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Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Snooker/Archives/2024/January

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Latest comment: 3 months ago by Nigej in topic List of world number one snooker players

WST website update

Latest comment: 3 months ago35 comments8 people in discussion

Hi folks, the WST website has been updated to the long-awaited new format. However, WST have failed to introduce a redirect system for all the old linnks, which means every link we have pointing to something like wst.tv/some-named-post-on-the-website-here/ will go to a 404 Not Found. As an example: https://wst.tv/murphy-takes-season-opener/

The new link format appears to involve including the year, month and day when the post was made (eg https://www.wst.tv/news/2023/july/21/murphy-takes-season-opener/ is the new link for the above article). The only way we're going to be able to fix this over hundreds of articles is to either:

  • Manually update every single link [after searching for every single title through the new search box] OR
  • Getting a bot to scrape the pages and adding the details in automatically.

While the new site is welcome, this broken link issue is not very helpful at all. They might introduce a redirect system for all these broken links in due course, but until then, all our WST links are invalid. -- CitroenLover (talk) 18:57, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

That's terrible. Perhaps we can use archive links, many of the WST pages are archived. EDIT: It also broke all of the tournament pages. The Masters, for example: old / new.AmethystZhou (talk) 19:19, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
Might be worth waiting to see if they do fix the redirects (although in my experience they rarely do). If there is a distinct naming convention, we can fix with AWB, else use archive-urls (you can run IABot on an article). Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 21:57, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
The image urls are also broken. If you go to the Murphy link above, the images are all missing. I just sent an e-mail to WST about the broken links and images, hopefully they add redirects, it shouldn't be too difficult to implement on their part. Although, the new urls do follow a naming convention. https://wst.tv/murphy-takes-season-opener/ turns into https://www.wst.tv/news/2023/july/21/murphy-takes-season-opener/, and the added dates are the article publication date. AmethystZhou (talk) 22:34, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
That's right, but trying to automate making that change relies on knowing the published date, which will kill the task being done by AWB/a bot. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 23:00, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
If someone shows me a bunch of before and after URLs (to the same content, before and after) I might be able to work out some kind of scriptable solution.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:11, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
I think the "news" articles all follow the same pattern as shown above, just insert the publication date shown at the top of the article. The other pages like the tournament pages are a bit more problematic, though. The Masters, for example, was moved from https://www.wst.tv/tournaments/masters/ to https://www.wst.tv/themasters. This is a huge mistake on WST's part IMO, now even Google will show the same broken old links that leads nowhere. AmethystZhou (talk) 22:24, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
Well, at least that one's a simple AWB/JWB substition. As for the others, if I'm understanding correctly, it requires going back to the article (somehow) and finding the date in it? If so, I can't fix that. If citations already have the date, maybe that could be extracted, though. But I guess it would still require manual testing of the repaired URL. Fargh.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:24, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
@SMcCandlish: You would also need to be careful not to just substitute the URL, because it also appears (in its entirety) within the "archive-url" tag for the citations which have been archived. There are many of these, and thankfully the archives all work OK.
Sure. Hopefully the WST people will fix this on their end. Scripting up some stuff to fix at least some of this would be a lot of gruelling regular expression and JavaScript work (and I'm rather backlogged on that account for a different on-site project).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:22, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
The more I look at this, the more intractable it seems. There doesn't appear to be any way to reliably distinguish something like https://wst.tv/murphy-takes-season-opener/ from other pages at the site (other than those with standardized directory prefixes like /tournaments/ or /players/), including ones that would not be fixed by a change to https://www.wst.tv/news/2023/july/21/murphy-takes-season-opener/ format, even after doing a tremendous amount of work to detect and "munge" various date formats. Urgh.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:51, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
You are right, the new format is actually better in that it distinguishes different categories of pages. But "upgrading" from the old to new is very difficult for us to do. Also, I manually fixed the WST links in the 2024 Masters article, and noticed that some of them had the wrong "date" tag, so using a script to automatically put the date from that tag into the url would cause some errors. Though if you Google the title of the page, it seems to capture the correct original publication date. AmethystZhou (talk) 08:29, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
Downright nightmarish.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:07, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
A nightmare as you say! It seems to me there are only two options. Option one is to manually go through all of the thousands of citations individually to correct them. Option two is to convince the WST's software suppliers to provide redirects. It would appear that there are two companies involved. One is https://urbanzoo.io/ and the other is https://www.imgarena.com/. Someone who is a lot more tech savvy than me will need to talk to them.  Alan  (talk) 10:36, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
AmethystZhou has sent an email to WST, but my experience is that they will not respond. It might be better to try to contact their software provider, but I have no idea who that is. The ideal solution would be to get them to provide redirects, which I don't think would be too onerous a task.  Alan  (talk) 06:50, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
...also: the WST player template, which is used in the "External links" section of many players' articles, does not work anymore; and the vast majority of the citations in the nicknames template are now broken, although most of them are archived.  Alan  (talk) 07:50, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
Most references should be archived. External links will be broken. Any ideas what the naming convention change is for players? Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 19:17, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
There doesn't seem to be a naming convention at all. For Ronnie O'Sullivan:
Old = https://www.wst.tv/players/ronnie-osullivan/
New = https://www.wst.tv/players/226c7294-655e-4925-bcde-17330ddfc438
 Alan  (talk) 19:29, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
Oh wow that's awful. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 22:18, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
It seems wst have replaced most SEO-friendly slugs with UUID’s. They guarantee that no two players can have the same name in a url, but it is also a horrible format for public-facing url’s unless you have some specific reason to use them. — CitroenLover (talk) 23:52, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

