User talk:Falastur2/Archive 7

Angelos/Aggelos Tsiaklis

Just so you are aware: in Greek, a double-G equals a "ng" sound. Aggelos is therefore the Anglicisation where Angelos is the phonetic. Falastur2 ^Talk 01:03, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, but I did already know that. Which is why I wasn't at all surprised to get a hit on the "Aggelos" Wikipedia entry when searching (using the "Angelos" version of his name) for possible alternative articles to cite as RS support for his season 2008-09 loan out. I really wasn't intending to replace his name with a link to his personal article (which I assumed did not exist for such an unimportant player), but when it popped up as Google hit I simply went ahead and added that link (by changing his name in the "Loan out" table to match the "Aggelos" variant used as the article heading) and carried on with my main focus of finding alternative RS support for the all the dead links in the "Loan out" tables (or simply verifying that the current cited references in those tables were still copacetic).

It was only when I was systematically verifying that all the new links I had added in my edit worked as intended (after I had submitted my article update) that I actually bothered to read his article entry after clicking on his updated name. It was then that I discovered that every occurrence of his name in the article was spelt "Angelos" except for the spelling used as the article heading. Which is why I feel his personal article title is misspelt. There are probably an equal number of arguments for or against spelling his name either way in the article heading, but the spelling used there (whichever one wins the day) should then be used consistently throughout the rest of the article when referring to him. The alternate version of his name (the Anglicisation, should the phonetic be chosen as the article heading variant, or the phonetic, should the Anglicisation be chosen as the article heading variant) should be mentioned up front - in the same way that we mention the Brazilian players' full names plus any other popular variants of their names - but he should then be referenced CONSISTENTLY by his main name throughout the article. If "Aggelos" is deemed to be correct for the article heading then all the other mentions of his name in that article should be spelt that same way; and vice versa, if "Angelos" is deemed to be the way we wish to refer to him on Wikipedia then the body of the article is currently correct and the title is (as I stated) misspelt.

I don't know what the correct resolution for the spelling of his article name should be (and I really don't have a dog in that race) ... I just recognize a blatant inconsistency when I see one. Which is why I resolved the issue the way I did rather than simply jump in and edit the article to make all the occurrences of his name in it match the current heading, or alternatively, to rename the current article heading to the "Angelos" variant - which I don't know how to do anyway! - so that it matches the current body of the text. If the article heading had been spelt "Abgelos" (because someone had typed "B" instead of the adjacent "N" on the keyboard) then I would have known it was a typo for sure and attempted to modify the title. But the current "Aggelos" is, as you so admirably expressed above, arguably more correct than the phonetic "Angelos" which leaves me somewhat stymied WRT how to resolve this issue. I don't even feel I know enough about this fellow to simply add the "Angelos" variant of his name as a "redirect" for his article ... because if he happens to spell his own name "Angelos" then "Aggelos" is indeed a typo, so adding a redirect would only support the typo remaining in place permanently, when it really needs to be fixed ASAP.

The BBC Sport spelling of his name as "Angelos" would appear to support the choice of that variant of his name for the English language version of his Wikipedia article (and thus the current title of his article is incorrect) ... but I am quite aware that the BBC hacks are far from infallible, so I cannot make any decision based on that fact. OTOH, he has represented his country (Cyprus) 3 times(?) at the U21 level so he has a UEFA.com profile which spells his name "Aggelos" - which would seem to suggest that the correct solution here would be to add the Anglicised "Angelos" variant as a "redirect" to his Wikipedia article to satisfy all the English language links (plus modify all the current occurrences of "Angelos" in the body of the article text to "Aggelos" for the sake of consistency). However, my past experience of the general accuracy of UEFA.com information makes me hesitate once again because, when there is a disparity such as this one, the BBC is usually correct more often than UEFA! :(

What to do, what to do ... perhaps you can resolve this one? How does the Manchester Evening News spell his name? :) Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 04:45, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

The MEN would write Tsiaklis' name as "Angelos" but since the MEN doesn't report on reserve fixtures, (exception of the Senior Cup, which I'm not sure if he ever played in), he wouldn't ever really appear in there. To the English-speaking world, thinking of City blogs and the OS and such, he is "Angelos" though. The article should really be "Angelos" - the spelling of Aggelos is the preserve of the Greek wikipedia. I'll move it (and leave a redirect) in a bit. Falastur2 ^Talk 11:06, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

And that was exactly my first take on this situation until I saw the UEFA.com entry for him (which is targeted at English-speaking readers because UEFA has other language versions of the same info. for all the other nationalities / ethnicities that it officiates over, although UEFA may well standardize on one single spelling of the names of players, teams and stadiums, etc. for all its different language versions), at which point I flipped. Then I thought some more about this and flopped back again. Once I realized I was flip-flopping like that I decided that I was NOT the person that should be fixing this, hence my compromised solution. I'm not entirely certain I understand what you've told me you are going to do here, but you now own this problem, so make sure when you are done that those two links to Mr. Tsiaklis (and that's probably the wrong way to address a Cypriot person too!) in the MCFC season articles (one for his loan out to Wrexham in 2008 and one for his release and eventual joining of F.C. United in the summer of 2009) are made consistent with your solution. If I understand you correctly, "Aggelos Tsiaklis" will now become a Greek Wikipedia article stub and you will create a new one titled "Angelos Tsiaklis" that will contain the original article's text (after it has been moved over there with a move page). Just remember that my edits of those table entries now have them linking to "Aggelos" but displaying as "Angelos" so you will/may have to change those too. I am now done with this issue since you now own it! :) Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 02:32, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Not entirely - and here's another thing I promised to do but forgot to. I'll get it done right now, I promise. No, what I was saying I would do is Move page "Aggelos Tsiaklis" to "Angelos Tsiaklis" on the grounds that the English Wikipedia is expected to have the Anglicisations of names where possible/applicable, and leave a redirect so anyone looking for Aggelos Tsiaklis in future can still find the page. I won't be writing an article for the Greek Wikipedia for the simple reason that I don't speak Greek well enough to do so. Falastur2 ^Talk 04:30, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Not entirely??? But that is EXACTLY what I said; please go re-read it. I've added a few more words in bold to further clarify what I was saying, but I really think it was clear enough first time around. Perhaps at 4 a.m. in the morning you were a little tie-red (as Roberto is want to say!). I wasn't expecting you to write a friggin' Wikipedia article on this guy in Cypriot Greek! Sheesh!! * rolls eyes * Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 09:38, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Sorry. I wrote that at 4.30am. When I read it, I for some reason was sure you'd taken the idea I was going to translate it into Greek and rewrite the article for the Greek Wikipedia - hence my "not entirely" comment. I didn't mean to cause you any offense... :\ Falastur2 ^Talk 12:08, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

