Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football/Finland task force

Finnish League and Cup articles

I am making contact with those Editors that take an active interest in Finnish football on English Wikipedia.

For a long time I have been happy to work on Finnish football on Wikipedia without making contact with other Finnish football enthusiasts - basically I like preparing articles / undertaking tasks that interest me and contact with others has not been important. However recently some of my work was changed by a Wikipedia Reviewer and this has led me to question what approach I should be following and indeed what approach would other Finnish football enthusiasts wish to adopt?

The current issue I face is the naming of Finnish Football League and Cup pages. I have adopted the approach that we should always be using the Finnish name in the title, for example 2007 Ykkönen and 2001 Veikkausliiga. However, I am aware that words like Mestaruussarja mean very little to most English speaking Wikipedia users. I therefore have included the English name in the title as well in recent pages, for example, 1936 Mestaruussarja – Finnish League Championship, 1938 Suomensarja – Finnish League Division 2 and 2000 Kakkonen – Finnish League Division 2. I thought that this approach might be a suitable naming convention until the Reviewer changed "2012 Suomen Cup - Finnish Cup" back to 2012 Finnish Cup.

The basic question I am asking is whether Finnish League and Cup articles should have a Finnish or English title or some form of hybrid?

I provide examples below:

Finnish Title English Title Hybrid Title 2012 Veikkausliiga 2012 Finnish Championship 2012 Finnish Veikkausliiga 2012 Kolmonen 2012 Finnish Division 3 2012 Finnish Kolmonen 2012 Suomen Cup 2012 Finnish Cup 2012 Finnish Suomen Cup 2012 Suomen Liigacup 2012 Finnish League Cup 2012 Finnish Liigacup 1938 Maakuntasarja 1938 Finnish Division 3 1938 Finnish Maakuntasarja 1954 Suomensarja 1954 Finnish Division 2 1954 Finnish Suomensarja 1970 II divisioona 1970 Finnish Division 2 1970 Finnish II divisioona 1986 III divisioona 1986 Finnish Division 3 1986 Finnish III divisioona 1997 Ykkönen 1997 Finnish Division 1 1997 Finnish Ykkönen

I have read Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English) and Wikipedia:Article titles but have not reached a firm conclusion yet on the best way forward in establishing a consistent approach. The issue does matter with respect to the corrections I must make to existing pages and the tens of pages yet to be prepared. It could also carry implications for some of the articles that you currently contribute to.

I think that the matter would best be addressed on a proper basis and encourage that the issue is considered on the Talk Page of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Football/Finland task force. If the matter is of concern to you as well, please add your name to the list of participants on the main page.

You may also wish to comment on the project structure that I have prepared.

Kind regards - (Finnish Gas (Finnish Gas 11:45, 23 February 2012 (UTC)).

The naming convention should depend on what the English-language (reliable) sources refer to it as. Having looked at 1989 Mestaruussarja then the only source (RSSSF) refers to both the Finnish title and an English 'translation', so it is difficult to be definitive about what it should be called. Are there other English sources referring to the league? Eldumpo (talk) 19:14, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

The European Football Yearbook 1988/89 (Mike Hammond) just refers to "League Championship" but does so for all countries in the publication - so should therefore be discounted.

Football in Europe 1990-91 (David Clayton and Jan Buitenga) refers to "Finland Futisliga 1990" for the Mestaruussarja while the second and third tier leagues are in English. The national cup is "Finland Suomen Cup 1990". There is little consistency in this source.

Soccerway - Goes back to 1994 and refers to Veikkausliiga, Ykkönen, Kakkonen (2000), Suomen Cup (2004) and League Cup (2005).

As one goes back in time (pre-1970) the position becomes even more complicated, with few if any English sources. (Finnish Gas (Finnish Gas 19:53, 23 February 2012 (UTC)).

