User talk:Toll Booth Willie/2020

Proposed deletion of The Rolla Daily News

The article The Rolla Daily News has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

No clear evidence of meeting WP:GNG. Unable to find any independent sources discussing the paper, or even citing it in any way - much less substantiating the claims made in this article.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 19:38, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

"Beacon Communications" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Beacon Communications. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 May 25#Beacon Communications until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 09:39, 25 May 2020 (UTC)

Holy Cross season articles

One note of caution on creating season articles for Holy Cross. The NCAA began classifying football programs as "major" starting in 1937. Holy Cross was classified as a "major" until 1981. See here, p. 471. If you plan to articles for Holy Cross seasons after 1981, you may run into editors questioning the notability. Solid sourcing is recommended to demonstrate WP:GNG notability for such seasons. Cbl62 (talk) 23:51, 13 June 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up, @Cbl62:. All of the schools I'm interested in (Patriot and Ivy) are I-AA (er, FCS) schools today and wouldn't be considered "major" after 1981 (in the case of some PL schools, after 1978 when I-AA began). I think in all cases they were "major" (Div. I/University Div.) programs before the split, however. They continue to get decent press coverage (especially the Ivies and the schools nearest NYC), people write books about them, etc., so I don't think I'll have trouble justifying WP:GNG on season reports, but I'll be forewarned. Thanks for the NCAA document -- not being a CFB stathead I never would have thought to check that site, and it's a great summary of conference histories up to 1999. _``` t b w i l l i e _{`</sub> $1.25 <sub>`} 00:18, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

DYK for Equestrian statue of Joseph Hooker

On 23 June 2020, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Equestrian statue of Joseph Hooker, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that visitors often find a double entendre in the General Hooker Entrance of the Massachusetts State House? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Equestrian statue of Joseph Hooker. You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, Equestrian statue of Joseph Hooker), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

— Wug·a·po·des​ 23:10, 20 June 2020 (UTC) 12:02, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:1959 in sports in New Hampshire

A tag has been placed on Category:1959 in sports in New Hampshire requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the category has been empty for seven days or more and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:56, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

Wikilinks in college football schedule tables

Toll Booth Willie, nice work on the all the new college football season articles you've been creating. I want to mention one small point of style. I see that in the schedule tables you haven't been wikilinking the subject teams's home stadium and city. I guess your rationale is that these are already wikilinked in the infobox and/or lead? Whatever the case, prevailing standard of style is to wikilink the first instances of these in the schedule tables, as these tables often function a stand-alone resource that aren't necessarily read in the context of the surrounding prose. Thoughts? Jweiss11 (talk) 02:50, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

@Jweiss11:, you presume correctly on my rationale. I always make sure the sentence that gives the home stadium and home city is a separate paragraph and is the last paragraph before the schedule section, just so that it stands out as much as possible.

The main reason I prefer to do it this way is not WP:OVERLINK but that the presence of bluelinked text in the location for all away games, and black unlinked text for all home games, provides an at-a-glance indication of which games are home games and which are away, a distinction that I think is important, but is easy to miss when the table coloring forces the reader to concentrate on wins, losses and ties to the exclusion of all else (admittedly, the most important thing, but not the only one). It's harder than it needs to be to concentrate on finding the two little letters "at" or "vs." in the "Opponent" column, particularly on tables where some of the opponents are AP-ranked, and when reading these tables on mobile. If I had my druthers the W-L-T highlighting would only color in one column ("Result", naturally), and there would be a separate and more subtle cell-coloring scheme, say light gray-medium gray-dark gray, to indicate home/away/neutral field, either on all the remaining cells in the row, or in the "Site" column alone (in addition to the word "at" or "vs." in the "Opponent" column). _``` t b w i l l i e _{`</sub> $1.25 <sub>`} 03:36, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Hey, thanks for your continued efforts. I've been meaning to follow up with you on this. Choosing not to wikilink to help indicate home field advantage does not strike me a good practice, and it's at odds with the standard formatting used on many thousands of others articles. If you have thoughts about how we might improve the layout or formatting of the schedule tables to address your issues, we could definitely have that discussion. Would be best to bring that up at Template talk:CFB schedule or Template talk:CFB schedule. Two other items...first there's no need to include "atvs = y" in these tables. That field is turned on by default. Second, on the category sort keys, see my edit at 1990 Brown Bears football team. Cbl62 I recently had a discussion about this and determined that capitalizing "football" in the category sort key of the ""YYYY in sports in..." categories not good practice and that team's fight name should also be included there. The proliferation of the capitalized format is largely my fault and I've been working to correct it. Jweiss11 (talk) 01:11, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

@Jweiss11: Thanks for the notes on "atvs" and on sort keys, and for bearing with a newbie's quirks. I'll be sure to make those changes in future pages.

Thanks also for making the corrections on Andy Kerr Stadium's location. I seem to recall reading an exchange between you and User:Cbl62 somewhere, maybe on his talk page, that didn't reach a definite conclusion on this, so I'd been sticking with plain-old "Hamilton, NY", as the town encompasses the village and would be correct either way. This evening I was finally able to find a decent enough map of Hamilton (in a PDF on the town of Hamilton's website; page 80 of this) that shows the village limits extending far enough south of College Street that the stadium must be inside. I'll make sure to use the more accurate wikilink in the future.

