Talk: The Locker Room

Introduction

I thought a centralized place for discussion of on-wiki issues that apply to broad areas of the project would be useful Powers 21:11, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Some thoughts

My name is Devan, I founded this beast about two years ago... it started to really pick up around a year ago though. At first I really didn't know what to do with it. You see, I sought this Wiki in fear that Wikipedia users would ban all articles for teams below the NHL level... it didn't happen... but I ended up with this wiki on my lap. It took a while to figure out what I wanted to do with it.

With some thought over the past few weeks, I have come to the revelation that hockey history... much like North American Native legends... is word of mouth... folklore... outside of what you can dig out of the odd book or newspaper... most of hockey history is an unsourceable mess, and should be treated as such... heck, catered too. In fact, unless what is written is slanderous or a "Whale of a Tale"... sources shouldn't be our number one agenda here. If needed... we should make a template that should have the old New England Whalers logo on it that says this article has been suspected as a "Whale of a Tale"... it will link to a vote page and that could be our arbitration. If deemed a whale of a tale, the user must provided a reasonable source... if cannot within a certain time frame... then the tale gets cut out. Any thoughts? DMighton 00:48, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Damn, this page has been existing since that long yet I only found out about it yesterday. And here I thought I had indeed sneaked everywhere here...

You're right, references are definitely not as important here as they can be on Wikipedia. I like the idea you propose. I'm just wondering wether we can get enough people to vote when an issue like that arises. There's still so few of us here... --Yannzgob 22:04, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Proposed expansions - scope broadening

Well, the title says it all. I think we should broaden our scope a bit more to include elements of the hockey culture that I think would fit in nicely here, make the wiki more complete as well as potentially attract some new contributors.

Here are the things proposed for inclusion:

Roller hockey (a good idea of Segelrj)
Hockey literature and culture (be it books dedicated to hockey itself or to specific aspects of it, dedicated websites, hockey encyclopediaes, movies, games...)
Collectors corner (hockey cards and other hockey collectables)

The latter two may already fit within our current scope, but I wanted to be sure if other people also thought so. In the case of roller hockey, I believe it'd be a nice complement to what we are building (a couple of the players we have articles here did play pro roller hockey) and fit in pretty well (with the IIHF also being the head federation for inline hockey); additionally, I believe that info for roller hockey is pretty scarce around the net, so we'd become one of the rare specialized places around.

Opinions and other propositions are of course welcome. --Yannzgob 22:29, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

--Yannzgob 22:29, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

I agree the latter two are already within our scope. I'd rather stay away from roller hockey for now. I suppose it's not a big deal to include it, but I'd hate to take time and effort and space away from ice hockey to get roller hockey in. Powers 00:45, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

Disambiguation

Hey, I can't seem to find guidelines on how to disambiguate. Are they written down anywhere? Powers 23:51, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

I don't think they are written down anywhere... lately I've been doing what I figure they do on Wikipedia... Any particular scenario? DMighton 03:57, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes, Wayne Wilson is the name of both the coach of the men's RIT Tigers team and an obscure player who played one season of Junior 'A' hockey in Manitoba. I'm not sure whether to use nationality, position, year of birth, or something else as the disambiguating term. Powers 11:54, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

I think you should use (coach), unless he had a great playing career we don't know about... DMighton 17:48, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

This falls in the Manual of style article, "Special cases" section. There's also a small instruction page on that at homonymy page (yeah, page name is not so instinctive for those who come from Wikipedia. I wanted to have several redirects to that page, but for some reason ended up forgetting them. Maybe I should just rename it altogether). For two players, it would be the year of birth as the disambiguation term; in the present case (that was not listed in the manual), I too would go for (coach) as the disambiguation term. Current article named Wayne Wilson should be renamed Wayne Wilson (player), so that the Wayne Wilson page becomes a disambiguation page linking to the coach's article and to a new article made for the player. There are several such homonymy pages out there, categorized under Category:Homonymy pages.