I think the easiest thing to do is just change url-status to dead and use the archive if it exists. That's what I'll be doing from now on. I don't suppose WST will ever fix the problem. And they've utterly jumped the shark with that awful new title font they're using. Rodney Baggins (talk) 23:24, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

On this note, I see that the new match stats page doesn't include century breaks per tournament. I saw Nigej add snookerinfo as a source for this (and it does indeed have the info). I just wanted to grasp if we deem it to be a RS or not. I thought previously we had it down as a situational source. Happy to have a full new thread for this, but it seems most suitable here.
I know if we take anything to GAN or FAC it'll get brought up, so best to have a convo about it first. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 13:00, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
One problem we still have is the that new WST is pretty useless for statistical information. See eg [1] which has the season total of centuries by player (scroll down). This has, for instance, Kyren Wilson with 31 and Zhou with 30, while snookerinfo has 32 and 29 (cuetracker has 32 and 29 too). Personally I happy with snookerinfo. Unlike cuetracker, it's got a very restricted amount of data, basically just the centuries. This have always been 100% reliable from my perspective. If they started publishing other types of data then I might need to reconsider. Nigej (talk) 13:36, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
I feel like, at this point, we should probably rely more on alternative sources of statistical data, for anything that can't be found on WST's site. snooker.org is what I've been using [and its generally accurate to my knowledge], so if anything matches up with it, that would be good enough for me. --CitroenLover (talk) 14:57, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
I agree that snooker.org is a good source. However it doesn't deal in frame scores/centuries before the semi-final stage. So it's no use for anything relating to century totals. It's true that there is sometimes text like "The 142 in the first frame was Carter's 400th career century", but the suspicion is that this information has come straight out of the snookerinfo site that we're discussing. Certainly there's no indication AFAIK that snooker.org maintain this information themselves. Nigej (talk) 15:06, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
Yeah, snooker.org is grand, but doesn't actually cover century breaks per tournament. Snooker Scene always used to, but I haven't gotten a copy since Clive left. BennyOnTheLoose might well know though. I think the thing is, if snookerinfo is the only place that covers the info, that doesn't mean we can cite it as reliable. I don't really know what editorial oversight it has, or how we can rely on the info it produces. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 15:26, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
I've been adding the WST live score pages for each individual match for the Masters, but it's probably not the best option for tournaments with more matches. AmethystZhou (talk) 15:31, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
As I noted earlier the WST site is very unreliable on pretty much any basis, but we continue to use it, shutting our eyes to the issues there. At the end of the day reliability is judged on a track record, and I've got say that snookerinfo passes that, based on matching statements in other sources that we regard as reliable (generally someone reaching a particular milestone). Nigej (talk) 15:35, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
Snooker Scene doesn't include century breaks as a distinct list, but does have them all in the match details. In some years, they used to do "career prize money" and "career century breaks" lists, but I haven't seen one for a while. No source is perfect, and it seems like snookerinfo might be good as we can get. Is there any appetite to try to get some tpyes of info from Cuetracker (excluding the known issues) accepted as reliable? I'm happy to draft up something for the Reliable Sources Noticeboard. Regards, BennyOnTheLoose (talk) 11:38, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Am I correct in thinking that the consensus on CueTracker's unreliability comes from older data, and whether they include events that may not be considered professional tournaments? If so, something like a date cut-off and limit to tournament stats of official WST professional events could be good. AmethystZhou (talk) 11:42, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
I'm not sure it really comes from just older data. The issue initially related to the use of composite data (mostly career totals) that were added (mostly uncited) in player infoboxes. This was commonly centuries totals, prize money totals, non-ranking wins. We removed the latter two from the infobox (since we couldn't find any reliable source for these) and centuries totals are now stored in a central location. Obviously the cuetracker totals are simply the sum total from the data that's in it. Some events are not and some events that are in it (as professional events) don't seem to regarded as such by others. I suppose the other issue is whether we could usefully use the information relating to a particular match or tournament (say). There's such a lot of data and we've not idea where it all comes from (mind you, you could say that a lot of other sources). Is there a compelling reason to use it? Nigej (talk) 12:59, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
I don't know whether or not it's a "compelling reason", but CueTracker is always my first port-of-call to check the century breaks totals for ongoing tournaments. For instance: cuetracker.net/tournaments/masters/2024/5965 agrees with SnookerInfo which agrees with our total for the Masters. This is, pretty much, always the case. Also CueTracker is the only site that regularly records the referees for matches. Our primary source (WST) is totally unreliable in almost every way.  Alan  (talk) 09:31, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
If we did petition to use cuetracker, we'd have to do so on a very strict "situational source" basis, that we only use it for certain items of information. Specificallythat it is used only for tournament total century breaks, and not for things which it was previously used for, such as career century breaks, total career prize money, and that it shouldn't be used to source prose information. Looking back at some old pages, they used cuetracker almost exclusively to source things like career summaries, which we have plenty of better sources to do this. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 14:26, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
That sounds like a plan. How do we go about doing that then?  Alan  (talk) 16:32, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
A well thought out post to WP:RSN is probably a good start Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 22:24, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
I wouldn't have a clue where to start with that.  Alan  (talk) 08:17, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