And none was taken. ;) Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 01:21, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

FYI, I noticed that the Angelos article you created got AfDed a few days ago and now is no more. I guess being a Cypriot international player with multiple U21 caps is just not notable enough for some folk. Personally, I think that makes him much more notable than Bébé ... but what do I know?  :( Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 22:40, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

You might wish to check this out. The other Abdul Razak (talk) 20:22, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Ben Mee and John Guidetti articles

I have moved this text to its own new section since the original section was becoming quite long, plus this discussion is completely off-topic for that section.
Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 06:30, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

On other somewhat related matters, could you possibly cobble together a short article (something akin to Angelos' article) for Ben Mee since he is now a graduate of the MCFC academy? He is the only player represented in the current PST without a supporting article that we can link him to. Even John Guidetti has a Wikipedia article.
Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 04:45, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

I'll write an article for Ben Mee but it will be speedy deleted in short order. Unfortunately, Ben Mee does not meet Wikipedia's inclusion criteria for a sportsman, which is that he's "...played in a league game for a fully professional team..." I've had a few arguments over inclusion of lesser players on Wikipedia before and unfortunately I rarely win them, but I shall try nonetheless. You might want to add his page to your watchlist so that you know when he's going to be speedy deleted too. In the meantime we can really only hope that he gets loaned out to a lower-league club and gets game time for them. Falastur2 ^Talk 11:06, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Not necessarily so ... John Guidetti has exactly the same status as Ben Mee (viz. he's only played for the first team in the League Cup rather than in any EPL games, although in his case he has also played at the top level in Sweden on loan, but IMO that shouldn't affect his status in Britain where he still fails the Wikipedia inclusion threshold) yet no one has put his article up for speedy deletion yet (touch wood). Just make sure you have a local copy of it should it be so deleted. There are currently a few Liverpool youth players that have active articles despite their also not having played EPL games, and I'm pretty certain that Bébé also had an article in place BEFORE he made his actual league debut for the unmentionables. I personally don't object to such articles (as long as they are accurate and well written) because, just like the "Ballet on Ice" article, they do not do anyone any harm - IMO, if you don't like them then simply don't look at them rather than lobby for their removal. I really do not understand why people get such a bee in their bonnet over their existence.

I can't help thinking that your "Ballet on Ice" article got deleted mostly because you gave it the wrong title (based on the two teams' names and the scoreline) while if you had called it "Ballet on Ice" from the get-go it would probably still be there today. The article on the 3-4 win at Spurs was a much trickier issue ... if I remember correctly, didn't United come back from being 3-0 down at White Hart Lane to also win 3-4 in the league that same season? If so, that performance pretty well undermines City's feat. Of course, the United team was not reduced to ten men at half-time ... but if we are honest here, losing that pillock Joey Barton was actually to City's advantage! :) Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 02:32, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

John Guidetti qualifies outright for inclusion as he played 8 appearances for IF Brommapojkarna - a fully professional, top-tier European national football league. This is the main demand for inclusion. The Football League Cup is not an actual league, and therefore the most ardent deletionists of football articles - "coincidentally" also the ones who spend least time actually reading and editting them - argue that the League Cup is not a notable enough competition for players to use it as the basis for notability. But oh well. As for the Ballet on Ice, perhaps so but the users who voted for deletion saw this possibility and still voted for deletion. Once again note that the ones who voted for deletion barely had a constructive edit between them on footballing pages (I may be exaggerating a little, but only just). And the scum won 5-3 against Spurs, not 4-3, but the main reason for the creation of that article was that it is the FA Cup's greatest ever comeback - perhaps any English cup's best ever comeback - and has become part of the City mythos - that game is still talked about by City fans as one of our greatest hours. Not to mention, United weren't a man down when they scored 5, were they? Falastur2 ^Talk 04:30, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

"John Guidetti qualifies outright for inclusion as he played 8 appearances for IF Brommapojkarna - a fully professional, top-tier European national football league." And exactly how does that not reconcile with my own, "he has also played at the top level in Sweden on loan"? If you re-read what I wrote you'll realize that my point was about pertinent notability and NOT whether IF Brommapojkarna is professional enough or plays at a high enough tier of Swedish soccer for John's appearances for that club to satisfy the minimum threshold necessary for him to have his own Wikipedia article. Guidetti's Wikipedia bio is an article intended for ENGLISH speaking readers, so surely the determination of whether he is "notable" enough to even have an article should be determined by how notable he is in the eyes of the average English person. The average (non-City) soccer fan that sits in the Kop at Anfield or the Stretford End at OT every other week has probably never heard of IF Brommapojkarna (unless, of course, their precious red team just happened to have played them in the Champions League some time recently). OTOH, that same average fan has probably watched the BBC MotD coverage of every round of the Carling Cup to date, and so he first became aware of Guidetti's existence because he saw him play in the West Brom. game on the telly the other week ... and NOT because he followed John's exploits playing in Sweden's top league last year.

Therefore, the fact that Guidetti has played part of one game in the Carling Cup that was broadcast on the telly actually makes him MORE "notable" to an average English soccer fan in the U.K. than the fact that he has played 8 full games in Sweden's top flight. John may be a minor celebrity in Sweden because of his soccer exploits there, but that still cuts no mustard with the British public who are ultimately the target audience for an English Wikipedia article. It is his "notability" in the U.K. that should determine whether he has an English Wikipedia entry, NOT his "notability" in Sweden (which almost definitely merits a Swedish language Wikipedia article for him). If the threshold for sufficient "notability" to justify having an English language article is to have played in a professional league match then that league game must be one with which an English speaking person is familiar, otherwise that is a meaningless threshold to achieve, and most Brits (rightly or wrongly) do NOT follow Swedish soccer. Thus, from that perspective, John is no more "notable" in the eyes of the British public than Ben Mee (who played in the same game) and therefore no more deserving of an ENGLISH language Wikipedia article than Ben. And thus IMO his article is just as vulnerable as Ben's to receiving a request for speedy deletion. THAT was my point.

