NinjaNerd8

List of current UFC fighters

• While I realize it may be initially confusing, in order to avoid general confusion and to treat all fighters in this page equally, all fighters are listed with the flag that they are advertised with in UFC broadcasts during the "Tale of the Tape" section of each fight. I realize that these flags say "Born" next to them, and their use has been noted at the top of each fighter column with an explanation that these flags will not necessarily represent nationality, but rather an advertised nationality. It is easier than trying to prove who has citizenship where, and which citizenship is primary and if just living somewhere counts etc., and hopefully avoids edit wars, since it's all based on citable material. I hope this clears up any mistakes you may have noticed, and if you'd like to discuss it further, you are free to add to the already lengthy discussion on the talk page. Thaddeus Venture (talk) 01:24, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the info, I was certain that the listed flag was a mistake since most of the sources I'd seen were Canada rather than El Salvador (I'm assuming this is Ivan Menjivar we're talking about). I assure you I'm not a crazy nationalist, I'm a fan of many fighters of many nationalities (in fact, my favourtie is an American). I wasn't trying to start an edit war so I hope that's not what happened.

No problem this is one of those weird situations where a guy is born someplace and grew up there and then emigrated at some point later in life and may hold dual citizenship/or have switched nationalities entirely/or may be living there only on work visas, and unless we can know which one it is for each fighter, it's just easier to list them by what their advertised with, which is where they're born, and make a note of it. Thaddeus Venture (talk) 13:31, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Flag Icons

Hello NinjaNerd8. I'm going to try to respond to the questions you left on my talk page, however, in the future, it's helpful to link to the specific examples of edits you're questioning. I edit a lot of articles and it's not always clear what someone is referring to if an example isn't provided.

After some searching I found this edit which I'm going to assume is an example of what you are talking about. The guidelines at the MMA project state specifically that we should not use flag icons in record tables, to quote "In the column Opponent, do not add flag icons before the name of the opponent." You can read about it here. This became part of the MMA guidelines through the consensus reached by editors interested in the MMA sub-project. That said, MMA guidelines (like all sub-project guidelines) cannot supersede general Wikipedia consensus unless the Wikipedia project as a whole reaches that same consensus (see WP:CONLIMITED). Which leads to this which specifically states this about flag icons "flags should only indicate the sportsperson's national squad/team or representative nationality" and "flags should never indicate the player's nationality in a non-sporting sense". MMA is not the Olympics and MMA fighters do not score points for their countries towards an international championship like in World Cup Football. MMA fighters represent themselves, not their countries.

You might also want to read WP:LIKE. The relevant bit here is that just because you think it looks better and makes it easier to read doesn't mean everyone else does and, most importantly, is not a good argument for including flag icons. Personally I find the flag icons distracting because they imply a national representation that does not exist and having a record table full of these little graphic image looks unprofessional. But that is my opinion and not related to why flag icons are not used in these tables. My point was to show that in matters of opinion we all have them, they contradict, and they are not generally useful to bring up in Wikipedia debates about issues. SQGibbon (talk) 17:50, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

I realize my message might have been a little rude. It's unfortunate that these are the agreed upon guidelines as I really feel the icons do make the table easier to read by adding visual cues. In any case, thanks for the timely response.