List of events in calendar tables

Latest comment: 3 months ago3 comments2 people in discussion

In a similar vein to @HurricaneHiggins' post above, I'm wondering about the criteria to which we include (or not) events in the season calendar pages (such as 2023–24 snooker season). We currently have a section for Q Tour events, which makes sense because they are run by the WPBSA and are feeder events for the main tour. But the "New professional players" list includes many other events, where the winner gets a tour card. I think those should also be included, but that'd be a lot more events in the list. Is it better if we organize the calendar tables into two categories, professional (main tour events), and non-professional (women's, senior, Q Tour, etc.), or even split the non-professional events to a separate page? AmethystZhou (talk) 09:46, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Personally, I've always thought that when we talk about the "snooker season", we are specifically talking about the WST. I did previously put some work into having larger list articles covering everything cue sport related - see 2018 in cue sports for example, which covers amateur events, women's events and also other cue sports (billiards, nine-ball, etc). Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 12:47, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
You'll notice from on there, that events are simply listed, given a location and what the final is. I think keeping the seasons articles as they are (maybe renaming them to 2019-20 world snooker season or 2019-20 WST snooker season) and limiting the scope to just those events and how they interact, and having an article for each year covering all cue sports tournaments (or, at least the notable ones) solves the issue. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 12:50, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Non-ranking titles

Latest comment: 3 months ago28 comments8 people in discussion

Hi all, someone posted this on my talk page: "Just want to know if the wiki snooker community is considering making a separate section/chart to list snooker players Senior Tour titles count as a whole new category instead of the current practice of listing it under the current 'Non-ranking titles'. I cannot see what justifies the recently finished, single-framed final match tournament - Mr Vegas Seniors 900 tournament being listed in the same category as The Masters or the Champion of Champions or Shanghai Masters etc., they are completely different in importance and difficulties and should not belong in the same category. Even listing World Seniors Championship title alongside The Masters or the Champion of Champions is unfitting. Obviously they are tremendously different in importance, some may argue they would trade dozens and dozens Senior titles to just one Masters. Having a separate category would make it easier for new fans of the sport to recognize the differences in these tournaments and grasp the weight of the achievements of the players."

@Lee Vilenski noted: "Well, I mean 'non-ranking' also contains super low profile events like the Vienna Open or Pink Ribbon events in the same bracket as other non-ranking events. Personally, I don't know why we try to count non-ranking events, as having 20 small non-ranking events don't amass to winning the Masters or the like. As for having a separate section, I'm not sure. Perhaps we should only mention professional titles, and then really notable non-ranking titles, which would include things like the seniors events and the national amateur titles. The issues you'll get would be with setting the inclusion criteria too low, and having John's bar's U25s handicap pairs or the like"

We probably need to set some parameters around what counts as noteworthy non-ranking titles. The Masters, Shanghai Masters, and Champion of Champions are obvious current ones. However, the Steve Davis bio lists his participation in 81 non-ranking finals, which seems excessive.