"Once again note that the ones who voted for deletion barely had a constructive edit between them on footballing pages." As I said to you very early on in our communications here, I see very little evidence of intelligent life amongst the editors of the Wikipedia footballing pages. Present company excepted, of course. :) It strikes me that many of the people that make edits here do so because they seek attention from others rather than they wish to move the material forward (i.e., the edit is much more about them than the article being edited). That is doubly or triply true of those that join the Talk Page discussions (of which the "speedy deletion" discussions are just one form). Look at all the idiotic comments on the Talk Page of the MCFC current season article that my changing of the AppsStats from a duple to a triple caused, and all from people that have never made a contribution to that article. Which is why I am hesitant to discuss anything in such an environment ... because to debate with fools only makes you a bigger fool! Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 09:38, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

re: John Guidetti. That is sensible and a strong point but unfortunately the rules have been laid down and that's not the way that it works. Encyclopedias are, for a start, by nature extant to provide information about lesser-known subjects and as the world's largest encyclopedia, it is Wikipedia's mandate to provide information about subject areas that may not be known about by people of one country but are researchable materials. For instance, I may never have heard of Brommapojkarna before Guidetti went there, but if I wanted to see how other European leagues faired compared to our own I might want to research them and thus there should be some information about them. However obviously there is some degree of differentiation between Swedish specialist subjects and English/Anglophone. For instance, while the restrictions on adding English teams is "has played in the FA Trophy or higher at some point in their existence" (which allows for a good 1,500 teams to have articles here) there is virtually no need for that level of detail for Sweden, whereas in Sweden there may be. However, Brommapojkarna are a top-tier team and thus are representative of Sweden's best and brightest, and therefore deserve an English-language Wikipedia article. I could also point out that with the globalisation of the world, you increasing could make an argument for the idea that the English Wikipedia should have an article on everything that exists in every other language, but I won't go into that.

Anyway to move on, what is officially notable (or rather, who is) is written and part of accepted Wikipedia practice. That means that Guidetti, having played at the top level in Sweden is officially more notable than Mee who has played in a second-class cup competition yet on a higher level. That's just the way it is, and unfortunately too many people buy into that to change it without a serious and sustained campaign of re-education that should start by writing a WP:ESSAY and trying to win support - almost like trying to change the scientific world's mindset towards something like quantum physics. I don't like it any more than you do, but doing anything else (i.e. creating an article for Ben Mee) will simply result in us losing articles for deletion votes and failing to make an impact. Incidentally, as the Conference National is not fully professional, Angelos Tsiaklis is under risk of being AfD'ed too...He's been deleted before. Falastur2 ^Talk 12:08, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

I personally believe all three of these players (Mee, Guidetti and Tsiaklis) qualify for their own Wikipedia articles because they are all capped U21 internationals. Their club level experience is now irrelevant. Surely being considered good enough to represent your country at the international level is an achievement a lot more significant (viz. much harder to attain) than managing to turn out for a club in a League Two game? I find it laughable that a player who makes a single appearance for Barnet as an 89th minute substitute in a League Two fixture meets the criterion of "notable" (and thus merits a Wikipedia article) while a player such as Dedryck Boyata, if he hypothetically only played two full 90 minute games for City in the Carling Cup semi-final ties against the unmentionables, would still fail that criterion (and would not merit his own article). How screwed up is that?

When did the League Cup become a second-class cup competition? IMO it's harder to win than the FA Cup. There are no "non-league" teams in it to permit "gift draws" for higher tier clubs and it is initially seeded so that two weak League Two teams cannot be drawn against each other guaranteeing that one of them will progress to the next round (despite the fact that neither team is really good enough to be playing in that round). In the FA Cup a team such as Blackpool can reach the quarter finals by drawing back to back home ties against Kettering Town and Forest Green followed by a tough away draw at Hereford United. You cannot get gifted runs like that in the League Cup. By the Fourth round it is mostly only being contested by Premier League and Championship teams. The two-legged semi-finals also eliminate the sort of fluke "they rose to the occasion on the day" upsets that can happen at that level in the FA Cup, such as Portsmouth beating Spurs last season. Clearly Portsmouth was an inferior side to Tottenham last year. Even if the League Cup is not harder to win than the FA Cup, it is certainly no easier. Just because Arsene Wenger treats it as an inferior competition does not make it so. I don't dispute that the two domestic cups are inferior WRT the Premier League in determining which are the best teams over the course of a full season; I just don't buy the argument that the League Cup is in any way inferior to the FA Cup, because if you understand its structure, it is theoretically tougher to win it. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 01:21, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Playing in a League Cup fixture for a top-notch EPL team such as Man. City might not be worth a hill of beans, nor might making multiple full game appearances for a top-tier Swedish club such IF Brommapojkarna count for shit, and nobody might be at all interested in the fact that he has represented his country as the U21 international level in the UEFA Euro 2012 qualifiers. But if he steps out at Turf Moor in a Burnley shirt in this weekend's upcoming Championship game then that will surely be the real McCoy! I think his article will be safe from 'speedy deletion' after that!  :) Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 06:30, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

I see that Mr. Guidetti was utilized as a 73rd minute substitute by Burnley in yesterday's game against Derby County, so I guess that means we can now both let out a big sigh of relief .... phew, finally he's "arrived" and is now a truly bona fide player in the eyes of the ever omniscient Wikipedia football article editors (many of whom probably don't have two CSEs to rub together!) Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 02:25, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

I see that you have already graduated Chris Chantler from the MCFC academy. Now that he is a bona fide player are you going to create a brief article stub for him (so that I can link to it when I add him to the PST)? Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 22:29, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Season 2008-09 custom team kit shorts and GK strips

I have moved this text to its own new section since the original section was becoming quite long, plus this discussion is also completely off-topic for that section. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 06:30, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

On less related matters, where the hell are the shorts that you promised me? :( Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 04:45, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Dangit! Knew that I'd forgotten something! Working on the shorts right now. Falastur2 ^Talk 11:06, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

The shorts have been created and added to your sandbox page about kits so that you can decide that (if?) you like it first before rolling it out to the actual article. I'll get on Ben Mee's article now. Falastur2 ^Talk 11:42, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Ben Mee. Feel free to add more if you can think of anything. Falastur2 ^Talk 12:38, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. The article looks good and so do the shorts, don't you think? At least the shorts that you did look sharp. What happened to the Third kit second variant ones (orange strip with a dark blue slash on the left, the opposite of the first variant ones)? They should be easier to produce because, unlike the others, there is nothing needed on the right hand side of them (as we look at them). Can you also produce a copy of the orange and blue shirt in gold and light green for the GK strips? IOW, could you flip the orange color to gold (and then green) and the dark blue color to black for the trim in each case? I've tried to get the GK strips right using standard stuff I see on other teams' kits but it still looks pretty funky. The gold lines on the orange shirts will need to become black lines in both cases. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 02:32, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Ack! Forgot about the third strip kits too. It's gone 4am now and I'm actually starting to feel a little off so I need my sleep, but I promise I'll have them made for you tomorrow.

