Category talk:Chronological summaries of the Olympics

Request for Comment: Where do Chronological Summaries fit in Wikipedia

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Where do "Chronological summaries" fit in Wikipedia? Are they encyclopedic? Should they be written?
The articles in this category place information from existing articles on Olympic Games into chronological order by day. Some of these were named as "YYYY Summer/Winter Olympics Highlights". Previous Articles for Deletion discussions (1, 2) raised issues multiple issues. The information in the "highlights" already exists in articles for their respective Olympic Games and/or in sport specific pages (ex. 2008_Summer_Olympics, Athletics at the 2008 Summer Olympics). The highlights articles may represent Redundant Forks. They may also represent a problem with Neutral Point of View as they inherently select a limited number of events or pieces of information and present them as more notable/important than others. Along these lines, the articles may also be original research. Some of these articles were updated during their respective Olympic Games, and were said to violate policy on What Wikipedia is not. The articles were also said to be contrary to the WP:MOS. They were also criticized as there was no long-term historical perspective to be gained from a per-day organization.
Users in favor of keeping these articles argued that they were "useful", but required cleanup rather than deletion. The move from "Highlights" to "Chronological Summary" may have addressed the NPOV issue. Becky Sayles (talk) 22:05, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

• Comment - I had never noticed these articles before, but I actually found them kind of interesting to go through. Yes they repeat a lot of info from the main pages, but they bring it to life in a way that many of our readers may enjoy. It's a bit like the discussion we had over at Tennis Project and tennis talk pages on Day by Day summaries of the 4 major tennis tournaments. Examples being we have an Australian Open article, we have a 2010 Australian Open article, and we also have a 2010 Australian Open – Day-by-day summaries article. Sometimes the day-by-day articles fit on the yearly article page and sometime they don't, but consensus was to keep. Heck the 2010 Australian Open article also forks into "2010 Australian Open – Men's Singles", "2010 Australian Open – Women's Singles", "2010 Australian Open – Wheelchair Men's Singles", etc, etc. So the fact wikipedia also has chronological summaries of the Olympics, and that editors want to keep them, doesn't really surprise me at all. As far as some events being presented as more notable than others...well it's a fact that some events ARE more notable than others. That's for consensus and WikiProject Olympics to agree on, as they have a better handle on what's more important. Fyunck(click) (talk) 08:44, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

I don't think redundancy is a main problem I think the pages are not redundant with your example 2008 Summer Olympics, because it goes much more into detail. It's a timeline overview that is hard to find otherwise. You have to visit all the different sport pages to get the info, that makes these pages valuable. It's the same with pages like List of 2012 Summer Olympics medal winners. They are also redundant but are valuable because they list the information in another way. And there is so much redundant on Wikipedia. I think the info of every medal is on about 10 different pages. Take for instance the gold medal of the 2012 women's road race. It's listed on:

• Cycling at the 2012 Summer Olympics – Women's road race
• Cycling at the 2012 Summer Olympics
• List of 2012 Summer Olympics medal winners
• Chronological summary of the 2012 Summer Olympics
• Marianne Vos
• 2012 in women's road cycling
• List of Olympic medalists in cycling (women)
• 2012 Rabobank Women Cycling Team season
• Netherlands at the 2012 Summer Olympics
• Netherlands at the Olympics

So it's not only Chronological summary of the 2012 Summer Olympics which is redundant. Literally all the country pages (like Netherlands at the 2012 Summer Olympics) of the Olympics are redundant, but are valuable. Sander.v.Ginkel (talk) 09:23, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Comment about Neutral Point of View The pages I scanned (Chronological summary of the 2008 Summer Olympics, and Chronological summary of the 2012 Summer Olympics) are quite complete and are not tagged with the Neutral Point of View tag. That's because the pages only lists the medal winners and records, and all the events are mentioned. If not, the page should be tagged with incomplete and not with Neutral Point of View, like on Chronological summary of the 2012 Summer Olympics. Sander.v.Ginkel (talk) 09:23, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

I think what was meant by Neutral Point of View was in that same article, Chronological summary of the 2008 Summer Olympics, if you take for instance "Day 10: August 18".... yes there's a chart for all the gold winners, but the prose only talks about one weightlifting, one table tennis and four athletic events, when there were 18 gold medals given out. Someone (or many someones) had to make a subjective decision on what to include in that prose summary. I'm thinking that is what @Becky Sayles: was getting at with her NPoV. Fyunck(click) (talk) 10:15, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

I think there are several ways to look at this. First, it does match WP:N, because I have seen day-by-day summaries of Olympics in reliable sources many times. Second, although some of the information is contained elsewhere, it is not included in the main Olympics article and per WP:SPLITTING it should not be included there, so a separate article is warranted in that respect. Because it is not intended to duplicate full information from the main article WP:REDUNDANTFORK does not apply here. Third, the last argument against, WP:NOTDIARY, does not apply here, because all events listed are notable, it are not trivial results. If these results were trivial, the same argument could be made for all subarticles for the Olympics. As long as it has good inclusion criteria and is not biased towards specific sports, there is a place for these kinds of articles in my opinion. CRwikiCA talk 16:07, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

I don't consider this duplication or a fork any more than History of Ghana is a fork of Ghana. These articles have most in common with articles like July 2012 in sports. I think they are unusual and certainly no one seems to have had a go at what a "good article" (or "featured list"?) version of these would look like. That kind of conversation would tease out the problems and benefits of such styles of article more than the bare bones timeline format that currently dominates. I think these articles sufficiently align with the scope that "Wikipedia combines many features of...almanacs". In my opinion, like many parts of Wikipedia, the problem is the implementation, not the topic itself. Pages like Great Britain at the 2010 Winter Paralympics have helped define how nation pages work. Chronologies are still waiting for a bright spark to make a big effort. SFB 18:28, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

• I have no idea why I was spammed an invite to participate in this discussion but for the record I don't really care. Beeblebrox (talk) 22:48, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

• Comment on the pages' origins: The origin of these list articles was that it was the result of a compromise on ITN. During the 2006 Turin Olympics, we had listed notable Olympics events directly on ITN.[1]. By the 2008 Beijing Olympics came around, a consensus was then reached (now archived at Wikipedia talk:In the news/Archive 23#Proposal: Olympics feature during the Beijing Olympics) to instead add a "sticky link" on ITN to an 2008 Olympics highlights page (now renamed as Chronological summary of the 2008 Summer Olympics). And that has been the consensus on ITN every Olympics since. This concept of adding periodic sticky link eventually evolved into the "Ongoing" list of links on ITN. Zzyzx11 (talk) 07:27, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
• As for the OP's concerns, these articles could be considered like any other legitimate "timeline" list article. Such lists are not redundant as it gathers elements from various other articles. And I fail to see how any such timeline list can be POV or OR just because it lists certain events and not others. The same could be said about Timeline of New Zealand history, Timeline of Scottish history, and many others timeline lists. You cannot list everything. Zzyzx11 (talk) 07:46, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
• There's already huge amounts of duplication and over specific articles IMO. Stifle (talk) 13:49, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.