Thoughts? HurricaneHiggins (talk) 12:21, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Someone, probably the same person, posted to my talkpage asking me to put the seniors televised 900 from pre-new year onto the season page as well. I am not acrive enough here now to be able to do this [and most of my time is spent on a mobile device which is hard enough to post on, let alone edit, considering my screen keeps freezing and not responding to my inputs]. CitroenLover (talk) 13:20, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
It's not the same user, unless they have an incredibly good VPN service. The one on your talk page was almost certainly blocked user User:DooksFoley147, best to just WP:DENY. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 13:26, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
I have not posted under any other ips and I don't have a handle, so whoever it is, it's not me. Especially after reading all the exchanges here, I get the impression that this other person - DooksFoley147 - you guys are talking about, seems to be all FOR the Seniors Tour being listed as a professional event, while I'm all AGAINST it. 2605:52C0:1001:260:E000:68FF:FEFE:D3BC (talk) 18:24, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Just to throw in my two cents, it could simple, we can keep it simple and systematic at the same time by following simple rationales, and divide all tournaments into 4 broad categories:
Professional Ranking(most easily defined), Professional Non-ranking, Amateur(also very easily defined), and Seniors Tour. The Professional Ranking and Professional Non-ranking categories must be a WST event to begin with.
I want to elaborate on the ‘Professional Non-ranking' category: it must be 1) a non-ranking tournament is open to all professional players. But almost all professional non-ranking tournaments have qualification criteria such that the number of players cannot be the full 128 players on the tour. However this does NOT mean that these tournaments are not open to all players, for example, ALL professional players have a chance to contend for a place in The Masters, as are ALL professional players have a chance to contend for a place in the Champion of Champions, the CHANCE is open for them, therefore even though The Masters and Champion of Champions only allow 16 players in each of the events, they are still open to ALL professional players.
or 2) invites players without an upper cap to their professional ranking, this is the case with ALL professional non-ranking tournaments, there cannot be a rule saying "a player with a current ranking above top 32 cannot participate". Or both (as almost all Professional Non-ranking tournaments do satisfy both rules)
Therefore, even though Seniors Tour tournaments are WST events, the Seniors Tour does not meet "Professional Non-ranking" tournament definition as I just mentioned, for which I will also elaborate on: In the past, in certain years, players participate in Seniors Tour can NOT be a current professional player to begin with! They must be an amateur or someone dropped off the tour! That puts the Seniors titles in those particular years equivalent to amateur titles at best. Now the current rule is that a player must be ranked 65th on the tour or WORSE to participate in the Seniors Tour, which means, if Ronnie is ranked #1 even if he's 90 years old, he could not participate in Seniors Tour. The rules for Seniors tour had changed so often in the past, some years the age cap is 40, some years the age cap is 45, all these rules were made to keep players like Ronnie out of the tour, then as the class of '92 aged, they realized the age cap alone could not work, so they played around with ranking requirements. So, Seniors tournament under the current rule is not fully amateur either(confusing I know), therefore Seniors titles must be a separate 4th category because it doesn't completely fit into the other 3. The only catch is, when making the general page on Seniors Tour, someone has to research up the participation requirements for each year and explain that to the broad public, so people understand why some players(like Mark Williams) played in certain years and not the other years, and that by itself explains the weight of the tournaments in different years.
Lastly, an extreme example: what if in a particular year, everyone ranked in the top 112 denies to play in The Masters(assuming the #1 seed - reigning world champion is in the top 112 as well), and only players ranked 113-128 participate? Well, The Masters in this case still meets the definition of "Professional Non-ranking", as it satisfies the 2 rules I just mentioned above. It simply means that for that particular year, that particular EDITION of The Masters had a lower quality, but that doesn't take away the prestige of the tournament as a whole, or the tournament in ITSELF being Professional Non-ranking. 2605:52C0:1001:260:E000:68FF:FEFE:D3BC (talk) 20:14, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
The problem is that this is all WP:OR. We don't operate that way. Other people decide on the categorisation and we report what they say. Another issue is that you are focussed on the modern game. We're an encyclopedia and cover a hundred year of snooker events. Nigej (talk) 20:25, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
We can't just make up our own categories. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 20:31, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
But wouldn't you agree these 4 categories would make the most sense? I don't know about wiki rules, but if that's the case, such that we are stuck with only 2 or 3 categories, I'm out of ideas where to best fit the Seniors titles. The Seniors Tour will most likely be here to stay for a long long time ever since its revival around a decade ago, some of the best players are going into retirement soon so I'd say the need for a separate Seniors category becomes more and more eminent and urgent. Sooner or later it has to be dealt with and categorized.
Ps: who decides or how do they decide the need to add a new category?(I had seen the stats part - the gray area on top right - of snooker player's page with their pictures etc. change over the years to include or exclude certain information, so someone must be making the decisions) 2605:52C0:1001:260:E000:68FF:FEFE:D3BC (talk) 20:39, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
I must say that I disagree about the World Seniors Tour. As yet it still trying to find its feet and it could go either way. Trying strange new formats like the 900 is a sure sign of desperation. We're not stuck with any particular number of categories - they just need to be well defined and be up to a certain standard, for inclusion. From that point of view I can see that the seniors tour is a good candidate for inclusion. Are there reliable sources listing all the events? As to your final question: The ranking events and the minor-ranking events are well defined - sources exist for them. The others like "non-ranking" are a mish-mash. We've had a few discussions here over the years as to how to resolve the issue but have got nowhere, and that's largely because there's no good sources out there. Nigej (talk) 21:05, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
As per your previous reply and said "other people decide on the categorization" and Lee Vilenski said "we can't just make up our own categories", I still want to be clear about exactly who are these "other people" in the wiki world? It seems like there's a higher power out there but with no direction to contact them? Are these "other people" wiki employees?
Maybe we should take it to these "other people" and have a vote on the need to have a separate category. 2605:52C0:1001:260:E000:68FF:FEFE:D3BC (talk) 14:30, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
We summarise what reliable sources say about a subject. We can't just split up items based on our own feelings of the quality of an article. The only real editorial concept we have for inclusion is notability. It's not for us to say an event is more or less prestigious than another, certainly not separate them in this way. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 15:40, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Of course what I explained is not based on my own feelings, it is absolutely by objectively speaking, and according to reliable sources such as WST, Seniors Tour entrance requirement clearly excludes it being listed as "professional" tournament. When you limit entrance requirement to only amateurs and people outside of top-64, that in ITSELF explains that such tournaments are not as prestigious as professional tournaments (ranking or non-ranking). It doesn't need me to say and it is not for me to say, but anyone reading the entrance requirement would draw the SAME conclusion that Seniors Tour isn't as prestigious as The Masters, it can simply be measured objectively. Therefore listing them in the same category for titles count is not right. 2605:52C0:1001:260:E000:68FF:FEFE:D3BC (talk) 16:15, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
I think we could add a qualifier: "professional" non-ranking tournaments. So invitational events run by the WST or Matchroom and are considered part of the "main tour events" (Masters, Champion of Champions, Shanghai Masters, Championship League, the new Saudi event, etc.) count, while others (pro-am, exhibitions, "Macau Masters", etc.) wouldn't. AmethystZhou (talk) 09:50, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
I'm confused now. Are we thinking about the season articles or the tables in the biographies? If it's the latter we need to consider the last 40 years or so, before WST or Matchroom were even thought of. Nigej (talk) 11:59, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Good question. From a historical perspective, snooker rankings didn't even exist before 1976, and so all tournaments before that point were "non-ranking." Some tournaments have had both non-ranking and ranking incarnations, such as the UK Championship, which began in 1977 but only became a ranking event in 1984, or the Shanghai Masters, which went the other way, transitioning from a ranking to a non-ranking event in 2018. So it's complicated and confusing, even to those who have followed snooker for years. We now have ranking events, non-ranking events, and a new category of tournaments such as the Macau Snooker Masters, which are being billed as "exhibition" events—presumably so they can exist outside the auspices of the WST—but are in reality lucrative tournaments featuring top players and more prize money than most regular ranking events. That said ... we need to consider what the purpose of a snooker biography is, and what counts as notable. HurricaneHiggins (talk) 12:57, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
We are talking about both. Also, WST was created as a direct takeover of WPBSA tournaments that existed before, it simply is the tournament / commercial arm of WPBSA. So it doesn't matter if we had WST 20 years ago or not, the modern games since 1977 run by WPBSA can simply relate to WST, one can easily understand that. The organization is just a name, doesn't matter what they call it, they are the same list of events. The point is, they are qualified as "professional". I think AmethystZhou understood my point perfectly, the Seniors Tour is in no way a professional tour and should not be listed under "professional" non-ranking. 2605:52C0:1001:260:E000:68FF:FEFE:D3BC (talk) 14:25, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
My point above was that if there was a well-defined list of Seniors Tour events then that would be a possible reason to hive them off into a separate table. However the main issue with the non-ranking table is still what it should cover. Do we know which events were "run" (or sanctioned or whatever) by the WPBSA and which ones were not. Was the 1978 Irish Masters "run" by WPBSA? The article says so but provides no evidence. Or did the organisers in Ireland just ring up the pros and organise it? There's basically no coverage in the British press. Seems to me we're still in the dark about many events. And there's the issue about whether some events were "finals" at all. John Spencer's win in the 1975 Benson & Hedges Ireland Tournament was a single match, how can that be a "final" in any real sense? So many questions and so few answers? Nigej (talk) 18:50, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
I think we can do our best with what we have. If we know for sure a Senior's event's organizers and format and entrance requirements, we can list it accordingly (such as in the Pro-Am as Lee Vilenski and others suggested). For the events that really lack good sources, we can instead put them under maybe as an "uncertain" category, instead of "guessing" which category it best fits. At least when doing it this way, everything categorized is concrete, and events needing guess-work will be put aside. When an event consists of just one match, in a sense it can be defined as a finals match, this is the case with challenge format events, such as the challenge format of many world championships before the crucible era, and yes, it is correct for those to stay as non-ranking, even though I personally think those would be more fitting to be amateur events. Since "professional" means to practice something as a profession and make a full time living out of it, and pre-crucible era's world championships were largely treated as amateur events and no one could make a full-time living out of snooker as a profession back then, so pre-crucible era is more like an era of bar sport hobbies. But that is a completely separate topic. 2605:52C0:1001:260:E000:68FF:FEFE:D3BC (talk) 21:27, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
We kind of already do that, see John Higgins#amatuer finals. There's an argument that the Seniors events should just be listed as Pro-Am events and have done with it. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 12:44, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
I support it. I think this should be done ASAP - switching Seniors Tour titles to a Pro-Am table instead of listing them in the current "Non-ranking titles" table in players' biographies. I just noticed cueTracker.net sets a perfect example on how to categorize: it specifically calls The Masters and other Professional Non-ranking events "Professional Invitational", specifically with the word "professional" in it, so it is exactly what my whole point is from the start. It also does not record head-to-head matches on Seniors 900 tour and tournaments alike, since Seniors Tour must not fit into the definition of "professional" in their definition as well. 2605:52C0:1001:260:E000:68FF:FEFE:D3BC (talk) 18:27, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

