Wikipedia:Notability (individual sports)
Essay
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikipedia:Notability (sports) (NSPORTS) exists as a guideline and has criteria for individual sportspeople involved in selected sports listed there. In regards, here is the list of the following selected individual sports, albeit pretty long:
- athletics or track and field and long-distance running
- badminton
- boxing
- cue sports (snooker, pool, billiards)
- curling
- cycling
- equestrian sport
- (rodeo and horse racing excluded)
- figure skating
- golf
- gymnastics
- horse racing
- kickboxing
- mixed martial arts
- motorsports
- orienteering
- rodeo
- sumo
- tennis
- triathlon
 | This is an essay on notability. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community. |
The whole list of individual sports having their own criteria for individual sportspeople is large and would potentially grow larger, while the list of team sports may have shrunk in early 2020s (as explained in Wikipedia:Notability (team sports)).
NSPORTS still supplements the general notability guideline (GNG). Indeed, NSPORTS has not been built or developed to replace GNG but rather clarify it.
Broadening the scope of NSPORTS to supplement other notability- and inclusion-related policies and guidelines, like WP:NOTSTATS and WP:NLIST, in order to apply other sports-related articles that are not solely about a "sports person or sports league/organization", like statistical ones, has not yet been considered or proposed so far. NSPORTS has criteria for "organizations, venues and games notability", but the section also supplements GNG.
A separate notability guideline for individual sports has not yet existed so far. Indeed, this page serves as an essay about notabilities of individual sports. The stability, longevity, and power of NSPORTS have been questioned since the WP:NSPORTS2022 RfC. How long NSPORTS will hold on its guideline status remains to be seen.
While alternatives to deletion, especially for stub articles, have been considered, like WP:ATD-R per especially WP:BIOSPECIAL, the nature of individual sports (as opposed to team sports) would make such alternative methods harder to implement and give a related page, e.g. one titled after an individual athlete, fewer options besides keeping by default and potential deletion.