Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports)

Discussion

• I started this RfC after looking at the course of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gohar Harutyunyan. I made the following comment there: {"I am not a fan of Armenian shooters. However this AfD is a precedent for handling of other similar shooter bios, such as Anja Senti, Gilles Dufaux, Kateryna Samohina, Valentyna Honcharova, and many more. If this page is deleted then a list of similar shooters must be compiled to be considered for deletion, in the way I remember a huge number of cricketeers were deleted." --Altenmann >talk 16:10, 13 February 2026 (UTC)
• If we can't consider world championships as a major international competition at the highest level, then why do we have that quote to begin with? BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:12, 13 February 2026 (UTC)
  • Cbl62 makes a good point that this depends on particular sport, i.e., the sport itself must be reazonably recognized. I believe we had the same issue with numerous beauty pageants, of "Miss The Whole Wide World" ilk. --Altenmann >talk 20:24, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

OK. I went ahead and {{prod}}ded Arusyak Grigoryan, Anja Senti, Sarina Hitz, Lilit Mkrtchyan, Valentyna Honcharova, Silvia Guignard, Gilles Dufaux, and see what will happen. If you feel this is a right way to go, you may {{prod2}} them. --Altenmann >talk 21:05, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

Discussion

• We would need objective evidence that such athletes almost universally receive SIGCOV in multiple, reliable, independent sources. Without such evidence, most editors (myself included) would not suport such an SNG. Cbl62 (talk) 17:39, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

  +1. Nor would I. Ravenswing 09:17, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

• Honestly, attempting to add criteria to NSPORT is a waste of time – it will never get approved. If you don't show ridiculously extensive evidence that every single person passing it meets GNG, it'll get opposed on that basis. If you do show ridiculously extensive evidence (as was done for the NBA) that every single person passing it meets GNG, it'll get opposed because "we already have GNG". NSPORT is worthless and should arguably be deprecated. And it's not like someone meeting it means anything. In, e.g., MMA, if an article fails NMMA but arguably meets GNG, the argument is "delete because fails NMMA". Meanwhile, if the subject meets NMMA but fails GNG, the argument is, "delete because fails GNG; meeting NMMA is entirely irrelevant". We've deleted articles that pass WP:NTRACK frequently and even have deleted Olympic medalists before, even when no searches for sources were performed. BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:48, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

  Honestly, we should just delete everything on this page except the YOUNGATH and NTEAM sections. All we need is a line that says sportspeople have to meet GNG. NSPORTS has been in a skeletonized state of randomness ever since NSPORTS2022 depreciated the participation criteria. No one cites this page at AfD anymore except when they're trying to impose stricter standards than GNG ("fails NMMA"). My proposal to eliminate NMMA got archived without action, of course. At least the baseball "likely to be notable if they are Hall of Famers" thing was finally removed. This whole page is misleading at best. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 18:04, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

  And people still citing NMMA like it's gospel: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Imanol Rodríguez. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 15:19, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

  I've been advocating ditching NSPORT in favor of the GNG for a couple of years now. (Come to that, I've advocated ditching all the SNGs on similar grounds, including oft-abused ones like PROF and NGEO.) Ravenswing 09:21, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

  (Come to that, I've advocated ditching all the SNGs on similar grounds, including oft-abused ones like PROF and NGEO.)

  I'd throw NPOL, particular WP:NSUBPOL into that list. Thousands of two-line articles about someone who was elected to represent a tiny state district, did 2 years in the State Congress, did nothing of note other than turning up and voting how their party told them to, and then left, with their Resume duly padded with "served as State Representative". Most of those articles are just a rehashing databases like ballotopedia and votesmart. There's a real lack of consistency across WP about what is notable and what's not. Hemmers (talk) 12:40, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

  Honestly, attempting to add criteria to NSPORT is a waste of time – it will never get approved.

  Yeah, I'm getting that impression, which is a shame as it seems to be running counter to WP:Globalize and entrenches systemic bias. For instance, many of the most notable target shooters are of Chinese and Eastern European origin, but Anglophone editors are bad at finding non-Latin sources in Chinese Script, Kanji, Cyrillic or Arabic, which is what will predominate outside the Olympics. Heck, there was an AfD on Anja Senti and that's only a matter of finding German sources. Took someone participating in WP:SWITZERLAND to come in and trivially say "Hey guys, there's tons of coverage at Tages-Anzeiger and Berner Zeitung". It's one of those perverse outcomes where we look at GNG and say "Yep, makes total sense" (which it does. I don't disagree with GNG in principle), but then an overbearing interpretation of that means we end up deleting articles about people who are objectively notable (based on relatively reliable but not RELIABLE sources like IOC or ISSF Competition results), but where there are limited English-language references, and the native-language sources are more difficult to parse than French (which seems ot be a lot of people's limits for non-English sources). I would hazard that Encyclopaedia Britannica are quite happy to say "If the ISSF say this person is World Champion, then that's probably true. We don't need the NYT to tell us that too". It feels like we're lacking the nuance to find a sensible path between "Must be reported in anglosphere news" and "Stuff in everything including the "Egg-Rolling World Championship that I started last week". I mean, the standards I'm seeing demanded to write about athletes would actually support the deletion of articles like Premier League records and statistics, which is entirely built on database and WP:ROUTINE match results. There's a distinct double standards/popularity contest going on. Hemmers (talk) 12:28, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

