Talk:Artistic gymnastics

From Academic Kids

very cool page!!!!!!!

Guh. NPOV issue!

An anonymous user has changed it from:

The world's best gymnasts have traditionally come from Romania, Russia, and China. The United States is usually considered a "second power" in the sport, despite having produced some famous gymnasts, especially in the women's category (such as Mary Lou Retton, Shannon Miller and, more recently, Carly Patterson). Japan is in a similar situation.

To:

The world's best gymnasts traditionally come from Romania, Russia, China, and the United States.

We should get rid of the section altogether. The American bias is also obnoxious. If they're a "second power", don't mention them. -- Consumed Crustacean | Talk | 00:41, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• Clarifying my postition: opinions on the "best artistic gymnasts" should be kept out altogether, partly for the NPOV, partly to stop edit bickering. -- Consumed Crustacean | Talk | 00:42, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I don't know. Certainly no one wants POV or bias in the article. But this is a general article about the sport, and in it there's a very clear "balance of power" between countries. Russia, Romenia and, more recently, China have a clear dominance in terms of how many top athletes they are able to produce; countries such as the USA and Japan come second, also with a considerable "output" of top athletes, but not as intense as those countries previously mentioned, and, in general (meaning that there are individual exceptions), the best athletes to come out of those countries are not as "top notch" as those who come from the créme-de-la-créme of the sport. After those, comes the third category, made up mainly of other former Soviet Republics (especially Uzbekistan, Georgia, the Ukraine and Belarus). Then comes the fourth group, made up of countries that produce occasional good (and every once in a while, even exceptional) athletes, such as the UK, France and Spain. The rest of the world fits in a broader, more general fifth group. Anyone who follows the sport is perfectly aware (at least on some level) of this country-based distinction — as are, incidentally, the judges who decide the official competitions; make no mistake about it: they are biased towards athletes hailing from the "more traditional" countries in the sport. To ignore it in our article would be, I believe, a significant omission. Regards, Redux 04:08, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Okay, I'm getting into agreeing with you. I mostly did this, however, to appease an obnoxious editing war that I didn't feel like dealing with. If you want to add it back in, I agree. I might just do this right now. If the nonsense starts up with the anonymous, I'll see what the heck I can do to deal with it. -- Consumed Crustacean | Talk | 05:16, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. I do agree with you that we need to be careful indeed with the text that goes in the article. Regardless of the anonymous contributors, who may be either vandals or just overenthusiastic (and thus are always a tad unpredictable), and despite the fact that this article is not that "visible" in the community (nothing like Pope Benedict XVI, for instance), if the text sounds somewhat dubious or biased, it will be that much more likely to inspire revert wars, or at least constant editing towards eliminating alleged bias, etc. I confess that the text you've just restored, which I wrote myself, is lacking in that department, not to mention that it is not that elucidative about the topic. Maybe we can come up with something here, on the talk page, before replacing the text on the article. I'm thinking we could use my previous comment as the basis for this new text. I figure it was rather comprehensive about the scale of countries. I could use a second opinion about its neutrality — the comment on the judges being biased would be excluded, of course, but other than that, how about it? Regards, Redux 04:54, 1 May 2005 (UTC)