Thanks. Do you understand what I'm looking for WRT the GK shirts? I'm looking to get something that better matches (than what I've already kluged together) the shirts that were used but which requires no more work than swapping colors on the custom team kit shirts that already exist. The result won't be perfectly correct but it will still look much better than anything I can put together with a mix-and-match approach from the trims that are already extant for other teams.
Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 09:38, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

I understand. I'll get it done in a bit. Shouldn't be hard at all. Falastur2 ^Talk 12:08, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Alright, so see what you think of what I just added to your templates. I ended up going back and designing my own GK shirts (or, adding the lower-left flash) since it was missing from the originals and needed adding. The flash doesn't match the stripe on the shorts exactly, but from the pictures I've looked at, it never did in the first place with the actual kit anyway. Anywho, if you think it needs tweaking then shout and I'll have another go. Falastur2 ^Talk 18:26, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Well, all of your kit changes are clearly better than what was currently in the article so I have already added them there. I also think we are now done with the team kits for this season. WRT to your GK strips I do have some suggested improvements. I think you got a bit carried away with that curved black slash that comes down to the shorts. It should not come quite so far around the front of the shirt nor is it anywhere near being quite so thick. When one initially looks at the GK strips for this season they do not appear to have anything in common with the design of the three team strips. But if you study them as much I have been doing recently you'll come to realize that they do actually follow the same overall design. Part of the problem here is that the artist - I think it was a lass, and I will refer to her as such here - that originally created the three custom designs for the team kits did not get them quite right, but to fix that would mean starting from scratch again and there are too many good points about what she did do to justify doing that. It is far better that we put that sort of effort into improving the kits of the other seven season articles (the three most recent seasons are now looking pretty good IMHO) rather than get too anal over this particular season's kits (which are by far the most complicated to represent with the "kitboxes").

What the original artist got right IMO was the elliptical nature of the designs of the three team kit shirts. This is most clearly seen in the design of the away kit shirt (and while I quite like the design of the home and third kit shirts for this season, I have never been very keen on that away kit design ... it is a little too effete-looking for my tastes, or as one of my cruder friends might put it, it looks way too gay!). The top of the ellipse is the two shirt sleeve seam bands that you've added to the GK strips, and then the ellipse skews around on the left hand side (as we look at it) as it approaches the shorts where it meets up with another much sharper (trowel-shaped) ellipse that is the slash of blue, white, orange or navy color on the custom shorts. These two ellipses (for want of any other way of describing these curved lines) also form the framework of the GK strips. But on the GK strips it is the outlines of these two ellipses that are used to provide the black trim for the shirts and shorts. The main exception to this rule is the design of the black GK shorts which feature the same triangular trowel-shape wedge of gold as used in blue, white, orange and navy on the home and third kits. Right now you show this as a thin gold outline of the trowel-shape wedge, where I believe it should actually be solid gold just like on all those other custom shorts.

The light green GK shorts are another story. They don't feature a corresponding black wedge but just a black outline of the front of that wedge. However, that curved outline goes from thin to much thicker as it progresses from the bottom of the shorts up to the top, in exactly the same manner as your black slash does on the front of the shirts. It is neither a thin outline of the front of the wedge (as used in white on the black away kit shorts) nor the full wedge of color used down the sides of all the other shorts. Viewed straight from the front, this thickening wedge outline probably looks more like the full wedges of color used elsewhere than the thin white line used on the away kit shorts, so what you currently have for these shorts is probably as good as we can get for this piece of trim. Now we come to the GK shirts ...

In all cases, the top edge of the trowel-shaped ellipse on the shorts (whether just an outline or a wedge of solid color) meets up with the bottom edge of the skewed ellipses that are featured on the front of the shirts. So your current black slash extends way too far across the front of the shirt (because it ends in the center of the shirt!). I think you have captured fairly well how that curved line appears from the side but you've then projected that look onto the front of the shirt. I think the best model for the GK shirts is the blue home kit shirt. It features two tones of sky blue. If you flip all the areas that are currently the darker sky blue color so that they are black, and make all the other areas gold or light green then I think you will have got as close to the actual GK shirts as we can get without actually designing them from scratch. The darker blue areas of the shirt, when the color is flipped, will make the under side of the left arm (as we look at it) be completely black - which indeed it is on both the gold and green versions of the GK shirts. This black trim then runs down the left hand side of the shirt and skews around to the front in order to meet up with the top of the triangular wedge on the top of the shorts.

A couple of the things that the original artist got wrong IMO are the right arms (as we look at them) of both the home and third kit shirts (the away kit shirt is correct). She has the underside of the home shirt being white and the underside of the third kit shirt being navy ... neither of which is the case. The only trim coloring I can discern on any of these shirts are the sleeve seams which you amply captured in your current versions of GK shirts. If you could flip the white undersides of the home kit shirt to be sky blue like the top half, leaving only the white arc of the sleeve seam, they would actually be more correct. Ditto, the navy undersides of the orange third kit shirts. If you cannot easily do that then NBD. But those white and navy shirt sleeve seams then become black on the gold and light green GK shirts ... just as you currently have them. I hope that helps.
Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 01:21, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

FYI, I have now copied the City team kit sections from the Talk Page "scratch area" of my sandbox account (where I play around with ideas and develop stuff) to here on the User Page area of that account (where I archive / maintain the developed stuff). You can add the new version of the GK strip when its done either there or back in the scratch area (where I left a copy of the 2008-09 season team kit section since we are still working on the GK strips). Just as a heads-up, this means that any links to these sections I've included in prior messages to you will no longer work properly, if at all. Do you have any suggestions where I can get the information for seasons prior to this one in order to produce a similarly comprehensive montage of kit variants plus kit usage matrix. It does not have to be video sources, still photos will work just as well (in fact, I frequently have to freeze the videos to focus on the details that I'm looking for). Remember that unless I can view images of ALL the games (including images of the City GK in each) it is pointless embarking on the usage matrix portion.