Reluctantly I guess I'll bow to convention on wikilinking home field, as I did with the awful and anti-MOS use of two-letter USPS abbreviations in these tables. I remain interested in having a discussion on how better to indicate home-field status in these tables. Do you think the template talk page is watched by enough interested editors to have a productive discussion there, or would it be better to have it at the Wikiproject CFB talk page?

I do have a few questions about your housekeeping edits:

• I noticed that oftentimes you've changed the order of categories (e.g., here where I had "winless seasons" as the first of four categories, and you moved it to third). Is there some wiki-software reason for this? It doesn't seem to me like the order of the categories should matter much.
• Similarly, I noticed that you've moved the 'champion' parameter in the infobox to a different position in the infobox markup. Again, is there a software reason for this? When coding the infobox it's a lot easier to remember to add/remove the "championship" line when it's next to the conf_record line, which is directly related, as opposed to when it's next to the "stadium" line, which is not related to conference standings. I'm not asking these questions to be oppositional, I just want to understand why these changes are being made. I have the categories and infobox parameters in the order that works best for me for the purpose of editing (building pages from a text template), so I'd rather keep arranging them the way I have been, but if there's some good reason to change I'm willing to do so to avoid making unnecessary copyediting work for you and others.
• Here you changed the piped link "The Game" to the nondescript "rivalry". I would argue that the Harvard-Yale rivalry, as with The Rivalry between Lehigh and Lafayette, is notable enough to be identified by name. Calling it simply "rivalry" on par with Harvard-Dartmouth or even Yale-Princeton doesn't reflect this game's importance on the schedule. It would be one thing if rivalry games were never named in the schedule box, but it appears to be common practice to at least use trophy names like "Little Brown Jug" or, in my neck of the woods, the ridiculous "Ram-Crusader Cup". Although there's no trophy called "The Game", this name is recognized at least as well as any trophy name is. Thoughts? _``` t b w i l l i e _{`</sub> $1.25 <sub>`} 03:30, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Based on my review of Google maps, it appeared that Kerr stadium was outside the village limits, but I noted at the time of the prior discussion that my conclusion lacked certainty. If you are confident that the stadium is in fact located within the village, I'm fine with your changes. Cbl62 (talk) 07:50, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

@Cbl62: Yeah, it's hard to go by Google because their municipal boundaries aren't always 100% accurate (sometimes they'll follow ZIP code boundaries instead, and sometimes ... I don't know what they're doing). I did look at it a couple months ago, or whenever I had read that conversation between you and User:Jweiss11, and reached the same conclusion -- too close to call. But check out the PDF I found yesterday. The best map is on the last page. It's an official planning document produced by the town government using GIS (Hamilton village is the gray territory on the bottom-left -- left is north, top is east). College Street is clearly labeled and if you compare it to a Google map that shows the position of the stadium relative to College Street, it's obvious that the stadium falls within Hamilton village limits. I'm confident of this and I think you will be too. _``` t b w i l l i e _{`</sub> $1.25 <sub>`} 20:15, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Yep, since Kerr Stadium is on College Street, that looks pretty clear. Cbl62 (talk) 20:19, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Glad the Kerr Stadium location question is resolved. Toll Booth Willie, to answer your questions above...on the order of the categories, I just aim to keep things in a consistent order for usability, so one can find the same class of category where one would expect to find it. In the infobox, the fields really should be coded in the order that they display, although the champion and postseason fields typically find themselves at the end of the infobox code even though they display toward the top. On the rivalries, how the relevant article is titled is paramount. When the article is titled "X—Y football rivalry", I pipe to "rivalry". If the Harvard–Yale football rivalry is principally known as "The Game", then that article should be renamed accordingly. Jweiss11 (talk) 01:41, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

@Jweiss11: I think the primary aims in choosing how to pipe a rivalry link should be to serve the reader and to truly represent what the matchup was called at the time. To take an example from the pages I edited yesterday, WP has a Columbia-Fordham rivalry page at The Liberty Cup, named after a trophy that began in 2002 but also covering all games dating back to 1890. In 1992 Columbia Lions football team and 1992 Fordham Rams football team I included the link but piped it as "rivalry", since no trophy was awarded in 1992.

Harvard-Yale is a unique case, as far as I can tell. I have no doubt that The Game can be shown through WP:RS to be the WP:COMMONNAME of the annual Harvard-Yale varsity football matchup, and the clippings I've used as sources in at least the 1970s-1990s Harvard Crimson football team pages I've written will back that up. That's why I feel it's appropriate to pipe the link the way I do. But I would not support changing the WP article name to "The Game (Harvard-Yale)" only because The Game is just one part of this football rivalry. The rivalry also includes -- and the WP article mentions this -- several other games that weekend, essentially club- or intramural-level matchups between residence houses of the two universities. That's also a big part of the rivalry, for the campuses involved if not for the general sports audience. It would be excluded by focusing solely on The Game in the WP article, though for the purposes of season articles about the varsity teams, The Game is how the rivalry is known. _``` t b w i l l i e _{`</sub> $1.25 <sub>`} 17:46, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

