User talk:Me? I'm not really here/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

List of football stadiums in England

Thanks for the update on this - I've done the 'big summer update' the last couple of years and it really is quite a cumbersome chore, so much appreciated! Super Nintendo Chalmers (talk) 10:32, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

• @Super Nintendo Chalmers: LMAO ... well, believe me, if I had fully known what I was getting into before I started my edits I don't think I would have done so; I would have just left the seasonal updates to some other sucker person such as yourself. :) It wasn't as if I intended to update all the teams when I started; I thought I would just update the Premier League and Championship club stadia info.; and leave all the other clubs for someone more familiar with the lower leagues than myself to complete. Which is why I ended my first edit after updating only the largest 70 stadia. When I realized I had made my Notts County error and had to make a further edit to correct it, I thought perhaps I should go the extra distance and complete the League One club stadia too - having updated the 70 largest stadia I was only 7 clubs short of achieving that. So I pushed on with a further edit without realizing how far down the list Fleetwood Town's stadium fell - hence my 107 stadia cutoff for my third edit. When I realized I was now only half a dozen stadia short of completing the main list (the ones prior to "Other Listed Stadiums") I thought "what the hell - let's be done with it"! Talk about pulling a loose thread and seeing things unravel... by the end, it had indeed became a most "cumbersome chore" and all I could think about was how silly I was not to have quit (after just the first 70) when I had more than achieved my initial goal. :(

Anyway, thanks for taking the courtesy and trouble to drop me your line of appreciation. You're very welcome. It is my experience that most Wikipedia editors are simply egotistically confrontational and boorish, which is why I stopped editing from my user accounts and now just do occasional updates as an anonymous IP user when I think I can do a quick fix (which, as I learned to my cost, this article update was most definitely NOT!). Your unsolicited courtesy was very refreshing and much appreciated. And I'll now happily leave the "summer updating" of all the other lists of English football stadia on Wikipedia in your very capable hands. :) 66.16.144.18 (talk) 18:45, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

List of European stadiums by capacity

Hi there. Since you obviously have an interest in the subject matter (i.e., football stadia) and a feel for what's involved, perhaps you would care to help me out in revamping this article. IMHO, by previously stating (meaning previously to my starting my edits there and rewriting the lead-in text) that temporary seating was not to be included in the stated capacities of stadia, the article pretty well made itself redundant and out-of-date in most reader's minds before they ever started to read any further. Because most modern stadia worth their salt employ some form of movable and/or retractable seating, so such an article must be able to embrace and deftly cope with these modern concepts, and not simply brush them under the carpet and ignore them as if they were irrelevant, or didn't even exist, with an up-front caveat that classified reconfigurable seating as being merely "temporary" and thus not pertinent. Multiple uses of stadia can no longer be ignored in such an out-of-sight-out-of-mind manner.

Not that such a caveat has stopped folk over the years from entering the largest capacity numbers regardless for certain of the multi-use / multi-sized stadia. But since there is currently no means of indicating in that article (or at least there wasn't before my latest round of editing) what a stadium's stated capacity number represents, the fact that some of the stated capacities include reconfigurable seating in them while others don't now merely serves to beg the question. Does the XYZ Stadium entry I'm looking at support some sort of reconfigurable (= movable or retractable) option, and if so, is it reflected in the 70,512 capacity figure I've just read? To my mind, without the pertinent context for what the capacity number actually represents also being clearly defined, the stated number is rendered somewhat meaningless. It's analogous to stating how long a piece of string is. Cue Spinal Tap: this stadium goes to 11,000 ... :(

It's one thing to compare apples to apples and produce a sorted list of apples ordered on size, which is what this list purports to similarly do for European stadia (with a few thrown in from Russia, Israel, Turkey and Armenia for good measure - God bless Henry VIII). But it is another thing entirely to compare apples to oranges and then use the results to produce a sorted list of mixed fruit ordered on criteria that only apply to apples. Which is really what this list actually does (even if unintentionally) - with the multi-sport and safe standing venues being the metaphorical oranges. Need I point out that producing a sorted list of anything based on some key piece of data (in this case, capacity), when it is totally unclear to the reader what that key piece of data actually represents, is a totally meaningless and fruitless waste of time - nothing more than an exercise in fruitility! (puns very much intended, I suppose).

Anyway, that's the issue I was trying to solve with my recent editing efforts, but I fear that once again I might have bitten off more than I can chew. I've certainly bitten off more than I WANT to chew, and just like with my edits on the list of English football stadia, I'm now beginning to wish I had never started! Maybe with more than one brain working on the problem the exercise I have begun might be more easily completed. IMO it's a problem that still needs to be solved whether it is me or anyone else that solves it, and it is not confined to just this particular list. It applies to all such lists of large sporting venues, including the list of English football stadia - and it is especially pertinent if the current ground roots pressure to introduce safe standing into English football reaches the same point as it already has in Scottish football (which seems very likely).

