Jitterbug, I just re-entered the links you removed 2 weeks ago from the Gulbis bio for Recent Match Results and Ranking History.

Please take a closer look at them and the level of detail and additional links they provide.

For the Recent Match Results link, first of all, it delivers Recent Match Results with just one click. Most of the time when people come to a wikipedia bio for a current player, it is during a tournament (such as the US Open) and it is for a player with whom they are unfamiliar, and they want to know who this player is and what they have been up to lately.

So a link that says Recent Match Results is about the most useful external link you can provide to a wikipedia user. And the ATP profile, Tennis Insight, and ITF main pages all have links to a player's results. And all 3 are inferior to the SteveGHelper results.

ATP does not ever list qualifying matches, and shows tournament results only AFTER the tournament ends, never during. And to see doubles results takes a couple more clicks to get to another page that shows them. The ATP results do not list entry status and seeding for opponents (entry status such as Wild Card, Qualifier, Alternate, Lucky Loser).

Tennis Insight does not list doubles results at all (unless i am missing something) and is extremely gambling oriented, with flashing gambling ads in several places on the page and gambling ratios everywhere.

ITF lists doubles, but only after all the singles results, not together by tournament along with that tournaments singles results. The ITF singles results do not list the ranking of each player in the match result lines.

SteveGHelper, using the data maintained at SteveGTennis.com, lists all singles, doubles, and qualifying matches, almost always updated every morning with the previous day's results. The player's entry status is there (WC, Q, LL, ALT), as well as links to each player's ATP profile page, the Head-to-Head page at the ATP site for the 2 singles players, and the player's Ranking History page at SteveGHelper (linked via the text for his ranking at the time of the match.) It has serious advantages over all the other alternatives (and no advertising.)

As for the Ranking History link, it pulls up a Ranking History page directly. Only the ATP site has anything similar, which takes 3 clicks to get to from the main page, and then gives you an inferior view of inferior data. The ATP site does also show doubles rankings, but it shows only the singles ranking number, shows it for every single weeks (do you really care to see EVERY week's ranking from a year ago, or would you prefer to just see a sample of ranking every few months to see how the player is trending?) The SGH site shows a "telescoping view" of the ranking history, first going back a week at a time, then 2 weeks, then monthly up to a year, then every three months after that. In a single screen of data, you can see both how a player has been rising or falling recently and his general trend over the last year and last several years. Additionally, SGH contains a direct link to each week's ranking file at SteveGTennis.com and shows 3 more important details: # of tournaments played, points accumulated, and increase / decrease since the beginning of the year.

When you look at the details that the SGH pages give compared to ATP, ITF, and TI, you can see they deliver a unique perspective on a player such as Gulbis and any other current tour player.

Please let me know if you think there are perspectives on this that I am not seeing clearly. ShabbatSam 11:03, 2 September 2007 (UTC)Reply