TL;DR -- I believe "The Game" is not the name of the rivalry, but is the WP:COMMONNAME of each individual varsity matchup. _``` t b w i l l i e _{`</sub> $1.25 <sub>`} 17:49, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

You're definitely correct that we don't want anachronisms, so your treatment of the 1992 Columbia and Fordham articles is correct. But if the Harvard–Yale football rivalry is now most commonly know as "The Game", then the article should be renamed accordingly. The article is about the rivalry between the two varsity football teams. The other stuff is just historical context. Jweiss11 (talk) 18:32, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

One difficulty with "The Game" is that multiple schools have attempted to brand their arch-rivalry as "The Game". Compare The Game (Michigan–Ohio State), The Game (Hampden–Sydney vs. Randolph–Macon), The Game (Cornell–Harvard). That said, my understanding has always been the Harvard-Yale was the original "The Game" with its branding as such dating at least to the 1960s. E.g., here. Cbl62 (talk) 20:01, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

The residence house games aren't historical context. As far as I know, they're still going on today (well, not "today", but you know what I mean). They are part of the rivalry lore and the on-campus rivalry experience, and deserve wider treatment in the article. I do believe the WP article is correctly named, as this is the rare -- maybe unique -- case where a college football rivalry has a substantial, notable and active football component other than varsity. That said, if the article scope were limited to the varsity game, I would support "The Game (Harvard-Yale)", and would support similar phrasing for any of the "The Game"s that Cbl62 mentions, provided that's the name by which they're commonly known in independent sources (i.e., not just college "branding" publications and press releases). Whether H-Y is the first "The Game" is immaterial. There's plenty of room for all of them, if they all meet WP:COMMONNAME. That's why the good Lord gave us parenthetical disambiguation. And it's not like "Harvard-Yale football rivalry" is shorter than "The Game (Harvard-Yale)". _``` t b w i l l i e _{`</sub> $1.25 <sub>`} 05:34, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

Thanks

		The College football Barnstar
		For your diligent efforts in creating more than 234 college football articles and performing valuable cleanup and expansion work on dozens more. Cbl62 (talk) 02:19, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

• You're now up to 568 new season articles in four months. Great work, sir! Cbl62 (talk) 19:14, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

Lead sections of college football season artices

Toll Booth Willie, I appreciate your continued march through the years for the Ivy and Patriot leagues. I have some critiques on the lead sections you are writing. Take a look at the changes I made at 1994 Holy Cross Crusaders football team. There's no good reason to mention the team's conference finish twice in the lead. And try to avoid paragraphs that are only one or two sentences long. Also, see my edit at 1995 Lehigh Engineers football team. When something occurred in the past, just use the past tense. Avoid the subjunctive mood, e.g. "would...". Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 03:43, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

@Jweiss11: I like your change on the Lehigh article. I agree that overuse of the subjunctive is awkward. Had I sat on the article a day, or perhaps even a few hours longer, I probably would have replaced it with simpler verbs as you did, so thanks for saving me there.

As regards the lead sections, I look at the first sentence as the topline summary (essential info), not requiring a citation; for a stub-length article, it's really a "lead sentence", with the supporting facts in the "body" of the article and cited there. Relative minutiae like the coach's length of tenure, the point differential, the captains' names aren't "lead section" material in an article this short; they're only in that section because it would look ridiculous to stick a header in there to break up a section only three short paragraphs long.

As a journalist, I'm used to writing two-sentence paragraphs, and I think that style suits a "light" topic such as a sports season summary, which is apt to be read quickly by a general audience, rather than pored over intently by a specialist audience. Paragraph breaks are also a good visual cue to the reader showing how separate information is gleaned from different sources. I recognize that this is all WP:IDONTLIKEIT, but looking at the rewritten lead section at that Holy Cross article, I find it unnecessarily long and broad -- it's not instantly apparent where the "introduction" ends and the supporting text begins, or why information like point differential merits inclusion in the lead paragraph, while captains' names and the location of the home field (i.e., "where is this team from, anyway?") don't. I also note that although it manages to avoid repeating the conference standing, it still repeats the conference name in a way that I find just as awkward. I don't mean any of this as a technical criticism of your writing. I just don't personally see these changes as an improvement over the way it was formatted before, and what the changes gain in brevity or elimination of paragraph breaks I think is balanced by losses in friendliness to the casual reader -- IMHO, and I do emphasize the "M" and mean the "H".

(One non-DONTLIKE criticism of the rewrite: The citation on the first paragraph is for the Patriot League record book, which is OK for overall record, league record and point differential, but does not support the head coach's name. The coach name and tenure is sourced, along with the captains, in the team record book/media guide citation(s). For some teams this is one footnote, and for others it is two, as some teams have coach and/or captain names on separate pages of their media guides from game scores and overall records. Believe me, I actually do put some thought into the structure of the text so that citations are attached to the sentences and paragraphs that they actually support.) _``` t b w i l l i e _{`</sub> $1.25 <sub>`} 05:00, 12 September 2020 (UTC)