The seniors have a tour the World Seniors Tour,so they should in no way be listed as a Pro-Am. Pros give ams a 21 point start in a Pro-Am, this does not occur in seniors tournaments. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.233.16.177 (talk) 13:00, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

And the Seniors Tour in no way is a professional tour either because it does not meet full professional standard in ANY given year, as such, a Seniors Tournament win should NOT be a professional non-ranking title. Please see my reasons above as I listed 2 distinct rules/rationales to consider an event professional or not. 2605:52C0:1001:260:E000:68FF:FEFE:D3BC (talk) 14:32, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
A Pro-Am tournament is simply an event that has both professional and amatuer players in it. Whether certain events have a handicap system is irrelevant. These events do have professional players who take place. It's a bit of a minefield. Personally, I think professional events, and then major amateur/pro-am events are the only items that really warrant inclusion. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 15:44, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
If no new category is being created for Seniors Tour alone, I agree with what you just said, handicap is irrelevant in determining an event is pro-am or not. And Seniors Tour tournaments under the current categorization is best suited for / most similar to Pro-Am category tournaments. 2605:52C0:1001:260:E000:68FF:FEFE:D3BC (talk) 16:08, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

I think Nigej already answered your questions above about this by saying that he was happy with how theses events are presented. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.251.168.128 (talk) 15:31, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

This comment is probably from User:DooksFoley147. Only 1 edit so far so difficult to be 100% certain. The truth is that I'm not "happy with how theses events are presented", certainly not in the biographies. Nigej (talk) 16:23, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Good eye, it was. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 16:39, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Proposal please

The above seems have got past the WP:TLDR stage. If someone could come up with a proposal relating to seniors events, with a brief rationale, I think we can make progress in that area. Ideally that should cover everything at {{World Seniors Championship}} (a template which clearly needs to be renamed). Nigej (talk) 10:29, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

