Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football/Women's football task force/Article alerts

Not a task force suitable for new editors

The rapid-fire AfDs of articles on women's players has put me off this work permanently, especially now that I've tied up most of the loose ends I created. Good luck with the project. Wikipedia seems to be a surprisingly poor venue for women's team sports since it relies on notability guidelines that are systematically stacked against the subject, and has no lack of editors who act with authoritative understanding of every guideline and policy except WP:ATD.

In light of watching 5-10 women's footballers being AfD'd every day for the last month — by one hand-counted estimate, 80 AfDs of women's footballers just by one editor since the start of the 2023 Women's World Cup, and accounting for more than 90% of their total AfD nominations in that span — without doing any of the work to WP:RETAIN anything being deleted elsewhere, the list of requested articles and Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Missing articles by occupation/Footballers on these pages becomes especially demoralizing.

It does not benefit new editors to request articles for players that either have already been deleted, or inevitably will be deleted for lack of notability as enforced on English Wikipedia. There are a few dozen footballers in this World Cup alone who lack articles but not already on the list, whose play is notable enough to be discussed at length in media reports and analysis of this tournament, all of which appears to be WP:ROUTINE and therefore not notable for English Wikipedia.

It also does not benefit new editors to see pages on that list that have been created under older guidelines, because it seems that most existing articles on women's footballers are worse than useless as examples. Most simply haven't yet gotten in front of an editor who'll AfD them.

• Particularly painful is the lack of context provided in this project around WP:NSPORTS2022, which I guess is assumed to be already known by everyone coming to it. Requested articles that link to international caps or club signings suggest either of those mean anything to Wikipedia, even as an indicator of potential notability for prioritizing research — after reading through more than 100 women's footballers' AfD nominations in the past month, they clearly and obviously do not.
• I suggest removing the link to Women in Red's Wikidata-generated list of footballer redlinks entirely. The vast majority of that list is composed of players active from the 1960s to 1990s who are unlikely to ever get the coverage necessary to suit WP:GNG, making it an unproductive timesink without further curation.
• I also suggest removing most of the currently requested articles from the curated list, which appears significantly outdated. Most currently listed requested subjects might have gotten a pass under the old NSPORTS but would fail NSPORTS2022.
• I also suggest directing new editors to start new articles about any women's football subjects in draftspace instead of mainspace, to allow for asynchronous collaboration and project review before they're inevitably PRODed or AfD'd by a new page reviewer, who in this subject area in particular appear to default to citing any policy but WP:ATD. There's no point running off more editors by stating, implicitly or often quite explicitly, that their work here is not just a pointless waste of time, but also unwelcome and damaging to the project.
• I also suggest providing concrete examples of consensus RS/IS/SIGCOV for a footballer article in the specific context of NSPORTS2022, either for WP:WOSO or as part of the broader WikiProject Football. WP:NSPORT is frustratingly vague on how to write a notable biographical footballer article compared to the guidelines available for other sports.

News sources that have most reliably, independently, and consistently covered specifically the women's game also appear to be unlikely to pass formal RS scrutiny over their perceived editorial standards and professionalism. They're also more vulnerable to linkrot of the sort that makes subjects who have been notable fail search scrutiny in AfDs, and more difficult to locate and cite SIGCOV of without access to paywalled archives, WP:LIB access, or enough luck to locate it on a Wayback snapshot. Nor are any of the factors as to why it's so comparatively difficult to locate SIGCOV of objectively notable top-flight professional women's footballers is considered worth exploring or factoring into GNG discussions.

More broadly, this task force feels like a lost cause, not for a lack of effort on anyone's part but because Wikipedia — by design, consensus, and execution — is fundamentally incompatible with the documentation of women's football on par with the default of men's football. This task force's work seems to be attractive primarily to other editors not participating in its work, who also thrive in situations where they can spend more time throwing policy and guideline abbreviations at each other in formal arguments like they're magic spells in a fantasy game than finding meaningful ways to improve or use the content that's already here. -Socccc (talk) 00:41, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

Sorry to see you go – you've done some amazing work, and I've also gone through bouts of despair like yours on here. Seany91 (talk) 01:55, 15 August 2023 (UTC)