I appreciate it is not always easy to find sufficient sources, although if there is a lack of (or none) English-language sources, then it is appropriate to consider Finnish sources. We need to be careful about coming up with 'made- up' English names just because we feel the own-language source may not be an 'obvious' title. Regards. Eldumpo (talk) 22:52, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

I do some editing on Norwegian football, and I must say articles about Norwegian football have the same problem. Even though the top league Tippeligaen, have it's official (sponosored) name as article name, the season articles have contructed names like 2011 Norwegian Premier League (Premier League is not English for "Eliteserien", which is the unofficial name, and I don't know where it came from), 1961-62 Norwegian Main League ("Hovedserien" directly translated) or 1937-38 League of Norway ("Norgesserien" translated). Your hybrid titles looks very reasonable to me, and maybe I'll give it a try to implement them into Norwegian football aswell. (2012 Norwegian Tippeligaen e.g.) Mentoz86 (talk) 15:14, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

It would be interesting to hear your views on the initial proposal by Apanuggpak (talk) below. Kind regards - (Finnish Gas (Finnish Gas 15:12, 24 February 2012 (UTC)).

As stated above, guidance does not encourage the use of made-up article titles, and it is not clear what the basis is for Apan's list. Has it been produced following examination of sources? Regards. Eldumpo (talk) 15:27, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

In my opinion, the Finnish names should be kept. I can think of no good reason why they should be changed. Todorov-FIN (talk) 23:29, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Response from Pyhäinhäväistys (talk)

Hi. My humble opinion is that the Finnish names of the competitions should be used whenever possible. So Suomen Cup instead of Finnish Cup, Kolmonen instead of Division 3 etc. When you look at the Spanish football league system article here for example, they also have all the competition names in Spanish.

And yes, we've "met" at FF2 previously. :) And thanks for the help with Mikkelin Kissat's season to season positions by the way!

(sorry if this is in the wrong section, I really suck at using Wikipedia)

Pyhäinhäväistys (talk) 03:43, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi. Many thanks for your response which I will add to the Talk Page of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Football/Finland task force article. This will enable others to see your comments. I was quietly frustrated that I could not provide the V divisioona details for Mikkelin Kissat for 1984!

I have set up the Wikipedia:WikiProject Football/Finland task force to try to encourage good practice. For the Group to be viable it needs to have 3 or 4 members to start with. Is it possible for me to add your name to the participants. I just need a bit of advice now and again.

Kind regards (Finnish Gas (Finnish Gas 13:50, 24 February 2012 (UTC)).

Finnish Football - Response from Apanuggpak (talk)

Hi,

and many thanks for your message.

Off hand I can just say the following:

Finnish Cup and Finnish League Cup are in my opinion perfectly good names for articles in English. Adding any Finnish will not make the subject matter any clearer to anyone, so I would urge you to stick to these names, which I believe are the ones that have been in use in Wikipedia.

The various “leagues”, however, are an entirely different matter. I do share your view that the Finnish name of a particular “sarja” (‘series’, literally), as we call them in Finnish (not “liiga” ‘league’), is not appropriate in English, because it doesn’t give anyone outside our language area any kind of clue as to what is in the article, not even that is about some sports, let alone football.

I might argue for some kind of hybrid names, but it is difficult to say off hand what they should be. That might depend on the history of the Finnish football system, and I’m not the expert on that. I may be that the structure and most of the league names have been constant since whenever, but I can’t be sure about that.

You may be aware of the match fixing scandal in Finland, which was again in the papers today, I think. It might have a bearing on these questions (see below).

“Veikkaus” means some sort of betting (“minä veikkaan” should more appropriately be translated as ‘I surmise’ or ‘I think (this (whatever) will happen)’, but it came to mean also predicting match results in the system that is run by Veikkaus), and I have thought for quite some time that “Veikkausliiga” as the title of a Wikipedia article is not appropriate, at least on the following grounds:

• We are not an advertising bureau or agency, and we should not be promoting a company (such as Veikkaus) that sponsors a particular league. I think this is the case with e.g. The Championship and the Football Conference in England, and also the League Cup.
• Regardless of the fact whether the top flight has been called “Mestaruussarja” or “SM-sarja” or “Futisliiga” or “Veikkausliiga”, what has been settled in it is the Finnish championship, and since whenever, who had the right to participate in the European Cup. The change from “SM-sarja” to “Futisliiga” appears not have been as dramatic as what you had in England, and thus in my opinion a total change in the names of Wikipedia articles is not very well grounded.
• Sponsorships change, and if I remember correctly, Veikkaus was at least considering withdrawing from the sponsorship relation with the league, due to our match fixing scandal. I don’t know the latest on that, however. So it is possible that the same organisation will continue with a different name, but Wikipedia articles on the same thing should optimally always have the same name.