• It occurs to me that a considerabe issue is the meaning of WP:SIGCOV. Most of medal winning spersmen do not have active public life beyond sport. Dull people, I must say. Still, dismissing their gold medals in significant events just because they do not have their sex life or parents discussed seems a bit disingenuous to me. If a person is redlinked in two dozen Wikipedia article, I guess they surely worth two dozen lines of bio. Here is what I wrote a minute ago in one AfD: Here is the complete SIGCOV rule: "Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material. Nowhere it says that the coverage must be 7 feet long, only "more than a trivial mention". detail about person's medals and how they were qualified for them IMO is hardly a "trivial mention". --Altenmann >talk 19:51, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

Nobody in the history of Wikipedia has to my knowledge ever argued that we need coverage of sex life or hair color. Nor does the coverage need to be book length but it needs to have substantive depth. Coverage of athletic accomplishments is fine so long as there is substantive depth rather than a mere recital of results. This is the rule that the community adopted with strong consensus in 2022 and by which we, as sports editors (myself included), need to abide. Cbl62 (talk) 00:21, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

""Substantial depth" is your overstrictification. The rule say about "Significant coverage", which "is more than a trivial mention". Gold medas is not "trivial mention". --Altenmann >talk 07:28, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

The words "gold medal" are not some arcane incantation that magically transmutes a single sentence into "significant coverage" ... especially when the footnoted example given in WP:SIGCOV explicitly sets out that a single sentence does not qualify. Ravenswing 09:25, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

"It occurs to me that a considerabe issue is the meaning of WP:SIGCOV. Most of medal winning spersmen do not have active public life beyond sport. Dull people, I must say. Still, dismissing their gold medals in significant events"

This is the crux of it. When it comes down to it, almost all sports coverage is - to a greater or lesser degree - WP:ROUTINE. 99% of the coverage for the Winter Olympics is pre-planned reporting of the winners and results. The only stuff that deviates from ROUTINE are doping scandals and coverage of people talking about how sorry they are for cheating on their girlfriend. They might wrap it up in a lot of fluff, but it's basically just a wordy version of a results table. So where do we draw the line? People would get really pissed if I started marking Premier League records and statistics, Premier League Player of the Season or List of NBA rookie single-season scoring leaders for AfD. But these are all lifted from database sites or else from ROUTINE coverage (e.g. a newspaper article reporting match results, and also noting it's a record). By the standards being applied to some athlete articles, these do not meet GNG. Worse yet, some of those articles probably constitute WP:ORIGINALRESEARCH. But we've given them a pass for <reasons>.

Despite having edited WP for 15 years, NSPORTS2022 passed me by. I don't necessarily disagree with the arguments put, although if people were shoehorning in athletes who had not in fact won a major honour, then they didn't meet the presumption of notability anyway and needed to hit GNG. It's becoming clear that the outcome and the way the outcome is being implemented via AfD is strongly biased towards US/Anglophone editors and has the (unintentional) systemic effect of excluding athletes from smaller countries or lesser-reported Olympic sports (if you win a medal the same day as the Men's 100metre final... you will not be on the front pages tomorrow. The sprinters get the front page. All Olympic events are equal... but some are more equal than others). An American wins a World Championships and you'll be able to find reporting in newspapers on both coasts. It'll be trivial to find articles in LATimes, NYTimes, and USAToday. Someone from a country of 3 million wins a World Championship and people are saying "Oh, well, the reporting isn't SIGCOV. Their national papers have a smaller circulation than the papers in my local metro. They can't be that notable.". It's an appalling double standard.

I have not read every argument made in NSPORT2022 because that would take too many hours, but the two proposals which got consensus, whilst removing participation-based notability, also don't amount to "delete all the things". They were basically designed to avoid arguments about whether a State HS football tournament amounted to a "major honor" and whether every 16year old on the winning team is now notable (short-answer: no). We've replaced those arguments with different arguments and lawyering over what constitutes SIGCOV. The fact this is bleeding over into "This World Champion in an Olympic sport who is named in a dozen other WP articles isn't notable because the Armenian press is a bit thin and Հայոց գրեր is hard to search in Google" is a slap in the face to everyone trying to progress WP:Globalize and related projects like WP:Womeninred. Especially when other areas of WP are carrying on with garbage like WP:NSUBPOL, which shoehorns in thousands of non-notable state politicians whose reference section amount to an election results article and a link to VoteSmart. (Yes yes, WP:WHATABOUT. Well Yeah. What about...?. I make no apology for grousing about double standards being embedded in our policy and guidelines!) Hemmers (talk) 13:53, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

I agree that it's a slap in the face to anyone who hates that WP:V and WP:N are core policies of the encyclopedia, yes. The fact on the ground, though, is that they are. However aggrieved you are at the arguments against notability in the Harutyunyan AfD, the counter to that isn't that people weren't able to find media citations in the Armenian press. It's that people have thrown up a half dozen cites repeating no more than the same sentence or two. (Seriously, if the fellow's own national press doesn't give enough of a damn about him to provide SIGCOV, how exactly is this the fault of the Anglosphere press?)

