Talk:World Chess Championship
|
|
| Missing image Cscr-former.png Former featured article candidate | This article is a former featured article candidate. Please view its sub-page to see why the nomination failed. For older candidates (where the individual nomination does not exist) please check the archive. Once the objections have been met you may resubmit the article for featured article status. |
- I've shuffled things around a bit - it's better now, I think. --Camembert
- I agree, its much better, and the reader gets a better feeling for the reality of how the idea of World Chess Champion evolved. I question one thing...the use of the word "official". It suggests a governing body. I would argue that the first official chess champion was Botvinnik, and that before FIDE all champions were simply consensus champions. I feel that the first player to definately gain concensus was Paul Morphy, and that after his retirement no concensus was reached until the 1886 match Steinitz won.
- Now, all this said, I admit that the article does explain its use of the word "official" and I don't have a concrete suggestion at this time for any changes.-- ChessPlayer
I think the material on the other championships (Women's, Seniors, etc) should be moved to their own pages, and I volunteer to move them soon. ChessPlayer 21:26, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
The opening paragraph had the following:
- Some still consider Garry Kasparov to be the world champion, despite having lost to Kramnik, as he remains the highest-ranked player on the ELO list.
I have removed this. I do not think that anybody (apart from the misinformed) believes Kasparov to still be champion. As I've said in my edit (and as should in any case be clear from the article) being number one on the rating list and being world champion are different things. Kasparov has not played in the FIDE championships since the 1993 PCA breakaway, and he lost the title which that breakaway created to Kramnik in their 2000 match, hence he holds no championship title. I certainly don't think Kasparov would claim to be champion himself, and there's no reason for other people to make that claim either. I've taken this out once before, but it was put back in. If somebody wants to put it in again, I'd like to know exactly who believes Kasparov is still champion and why they believe it.
- Bobby Fischer, who hasn't played a competitive game of chess since 1992, is the still, theoretically, 'undefeated world champion'.
I have also removed this. Originally, I had edited it to read "is self-styled 'undefeated world champion'", but on reflection, I don't see why Fischer is deserving of such prominent mention in the first paragraph like this. The opening paragraph should give the reader a very quick intro to the subject, which here, I think, means saying what the championship is and who currently holds it. The fact is that virtually nobody (apart perhaps from Fischer himself) considers Fischer to be world champion--hardly surprising given that he's played just 30 games in over 30 years, and those against a player hardly at the top of world chess (Spassky in '92 was far from his peak)--so I don't believe he needs to be mentioned in the opening paragraph (of course, it's fine to explain it all in detail in the body of the article itself). I mean, one could also argue that Alekhine, who won the title back from Euwe in 1937 and then never lost it, is "undefeated world champion", but as he died in 1946, I think such a claim would be a bit silly :)
I've also made a few other changes which I hope don't need explanation (the manner of Alekhine's death and 2004 being FIDE Year of Tigran Petrosian aren't really pertinent to the subject of the world chess championship), but if they do, I'll be happy to provide. --Camembert
ChessPlayer asked in an edit summary: "is Qadhafi the sponsor, or the nation of Libya?" I'm not sure there's a great deal of difference between the two in practice, but according to the FIDE website [1] (http://www.fide.com/) it is Qaddafi himself. It says "FIDE has a pleasure to announce the dates and venue of the World Chess Championship 2004 - Tripoli, the capital of Libya, from June 18 till July 13, 2004 under the patronage of the Leader of the Libyan Jamahirya, H.E. Moammar Al Gathafi, who also provides the prize fund for the Championship." --Camembert 00:51, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Yeah, agree with you about Alekhine's death/year of Petrosian being irrelevant, and that the Fischer/Spassky rematch should perhaps only be mentioned within the actual body of it rather than in the introduction. I've been trying to fill the gap from 1948 to 75, covering Botivinnik's reign and then the "Game of the Century" - which is where I've stopped short so far... The Karpov/Kasparov epic certainly needs to be mentioned too. - Mack
Heavy rewrite, much expansion. --Etaonish 19:36, May 27, 2004 (UTC)
In the the section on the women's world champions, should an aside be added to mention Judit Polgar - as perhaps the strongest women player of all time?
- Yes, I think that's an excellent idea. The prestige of the title is less than it would be if Judit participated. (In fact, it is also too bad that Susan Polgar doesn't compete.) There is some sentiment that there shouldn't even be a women's world championship, because it implies that open competition is unfair, as if women are apt to be mentally weaker than men just because they are apt to be physically smaller. Judit's scorn for the women's title is in any case worthy of note, whether the controversy gets any play in the article or not. --Fritzlein 06:50, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Just to note that FIDE is currently plagiarising this page on the 2004 championship website at [2] (http://wcclibya2004.com/main.asp?id=457) - I've listed the page on Wikipedia:Copies of Wikipedia content (low degree of compliance) and sent FIDE an email to try and get them to comply with the GFDL. --Camembert
Odd...it's using an old version.--Etaonish 23:28, Jun 24, 2004 (UTC)
- It's based on a slightly old version, but I think they've also cut a few bits and rearranged some of the sentences slightly (though not enough to make it anything other than a derivative of our version, clearly). --Camembert
Pictures
How to do it? One thought is to place thumbnails throughout, but then it looks like this:
(removed now)
Suggestions?--Etaonish 18:16, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)
- Hmmm, the pictures do dominate rather. I suppose that there are two obvious solutions (and probably a much better one that's not obvious): reduce the number of photos, or reduce the size of the thumbnails (I mean, those are pretty scary thumbs...). Of the two, the latter would presumably be less painful. You must have thought of this, and have decided against it; why? What am I missing? I don't know anything about the mechanics of Wikipedia thumbnails; how easy is it to change their size? Mel Etitis 19:58, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Finally fixed up everything. I might do women's later.--Etaonish 01:38, Jan 23, 2005 (UTC)
"Greatest of all time"
Short version: I don't think the "greatest of all time" section should be in this article. Lets split it off to something like greatest chess player of all time. Objections?
Longer version: The question of who was the greatest player (or "strongest player", which may or may not be a different thing) of all time is often discussed; it's something many chess players and fans have ideas about, and, as such, it's probably a subject which is worth us tackling. I don't think we can actually answer the question "who is the greatest player of all time" and be neutral about it (for this reason, I don't like the list currently in the article: such lists will always just be a matter of opinion and it's wrong of us to push one particular list forward), but I do think we can talk about others' efforts to answer the question, and about what sort of things one might consider when trying to answer it.
So I think it's something we can write about. What I don't understand is why we're writing about it in an article on the world chess championship. I don't think there's really much of a relationship between the subjects. Of course, many of the candidates for "greatest ever" will have also been champions, but there's no reason to believe that the greatest ever must have been a champion. We even say ourselves in the first paragraph of the article that the champion is not necessarily the "highest-rated" (one measure of "strongest") in the world.
So I do think this is a subject we can talk about, but I don't think this article is the place to do it. I propose, therefore, that we move it to a new article called greatest chess player of all time or similar. Then we can give the subject the proper treatment it deserves, not limiting ourselves to just a handful of players, and bringing in outside sources like Keene and Divinsky's (rather dopey, but relevant) book, Warriors of the Mind, which ranks players through the ages in order (it's not sensible to mention the book in this article, since it considers players who were never champion). Objections? --Camembert 00:08, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Well, it's a couple of months later, and no objections are forthcoming, so I'm going to move that section of the article out to greatest chess player of all time and edit it somewhat. --Camembert 16:39, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)