I guess we really should have all those help pages in one readily available place... and a more complete manual would not hurt either, especially since we've reached 7,000 articles. I don't mind doing this, but so far I kinda feel I impose loads of things, which is not very wiki-esque. --Yannzgob 22:59, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

I wouldn't worry about that; for issues of style, sometimes it's better to have one person just making the decisions. =)

I knew there was a page that describes what to do with homonyms but I couldn't find it, thanks for pointing it out. I note that it doesn't address what to do with two people with the same name but known for different things; is (coach) and (player) okay for that? Powers 23:38, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes, (coach) and (player) would be very fine. That was a case that didn't occur to me when I wrote the homonymy page, I'll add that. Try to make sure that these two Wayne Wilsons are not the same person. HockeyAl does a terrific job, but his articles usually only focus around the leagues he cover, even for people who enjoyed long pro careers afterwards. I'll make the appropriate article renaming for the player article afterward. --Yannzgob 02:42, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Sports template

Hey guys,

I've had this message left on my discussion page:

Hi Yann - I was checking out some Sports wikis and I just wanted to stop in and say how amazing the place is becoming, especially the stuff HockeyAl has been doing lately. I wanted to ask quickly if there's any interest in having your wiki join up with the unified look the Wikia Sports team is doing on some other new Sports wikis. We're going to be rolling out a sports drive program pretty soon to encourage new people to start Sports wikis, and it'd be great to have this wiki as a featured one since it's so well developed. You can see some of the things we've been doing on the Pro Wrestling wiki as well as Houston Rockets wiki to give you an idea of the new look we're trying to promote for Sports wikis. Let me know what you think! Shawn (talk) 21:13, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Personnally, I'm all for us being featured by the Wikia Sports team, but I don't want our wiki to have their unified look. It just takes so much good stuff out of the main page by turning it into a mere news page. Just wanted to have your opinion on the matter before replying to the guy. --Yannzgob 22:59, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

I agree the main page is better as a portal than with the news taking up the majority of the page. To whatever extent we can unify the style besides that, though, I think it's a great idea. Powers 23:38, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Switching to the new parser

Hi,

We are currently making preparations for the next wiki software upgrade. While we expect this to have little or no effect on most wikis, it may cause some pages on this wiki to render poorly. To help reduce or eliminate these issues, please see the Central Forums for more details.

Thanks - sannse (talk) 12:16, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up. DMighton 12:28, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Our list of affected articles (based on their parser test) is here: [1]. I think most of the differences are going to be in complex templates we've imported from Wikipedia. In most cases, I think this change will actually fix some errors. Take, for example Template:Country data USA. The table at the bottom (under "Redirect aliases") displays as HTML code today; after the parser change it looks like it will display as an actual table. Powers 16:27, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Raising IHW a step further

Hey guys,

with the conversation around Danny's questions, I thought it was time for us to sit and think about our weaknesses and try to fix them so that IHW can be raised a step further. As LtPowers so rightfully said, there is still a lot of work to do here.

A small overview of our problems would go like:

- our small number of contributors, which results in:

Many important articles being still red links or weak stubs
Many rosters or statistics being left incomplete or completely outdated

- a lack of a 100% uniform format for the wiki's articles
- there could be a better manual of style and guidelines page

What else would you like to add to the list and above all, how do you think we could improve things? About the lack of contributors especially... what kind of move should we do to attract more people to join our cause? --Yannzgob 22:21, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

It ties into your last two items, but a more robust categorization schema would be helpful. =) And of course, we need a central location from which to access these new formats, styles, and guidelines. Powers 23:21, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, categories.... the mistake was to start creating them without having made a clear outline of how it should have been like beforehand. It quickly got out of hand, especially with two mergings that brought an influx of additional categories that didn't necessarily match the existing ones... And then you had HockeyAl who created a flood of incorrectly categorized articles. Much work has been done manually so far, but there's still a world of changed to be made. A bot like they have on Wikipedia might come in handy for such long and painful tasks.

Back then, I tried to work on the "Community" link to make something good out of it - basically, the central location you suggest. It failed as I found myself unable to make the forums work - they basically are just one page that eternally redirects you to itself whatever you do on it. Creating a new post creates a huge nothing in which there's no place for anything; it won't even show a thread has been created, for no thread at all can be created from them. I didn't know what to do to fix them, so they soon fell into oblivion... --Yannzgob 23:47, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Deletion

Is there a central place to request deletions, or are we small enough that I can just drop a line to an admin? Template:Men's Division I Independent is useless because we have Template:Division I Independent to cover both men and women. Powers 13:05, October 19, 2009 (UTC)

