Loxoman

Flag icons in articles

Hey, thanks for your message. You said "The discussion isn't done". Actually it is as you can see here. Consensus was reached to follow the Wikipedia Manual of Style with regard to flags which you can read about here and the MMA project guidelines were changed here to reflect that consensus. This doesn't mean that you can't open the topic up for discussion again but in the meantime please respect the consensus that was achieved and stop inserting flag icons into article against the guidelines set up for Wikipedia and MMA articles.

Further, it's true that boxing articles do use flag icons in this manner but that doesn't mean that they should do it, it in no way compels any other project to do it, and it doesn't mean they won't change their minds either. In fact we've opened up dialog on the subject with that project to see if they want to make that change as well. As for association football I don't see it. I edit a lot of football articles and I don't recall seeing flag icons in widespread use contrary to Wikipedia guidelines, but there are a lot of footballers so it's possible I've missed a few. However, in looking at the Leo Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Wayne Rooney articles (to pick three of the better known players right now) you can see that the use of flag icons is being done according to Wikipedia Manual of Style guidelines: no flag icons in the infobox, no flag icons used for club play, no flag icons used to indicate the location of a match, and flag icons are only used in the tables where the players are representing their countries' in international competition. This is according to Wikipedia guidelines and what we want to follow for MMA articles.

Also, the fact that this has been going on for years is not a very good argument for keeping it that way. Wikipedia, like all things Internet, is constantly changing and growing. You can see how the quality of Wikipedia articles have improved even in the last five years not to mention from ten years ago. Policy, guidelines, and general editing practices are always evolving.

Finally, that you draw some useful information from the use of flag icons is interesting but is in itself not compelling. I think it would be useful to include the weight of the fighters in the tables. Their fighting styles, arm reach, leg reach, and right/left handedness, but obviously we cannot include all that information because it would quickly distract from the reason for the tables in the first place -- the result of the bout. What country a fighter was born in is not relevant to the facts of the fight. What is important is the result, the round, the time, and the event. Anything else just clutters up the table. If the contestants were officially representing their countries in international competition (US vs. Canada World Cup of MMA, for instance) then it would be entirely appropriate to include flag icons in those records, but since that is not happening it is misleading to include flag icons in the way it has been done.

But like I said above, if you disagree with the consensus that was reached by all means you should start up the discussion again. If everyone else finds your argument compelling and compatible with Wikipedia policy and guidelines then the consensus view will be changed. SQGibbon (talk) 05:40, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

OK, I didn't get you meant football club articles. That said there's a key bit of information you might not have noticed and that's this line that appears above the roster "Note: Flags indicate national team as has been defined under FIFA eligibility rules. Players may hold more than one non-FIFA nationality." This follows the usage of flags as suggested by MOS:FLAG where the guideline indicates that flag icons can be used to indicate the nation that a sportsperson represents. The flags do not indicate where the person was born or is a citizen of. For instance Oliver Norwood is listed as being part of the Northern Ireland national team but he was born in Burnley England (not the best example but it was the easiest one to find from Man. U)

There are other reasons for not including flag icons even though they are just one small icon. One is that they add to the bandwidth requirements. This is not an issue for most people in Western countries but in many parts of the world dial-up connections are still prevalent and having sometimes upwards of 50 flags in one article load can seriously impact a user's experience. Also general Wikipedia consensus is that having too many flags clutters up a page (a view I agree with). Another problem is that flag icons stand out so much that the implication is that the flag indicates something of greater importance than the rest of the information (it would be like writing "David Foster Wallace was an American writer best known for his book Infinite Jest" -- there's no reason to give such emphasis to the fact that he was American).

And to answer your question about confusion, yes it has happened, to me. I actually don't care for or know anything about MMA as I just mainly do vandalism patrol throughout the entirety of Wikipedia. Sometimes I get sucked into issues like this (if you look through my contributions you can see I have participated in a lot of things that I can tell you I'm not interested in like the royal families in Georgia, Mollie King (not even sure who she is), and Filipino Christian churches). I was well aware of the use of flags to indicate national representation mainly because I am interested in football and when I first saw them being used in MMA articles I was impressed that all these fighters spend so much time representing their countries in international competition. Obviously it didn't take long to figure out what was going on but then when I started checking other fighters I was completely surprised that people involved in the MMA project were letting this go on. So there's also the issue of consistency throughout the entirety of Wikipedia. Yes, different projects reject various style guidelines but my feeling is that there needs to be a really compelling reason to do so. Adding a little information that is not strictly relevant to a fight does not strike me as compelling. I would hope that you would agree that having the entirety of Wikipedia on the same page with regard to style issues would be ideal (when it's at all practical)?

Your hypothetical about fighting style icons helps to illustrate another point about flag icons. If those fighting icons did exist can you imagine the edit wars that would take place? As far as I can tell any one specific fighter is trained in multiple disciplines so either people would edit war over which one was to be used or the tables would fill up with fighting icons (including when a fighter just happened to use something from a particular style just once that he otherwise never uses). The relevance is that while I imagine that most MMA fighters are citizens of the same countries that they are born in, what happens when someone is a citizen of multiple countries? Or was born in one nation but is now a citizen of a different one? We would have to come up with whole new guidelines for these cases which would lead to even more edit wars or using multiple icons in a given table. And still these articles would be contrary to general Wikipedia guidelines.

Finally I was not aware that these MMA article in Wikipedia were held in such high esteem by fans. That's great for Wikipedia but definitely makes one ask what the heck all those other websites who do this for money are thinking? I guess in the end part of what I'm saying is that I look at this issue from a Wikipedia-wide perspective and not just what might be desirable for MMA fans. In no way am I suggesting that you don't care about the project as a whole it's just that we're coming at this from slightly different places. I want all of Wikipedia to be awesome, be of high quality, and standardized throughout (like in a commercial encyclopedia) and for me that global consistency takes precedence over the desires of individual projects. I understand completely that individual projects within Wikipedia can have needs that run counter to general consensus I would just like for it to happen only when the need is really striking. SQGibbon (talk) 07:21, 9 April 2011 (UTC)