2023–24 snooker world rankings page

Latest comment: 3 months ago18 comments4 people in discussion

I want to start working on the 2023-24 ranking page, but unlike the last season, I can't find either the revision dates, or the lists after each revision. Looks like WST uploaded these to their website last season, but not for the current one. And snooker.org only has the rankings, not the actual points after each revision. Anybody know where to find a good source for this information? AmethystZhou (talk) 08:50, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

There are these pdfs on the WST site: [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9] which give the ranking points after each ranking event. WST/WPBSA used to provide a re-ranking schedule like this [10] but I can't find one for the current season. There is this [11] but it's not got the same level of detail. https://wpbsa.com/rankings/rankings-faq/ says "Points from the current season will be removed according to the 2023/24 Re-Ranking Points List" but gives no clue as to where this list is. Nigej (talk) 09:47, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for these! I'll start working on this. I was wondering the same thing about the re-ranking list, I suppose we can work out points from which tournament was removed based on the points, but we still need a source for that. If only the WST website isn't a shambolic mess... AmethystZhou (talk) 09:54, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
Indeed the "re-ranking" stuff can be worked out from the points lists but it would be nice to have a proper source. Nigej (talk) 10:00, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
I created the page with the ranking points, still need to figure out those cut-off dates, though. AmethystZhou (talk) 14:01, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
I'm assuming that if we work out (Points after ranking event N + Money earned in ranking event N+1 - Points after ranking event N+1) (eg for Trump 799,000 (after Wuhan) + 80,000 (winner in Northern Ireland) - 869,000 (after Northern Ireland) = 10,000) you'll find that it matches events at Snooker world ranking points 2021/2022#Ranking points which will be the ones that were lost at the re-ranking (maybe the 2021 English Open (snooker) in this case, not sure). Would need to be cut/paste into a spreadsheet. All exceptionally complicated. Nigej (talk) 14:26, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
I am using an Excel spreadsheet to convert the WST .pdf lists into a Wikipedia-friendly format. The tournament winners lose a lot of points so it's not too hard to figure out the drop-offs. AmethystZhou (talk) 14:48, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
Good work. I notice that you've added columns at 2023–24 snooker world rankings for two events where the rankings changed (as they always do after a ranking event) but those new rankings were not used for seeding any tournaments. Previously we haven't included such rankings. https://www.snooker.org/res/index.asp?template=25&season=2023 also leaves them out. Personally I'd be quite keen to have these included somewhere, since they help to find a player's highest ranking. I suppose one issue is that this table quickly gets way too wide. Not sure what the best approach is. Nigej (talk) 16:16, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
Yes, I've hidden the columns for upcoming revision points, and there are a couple more that are not used to seed events. About the table width, I think we can add a single "rank" column to the left, and only have the points to the right, instead of displaying both the rank and points for each revision point. I made one in my sandbox. Perhaps also make the fonts slightly smaller, but I don't know how to apply that to the entire table, without having to add the "style=" attribute everywhere. AmethystZhou (talk) 17:26, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
You can replace the opening line of the table with something like {| class="wikitable sortable" style="text-align:center;font-size:90%". 85% is the minimum allowed, per MOS:SMALL, MOS:SMALLFONT, WP:MOS#Formatting issues. Personally I'd prefer a bit the opposite of your sandbox idea, rankings for all events, points for just the first and last; on the basis that the ranking is more interesting than the money. Nigej (talk) 18:13, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
I don't think it's possible to collapse part of a table (i. e. make the points columns collapsible and hidden by default). But changing the font size works! I must have been using the wrong syntax for the font size. When the entire table is complete, it'll be about two screens wide on a regular desktop monitor. Not too terrible, I suppose... AmethystZhou (talk) 17:06, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
You could make it a little bit narrower by removing the "Country" column entirely, and putting in a flagathlete wrapper for each player. Just a thought.  Alan  (talk) 09:30, 17 November 2023 (UTC)
Yes I plan to do that too, I don't think many people would be sorting that table by country... AmethystZhou (talk) 18:24, 18 November 2023 (UTC)
@AmethystZhou: Also - take a look at the way this table in Formula1 is arranged, particularly with regard to the horizontal scroll-bar and how one specific column is always visible. I have no idea how that is achieved but it might be useful for you to investigate.  Alan  (talk) 17:27, 18 November 2023 (UTC)
That's a nice looking table! And yes, wikitables allow fixed rows or columns, like this one in my sandbox. It looks good but the code has a bug where the borders disappear on Firefox, for some reason.. We can definitely borrow the color coding idea from that F1 table, though. Denoting top 16, top 64, etc. could be useful. I'm using an Excel spreadsheet to generate the wikitable code, so it's relatively easy to tweak styles. I'll find some time next week and figure this out. AmethystZhou (talk) 18:23, 18 November 2023 (UTC)
Do you know if WST is still doing these pdf lists after the website update? Those are very handy for creating the world rankings article and can be easily archived for reference. Now since the website update, I can't find them anywhere, and the old pdf links are all broken. :( AmethystZhou (talk) 02:51, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
World Snooker have today (23 November) updated the calendar for this season following the cancellation of the Six Red World Championship, with the 2024 World Open dates changing ([12]wst.tv/updated-tournament-calendar-2/) ([13]PDF Calendar).
World Snooker have also kindly provided a Re-ranking points list as well ([14]Re-raking PDF) Steveflan (talk) 20:41, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
Thank you! I added these to the ranking and season page. Although the WST page says the Six-red Championship is postponed, not cancelled, but didn't give a date. The snooker.org page says the same. AmethystZhou (talk) 21:21, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Names of some Championship League articles

