad medals, we will have to add them to pretty much all medalists. We can't just do it for Indians player because this wouldn't be fair otherwise and can be seen as breaching WP:NPOV and WP:PROMO. The only one I have seen used consistently is Asian Games so far.

Imcdc Contact 07:32, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

There was a discussion of medal tables for articles about chess players in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chess/Archive 34#Medal template for Infobox chess biography. It was not a popular idea at the time. Although chess players who win medals value them, credentials and other criteria for judging a player's success and strength tend to run to FIDE title, ratings, championships won, etc. Bruce leverett (talk) 17:46, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

I will take it then to be consistent, we should just remove all chess medal tables then?

I am ok with stuff like Asian Games and FISU World University Games which are multi-event and measured by medals. But not with putting stuff like Olympiads where there is no precedence to do so. Imcdc Contact 01:02, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Chess Olympiad, World Team Chess Championship and Continental Team Chess Championships are the long-established major team events in chess, held once in a fixed duration, and of sufficient importance that the teams are selected by the national chess federations and the results covered in media. Almost all the best players take part in it, with rare exceptions.

Asian Games chess is a recent and intermittent addition to the chess calendar, but still gets sufficient coverage due to the notability of the Asian Games, and the chess players involved too. From what I see, strong Asian chess nations like India, China, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Iran have invariably fielded their best players at these events. There are other multi-sport events such as Summer Universiade and Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games which have included chess.

In my opinion, these two categories of events should be present in medal templates as they are fundamentally about medals (gold, silver, bronze medals are actually awarded), and strong and important enough for medals won at these events to be mentioned in templates.

World Championships are obviously worthy of a template. The conventional chess tournaments such as round robins (Sinquefield Cup, Tata Steel etc), Swisses (Aeroflot Open, Qatar Masters, national championships etc) and knockouts (American Cup, Speed Chess Championships), do not deserve a medal template as only the 1st place matters. These can perhaps be mentioned in a text section called "notable tournaments won" for prominent players, but WITHOUT a medal template. Also, perhaps specific FIDE tournaments such as FIDE World Cup, FIDE Grand Swiss, FIDE Grand Prix and FIDE Candidates can be mentioned in templates. Vajrayudhan (talk) 01:06, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Also, the presence of chess Olympiad medal templates is not unique to Indian chess players. For example, see Vasyl Ivanchuk and Ruslan Ponomariov. Vajrayudhan (talk) 01:13, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

@Bruce leverett Any thoughts on this? Imcdc Contact 01:04, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

I recognize that, for our chess biographies as a whole, we do not have a consistent system for summarizing a player's major achievements in an easy to read form. For instance, in Magnus Carlsen we have a table of all his tournament finishes, but if the reader wants only to see his major successes, this table is too much. For most other players we don't have anything, and the reader can only try to digest the flat year-by-year narrative of the player's career.

So a medal template for the infobox is an attempt to solve a genuine problem. But it has several flaws.

A team medal earned in a team event may not reflect the player's performance; for example, if he fell sick and only played one game, he still gets the medal.

A board prize earned in a team event may have been earned by facing a weak field. For example, the silver medal for second board in the recent Olympiad was won by a player who faced only eight opponents, of whom only three were rated above 2500.

Most of the strongest tournaments do not award medals at all.

Your suggestion of a "notable tournaments won" section could help with this. I assume that what you have in mind is something like Vasyl Ivanchuk#Notable tournament victories. I am dissatisfied that the medal table in the infobox and the notable tournaments section in the article text are not near to each other -- we almost make matters worse by putting them in places that do not have equal prominence and are not near to each other. Bruce leverett (talk) 05:01, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

The medals infobox is an abomination. All the arguments from 2018 against the medals infobox are still valid, but seeing it in practice shows it is actually worse than I thought.

Making this so prominent in articles is undue weight since Wikipedia is placing importance on the medals that does not exist in the English-speaking chess world. (I'm not going to presume what importance the medals have in other parts of the world.) Compare the medals box for Viswanathan Anand and Savitha Shri Baskar. The medals infoboxes do not convey any useful insight into their relative accomplishments, and in fact they actively obfuscate. Bloated infoboxes at the top of an article do not have the effect that is likely intended, rather they appear sad and a little desperate. If the achievements are important they should be described in prose in the article body. I may be in the minority, but I expect Wikipedia to be an encyclopedia, not an infoboxopedia.

The medal boxes are bloated and the effect on some articles is just ghastly. For example, take a look again at the Savitha Shri Baskar article. You might think it isn't too bad, but I invite you to view that page on a phone. The infoboxes take the entire width of small screens so on a phone you must scroll down several screens to reach the article proper. I also think there are some issues with accessibility and legibility of the medals infobox. The medals are in small coins that are difficult to distinguish at low resolution, and the contrast differences between the medal colors are relatively low.

Rather than jamming these monstrosities at the top of the article I think it works better to use a standard wiki table to present tournament and match results near the end of the article. An example of this that I like is Alexander Alekhine#Summary of results in competitions. The regular table format allows inclusion of a lot more information and in a format that is easier to understand. Placing a potentially large table near the end of an article is much better than putting it at the top and before the article body.

I am strongly opposed to use of any medals infobox in chess biographies, and I think they should be removed. Quale (talk) 07:08, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree. Chess in general doesn't put a lot of emphasis on "medals". I don't really care if someone got a "bronze medal" at the Vietnamese Team Championship. They can be mentioned in the article, but shouldn't be in the infobox. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 00:45, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Should we add this as a guideline to the WikiProject front page?

We probably also need to add a cleanup project since there are a lot of players to be dealt with. Imcdc Contact 01:02, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Live rating being added by unregistered users despite being against guidelines

I have observed that live ratings are being constantly added to pages such as List of chess players by peak FIDE rating as well as player pages such as Arjun Erigaisi and Gukesh Dommaraju despite being against WikiProject Chess guidelines. Markdown flags such as "DO NOT ADD LIVE RATING" have been placed on such pages to no avail.

I wonder if the issue can be tackled by adding semi-protection or pending changes protection (See Wikipedia:Protection_policy#Comparison_table). At least the List of chess players by peak FIDE rating page, a target of frequent vandalism by unregistered users, is worthy of it. Vajrayudhan (talk) 01:58, 25 October 2024 (UTC)