User talk:Dirtlawyer1/Archives/2012/January

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It seems like you have been alphabetizing cats on the 1978 & 79 Consensus AA templates. The older ones I have looked at have needed to be alphabetized. I have yet to look at 81, 82, 85, 86, 91, 96, 09 and 11. Have you already done those too?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 21:54, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

Infobox

In your email you mentioned an interest in cleaning up infoboxes for CAA athletes. I am wondering about your thoughts on AA detail like I have for athletes like David Molk, Brandon Graham or Sherron Collins?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 07:54, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Tony, I have several thoughts . . .

First, we should be using the same formatting for college football player infobox honors that we use for NFL player infobox honors; specifically, we should state the name of the award, followed by a parenthetical with the year of the award. (The year of the award should not precede the name of the award, as now seems to have become common for the last couple of CFB seasons.) Furthermore, multiple awards of the same honor should be combined in the same line item and represented by the years of the multiple awards in the same parenthetical. For All-American honors, the years of the awards should be linked to the relevant year-specific College Football All-America Team articles (just like we do for All-Pro and Pro Bowl honors).

That's the formula, but there's still quite a bit of art and editorial judgment in deciding what "honors" to include in a given player's infobox. There is no WP:CFB or WP:NFL rule that requires every honor received by the player must be included in the infobox; the section is called "highlights" for a reason. When a player has received a lot of college honors, the trend seems to be to include a section link in the infobox with a full list of honors presented in a separate section in the main body text. This seems to work well when the player has received more than five or six college honors, followed by a lot more NFL honors. Compare, for example, the Percy Harvin article where this was done, and the Emmitt Smith article where it was not. The Emmitt Smith infobox has become ridiculously long, and would probably benefit from this technique.

Also, when a player was a first-team all-conference selection, a first-team All-American, and won one or more national awards, it strikes me as unnecessary and a little bit over-the-top to include his high school honors, freshman-year honors, preseason honors, preseason watch lists for national awards, or the fact that the player was a semifinalist or finalist for a national award. It's appropriate to include this information in the article's main body text, but the infobox should be reserved for the highlights, right? Why clutter up a strong statement of top awards and honors with trivia? All it does is make it harder for the reader to discern the top awards and honors the player actually received. If the guy won the Heisman or was a consensus All-American as a senior, does anyone really care that he was on somebody's Heisman watch list as a junior or that he was on the conference all-freshman second team? Like I said, it's supposed to be a highlights list, and deciding what honors and awards get included in the infobox requires editorial judgment.

Those are my thoughts on point, Tony. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 14:02, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

• It sounds to me like you have given this so much thought that you may want to put infobox content into a 10pt scale and help us prioritize what should be included. Almost kidding, might be useful. Something like 10-Pro HOF, Heisman, 9-Canadian/College HOF, Super Bowl championships, career/single-season Pro all-time records (yards, rec, touchdowns, sacks, ints), 8-Pro statistical champions (yards, rec, TDs, sacks, int), Special teams Pro all-time career records (FGs, return TDs) 4- Bowl Coalition Conference career/single season records (yards, rec, touchdowns, sacks, ints), 2- Freshman All-American, High School All-American, 1 Preseason watchlist. Maybe a bit much, but I am not sure what outranks what.
• You also went well beyond my question and sort of missed what I was asking. Should AA just say All-American or should selector detail be presented like I have done.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 16:35, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Whoops. Sorry about that, Tony. In answer to your more specific question, I do not include the specific AA selectors in the infobox, but I often include them in the main body text. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 16:55, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Do you remove it if found or just not seek it when adding content?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 17:27, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

• Check your email.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 00:41, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

CAA templates

It has been 5 days for the 2009 guys and there are no issues. I am thinking about doing the 2011 guys.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 16:32, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

"free agent in the National Football League"

Articles should not have "is a free agent in the National Football League" in their leads. Players not on an NFL team are also not on a CFL, AFL, or IFL team, and thus this should not be included at all. Eagles 24/7 (C) 18:59, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Greetings, E. If you looked at the before-and-after diff, you can see I was trying to fix the even more ambiguous pre-existing lede. I'll tweak it again. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 19:01, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Looks good now, thanks. Eagles 24/7 (C) 19:11, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

This should be discussed at WP:NFL. However, I am not averse to saying "is a free agent" or "is a professional football player most recently affiliated with team x".--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 19:33, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

mos on ordinals

Regarding your edit summary at Wes Chandler, WP:ORDINAL says "numbers greater than nine are commonly rendered in numerals". While not "required" as you say it seems to be common practice.—Bagumba (talk) 20:33, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

B, the full quotation of the relevant part of WP:MOSNUM is: "As a general rule, in the body of an article, single-digit whole numbers from zero to nine are spelled out in words; numbers greater than nine are commonly rendered in numerals, or in words if they are expressed in one or two words." It's one of the most misapplied MOS provisions; I see it cited all the time for supposed "rules" that it simply does not require or even state. FYI, I always use the short-forms for one- and two-digit ordinals in tables and infoboxes because of the space limitations, but usually not in text----unless the article already consistently uses all short forms, and then I just defer to the article's existing formatting and style patterns. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 21:03, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Neither is technically wrong. I've just seen more instances of "13 receptions" vs "thirteen receptions". No worries, was just trying to be bold. Good day.—Bagumba (talk) 21:26, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

endashes

Why are you changing the endashes to & ndash;? (The space is there to prevent the changing to –) Eagles 24/7 (C) 19:07, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

E, as I understand it, either HTML code or the ASCII character are both accepted by MOS. That having been said, I usually use code on pages I maintain because, like most people, I can't distinguish among the ASCII hyphen character, the ASCII ndash character and the ASCII mdash character in the Wikipedia edit window. On pages I don't maintain/monitor (i.e. the vast majority of non-Gator articles I touch), I usually go with whatever the established pattern for the particular article is. If it's a mixed bag when I arrive, I will generally uniformly convert to code. Sorry if I've stepped on any of the articles you maintain with the ASCII ndash character; please feel free to roll back any such with prejudice. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 19:22, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I was just wondering. Eagles 24/7 (C) 19:33, 24 January 2012 (UTC)