User:Andrewa/Professional wrestling think tank

This is a page to incubate thoughts and ideas on the subject of articles concerning professional wrestling

Article name

Currently, the professional wrestling article deals with the sports entertainment popular in the USA, Australia, Japan, Mexico and possibly other countries. [1]

But is this the WP:primary meaning of professional wrestling?

Many codes of wrestling have professional levels that are genuine competitions, such as sumo in Japan. See professional wrestling (disambiguation). Now, it's not enough for the sports entertainment to be the most common meaning of professional wrestling. It needs to be significantly more common than all other meanings put together, and this seems dubious.

Article structure and content

History

http://www.solie.org/articles/pwandfans.html is a fascinating essay that describes some of the history and seems a good reliable source, and is itself well sourced.

There is currently no history section at all in the professional wrestling article. This has been questioned back in 2010:

There's no mention of any professional wrestling history here as such. Surely the concept of the evolution from catch wrestling to professional wrestling (as well as it's reasons) should be mentioned as well as the history of territories giving way to a monopoly (obviously whilst avoiding overlap with the article WWE). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.140.126.241 (talk) 18:12, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

See History of professional wrestling^{--UnquestionableTruth--} 08:23, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

(copied from the talk page) and sure enough, there's a C-class article at History of professional wrestling.

Codes

There is no succinct list of the codes, circuits, organisations, involved in the sports entertainment based on wrestling.

Rules

The rules section does not make it at all clear which codes, circuits, organisations have which rules. Perhaps it's a bit like Calvinball and they all just make up the rules as they go along (it's not obvious why this would not be the case in fact). If so, we should try to source this fact and state it. Or perhaps there are published rules, for some matches at least. Either way, rules that are recorded in reliable secondary sources should be included, and only those, and it should be spelled out which matches are under these rules.

As it is [2] the lead of the Rules section states in part Any rule described here is simply a standard, and may or may not correspond exactly with any given promotion's ruleset. The entire Rules section contains only two inline citations, both in the same section, Disqualification. One of these http://www.wwe.com/shows/smackdown/2013-05-10/results-26114074/page-10 reads in part However, when the action spilled outside, Ryback stopped Y2J’s rally stone cold, throwing him into the barricade, then using the steel ring post to deliver a low-blow for the DQ victory. This seems the only mention in it of disqualification, so it's not a useful reference at all. The other http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CftFEi3RDY is a YouTube video of a particular fight, I guess the commentary mentions the rules, but it's not a secondary source at all, it's primary, as arguably is the other reference as well.

So in conclusion, the entire Rules section is unreferenced, dubious in accuracy, reeking of original research, and could be summarily removed.

US centricity

Some sections are very US-centric. Perhaps we need a separate article on the US. The US style has been exported to Australia at least and possibly other countries, but Mexico and Japan both have their own local (and equally staged) variants, already with their own articles, and there may be others.

Pro wrestling might be a suitable title for the US article.