I took a look at the Finnish football league system, and the English names would seem quite appropriate to me. (I mean the ones that appear in the article, not what is in the code left of the symbol |.

Looking at that article, my initial proposal would be the following:

Finnish Title My proposals for English titles 2012 Veikkausliiga 2012 Finnish Championship (Veikkausliiga) 2012 Kolmonen 2012 Finnish Division 3 (Kolmonen) 2012 Suomen Cup 2012 Finnish Cup 2012 Suomen Liigacup 2012 Finnish League Cup 1938 Maakuntasarja 1938 Finnish Division 3 (Maakuntasarja) 1954 Suomensarja 1954 Finnish Division 2 (Suomensarja) 1970 II divisioona 1970 Finnish Division 2 (II divisioona) 1986 III divisioona 1986 Finnish Division 3 (III divisioona) 1997 Ykkönen 1997 Finnish Division 1 (Ykkönen)

But as I said, I don’t really know much of anything about things in the more distant history, such as having to do with Maakuntasarja (‘Provincial series’ or (‘Provincial league’)

I do go to the Finnish Sports Museum from time to time, and we even have a bit of cooperation, I mean I’ve helped them out a bit, but mostly it’s them that help me, such as compiling Mixu’s statistics, which I did. But I’m off to warmer continents soon, and I won’t have a chance to go there until late May or early June. But it might be possible for me to bring this exchange of ideas to the attention of their football expert. But even so, I probably won’t get any feedback from them until I’m back in this country. But I do think that they would not be indifferent about what is in Wikipedia on Finnish sports. (Actually, I know this for a fact from my encounters with them. Of course, they are doing original research, which is a priority over things such as Wikipedia.)

By the way, I just looked at Mikkelin Kissat. How much of the Finnish language do you know? I’m not doubting your abilities, just curious about how much Finnish stuff you might be able to incorporate into English Wikipedia.

Yours sincerely, Apanuggpak (talk) 23:02, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

Many thanks for your detailed and prompt response. I will add the Finnish content of your message to the Talk Page of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Football/Finland task force article. This will enable others to also enjoy your informed comments. I really like your initial proposals. However, I do have some concerns about the use of brackets in titles but note that Wikipedia:Article titles allows brackets in certain circumstances - to avoid duplicate titles. At the moment I will give others the opportunity to participate in the debate.

I certainly have had quiet reservations about the Veikkaus element of Veikkausliiga - for a number of years in the late 1970s I received the weekly betting paper Veikkaus Lotto (when it was very cheap)!

My big Finnish football project is to provide comprehensive coverage of league tables of the top 3 or 4 tiers back to 1930. I have copies of the Jalkapallokirja back to 1975 (1974 tables). The big gap in coverage is that the last III divisioona tables appeared in the 1995 publication (1994 tables). They appear again next as Kolmonen on the internet in 2000 but coverage was patchy. There is the void in coverage for 1995-99. Would the Finnish Sports Museum have this type of information? My proposed starting point is to visit the Finnish Football Association offices this summer.

My Finnish is very limited - but there is a common language in formatting brief football pages. I would like to ensure that every Finnish club down to Nelonen (and lower if they have entered the Finnish Cup) have their own short Wikipedia page. I propose to use the same format that I have used in Sweden where I have prepared or reformatted in the region of 800 pages - Category:Football clubs in Sweden and Category:Seasons in Swedish football competitions. I cannot speak any Swedish!!

Pyhäinhäväistys has made a lot of additions to the Mikkelin Kissat article. My Finland project will probably take a number of years.

