User:Dennis Bratland/Draft MOS:SPORTFLAG RfC
The following is a draft working towards a proposal for adoption as a Wikipedia process of gathering consensus for adoption. Thus references or links to this page should not describe it as policy, guideline, nor yet even as a proposal. |
RfC to either strengthen or remove 'official representative' requirement for flag icons in sports
Proposal replace
The point is to say clearly whether or not the current practice of most sports-related WikiProjects of using flag icons on virtually all international sport topics is or is not consistent with the MOS guidelines, and to resolve confusion and contradictions by consolidating the flag icon rules for sports in one place if consensus favors treading sports by a different standard than other topics.
Not strictly official option:
Unlike military service and political office, sports persons or sports teams do not need to officially[a] represent a country to have a flag icon in an article's infobox, or in lists and tables. If flags, nationalities, or national symbols are commonly[b] displayed by reliable sources alongside competitors' names, they may be considered to "represent" that country, even if reliable sources do not directly state they are official representatives. A country can be "represented" by an unlimited number of competitors, and they do not need to be selected from among all potential competitors of that nationality by means of a national tournament or other process to fill a quota of international representatives.[c]
Official option:
As with military service and political office, sports persons or teams must officially
burden to cite a reliable source that directly supports that the subject is an official representative of that country.[d] The frequent use of flags, colors, national anthems and other national symbols, by news media, or by the competitors themselves, or by the sport's governing body, is not sufficient unless there is direct, verifiable evidence of official representation.[e]
There are three options here and that means
Generally other editors would appreciate keeping lengthy comments to the discussion section and keeping your !vote rationale concise. Survey answers often attract replies, but starting discussion threads outside the discussion section isn't going to win you any popularity contests. Just saying.
If Official is chosen, most of the mentions of sports can be kept. If Not strictly official is chosen, mention of sports in most places will be removed in order to avoid contradicting the sports flag icon guideline. This would include deleting 6 of the 7 places where Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Icons discusses sports, keeping the 7th as it deals with logo copyrights, not flag icons. Click [show] for specific text changes.
Detailed list of changes
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[No change if official is chosen; sports removed if not strictly official is chosen]
[Official version:]
[Not strictly official version]
[No change if official is chosen; sports removed if not strictly official is chosen]
[No change if official is chosen; sports removed if not strictly official is chosen]
[No change if official is chosen; sports removed if not strictly official is chosen]
[This entire section would be replaced by either official or not strictly official above.]
[No change in either case.]
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Please
Notes
- ^ a b By the common defintion of officially, e.g. "In an official manner or capacity; by virtue, or in consequence, of one's office; by or in presence of an official; with official authority, sanction, or formality." (OED) or "in a formal or authoritative manner" (Dictionary.com) "in a formal and public way" (Google/Oxford Languages).
Whether governmental or not, officials select from among their nation's competitors which of them will represent that country, whether by sanctioning national tournaments or some other selection process.
- WP:COMMONNAMEguideline for article titles, "as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable English-language sources".
- local consensus of most sports-related WikiProjects, so flag icons can be used for most international sports topics, such as any FIA, FIM, or Grand Slam tennis events or championships. Topics that would not meet this criterion include the National Football League, English Football League, or NASCAR, often because they are national, not primarily international, in scope. The logic behind why sources do or do not commonly use national symbols is not a great concern; we are only trying to determine which practice is prevalent among reliable sources.
- ^ Official representation can also be determined when we can cite reliable sources that verify each country has a quota of competitors selected by tournaments or other process within that country, or selected as representatives and entered in the international competition by an authority or sanctioning body for that sport or event of that country.
- MOS guidelines.
Survey (Sport flags)
Discussion (Sport flags)
Table of topic classes with explanation
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Grouping sports topics in three classes or categories in this table illustrates the distinctions drawn by the proposed options, and comparing these categories with current practice helps to illustrate what problem is solved by revising the MOS. Our goal should be to tune the wording to make it easy for any editor to know which of the three categories a topic falls into, and to establish a broad consensus as to where we want to draw the line for flag icons.
In the first category, both the MOS:FLAG exception for sports.
Both Major League Baseball (US) and the English football league system (UK) include, just barely, more than one nationality, but reliable sources do not commonly display US flags for the 29 American teams and a Canadian flag for the one "representative" from that country, nor are flags necessary or meaningful to highlight one or possibly two not strictly UK-national English football league teams. The second category has competitions which are international in scope, and which we can verify that high-quality sources routinely identify competitors with flags and national symbols. We can even cite sources that refer to competitors as "representing" their nations, but in an apparently figurative way, much like Marylin Monroe being called a sex symbol who "represents" women. With few exceptions, the current versions of articles on topics like Grand Slam tennis or Grand Prix motorsport use flag icons.