I deleted it. I've run across and emptied a kind of deletion request page over here recently that I didn't know we had - I forgot where it is. I guess it is a pertinent thing to implement, a simple tag that leads to a deletion page. Another very useful thing we need is a bot.... there is a colossal clean-up to do in the categories and the task would require several years by hand only. --Yannzgob 14:35, October 21, 2009 (UTC)

Skin project and thoughts

Guys: What do you think of Wikias New Look? Personally I don't like it as much as the current look but I don't absoultely hate it. I was thinking that one of the areas of the wiki with the most red links is draft picks. What do you guys think about arranging an IHW:Project on NHL and WHA draft picks? In terms of articles we have a ton of excellent articles, and I think we are one of the best hockey reference sites on the web, and the project will only get bigger. Hockeyben 20:23, October 12, 2010 (UTC)

How about you focus on cleaning up the gazillion "articles" you've created first before you focus on getting us bigger? A lot of the European seasons you've put up are so incomplete they should be deleted... maybe that should be more of a focus for you. DMighton 00:50, October 13, 2010 (UTC)

Mexican Hockey League

hello all

I would like to know if the Mexican Hockey League played in 2009/2010 season or was it planned, If played, I would like to get the final standings or the websiteSportsnut2 13:58, November 5, 2010 (UTC) (if possible).Sportsnut2 10:54, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

thank you

Hello Sportsnut2, sorry for the delays.

I found results for the Junior/Senior 2 league:

1 Jurasicos - San Jeronimo 9
2 Osos 2 - San Jeronimo 6
3 Zorros - Leon 5
4 Pumas - Galerias-Reforma 4
5 Titanes - Lomas Verdes 3
6 Halcones - Lomas Verdes 2
7 Pumas - Tamaulipas 1
8 Osos 1 - San Jeronimo 0
9 Toros - Monterrey 0
10 Jaguares - Pabellon Bosques 0
11 Leones - Leon 0

This is pretty much all I could find. Hockey in Mexico was very disorganized until this season (they now have a semi-pro league). I suggest you ask at the folks at [2]. There's a lot of highly knowleadgeable people there, some of whom may know something about it. Hope it helps. --Yannzgob 20:43, December 15, 2010 (UTC)

Imports from Wikipedia

We've had an awful lot of pages imported from Wikipedia. Which is okay, I suppose, but there are some issues.

First, many of these pages are not tagged with the appropriate template that tells readers where the content came from. That makes it a copyright violation -- Wikipedia's licenses require author attribution, and the only way to do that here is with Template:Wikipedia. If that template is missing, we're in violation of the licensing terms.

Second, Wikipedia's pages are very complex and their templates an order of magnitude moreso. That makes for nice-looking pages but complicates maintenance. On Wikipedia, they have lots of people maintaining their pages; we don't. Does anyone here know how Template:Country data USA works? Could they fix it if there was a problem with it? It's even got an erroneous "this high-risk template has been protected" template still at the top, complete with a link to Template:Editprotected (which is, right now, worse than useless -- go ahead, look at it).

Third, it results in silly titles like United States men's national ice hockey team. This is the Ice Hockey Wiki; we don't need "ice hockey" repeated in every article title. United States men's national team would be sufficient and much shorter.

This unconsidered and indiscriminate copying from Wikipedia has resulted in a mess. Formerly clean and easy-to-read pages like College Hockey America are now messes of imported formatting and templates and irrelevant links. These sorts of mass imports were a bad idea, and I'd like to suggest we don't do it anymore, and we start fixing the problems I've identified above.

-- Powers 18:53, May 27, 2011 (UTC)

Well, any ideas? The rule initially was that anything had to have the template on it if it came from Wikipedia. Is there anyway to make a list of all that needs to be tagged with this template?

I have no clue what is going on with the country data stuff... but it seems like something that needs to be tweaked.

I think the "mess" disappeared about a month ago when his sockpuppet got caught fiddling on my talk page... so I see this as a situation that is fixable and won't get worse... DMighton 04:45, May 28, 2011 (UTC)

Whose sock? If you think the flood of Wikipedia imports has abated, then maybe there's no big problem. It's just something I've noticed over the last several months. Our college hockey articles -- which I believe were originally imported from the College Hockey News Wiki -- were sparse but they had a charm to them that the dry encyclopedic articles from Wikipedia don't. That's not to say we should never import from Wikipedia -- I did just that to start the Rochester Americans page here, for instance. But I don't care for overwriting our content with articles copied from Wikipedia (as happened to several College Hockey articles). Powers 23:41, May 28, 2011 (UTC)

Can't really say... I don't mean to be mysterious... but I can't point fingers without proof...

I've asked for input on the wikipedia issue from Fanofpucks... he is our editing ace... I think he'll have some good ideas on how we can keep this from happening again -- he's the man. I too am not a fan of overwriting, especially when we had good original content... and I would implore anyone to revert overwrites and update the previous article... no offence to anyone who overwrites... but it is a poor practice when we could be original. DMighton 01:05, May 29, 2011 (UTC)

Well, sorry for joining the debate late - lots of things happening in my life lately and they sadly eat up much of my free time I could spend here.

The massive Wikipedia imports and its consequences have been a problem for a very long time actually. It all started with the merger with the NHL Wiki, which was itself 100% Wikipedia imports. It took ages of boring work to delete the duplicate pages it resulted in and fix the articles so they fit our standards better rather than Wikipedia's, especially on categories and templates, and it's not even complete yet and to remove irrelevant links in the text - it's quite possible that I missed many. I had also started a grand clean up of categories for the whole Wiki that has yet to come to completion, time and ressources lacking.

The problem expanded as Fanofpucks imported quite a lot of Wikipedia pages too at some point in his editing career, sometimes duplicating already existing articles - the United States men's national ice hockey team is actually a younger page on this Wiki than American National Team, originally intended for that purpose. At quick glance, it seems like a lot of national team pages have been duplicated this way, and it might be true for other pages as well. Chances are the aforementioned exemple of the US national team occured as it was linked as such in an article taken from Wikipedia, which got "blued" by importing the corresponding article from Wikipedia - which in result just expands the problem ad infinitum.

The ease of importing articles is also creating another, more pervasive problem - by easily and rapidly increasing our article volume with such imports, we find ourselves in a position where we're too few to maintain all those articles, in such a dynamic world as hockey. There's nothing yet here in articles on the Jets' return, which is already bad, but even worse is, lots of pages are several years frozen in time because no one edited them in a long time. That does no good to our reputation and our status as a reference takes a pretty big hit there. I'm all for stopping, or at least strongly diminishing, importing of Wikipedia articles - I (really think I) had actually mentioned in the manual of style long ago it was not encouraged.

Powers, "Country data" templates are useful as inclusions in the flagicon template. You can quickly and painlessly add a nation flag besides a name using the code {{flagicon|XXX}}, where XXX is a standard 3-letters code (used by the International Olympic Committee) to designate a country (USA, CAN, FIN, SUI, etc). That template prevents the trouble of fully writing the link to the flag whenever one wants to plug it in a text or table (very useful with international hockey articles, or even just rosters), while automatically adjusting its size and position so it doesn't look bad. You could, for instance, in a table, have a row that reads "

Canada", and which code is {{flagicon|CAN}} [[Canada]] instead of [[File:Flag_of_Canada.svg.jpg|24px|border]] [[Canada]], which will yield a result rather alike, but is longer to type, not counting the fact that you have to double-check every time the exact name of the flag pic used so it displays well. That was.... an idea imported from Wikipedia ;) The semiprotected template is indeed useless at best, though. We'd need a bot for mass-editing, that'd help remove such kind of useless artefacts in articles and solve a part of the mess. Though I have tried long ago, I have no knowledge whatsoever of how to make one. --Yannzgob 04:15, July 7, 2011 (UTC)

This is very nice to accuse me of wrongdoing by importing Wikipedia articles but there is something missing here. We still needed articles on the Atlanta Thrashers, for example, but whether they were written by one of us or imported from Wikipedia they still would not have been updated due to a shortage of people. To have no article on the Atlanta Thrashers, an NHL team, would have been unthinkable.

I tried to edit every imported article both in content and category. I also tried to add to some of the articles so that the Wikipedia part was only a base for further expansion. See 1963-64 NHL season. I hoped that other editors would do the same. I still want to add extensively to many of the imported articles.

If there are errors in my edits (and I would be the first to admit that I am far from perfect) then fix them. I have fixed errors in my and others' articles with no fanfare.

Categories - I have changed many of the articles to get the categories to adhere to Yannzgob's standards.

Fanofpucks 20:46, July 7, 2011 (UTC)