Regardless of how the safe standing issue politically pans out, WHU's move to the Olympic Stadium in 2016 will introduces the first multi-use stadium into the Premier League, thus making the English Wikipedia's current inability to properly handle movable seating alternatives in such "ordered on capacity" situations very apparent to many more Wikipedia users than it currently is today. So if you would do me the courtesy of taking a gander at the said article and letting me know your thoughts I would very much appreciate it. Thanks. 66.16.144.18 (talk) 06:04, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Will have a look at this User:66.16.144.18, though may be on a timescale of a few days to a week! --Super Nintendo Chalmers (talk) 10:49, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

I understand. It is because I have my own restrictions on available time that I am seeking some help. But this is a two stage process IMO. First, I just want your feedback and opinion - no editing effort necessary. Obviously you'll have to spend some time reading prior edits and delving around a bit, etc. Mostly, I'm looking for someone to bounce some ideas off and have them say, "Yeah, I agree that needs fixing / enhancing" or "No way, I wouldn't touch that with a bargepole; you'll just get everybody bent out of shape if you try and do that." That sort of thing.

There is more wrong with the table than just its prior inability to cope with reconfigurable seating. Here is a quick list of issues (off the top of my head) for you to consider when you do put some time in - I might add to it later if I think of any others ...

• The first and main issue is, of course, the moveable / retractable seating one. I think I have that theoretically solved between my updates to the lead-in text and the 3 main example stadia I chose to do as a template for others to copy - (1) Dortmund's Signal Iduna Park (single sport use, retractable seating only); (2) Stade de France (multi-sport use, moveable seating only); and (3) Schalke's Veltins-Arena (multi-sport use, multiple forms of retractable seating plus movable seating). I think that covers all the options. To my mind all stadia will fall into one of those 3 categories or the default fourth one - (4) most traditional stadia (single sport use, fixed seating only - plus fixed standing outside the top 2 tiers in English football). But it is that sort of assumption I want you to try and throw rocks at. I don't want to get 75% of the way through updating the table to suddenly discover that there are really five, or even six options, and that a total rethink is required - not to mention edit reversions!
• Things to consider about what I've done already ...

• (a) Is my approach too complicated; am I expecting too much from other editors to create the sort of notes that I have done?
• (b) Is my terminology confusing? Some forms of "retractable seating" move (e.g., fold-away seats) while most forms of what I'm calling "movable seating" retract in some way (e.g., the bottom tier of seats at the Stade de France retracts under the second tier to reveal the running track). Can you think of better, clearer terminology?
• (c) To my mind, "moveable seating" is deployed over some part of the arena's largest playing area to bring the spectators closer to the action of one of the supported multi-sports. When deployed, it increases capacity because it simply adds more seats to the existing base of fixed seats in the stands. In contrast, "retractable seating" plays around with the numbers of spectators that can be squeezed into traditional stand space. When deployed, it normally decreases capacity because it assigns available standing space to less dense seating. Or am I missing something? That's something else I would like you to think about and try and find fault with.

• Other problems with the table ...

• (d) There needs to be an upfront definition (i.e., in the lead text before the table) of which competitions, IF ANY, are worthy of being added to the "Tenant" column. In fact, there is the problem right there. "Tenant" is NOT the same as "Venue" or "Event"! That column was only ever intended by the article's original author(s) to contain the names of the various sport teams that called that stadium their home ground. In the case of multi-sport and ground share stadia that list could run to 4 or 5 names. But somebody along the way probably entered something along the lines of "1996 Olympics team" as the home athletics team based in a national athletics stadium and then natural tribal football competition kicked in. Many editors edit in a monkey-see, monkey-do fashion and just copy other things they see have been done without even thinking whether what they are copying and propagating makes any sense - such as adding competition events and venues in a column labeled "Tenant".

So rather than see that entry as a home team designation some later editor saw it as an event designation ... and well, if the athletics stadia are going to boast about Olympics events staged there, then I should add that a FIFA World Cup was staged at the stadium I'm updating. Then someone else took it to the next level ... if we are going to mention FIFA World Cups we should also mention FIFA Confederation Cups ... and why stop at FIFA international events, surely UEFA Euros are pretty major too ... and then UEFA CL and EL cup finals started to be added ... and then domestic cup finals (I just removed "venue for the finals of the KNVB Beker" from the entry for the De Kuip stadium after it had triggered the same instinct in me and I was about to update Wembley with a list of all the domestic rugby league, rugby union and soccer cup finals it normally hosts on an annual basis, which on top of past Olympics, rugby union, rugby league and soccer WCs, Euros, Tri-Nations, Five/Six Nations, Champions League and UEFA Cup finals, etc. tournaments would have made it nearly a 10-line entry!) and even events yet to be staged in the future such as the 2015 Rugby World Cup, 2017 Confederations Cup and 2018 World Cup in Russia.