I suspect that a possible method (at least for the team kits) will be to look at the photo images on all the match reports for a season. I notice that most, if not all, of the match reports for seasons 2005-09 (4 years' worth) are now "dead links" (viz. 404 missing page errors or the equivalent). I could possibly combine the task of locating suitable replacement reports (i.e., BBC Sport, Guardian/Observer, Times Online, Telegraph or Independent articles) with building up this record of kit usage for these seasons. I don't care much for the Sporting Life reports; they are a bit too light weight for my tastes. I prefer the Guardian and BBC Sport reports over all the others and I see that you (or possibly someone else) have favored the Guardian as the source for most of the earlier seasons (2001-05) too. Do you think we should mix it up a bit when fixing those interim years or just stick with the Guardian reports? I prefer the BBC Sport reports because they are multimedia; meaning that most of them contain both video and audio interviews and analyses plus the final copy of the "live text" coverage they do for all the games. However, the journalistic quality of the writing is probably the best in the Guardian reports. What are your thoughts on this? Is there a season that you feel should be fixed in preference to any other one?

If I do take the trouble to touch any of these games I will probably also collapse the report. My attitude to collapsing the reports in any of the previous seasons is one of, "if it ain't broke don't fix it"! But if I'm touching them anyway it requires very little additional effort to collapse the report. I really like the way that this has worked for this season's article; it appears like we are going to be able to condense almost the whole EPL season into not much more space than a single screen length. However, I fully realize you don't feel quite so good about the collapsibles as I do. I think the first games that need to be fixed (and thus collapsed) for any season are the pre-season games - as I have already done for the 2006-07 season. In general, the news media do not report on these games so the only source of reports for these games anyway are the MCFC OWS ones, and it's the MCFC OWS match reports that are the most likely ones to become "dead links". Also, the pre-season games are of very little interest outside of the pre-season timeframe in which they occur, so IMO they should be collapsed down to the minimum in any given season anyway, even if none of the other competitive match reports are collapsed. Consequently, outside of any issue of fixing broken match report links, I would want to collapse all the pre-season reports for the nine extant completed seasons for which we have season articles in place (actually that should be 8 since I've already done 2006-07, plus most of the older season articles do not address the pre-season games, so its actually much less than that; possibly 5 seasons at most). How do you feel about having a mixture of open and collapsed reports in the same season article?
Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 06:30, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

U.K. versus U.S. MCFC OWS servers

I have moved this text to its own new section since the original section was becoming quite long, plus this discussion is also completely off-topic for that section. IMO, now that we've got this mixup straightened out, all of what follows ptobably has no further value (at least to any other readers of this text) and should probably be deleted anyway. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 06:30, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

As for that "mcfc.com" versus "mcfc.co.uk" match report for the Portland game, I don't really know what happened there. It's kind of bizarre actually. I can't remember who added which reports for those pre-season games ... I thought I added most, if not all, of them, but gonads may have also added some. Clearly, the report for the Portland game must have been added by me, yet I did nothing different to track it down than I've done for any of the MCFC OWS match reports and transfer/loan notices I've used elsewhere (and there are quite a few of those latter ones now as I continue to fix dead links). I essentially see myself as being just another user of the MCFC OWS, just like yourself but located a bit further afield geographically, so I don't really know where "mcfc.com" comes into the equation. Perhaps MCFC created a temporary U.S. server for the duration of the U.S. tour. I do know that the match reports and videos were being filed from over here initially (understandably so) but I had assumed the people creating those were simply logging onto the MCFC OWS and uploading them from over here, rather than placing them on a different server located stateside.

Interestingly, I can access both reports (depending on which edited version of the article I click on) while you can only access just the one. Even more interesting is that they are different reports. "Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice. The U.S. (.com) one was credited to Chris Bailey and was posted with the same title (but a different photo of action from the game showing Adam Johnson and Patrick Vieira) and a timestamp of "Sun 18 Jul 2010, 5:05AM", while the U.K. (.co.uk) one was credited to Tim Oscroft and has a timestamp of "Sun 18 Jul 2010, 5:14AM" (9 minutes later!). But the text of both reports is different, and one is not a manipulated (later) version of the other. It looks to me like those guys didn't get their acts together before the game and agree who was doing what, and thus both of them ended up independently writing and posting a match report for the game, presumably Chris from over here in the U.S. and Tim from back there on your side of the pond. If it's any comfort to you, Tim's is the better report, though neither of them are very long. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 02:32, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

re: the .com/.co.uk thing, the problem isn't that I can't view the match report anymore: I can. The problem is that I can't direct-link to it. City's board had an America-centric website created at the time of the US tour and it's still going strong (albeit not with as many news articles as they try to write American-culture-tuned articles for the US site, hence the re-writing of the same match report. The problem is that whoever created the US site obviously knows that a lot of major UK companies create a .com version of their url and have the .co.uk link into it (or vice versa) so a lot of British people almost view the endings as interchangeable: thus they are expecting an element of confusion between the US site and the UK one. Hence, they coded it so that if you are not an American IP address, any link to the .com site flashes up a box asking which site you want to set your browser for, and then takes you to the homepage. Thus for UK users, any US site match report will just be an indirect and slow link to the .com main page, and you'd have to navigate for yourself to find the match report. Presumably the same can happen for US users trying to read a UK match report, though I'm unsure given how set in stone the UK site is as the main point of reference. However, given the fact that - at this early stage anyway, I expect that the vast majority of readers of the site will be British (or non-US), I changed the link. Actually it was a bit of a spur-of-the-moment thing, but I stand by my decision nonetheless.