One final point - I have set up the Wikipedia:WikiProject Football/Finland task force to try to encourage good practice. For the Group to be viable it needs to have 3 or 4 members to start with. Is it possible for me to add your name to the participants. I just need a bit of advice now and again.

Kind regards (Finnish Gas (Finnish Gas 12:28, 24 February 2012 (UTC)).

Hi,

I’m very pleased to receive another message from you and to see that there is at least someone out there who seems to appreciate my efforts concerning English football.

I think I have a few thoughts to add now. First of all my proposals. You’re correct about the brackets (I grew up used to the term “parentheses”), and as you can guess, I’ve come across a fair number of those. For example in the name of one of the topscorers in the infobox of the 1969–70 Football League article, some Jones I think it was. But the main thing is that there should be some graphic element between the English bit in the title and the Finnish bit. For example as in below:

Finnish Title	My proposals for English titles
2012 Veikkausliiga	2012 Finnish Championship — Veikkausliiga
2012 Kolmonen	2012 Finnish Division 3 — Kolmonen
2012 Suomen Cup	2012 Finnish Cup
2012 Suomen Liigacup	2012 Finnish League Cup
1938 Maakuntasarja	1938 Finnish Division 3 — Maakuntasarja
1954 Suomensarja	1954 Finnish Division 2 — Suomensarja
1970 II divisioona	1970 Finnish Division 2 — II divisioona
1986 III divisioona	1986 Finnish Division 3 — III divisioona
1997 Ykkönen	1997 Finnish Division 1 — Ykkönen

Or perhaps you can come up with some other symbol or string of symbols or characters or whatever. Just something that visually separates the two languages there.

I wondered for a while what you meant when you said that these decisions have a bearing on articles I have contributed to, but then it dawned upon me that you must have meant the articles on Jari, Sami and Mixu (I think there are no more than these three). What I thought is that it would be important, and certainly handy, if what the reader sees in the statistics is things like Kolmonen. The code behind the link could have the real name to the left of the character “|”, and Kolmonen to the right of it. This way the wikitables would remain manageable, and even if English speakers would not readily understand this, it would be a non-ambiguous way of presenting this info to the readers, and they would find out what it means by clicking on the link and going to the article in question. I would say that I would strongly recommend adopting a practice like this.

One thing to understand is that the word “sarja” literally means a series, such as in the Summit Series in ice hockey. Only the winners of the Mestaruussarja type of sarjas (remember, <j> is pronounced as [y]) were ever champions in Finland. If you played in some lower kind of sarja, and you won it, you were just winners, but not champions. This is something that Mixu had to explain to us when he guided Cowdenbeath to the championship of the Scottish Third Division. So if it is the case that in the British Isles the word “league” always goes together with the idea that the winners are champions, then in my opinion one should not use the word “league” when you are talking about pre-Veikkausliiga (or actually pre-Futisliiga) sarja-type of competitions. I don’t know if this has some bearing on what you are doing (possibly it will have), but this is an interesting bit of British/Irish football culture that was introduced to us only rather recently. But I won’t be able to tell you whether the winner of, say Kolmonen, will call themselves champions these days. I have some doubts about that.

Now that I’m looking at your user page and your description of the tasks you have taken upon yourself (which is quite impressive), I think this pondering about the words “league” and “sarja” might be of interest to you.

Anyway, as I mentioned I’ve done some cooperation with some very knowledgeable people over here: Vesa Tikander of the Museum, and Markku Kasila, who is the statistics wizard over here. (Even Vesa relies on him, and he is, of course, one of the compilers of the book Pelimiehet. He lives in Valkeakoski, which seems to be a familiar name (and place) to you. (My grandma was from Sääksmäki, the “parent parish” of Valkeakoski, and I’ve always had a soft spot for FC Haka because of that.) These two people would certainly have good ideas about naming the various divisions or whatnot in Finnish football. I might be able to engage them and get some input from them over e-mail, even from the southern hemisphere (provided I remember to take their contact info with me). I’m inclined to believe that they would have access to the sarja tables you are missing. I suspect that they would even be printed in the magazine Veikkaaja. Although I’m not familiar with its history, I must say. And I don’t know if much betting (I mean veikkaaminen — surmising (?)) has been going on with regard to Kolmonen.