• (e) So that free-form "Tenant" field now contains all sorts of info. that has absolutely nothing to do with the current stadium "tenants". I have just complicated this situation a whole lot more by using that same column to hold my movable / retractable seating designation, but at least that info. is pertinent to defining the stadium's true capacity so that its various components can be better understood, but more importantly, so that its entry can be correctly sorted in the table list. All that event/venue info. is more about chauvinistic one-upmanship between the various sporting interests / national backgrounds of the editors. It's all very interesting stuff but it really all belongs in a separate article in a much more codified / less busy format. So there's something else for you to consider and give me your feedback on.
• (f) The table is not meant to be sport- nor nationality-specific ... it is merely meant to be a list of the largest European stadia ordered on capacity, regardless of what goes on there. With the 25,000 threshold cut-off it tends to eliminate certain pretty popular spectator sports such as tennis (Wimbledon's Centre Court is ~15,000, I believe, and that must be one of the biggest tennis stadia in the world). That's not a bias based on sport, it's just a consequence of how much bigger the venues of all the other sports represented in the listed stadia are compared to tennis. Nevertheless, despite this natural bias in its favour, the table still appears to have been taken over by soccer interests. Most of the event/venue info. entered is soccer related (rather than rugby, cricket or athletics oriented), and the final "Category" column is purely soccer specific. If it were kept as a truly multi-sport embracing table then we might need a "Category" column for each sport represented. And imagine what would happen to the table if people with cricket, hurling and camogie interests started listing all the important events of their sport in the "Tenant" column of the relevant stadia! So there is a strong argument for creating two versions of this article - one for purely soccer, and one for everything else. That's something else for you to ponder before getting back to me. Thanks. 66.16.144.18 (talk) 02:17, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Hey, So I think that you're right in identifying it as a page that needed some attention! If I was putting this page together my inclination with the 'retractable seats' etc would be to just give the highest maximum regular capacity of a stadium: it saves the need for annotations. However I think that I have a slight editing bias for removing info in favour of neatness, and I can see the merit of your fix (which works).

I have no problem with removing irrelevant info., especially if I know of a more appropriate location in Wikipedia to go include it instead. But I have little time for the "form over substance" types that would have Wikipedia articles read like those flashcards they use in remedial education. It's an encyclopedia. It's meant to contain facts. Lots of them; sometimes in excruciating detail. But they must be pertinent facts and presented in a well-structured and accessible manner. And that's the tricky bit! But ease of editing should NEVER take preference over being an accurate and useful source of information.

The two paragraphs "Also note that stadiums...rather than "regular", "permanent" or "primary" use" could be formatted into a footnote rather than included in the lead.

The problem with footnotes is few, if any, people actually read them. The problem with the text you referenced is that it is really instructions to other editors and should not be visible to the users of Wikipedia (as opposed to other editors). The correct place for it is as a comment in the text so that editors see it rather than users. The problem with that is there is no way to make such guidance stand out from all the other text - such as being in a red or bold font - so it gets lost in amongst all the other textual clutter. Or purposely ignored ... but a more readily identifiable "guidance to editors" font won't ever solve the problem of other editors choosing to ignore the instructions.

With regards to tenant - one way of solving that is to replace it with 'owner', whether that's FC Barcelona, The FA, Consortium Stade de France, Milan Municipality.

I disagree. Not all clubs are owners (e.g., Man. City do not own the Etihad Stadium). However, even less clubs are tenants - that is, most of them DO own their stadium. I submit that the current column title should really be, "Owner or tenant sports team(s) calling this stadium home" or perhaps something equivalent but pithier. However, all of the event/venue stuff isn't in there because prior editors didn't know the meaning of the word "tenant". It is (and this is just a hypothetical example) because instead of someone entering "Consortium Spyros Louis Olympic Stadium" (or whoever the owner really is) for that stadium, they instead entered something along the lines of: "Greek national athletics and 2004 Summer Olympics team". Then a subsequent monkey-see, monkey-do editor interpreted the word "Olympics" as being an event rather than the name of a tenant athletics team, and so he entered World Cup info. or some such in the entry he was changing, and then the whole thing just escalated over time, as I tried to explain to you in my previous message. IOW, whatever that column is currently called is completely irrelevant while all that other venue/event stuff is also included in the table for all the other entries.

