Talk:Washington, D.C./Archive 9

Sports section

At around 2,000 words, this largely unsourced section is way too long, especially when you compare it to those of other FAs on populous cities such as Boston#Sports and Minneapolis#Sports. I think it would be way better if we wrote one paragraph for each sport instead of many subsections each containing multiple paragraphs. Overall, this article is 14,445 words long, which is quite long, so trimming the sports section will make this article a lot easier to read. Wow (talk) 18:53, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm in agreement, especially with a separate article on Sports in Washington, D.C. A summary should be in this article, with the detail moved and kept to that subarticle. —ADavidB 19:02, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

Agreed, summary style is crucial to maintain. I'd be happy to revert back to the version from July 7, with apologies to Dmford13 (talk · contribs), this sort of detail needs to be reserved for subarticles like Sports in Washington, D.C., or on the teams' own articles. -- Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 13:08, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

I understand the concerns. I would still suggest providing a full paragraph to each sport. We don't need to have as much detail or length, but the current section is far too short. Other cities, like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York have far larger sections. Dmford13 (talk) 00:54, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

This Sports section is still way too long. We just don't need that much information on the history of the pro franchises, it's in total violation of WP:SUMMARY. WP:WHATABOUT is not an acceptable argument. -- Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 13:04, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

@Dmford13: So here is the thing that I think is a misunderstanding. "Sports" is a subsection of the "Culture" section. It's not a history section, it's not a biography section, it's not a list section, it's not an economy section, and it's not an exhaustive section, not every sports organization or institution is required or expected to be itemized. It's not even necessarily about professional franchises, it's about humans and sports culture. This is the sort of source that should be the basis of paragraphs, which start with sentences like "The Washington Nationals are D.C.'s most popular sports team according to yadayada."

I want to work with you on this, you obviously care a lot about this topic. I too, am a D.C. sports superfan. But I can't have edit wars. I'm happy to bring this issue to WP:3RD if an outside opinion would help explain why 1300 words across 13 paragraphs is still excessive for this summary section, and why a paragraph for each sports team isn't and shouldn't be a goal. -- Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 15:10, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

If you compare this section to the sports section of many other cities with a similar number of sports teams/events, this is much shorter. Also, a ton of the information in the section is simply not correct. The Commanders do not have 5 super bowls, but 3 (I just fixed it). Also, the tennis tournament is no longer called the Citi Open. Much of the information about the rugby teams and less popular sports teams is incorrect--several of those teams don't exist any longer or have moved. If you look at Boston, every sports has a (lengthy) paragraph. Same with Philadelphia, New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Miami, Seattle, and Chicago. Now, each of those pages gives sports its own section--that's what we should do for Washington, DC. We should remove Sports from the culture section, give it its own section, and expand it so each sport has its own paragraph. We can remove some of the historic references that I originally included (though a ton of those cities have detailed historic references for each sport), but I think a few historic points--such as the year a championship was won and a major player or coach involved--should be kept. Again, please look at these other cities for reference. But, again, much information currently included is simply incorrect. I think we should follow the template of other major cities with a big sports footprint. Dmford13 (talk) 04:11, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing those errors out, those are good to fix. Again, I think whataboutism is the wrong method for determining what to include or exclude from any article. See WP:OTHERCONTENT. There will always be a longer article somewhere, and longer ≠ better. Instead of copying what other articles do, we should look to build the section to cover sufficient information to give the reader a good overview of this part of life in the District. What we're talking about is called scope, there will always be information that Wikipedia leaves off of overview articles like this one.

We do have some good advice from the cities WikiProject, and looking at that, to me, what is currently missing are "sports that people participate in." If it is helpful to compare other articles to get a sense of summary structure, try reading the sports sections on the FA and GA U.S. state articles, Virginia#Sports, Massachusetts#Sports, or Texas#Sports. But again, just because those editors chose to include something there, doesn't mean we must then make the same choice here on this article. And if we want to promote Sports from subsection to section, that's fine, but that doesn't change the scope or expectations for summary style. -- Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 12:45, 20 July 2023 (UTC)