So if you’re coming over, I think the Museum would be your first priority. They have a photocopying machine which also does TIFF or PDF documents and sends then to you chosen e-mail address. I’ve used that quite a bit, and I’m afraid I’ve ruined one of their Rothmans books doing so. You might also try to get into contact with Markku Kasila.

And yes, I suppose you could add me to the Finland task force, although I probably won’t be able to do anything very substantial. But I might be able to help here and there, especially in matters of translation, even from the southern hemisphere, I think, though only occasionally.

Yours sincerely, Apanuggpak (talk) 21:47, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi again. Just a short reply this time as I have done very little Wikipedia work on articles over the last few days and have loss that current sense of achievement.

Again I like your proposals "1938 Finnish Division 3 — Maakuntasarja" etc but am concerned how they relate to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English) and Wikipedia:Article titles. It is an issue that needs to be addressed quickly by our Wikipedia:WikiProject Football/Finland task force. I think that we possibly might make a case that Finland is a special case as most people would have little understanding of page titles like Maakuntasarja, Ykkönen etc. and therefore the incorpation of English within the title can be justified. There is also the issue of categorisation as if "Finnish" comes in the title after the year all the Finnish articles should sit together in the category listings. By the way thanks for the tip about not using the word "League" for divisions below the Mestaruussarja.

My sincere appreciation for the details and contacts at the Finnish Sports Museum. I have now looked at their website and can see Jalkapallokirja catalogued year on year. I will visit there in late July / early August. Thanks! I also hope that they have copies of the Finnish District Football Associations anniversary publications. I do not know the book Pelimiehet and will look up that one with interest.

Thanks for letting me add you to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Football/Finland task force - it is much appreciated. Kind regards - (Finnish Gas (Finnish Gas 15:20, 27 February 2012 (UTC)).

Comments from Reckless182

My opinion is that we should use the native names for both leagues and competitions unless a competition has an English name which is more common than it's Finnish name. WP:USEENGLISH says:

"It can happen that an otherwise notable topic has not yet received much attention in the English-speaking world, so that there are too few English sources to constitute an established usage. Very low Google counts can but need not be indicative of this. If this happens, follow the conventions of the language in which this entity is most often talked about (German for German politicians, Turkish for Turkish rivers, Portuguese for Brazilian towns etc.)."

I believe that this rule/guideline applies to our case and thus the names of the competitions should remain in Finish. This is actually already in use on WP if you we look at 2011–12 Copa del Rey and 2011–12 Coppa Italia to take some highly notable examples. I'm uncertain what to do with lower leagues or cups with similar names, see 2012 Division 1 and 2012 Supercupen for articles that probably should be renamed as to avoid confusion. We should try to establish a naming convention across WP as to avoid inconsistency and confusion. --Reckless182 (talk) 17:16, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Discussion?

Was this task force ever proposed and discussed at WT:FOOTY? I'm sure you guys are willing to put in the work to get Finnish football articles up to a good standard, but task forces really should be discussed before they are created. – PeeJay 12:07, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

• My apologies for not following the correct procedure - I will prepare a short proposal for WT:FOOTY. (Finnish Gas (Finnish Gas 12:30, 14 March 2012 (UTC)).

Here we go!

This thing is finally up and running properly. Now you can tag articles with finland=yes and finland-importance= using the Template:WP Football. The founder of this task force and their companions are unfortunately long gone, and no one else seems to have engaged to fill their void. But there has been a good amount of tagging in the past almost two years, when the template had code for tagging but no statistics was available and almost no categories for it existed, so I have good hopes that this will catch on. I am not going to become an official member myself, I have other endeavours to pursue, but I will keep this in mind. Cheers! --Mango från yttre rymden (talk) 06:04, 19 July 2022 (UTC)