Even if/when it is removed there is nothing to stop the whole process from starting all over again. Because the column name is really a sort of instruction to other editors (e.g., please enter tenants in this column) but because the table is so humungously long, for 98% of the entries being edited that column name is off the top of the visible screen out of sight (and thus out of mind) for editors updating specific entries. So instead they will look at the collocated entries nearby for a reminder of what they should be entering in that column (I do that a lot myself). If the nearby entries say things like "Olympics" and "World Cups" they go, "Oh, right," and proceed to add a Euro or Confederations Cup competition for the stadium they are updating. It's just another case of the editorial guidance being lost, this time not due to being hard to spot in amongst other textual clutter, but because the table column headings are off the screen and nowhere near for most of the entries being edited. Once again, if the reason the editor is editing the entry in the first place is because he's read the table and seen all the events listed for other stadia and he wants to make sure the stadium of his preferred club isn't left wanting in comparison, then NO amount of editorial guidance - no matter how bold, nor how red, nor how frequently and emphatically stated - is going to stop him!

This would then create scope to strip-out all the events material.

We don't need to change the column title to "Owners" in order to create such scope - we can do that right now based on its "Tenant" title. Because events and venues are no more "tenants" than they are "owners". What I need from you is a commitment to help sort this table out in a planned fashion with me. I don't just want to delete this info. cold turkey and completely reset the table because that will very likely trigger adverse reactions from past editors that have placed that info. in the table. We need to strategise a plan to systematically remove the info. in an organised fashion. For instance, by placing a link to an article such as this one plus some verbiage into the lead-in text while at the same time removing all references to the Olympics from those stadia that contain it, most/all of the editors that might otherwise have had conniptions if that info. just disappeared would probably see that as a better and more efficient way to link that info. to the table (rather than just trying to cram it in the "Tenants" column).

References to World Cups and Euros, etc. can be similarly removed by placing a link to an article containing that info. elsewhere. That is the approach I wish to first strategise with you; and then we can divvy the actual execution of the work up. Also, I need someone to cover my back; to back me up when I do my part in some of this removal because I'm editing from an IP address. Most people don't get upset when you add stuff from an IP address, but they tend to view removal of anything they are emotionally attached to as vandalism, especially if done from just an IP address. IP addresses are actually less anonymous than made-up monikers but most Wikipedia editors don't appear to understand that fact!

If someone then wants to find out about the various events and uses of Twickenham, or wherever, then they can read the article! We could throw in a 'sports' column but this does create the problem of arbitrary definition. Finally - perhaps killing the 'UEFA stars' column is appropriate, given that this is not a football article.

Now you are getting me upset because I just spent a chunk of time improving that column! So I'm emotionally attached to keeping that column based on the amount of time I've already got invested in it. LMAO. The problem with the UEFA stadium designation is that UEFA doesn't ever print any kind of list of all its 4-star, 3-star, 2-star, etc. stadia so that all you have to do is copy it and then reference the UEFA list as your source and then you are done. If only life was that easy! What UEFA does publish is the criteria that each stadium has to pass in order to get those designations, and that subject matter is covered here. It was that article that was my point of entry to the list article we are discussing. IMO, the authors of that article were quite right not to reinvent the wheel (and come up with an almost identical list article for their purposes) but to adapt the existing article instead. By adding that additional column. So don't be too quick to remove it - pull one piece of thread and another one unravels!

Once all the extraneous stuff is removed from the "Tenants" column we can probably restrict it in width for what it has to contain thus freeing up more space for an additional column or two. I don't need to put the text, "This stadium uses whatever seating" into that column - I just need something to attach my ref notes to (which is the main purpose of that string). We could codify all stadia into one of the four classes (that I identified in my previous message to you) upfront in the lead-in text, and then introduce a new very thin column next to the "Capacity" column that contains the stadium's 1-4 codification. I could attach my ref notes to the codified number in that column. That's how my strings can be removed from the "Tenants" column. What we need to come up with is similarly creative ways to remove and codify the other event/venue info that is already there, or place a link in the article to where else on Wikipedia that particular info. is handled in all its glory so we can eliminate the info. in the "Tenants" column that way.

Removing this and a shorter tenants column would created space for a thumbnail image - this works well at List of football stadiums in Scotland. --Super Nintendo Chalmers (talk) 08:31, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

Yes, that is exactly the clean look I would want to get this article list to end up having. I'm surprised you were able to find images for so many of the stadia. That is one thing we would have to investigate for the Euro table - there is no point in planning to go in that direction if there only exists images in Wikimedia Commons for 20% of the stadia. But one thing I must point out is that there are only 85 stadia in that Scottish list - there must be closer to 300 in the Euro list, so it will be a whole level of effort above and beyond. 66.16.144.18 (talk) 15:58, 27 June 2015 (UTC) @Super Nintendo Chalmers: