Talk:Wheelchair basketball classification

Merger proposal

I do not think that 1 point player, 2 point player, 3 point player, 4 point player, or 4.5 point player need to be separate articles. Instead, they should all be described in this article. 2601:644:101:9616:6D32:1EC3:EB3B:CD32 (talk) 07:13, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

The article was created as a result of a joint workshop with the the Australian Paralympic Committee and Wikimedia Australia held at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra in November 2011. The layout is consistent across sports, including the Para-alpine skiing classification set which is a good topic. Experience during the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London confirmed the Australian Paralympic Committee's position; the articles on classification attracted more hits than the corresponding ones on the athletes themselves. Thus, the normal Wikipedia reader search term is the classification. What are your reasons for consolidation? Hawkeye7 (talk) 20:21, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

I don't see how the Australian Paralympic Committee's opinion is relevant here. The relevant Wikipedia policy is WP:PAGEDECIDE. It seems to me that these different classifications are not in themselves notable topics, but merely different aspects of the main topic covered at this article. Currently the different classifications contain a high degree of repeated information. Additionally, presenting the information in a single article would allow the reader to compare the different levels without having to navigate to multiple articles. The individual classification pages can be converted to redirects to aid searching and simplify linking in other articles. The main reason I could see for having multiple articles would be that combining them into one would result in an excessively long article, but this doesn't seem to be the case here. 2601:644:101:9616:7D66:5163:7326:866E (talk) 08:36, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

• Merge per 2601:644:101:9616:7D66:5163:7326:866E. The separate class articles don't make sense in isolation, even their titles are meaningless and the repeated context and background content in each one is redundant. Each seperate class could easily be described in a single paragraph within the main article. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 08:38, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

This is a very interesting and relevant discussion. During the Paralympic Games or specific sporting events, the classification articles are widely accessed. For example, on the day of the T38 100m athletics final at the London Paralympics, the T38 classification article received more than 35,000 hits. (The growth of Paralympic sport indicates that the figures for London will be greatly surpassed in Rio.) It seems intuitive that people hear or see the name of the classification while watching an event and google that name - for example: "T38", or: "1 point player". Wikipedia provides a more comprehensive and 'accessible' explanation of classifications than (for example), the International Paralympic Committee's own 'Explanatory Guide to Classification'. As a person with some experience in this area, I believe that at present most of the Wikipedia classification articles are still quite incomplete and require considerable work. For example, ensuring that each article is illustrated with images of prominent athletes in that class would assist greatly, as would diagrams that are available in sport-specific classification guides for classifiers. Many of the articles would also benefit from a more comprehensive explanation of the impact of the impairments covered by that class on the capacity of the athletes in that class to perform the skills of the sport, compared with athletes in other classes. This would make articles longer than they are currently. I can see that the comparative element might lead to the idea of combining the details of each class article into the broader article for the sport. However, in the end, I think that it is preferable to retain the current system - there are general articles for people wanting an overview of classification in that sport, and there are class-specific articles which give more detail than can be reasonably covered in a general article. The pageview statistics seem to back this up. For example, in athletics, the general classification article was accessed 984 times in October 2015, and the individual class articles were accessed a combined total of 10,457 times, with the T44 classification article by itself accessed 947 times. In wheelchair basketball, the individual class articles were collectively accessed 971 times for the month, and the general wheelchair basketball classification article was accessed just 297 times. It is obvious which ones are being accessed by Wikipedia users. The figures seem to clearly support the argument for maintaining the current structure, but improving the articles.Tony.naar (talk) 07:35, 10 November 2015 (UTC)