BTW, I didn't for one moment question your decisioon to flip the reports. Almost every other referenced match report and cited news or web reference in all ten extant MCFC season articles is located on a .co.uk server, so if I myself had noticed that it was located on a .com server, when there was an alternative .co.uk version also available, I would have done exactly the same. I just assumed that since it was a U.S. article that it was me that had linked it in as the match report, and I was simply confused / curious how or why I had managed to do that for the reasons I've stated. Additionally, the current match report (Tim's) is the better effort of the two IMO, so it's also the right choice based on quality criteria as well as ease of access for the reader. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 06:30, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Oh, and for the record, Chris Bailey is City's (Manchester-based) Head of Media. I'm not sure if City have hired a US-based reporter for the US site, but I suspect that the US articles are just being written by the UK media team, under advice from Americans. Falastur2 ^Talk 04:30, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

I don't have that issue because the MCFC OWS does not put up a similar message for me (however, I cannot claim that that is how it works for all American users; there may well be something unique about my own circumstances). However, I have seen the same sort of message when I connect to the Arsenal OWS. The OWS server recognizes that I'm accessing from a U.S. web address and automatically asks me whether I would prefer to connect to the U.S. Arsenal server rather than the U.K. one. In fact, it automatically assumes that I would prefer sloppy seconds and merely asks me to confirm my preference to connect to the U.S. server and I usually have to fight it in order to stay connected in Cockney space. If I've configured anything permanently for myself during these fights with the Arsenal OWS it is that I prefer access to the U.K. server. Which is exactly the opposite situation to your own WRT the U.S. MCFC server. It has suggested to you that, since you are accessing from an U.K. web address, you will probably prefer to connect to the U.K. server rather than the U.S. one, and you have concurred. The reason why I don't get such messages from the MCFC OWS might be because I was an established user of it before the U.S. server was ever brought online, and that message might only be presented to connections from new IP addresses (which is a criterion I would fail).

But none of that explains how I managed to latch on to that Portland game match report located on the .com server, because I was using the .co.uk server long before this summer, and I always connect to it by using my browser bookmark for it. So it's not as though I went searching in Google for the MCFC OWS and latched on to the wrong server without noticing. By using my bookmark I always specifically request to be connected to the .co.uk server. Maybe it was gonads that added that match report? That might actually make more sense. But it really doesn't matter now. BTW, I still think the fact that two separate match reports were filed 9 minutes apart on two separate servers was a SNAFU. I believe it is the only game it happened for. Chris Bailey filed all the other four match reports for pre-season games played on the U.S. tour because he was the person on tour with the team. If Tim Oscroft was also over here travelling with the team and the two of them sat in adjacent hotel rooms and posted their reports 9 minutes apart, then IMO it was a SNAFU of the highest proportions! LMAO.
Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 09:38, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Very probably true. I couldn't comment about whether you're right or not, and it does in fact seem like tremendous overkill. I trust that they knew what they were doing anyhow. As per who put that match report up - turns out it was me (I checked the page history). I have no idea why I did this. It may be that it was right after they announced the US site and I was taking a look around (some of the early articles truly were very divergent) and simply forgot where I was as I rushed out an edit for the match report. I'm really not sure anymore - it was after all about 4 months ago. My mistake, anyhow. Falastur2 ^Talk 12:08, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

LMAO here. You remind me of those firemen that run around town setting fires in order to keep themselves employed! :)
Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 01:21, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Use of singular versus plural when referriing to group entities

The use of the parochial British plural to refer to sporting clubs, although grammatically correct within British English, also gives the overriding impression to the reader that any team so referenced is a loose collection of individuals rather than a coordinated and cohesive entity. I specifically chose to use the American singular over the British plural because I feel it is the more correct of the two options in this context. I personally feel that Manchester City are one of the four best coached teams currently playing in the Premier League (as the club's current league position deservedly reflects) and that that position has been achieved by the professional hard work and graft everyone concerned puts in daily on the Carrington training fields, and not because the players are just an amorphous "ungelled" mass of overrated and overpaid Galácticos that could do much better if they would only stop bickering amongst each other and apply themselves to the task at hand. That latter is the "popular image" that the City-bashing media, such as the Daily Mail, likes to continually create when writing about City, and IMO your insistence on using the plural when referring to City simply plays into their hands.

I'm quite sure SAF loves it every time someone such as yourself refers to City as being just a bunch of high-priced individuals (as if Rooney and Berbatov only joined MUFC on free transfers!) ... after all, SAF's always the first person that will remind the public that it takes time to build and gel a team, and that it cannot simply be done in a season. Although no one expected the current MCFC project to turn a mid-table team into PL champions overnight, I do believe that, like Chelsea, it can be done a lot quicker than SAF would have everyone believe with his "Red Devilish propaganda" and that City are right on track for achieving it. So I would prefer it if you would cease and desist from being SAF's mouthpiece in this regard.

When I make my Wikipedia edits I choose and craft my words very carefully and I wish to put forth the image of City as a well-bonded team unit rather than play into the hands of the club's jealous detractors by using phraseology that subconsciously suggests to the reader, like SAF likes to do at every opportunity in his press statements, that the City team is merely an uncoordinated group of Galácticos ... hence my choice of the singular over the plural whenever I refer to the team. It has nothing to do with your own rather tiresome "Yank versus Limey" take on this issue, particularly so as I'm an ex-pat Mancunian. You also need to learn the Wikipedia guidance in these matters, which states that both the singular and the plural are correct, but whichever form is chosen, it must be used CONSISTENTLY throughout the article. Which is what I did.

I have put considerable effort into editing the MCFC family of articles during the last couple of weeks in order to try and bring some semblance of CONSISTENCY to both their content and format so they look more like the product of a coordinated team of editors. What I find particularly annoying about your recent edit is that you have chosen to spend your Wikipedia time making such a pointless correction to my text while at the same time you have completely ignored my recent friendly solicitation of your input. I’m afraid that comes across as a bit of an F.U. to me. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 03:20, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Sorry to hear that you feel that way. I made the edit on the accepted Wikipedia principle of using the variant of English which relates to the subject matter - that is to say, articles about British entities should use British English whereas articles about American entities should use the American form. Articles about other foreign entities should use the style of English most associated with them. I understand your logic, and your theory is sound except I can't help thinking it's a vast over-exaggeration of what is (I thought, but gauging by your response, clearly not) an exceedingly minor conflict of opinion.