Direct evidence that competitors are official representatives is lacking, or at least is controversial among Wikipedia editors, and has been a subject of debates for many years. There is little agreement as to what a citation to support this would look like, and it relies heavily on subject experts parsing the language in carefully selected sources. Evidence that reliable sources predominately use national symbols is overwhelming and uncontroversial. Edge cases that help define this boundary include Formula One driver Lance Stroll, whose Canadian nationality is commonly emphasized by sources, meeting the first criterion, but he wasn't selected to represent Canada by Canadian official, not meeting the second criterion "selected as representatives and entered in the international competition by an authority or sanctioning body for that sport or event of that country."[1] The third category includes many Olympic Games style competitions, where we can verify in Rule 41 of the Olympic Charter that competitors are representatives of nations, and cite sources that state directly that these representatives are chosen by officials of that nation to fill a defined quota assigned to each nation. In the case of motorsports, we can verify in both primary and secondary sources a distinct difference between traditional international motorsports like Formula One the new FIA Motorsport Games "in which drivers—in contrast to the historically transnational norm of motorsport—competed under their national flag."[2] A similar dividing line can be seen in motorcycle sport, between FIM Superbike World Championship compared to various world cups like the Speedway World Cup, or by contrasting FIM Trial World Championship with Trial des Nations .
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--Dennis Bratland (talk) 21:25, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
Why is this needed
Below is a sampling of some of the longest disputes over flags in sports spanning more than a dozen years. The MOS of 2008 or 2013 isn't all that different from the current version. Small changes in wording have been tried, but the essential boundary lines haven't really changed. The disputes over these boundaries haven't changed much either. Editors 10 years ago were reading the same rules and reaching the same contradictory interpretations as they do today. The same arguments, often citing the same facts from the same sources, are repeated, across different topics and WikiProjects, and the acrimony and bitterness of the early days looks much the same as today. There's a whole sub-genre of
What this suggests is maybe the problem is the boundary between appropriate and inappropriate flag use is poorly defined, or fails to represent global consensus. For those reasons, it might be better to seek a new consensus around one of two new boundary lines between appropriate and inappropriate flag icon use, in the hopes that editors who read the MOS will disagree less over what it means.
- 2008 Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Icons/Archive 4#Suggestion related to sports players
- 2009 Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mixed martial arts/Archive 4#Proposal: enforcing MOS:FLAG by removing the flags from event pages and fight records
- 2011 Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Motorcycle racing/Archive 2#Flag icons - action needed
- 2012 Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Icons/Archive 11#RfC on MOS:FLAG
- 2012 Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mixed martial arts/Archive 8#Flags
- 2013 Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Tennis/Archive_13#We_can't_use_flags_per_MOS
- 2014 Talk:Manchester United F.C.–Arsenal F.C. brawl (1990)#Flags deliberately hiding the information from readers?
- 2015 Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Formula One/Archive 43#Proposal for the flag field in F1 infoboxes
- 2015 Talk:Joe Calzaghe#Flagicons
- 2017 Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Formula One/Archive 46#Race flags in season articles
- 2017 Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Rugby league/Archive 24#Flags in squad templates
- 2018 Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football/Archive 121#Serious issue with flag icons and edit warring.
- 2018 Talk:2019 Monte Carlo Rally#National flags
- 2019 Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/2018 World Snooker Championship/archive1
- 2021 Template talk:Infobox racing driver#RfC on making an exception to MOS:FLAG for motorsports
--Dennis Bratland (talk) 18:40, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
References
- ^ Rencken, Dieter; Collantine, Keith (February 11, 2020), "Canadian F1 pair Stroll and Latifi to race under American licenses", The Drive
- ^
- FIA (June 28, 2019), New 'Fia Motorsport Games' Announced With Rome As Inaugural Host City 31 October - 3 November 2019,
The Council approved the 'FIA Motorsport Games', a new international, multidisciplinary sporting event that will see drivers competing not for individual recognition, but for their country.
- FIA (November 9, 2018), 18-Strong Entry List For Inaugural Fia Gt Nations Cup; GT showpiece to be hosted at Bahrain International Circuit next month,
Held at the Bahrain International Circuit on 1 December 2018, the event will pit nation against nation in a patriotic twist on the traditional racing format.
- Watkins, Gary (December 30, 2019), "2019: the year that saw motor racing's first 'Olympics'", Motor Sport,
Some might argue that the games can only ever be some kind of novelty event in a sport that in recent history hasn't been drawn up on national lines. But the flags of 49 nations flying over Vallelunga suggests that 'our' Olympics can become an important event on the motor sport calendar.
- Næss, Hans Erik (2020), A History of Organizational Change;The Case of Fédération Internationale de L'Automobile (FIA), 1946–2020,
In essence, the Games brought together drivers from five racing disciplines into a single event in which drivers—in contrast to the historically transnational norm of motorsport—competed under their national flag.
- FIA (June 28, 2019), New 'Fia Motorsport Games' Announced With Rome As Inaugural Host City 31 October - 3 November 2019,