Latest comment: 3 months ago15 comments4 people in discussion

Three of the Championship League tournament articles have very odd names. I fully understand how this came about, because of the mess COVID made of the schedule in 2020 and 2021. But now that the dust seems to have settled, it would seem sensible to change these now. I would suggest the following:

That would bring them into line with all the others, except for the round–robin which was a one-off anyway. Anybody agree/disagree?  Alan  (talk) 19:23, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

...sorry - just realised that the 3rd one in my list was renamed a long time ago. Only two then.  Alan  (talk) 19:28, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
Thing is the first two require no disambiguation, because there is no other event. The reason why we disambiguate 2021 Championship League (2021–22 season) is because there is a 2021 Championship League (2020–21 season) article. As these both have the same title, we disambiguate. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 09:56, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
OK - no problem. I just thought it would be tidier.  Alan  (talk) 10:05, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
I totally understand. Article titles are supposed to be succinct, the reason why we don't have (snooker) at the end of every title. They don't have to be internally consistent either. My thoughts are that we should only disambiguate if there is another article with the same name (or, one is incredibly likely to be created). Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 10:23, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
We have a number of articles disambiguated with (snooker), most of them being home nations events. See for example: 2023 Scottish Open (snooker) but the undisambiguated title doesn't exist. I can see Scottish Open offers a reason for why this is, but until any such articles are made for the other sporting events, I feel we shouldn't disambiguate these snooker pages until it becomes a requirement to do so (and there's nothing to suggest those other sports are getting pages tbh). -- CitroenLover (talk) 19:59, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
I kind of agree, but I know the wider wikisphere doesn't so much. There are articles such as 2018 Scottish Open (badminton), as much as we shouldn't need to disambiguate if there is no other article with the same page, it wouldn't be great to have 2018 Scottish Open (snooker) and then the next year have 2019 Scottish Open, because that one is free. Because it's a series of articles, they should probably be as consistent as we can be. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 10:13, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
That being the case, for consistency, should we make the changes to the names of the two articles as suggested in my original post?  Alan  (talk) 10:30, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
Well, the 2019-20 event was never called the 2020 Championship League, so should stay where it is. The second should probably move to (invitational) for consistency. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 10:33, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
I don't think that would be right. The 2019–20 Championship League was the usual format, and I think should therefore become "2020 Championship League (invitational)" to bring it into line with the rest. The 2020 Championship League (2019–20 season) was a one-off round-robin tournament and I think should either be left as it is, or changed to "2020 Championship League (round–robin)" or something similar.  Alan  (talk) 11:56, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
I would have thought we should the name used at the time the event took place. Whether that's consistent or inconsistent with the names of the other similar events doesn't really come into it. Nigej (talk) 12:07, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

No, the 2019-20 Championship League was always known as the 2019-20 Championship League, not known as the 2020 Championship League. See [15] for example. We can't just name it the 2020 event because we just want to. There is two events called the 2020 Championship League, the 2020 Championship League (2019–20 season) and 2020 Championship League (ranking). The first could probably be "invitational", certainly not round-robin, because all Championship League events are round-robins. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 12:08, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

I don't think that's right either. Championship League events are not all round-robins. The "normal" invitational version is a weirdly structured mish-mash of round-robins and play-offs, with a final best-of-five match. The 2020 Championship League (2019–20 season) was a complete one-off, all round-robin, with no "final" as such.  Alan  (talk) 10:05, 24 January 2024 (UTC)
But to call one edition the "round-robin" one, when they all have a round-robin isn't very descriptive. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 12:14, 24 January 2024 (UTC)
That is very true, but its current name isn't descriptive either. I think it needs to be called something that sets it apart from all the others.  Alan  (talk) 12:43, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

Improving the "Performance and rankings timeline" tables in player articles

Latest comment: 3 months ago12 comments6 people in discussion

I'd like to propose some potential improvements to these tables. There are a couple of issues with the current format:

1. Some tournaments changed formats throughout the years, and "1R/2R/3R" may mean different things. The UK Championship for example, the first round in 2015 is the last 128, while the first round in 2023 is the last 32. And in the Northern Ireland Open, the tournament has always had the same format with 128 players. However, in 2020, there's no qualifying and the first round of the main stage is the last 128, but in 2023 there is a qualifying round and the first round of the main stage is the last 64.

2. While we want to differentiate when a player lost in qualifying versus in the main stage, it's also useful to point out which stage the player made it to. I think it's better to use "L128/L64/L32/L16/QF/SF/F/W" instead of "LQ/1R/2R/3R", etc. Basically, treat qualifying and main stage as the same. Although tournaments with limited entry such as the Masters or Players Series should be noted with "DNQ" if the player didn't qualify because of rankings, which is different from "A" or "WD" for absent or withdrawn.

3. The current color-coding is confusing, an actual color gradient would make more sense, such as ColorBrewer. Since it's a multi-hue gradient, it allows smooth color-coding from L128 to L16, while emphasizing later stages in a different color, like so:

A LQ L64 L32 L16 QF SF F W

4. Is it possible to make these tables into a template, to automatically populate the results and Wiki links? Also to sort the tournaments in order of the season, since it changes slightly every season. It'll probably be a lot of work though.