I have to say that I'm not a little hurt by the wording of your comments to me - especially as your comments have frequently been abrasive or accusatory and I have each time done my utmost to apologise every single time and not even to let on that I had taken offense to your comments (I'm not sure how successful I have been, but I have tried). I am a little troubled that I could cause you so much anxiety. I understand that you disagree with my edits, find them counter-productive, and are the possessor of the concept for a better article than I could write, but anything I do can be easily reverted with a single click of the "[undo]" button in an article's history and I struggle to see how I could have engendered in you so much hatred towards my efforts. I have, for example, in the last month made a grand total of 27 edits to public-space articles - a pitiful amount compared to my former activity. Of those 27 edits, 11 have been to articles you have no involvement with and thus probably have never even seen my changes for, 8 have actually been done on your own advice or with your consent, and the rest have been very deliberate and stylistically unquestionable changes such as updating the article I wrote on City's history in European competitions with the Lech Poznan score, etc. Only two can I see as potentially spurious: the lead paragraph for the reserves and academy article, and that edit to your style which for your peace of mind I have even undone for you - and I'm willing to undo the lead paragraph from the reserves and academy article too. I am frankly confused and upset that I should cause so much fury in yourself. OK, I will admit that I've been particularly bad at responding to comments left on my talk page, but I'm not an employee of Wikipedia and I use it in my free time as much as I feel like at any one time. I've gone out of my way on several occasions to create kit templates and help you with things you've been designing, but honestly right now Wikipedia is not high on my list of priorities each day - especially with the job I started a few months ago occupying much of my time until late, and with the fact that I had been making constant contributions over the space of a couple of years, what with the season articles I'd been writing recently and with my previous commitments to updating the current season articles, as well as creating other articles such as the Records and Statistics and the City in Europe pages, most of which are about 20,000 bytes long when I first publish them and take an incredibly long time to actually write up in the first place. To put it simply: I'd had reserves of energy which surprised even me in recent years but I've just hit burn-out over the last few months. I've spent so many hours contributing to Wikipedia that it actually tires me out now to simply think of making edits unless they are individual word changes (which has been about the sum total of my edits over the last 4 months or so). I just don't have the energy to be on here every day, responding to everything that is said to me, coming up with suggestions, implementing new ideas and above all, reading every article to make sure that it all adheres to one single style and that my edits are never at fault. In fact if anything I like the active mutual support principle of Wikipedia: if someone makes a mistake in style, someone else can correct it and everyone can learn from the situation, rather than each user being responsible for cleaning up their own mess and only comprehending their mistakes when they receive angry letters over their talk pages. But whatever. I clearly need a break from this stuff, and you clearly need an environment where I am not causing you issues, so I will accept your blame, admit that I was in the wrong, and simply step back. I guess I'll return to tinkering with a few things on my userpage which I might eventually publish, but any article you have editted I will leave firmly in your disposal so that this never happens again.

For what it's worth, I never had any "Yank v Limey" thing going. In fact it was only in the last couple of days that I realised you were even in America. For the longest time I had a hypothesis that you were Australian - don't ask me why, but I did. I admit that I made some comments from the perspective of "resident expert on British affairs", and I will take the blame for doing that too: clearly it was insensitive and you can be sure that I will not make that same mistake again. However, I will state that you introduced yourself to me as being based overseas and I never had any indication that you were an ex-pat. Had I had then you can be sure that I would not have made any of the comments that I made. I can only offer my sincerest apologies, and I hope that you can forgive me.

Anyway, all the best. I'm sure you will go from strength to strength. Your edits really have been top draw, and I do mean that. Falastur2 ^Talk 13:47, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

P.S. The word is "disambiguating", not "disambiguifying".

Falastur2, I sincerely apologize if my last message appeared a little strong to you; it was not my intent to cause you any upset. The source of my frustration with you was not your edit but your general lack of response whenever it suits you. The important part of that message is the last couple of sentences. FWIW, I agreed with 50% of your edit ("3" to "three") - and have already changed that back again - and I feel somewhat ambivalent about the singular versus plural thing. However, I DO feel strongly that it must be done CONSISTENTLY, not picked at in an arbitrary fashion, a word here and a word there. I also wanted you to know that my choice of the singular over the plural was not the result of some ingrained differences in cultural upbringing - for all we know, we may have attended the same schools and there be little to no such differences! - but was the result of some conscious thought.

Additionally, the text I wrote in that "Review" section (note to self: must remember to change that section title to "Season review") was mostly added to replace what I felt was a bit of a Trojan Horse by the editor that initially added that section. It seemed to me that he had only added that section into the article so that he could juxtaposition his documentation of City's high summer transfer window spending with its rather mediocre results performance in the pre-season games, which, in the way it was done, left a somewhat negative impression on the reader. So I rewrote that section as soon as City had enough actual competitive games under its belt to be able to justify a review of them.

Personally, I don't think it is a good idea to write a season review while in the middle of the season; such a review should only be written once the season is over and sufficient time has passed to enable it to be retrospectively reviewed with equanimity. I just wanted to remove that text. I considered simply deleting that section but I quite liked the idea of all the season articles having such an introductory section, and in my recent bout of edits I have added one to every season article, although in many cases it is just a stub with an encouragement for someone else to provide the text. So I am not at all attached to what is written in the current season article's "Review" section because I think very little of it will remain when that section is revisited again once the season is over.

Consequently, the whole point of my last message to you was not really what you did in your edit ... it was the fact that you had blown me off and not responded to my earlier messages to you in order to make that edit. I don't expect immediate replies from you - we all have lives outside of Wikipedia and the internet - but I do expect the courtesy of a reply once you do spend some time on Wikipedia again. I fully understand your point about Wikipedia burnout and I'm probably about to come down with a big dose of it myself. In fact, I'm surprised I'm still contributing here. So I do understand how one can reach the place where one only has the energy to tinker and do minimal edits. Nevertheless, I always force myself into the discipline of addressing my outstanding correspondence before allowing myself to start doing any edits because IMO there is nothing worse than seeing someone you are awaiting a reply from letting you know how unimportant your messages are to him by happily editing away elsewhere on Wikipedia. I strongly suggest you do the same.

P.S. I did know the word is "disambiguating" (although I did initially have to go look it up) but I just kind of like the word I made up in its stead ... the question mark was more about letting others know I knew the word was wrong than about soliciting the correct word. But thanks anyway. :) Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 06:27, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

It's a pity that you have adopted such an uncommunicative stance since I was hoping we might have worked together to improve the kit sections in the various MCFC season articles. BTW, while improving the "previous/next" linkage between the MCFC season articles today I found another one (season 2000-01) which was only created this last October. Do you have any of the match report info. that it lacks that you could add? If not, do you fancy creating it? You have also not let me know your current views on the collapsible match reports? Have you been won over to their use yet or do you cringe whenever you see them? Oh, and do you know who was City's captain in the 2000-01 season ... I know it wasn't Stuart Pearce but I'm buggered if I can remember who it actually was. :( Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 23:08, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Apology accepted, though please understand that if I went "cold turkey" on you over the last couple of days it was because I was genuinely offended and needed some time to put it behind me. It's now in my past and I accept your reasoning and hold nothing against you, but regrettably I can be quick to anger and very slow to cool off from that anger. For my part, I apologise again for my slow responses, and you are right to say that I should prioritise making replies. Unfortunately I'm a very flawed person and highly distractable, but I will try to reform my ways as per responses to my Wiki talk page. But I don't want to keep bad blood between us so I'll move on and stop talking about this issue.