With that, if you're groused about NPOL, its talk page is over thataway. As with NSPORTS2022, decisions are made by those who show up. Ravenswing 16:14, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

• We should be moving away from SNG (like we did with WP:NFOOTBALL being abolished)... GiantSnowman 12:20, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
• My general perspective is that the SNGs help with determining who (and equally importantly who should not) have a stand alone page. I believe the SNGs serve as proxy for who should be included in this project. Without NSPORT, I fear Wikipedia ceases to be an encyclopedia of notable figures and becomes a more akin to a directory of professional athletes, with the only bar being whether a writer decides to add a few paragraphs of biographical color in a story rather than if there is significant coverage of the athlete's accomplishments and legacy (WP:ANYBIO). And, since notability is not temporary, abandoning the SNG could lead to the creation of stand-alone pages of people without significant accomplishment (youth or second-tier athletes) who may receive coverage within a single season, but are otherwise low-profile for the rest of their lives. --Enos733 (talk) 18:35, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

  Before 2022, NSPORT had exactly been responsible for Wikipedia being a directory of professional athletes. The oft-cited fact was that at one point, one in seven of all biographical articles were of soccer players alone. Now yes, there's a danger of second-tier athletes who got coverage for a single season alone having articles. But isn't that true of any field of endeavor? A general famous for one major battle alone. An author who had one major bestseller. An otherwise unremarkable politician who'd never make NPOL who was assassinated, and therefore had a great deal of coverage. Ravenswing 22:05, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

  I don't disagree, but there was a floor of what I describe "real-world notability." Making it to a top-tier professional league is a globally notable feat, and for many of the most popular (western) sports, there is sufficient coverage of those athletes. The challenges, as I saw them, were 1) this assumption of significant coverage does not extend to all sports and even across top-tier leagues equally (especially in non-western countries) and there were disagreements on what a top-tier league was. 2) We had some editors who were intent on rapidly creating articles based on statistical databases without any other significant coverage.

  So, the community rightly rebelled against the "did one thing for a day" floor as equating to notability. However, in my mind, we (unwisely) do not have any real-world guidance for when a subject should have a stand-alone article for athletes. Now I know some editors prefer to just base everything against GNG, but I think it is more helpful to editors for us to articulate when we generally might have stand-alone pages and when a subject might have "coverage" but probably doesn't need a stand-alone page that exists into perpetuity (see how we treat youth athletes) (see also WP:LOWPROFILE). - Enos733 (talk) 00:07, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

  Making it to a top-tier professional league is a globally notable feat Nope. Being a starter in a skill position for one of the big-name leagues -- the top four North American pro leagues, one of the top half dozen European soccer leagues -- that's truly noteworthy. But there are any number of benchwarmers in the Moldovan Liga or the Nationale 1 Masculin or the KBL that no one's heard of outside their own fanbases, if that. The judgment calls in these sports were made by a very narrow number of editors, most of whom pumped up their own sports and declared ever-increasing number of criteria to be presumptively notable.

  Heck, take NHOCKEY for example. It was altered some over the years, but it was my draft that was initially accepted, right after NATHLETE devolved to the individual Wikiprojects. That made my personal opinion the fundamental decision maker for notability for literally thousands of biographical articles. Now I think I did a good job, but neither you nor anyone else should be trusting my naked word as to my qualifications to make that decision ... and I hate to think how many SNGs around Wikipedia similarly stemmed from one or two energetic people.

  That's the bottom line here: that in the absence of doing colossal work to determine whether a certain (subjective) percentage of meeting the criteria actually meets the GNG -- work just about no one is prepared to do -- it's just going to be spitballing, and it's going to be subjectively set mostly by people with partisan blades to sharpen, and likely by the loudest voices in the room. NSPORTS2022 was a massive wakeup call: that the community decided, with a good deal of justification, that editors from the sports Wikiprojects can't be trusted to make those calls in isolation. Ravenswing 07:51, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

  I don't want to massively overhaul the community's decision that participation does not equate to a stand-alone page. What I do advocate for is that we should develop something more akin to an essay - providing guidance to editors about when we do (and when we do not) expect stand-alone articles. I really don't want to be in a position to evaluate the merits of thousands of minor league baseball players or EFL League One players, or (insert league here), because they happened to have some coverage of their exploits as a youth or collegiate athlete and a few paragraphs of biographical material as a professional. - Enos733 (talk) 21:19, 28 February 2026 (UTC)