I have taken part of the table from Judd Trump and created a mockup in my sandbox, please take a look! AmethystZhou (talk) 05:53, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

Proposals to revise these tables come up quite regularly, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Snooker/Archives/2023/February#Performance and rankings timeline table, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Snooker/Archives/2022/April#Results tables, but never come to any conclusion. A problem seems to be that making a wholesale revision to the tables tends to lead to long discussions which get nowhere with some people asking whether we need these tables at all, given that they're completely unreferenced. Maybe a step by step approach might make better progress. Nigej (talk) 09:28, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
Long overdue changes, but I'm not sure we are looking at the right bits. First, I agree we need to change from the rounds to how many people are in that round. A first round loss at the Worlds isn't equivalent to a first round loss at the English Open.
I'm not sure I like the colours (not specifically ColorBrew). I get that it gives a visual representation of the events, but it could almost be a heatmap of success, which isn't really what we are here to do.
My biggest issue with this section is that it is almost always uncited (aside from the rankings). I think that should be our number one priority on our bios to cite this section properly. It can be done, but no source covered every player for every season (and definitely not every event). Perhaps we should have a whipround and find out which sources we can use for this purpose.
I've also thought for the longest time that we should ONLY include the ranking events (and only when they are full/semi- ranking events. It's what makes these tables massive. I get that people use these tables to find out all of the information about a player, but I don't think we can offer that service. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 10:10, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
Writing out prose for the career performance will take a LOT of work, and adding the references to individual events to the table will make it much wider. Maybe we can simply add all the references at the end of the table. The older events would be problematic, but snooker.org should be sufficient for recent events. I agree with @Nigej that a step-by-step approach is good for improving these tables, and adding references could be the first one. And while going through these, the table can be updated to the L128/L64 format at the same time.
I personally like the color-coding, though. Without it, the table is very difficult to read (see this). AmethystZhou (talk) 12:44, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
You are right, without the colours it's pretty difficult. I do think sourcing the materials is the most important bit.Shaun Murphy for example is unsourced (aside from the rankings), but see what we've done with say Steve Davis#Performance and rankings timeline works with a reference column. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 12:59, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
The Steve Davis one is great! I forgot about the player pages on snooker.org, and thought each individual entry needed a reference... Now if only WST can provide such convenient sources, but I digress. The additional row at the top for references is perfect. AmethystZhou (talk) 13:01, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
That would be my suggestion, snooker.org only goes back so far, but The CueSport Book of Professional Snooker: The Complete Record & History goes up to 2004, so it overlaps. The only issue as far as I can see is finding all the player numbers for the snooker.org lists if we were to try and automate it. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 13:14, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
Looks like I made the last comments at both the discussions linked by Nigej, si I'm hoping this won't complete a hat trick. Joe Davis, John Spencer (snooker player), Ray Reardon, Terry Griffiths, Cliff Thorburn, Joe Johnson (snooker player), Clive Everton, Tony Knowles (snooker player), and Tony Meo also have referenced performance & rankings timelines. If we are changing, can we also get rid of the subheadings like "Former ranking tournaments" and "Former non-ranking tournaments"? As I've said before, I hate seeing the World Championship or UK championship split across different rows (e.g. at Reardon's article). Might also be a chance to improve accessibility (see towards the end of Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/John_Spencer_(snooker_player)/archive1#Support_from_Harrias). Regards, BennyOnTheLoose (talk) 14:54, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
Agreed with everything Benny said Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 15:38, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
Agree also - easy to add a note to distinguish ranking/non-ranking instead of those separate sub-headings. Also like the suggested L32 format instead of the current one. Not keen on the suggested colour change though; personally I find it hard to distinguish between them and not sure it would pass the contrast guidelines of WP:COLOR. Aware colours aren't necessary but personally think the current colour scheme works fine visually and assists readability. Andygray110 (talk) 17:16, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
I would say one way we can make rhis table better is to do what was done on the season overview: that is to say, split it into multiple tables. I also think we should stop separating tournaments just because one version was non-ranking and then became ranking later, overall it is the same tournament and we could use a cross mark or star to indicate a non-ranking edition.
I don’t know if this next suggestion is possible, but can a cell [ie a ] be split into two within an existing row, when using the mediawiki table syntax? Im thinking that it would help to not make these so unwieldly, as currently if you go to someone like ronnie o’sullivan, the table is massively wide because of a ton of “not held” rowspans over several seasons when the tournament didn’t exist in the first place, making it exceptionally hard to follow.
i agree that this would need proactive minor changes over time. Trying to discuss it all as one overhaul will never go anywhere. Any incremental minor updates to improve the editabilitt of the tables would be a srart. CitroenLover (talk) 17:33, 24 January 2024 (UTC)
Regarding the width problem, I think there are two solutions: 1) make it scrollable with a sticky header column (I don't know how to do the latter), or 2) split it into two tables, each one with a max span of ~ 25 years.
I also agree on splitting the table based on types of tournaments. We can have a main table that has current ranking events, followed by current non-ranking events. In the case that a current ranking event was non-ranking in the past, do not split it into a separate row, but denote on the relevant entry that it was non-ranking for that year. And put all the previous events in a separate table. This way, long-running tournaments like the World Championship or the UK will stay in a single row. AmethystZhou (talk) 00:00, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

List of world number one snooker players

Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I've started a discussion at Talk:List of world number one snooker players#Total days/weeks at number one which may be of interest. Nigej (talk) 14:05, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

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