Talk:2019 Washington Nationals season

Unintended consequence: Article split, then immediate proposed deletion

@Onetwothreeip: @Muboshgu: Wikipedians, we have collectively stumbled into a bit of a mess.

For the first time, the Washington Nationals advanced beyond the first round of the playoffs in 2019. Wikipedia:WikiProject Baseball classifies just about all baseball team season articles as "start" class, requiring more information to be complete. The project provides no guidance on the contant of a postseason section for a team season article, but does identify the need for one. Lacking any other obvious way of adding additional information to move the article beyond "start" class, I began to generate game summaries (generally four or five paragraphs) for playoff games few seasons ago. This seems appropriate, as a postseason baseball game generally is considered a significant event in the team′s season and even in its overall history.

Obviously, a deep run in the playoffs will result in a longer article if we are to maintain consistency across season articles because there will have to be more game summaries and linescores. This has resulted in a longer-than-usual 2019 Washington Nationals season article. Someone placed a "too long" template on the article recently, although there is no extant guidance on how long a baseball season article should be, especially when the team goes deep in the playoffs. That merits further discussion, although no such discussion has begun.

Meanwhile user Onetwothreeip made a good-faith edit to try address the "too long" template by splitting the entire "Postseason" section of the article into a new 2019 Washington Nationals postseason article. It may or may not be the best solution – personally, I prefer a holistic season article where a reader has one-stop shopping for a complete description of the team′s season rather than separate articles requiring additional clicking to get to the history of the season – but it is a reasonable idea. Only three minutes later, Muboshgu well-meaningly placed a deletion template on the 2019 Washington Nationals postseason article, citing its similarity to various other playoff series articles and a concern that it merely was the equivalent of one or more newspaper articles. I dispute both of those contentions – because the section is intended to capture details of the 2019 Nationals season which would not be expected in a general article about any particular playoff series and because the section is not written as a series of newspaper articles but rather as a lasting history of what happened in the games, and that distinction is what is most important – but that is something for WikiProject Baseball to consider, and I do not see any discussion of that having started on the project page. Wholesale deletions based on the application of Wikipedia guidelines without specific rationalization against WikiProject Baseball′s goals seems at best premature, even though the proposal for the deletion was well-intentioned. The format of baseball team season articles needs to be established before any one editor or administrator can judge what should be kept and what should be deleted.

Meanwhile, an uncoordinated series of good-faith actions – a "too long" template which led to a good-faith article split, which in turn led to an almost immediate proposed deletion of all the information that was split off – has led to a very undesirable outcome. No one involved intended such an outcome, which would destroy hours of research and writing, remove information germane to the 2019 Nationals season entirely from Wikipedia that otherwise would be included in it and is included in similar articles, and deter further attempts to expand baseball team season articles in ways that would make them more complete and something more than a "start"-class article (something I don't think any of us wants). We cannot have a situation in which article size is arbitrarily limited in an ill-defined and non-topic-specific way AND we try to reduce the size through article splits AND those splits get recommended for deletion. Something's got to give.

I recommend that we correct this problem by returning the content of 2019 Washington Nationals postseason to its former place in the 2019 Washington Nationals season article. Once it is returned, additional edits can be made on the section there to improve it without deleting its contents from Wikipedia, and readers will still have the history of the season all in one place. Mdnavman (talk) 15:53, 26 October 2019 (UTC)mdnavman

Splitting the post-season section would be a good outcome, even if there are better outcomes. The article is far too large and some kind of split is inevitable. Onetwothreeip (talk) 02:55, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

Personally I feel you have way too much detail in the post-season sections on the article.. we don't need extensive game recaps on the season pages. You should just move your game summaries to the various articles on the post-season series themselves.. write a shorter one paragraph blurb here and link the the NLDS, NLCS, etc. pages for more detail. Spanneraol (talk) 14:04, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

Trimming

This article needs to be cut down some. The easiest ways to cut are the places where there is editorializing language. For instance, "Scherzer ran into trouble immediately, walking the Brewers′ first batter, right fielder Trent Grisham" can be said as "Scherzer walked the Brewers′ first batter, right fielder Trent Grisham". Also, much of the postseason info can be split to the relevant pages, be it the 2019 NLDS, 2019 NLCS, or other. – Muboshgu (talk) 17:28, 26 October 2019 (UTC)