As for the kit images which need updating: I'll do it when I find some good images. Hopefully that'll be tomorrow but we will see.

As for finding sources of images for kit pictures: that's a very good question, and a hard one to solve. Much as I am sure that the data exists on the internet somewhere, and strange as it seems, until very recently information on games was both highly disorganised and very sporadic - as you probably know. I'm rather short of ideas myself. Those sources you mentioned are about the only ideas I have - the only other idea, and it's a total shot in the dark, is to suggest you try eBay for some replica shirts on sale - you never know what will pop up, and if one is on sale it's a good bet that it will have a picture showing the shirt from a lot better angle than a match report will have. You could also try this page which is a fantastic website though it caries no information on away kits or goalie uniforms before 2008 so it's only really a source of info for home shirts (and it does nothing for your kit usage table, same as eBay). In fact, really I'm kind of short of ideas for pooling info for your table altogether - I can only suggest what you already came up with. My only ideas revolve around finding ways to examine the kits in detail for the purposes of designing image templates for them. Maybe I wasn't actually any help at all :\

As for collapsible match data - you're right that I am still not convinced by them, but that shouldn't stop you. Personally I think that once we've stuck to a style we should stick to it, at least for each individual article (I think it's less of a concern if the old season articles have a different style to the modern, though a unity of style would be nice) so I'd advise against using collapsibles for some competitions and not for others for the same season, though if there ever was one section which could be collapsed it was the friendlies, and I really wouldn't batter an eyelid if you went ahead and collapsed them all to save space or whatnot. Personally I always preferred the non-collapsed versions of the match box, but that's because I tended to go for short, succinct but aesthetically pleasing match boxes - I didn't, for instance, as you surely know, ever really have much support for adding substitution info or yellow cards as I viewed their relevance to be less important than keeping the layout neat. However, I'm aware that you disagree on that point and I'm coming round to the idea of their importance as statistical evidence making them necessary contributions, so my argument kind of collapses around my feet anyway. In short, I'd suggest that you stick to one style (collapsible or non-) in each article, but I would agree with your rolling out the collapsible tables to the previous season articles. I don't know if it helps at all but as an afterthought I will mention that I'm pretty sure that I've seen code around for the collapsible tables that makes them collapsible by style but by default uncollapsed - perhaps you could use this so that you retain the unity of style, yet can pick match by match (or by logical extension, competition by competition or season by season) which games/competitions are fully open to readers as standard. Unfortunately I don't actually know the code for this (as is probably expected given my lack of enthusiasm for writing collapsible match reports) so you'd probably have to dig around for it. Falastur2 ^Talk 02:33, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Not to dwell on the negative here, but my frustration at your behavior was also very much compounded at the time by my anger that all of the MCFC crest images in the Infoboxes I had added to the season articles had been reverted by Hammersoft while Oldelpaso had reverted the most recent changes I had made to the List of Manchester City F.C. seasons article, so I felt like I was under attack from all sides, and thus I probably vented all of that in the message I wrote to you.

I stand by my previous statement re creating kit usage tables for seasons earlier than 2008; I do not intend to even try to do it. I threw that question out at you just in case you knew of, for example, the existence of some nifty blog (or something similar) that had been lovingly compiled by a group of City fans over the last decade or so, and which contained good, clear photos of all the games in each season, including shots of the City goalkeepers in each case. If you had of done, then I would have revisited that decision. The fact that you are as much at a loss as I am in this regard puts an end to that issue. BTW, I have come across a number of such type of blogs that contain enough quality photos to help us get the details of all the main team kits correct, but they unfortunately fall short of providing me with the comprehensive level of detail that is required to compile the usage tables. So end of issue.

WRT your suggestion re using kit images from eBay, that is kind of what I did in order to get the "crest on their shirts" image in my write up for the season 2009-10 kits (which was in turn built on something I think Stevo1000 had originally written). I think that particular image came from the City store, but silly me, I never thought of looking there first and so I only found it as a result of Googling around looking for information on City's cup runs in the early seventies. Which is also how I found the Radio Times image used a little later in that section. Because the image was from the City store I went ahead and linked to it in the article because I'm guessing that MCFC will still be selling those shirts many years hence, which consequently reduces the chances of my link to it becoming a "dead link" a couple of months on from now. And that is the problem with any image you might find on eBay - it's no good hot-linking to it because it won't be there three months later (or possibly even next week), and if you take a local copy of it onto your own PC (to get around the fact that you know it will not be up on eBay for ever) and then upload it to Wikipedia in order to use it to support the article, then that's technically theft ... or, at least, potential copyright infringement; or minimally, plagiarism.

As for the issue of collapsible "footballboxes", let me reiterate my own take on this. If it ain't broke I'm not going to fix it. I totally agree with you about your claim that your original format was "short, succinct but aesthetically pleasing." If there was no collapsible option I would have those "top level" reports looking no other way (viz. I would be strongly resisting anyone trying to add the yellow card and sub info. - because it's way too much data for the "top level"). However, the collapsible "footballboxes" push all that information down a level and replace it with something that is shorter and succincter still and even more aesthetically pleasing. When you then open up a collapsible report to the next level, seeing all that info. confined for just a single game, is still quite acceptable IMO - it is only when you concatenate 38 of the reports one after the other that it becomes a total visual overload for the reader.

I like to see all that info. there because it directly correlates with all the stats. displayed in the PST and renders a good level of support to it. If you opened up all the collapsible reports and counted up all the yellow and red cards and balls, they should exactly match the totals for those respective columns in the PST (except for own goals, which are not scored by City players and are thus not accounted for in the PST as we currently maintain it). Similarly, all the subbed on and subbed off information should match exactly with the parenthetical duple info. within the AppStats triples - thus if Tevez's current triple in the "totals" column is "17 (12/0)" then you should find a dozen instances of him being subbed off in the match reports and no instances of him being subbed on (which was, incidently, how SAF used him almost exclusively at United, and why he crossed over to City in the first place!).

Personally, I detest bot edits to the articles because most of them don't do anything very useful (and are almost a case of being an edit just for the sake of doing an edit), while most bot edits overstretch themselves and screw up the format of the document; so I usually always revert them. The only useful bot edits I've come across are the ones that identify and try to rectify "dead links" and if it were not for these I would probably push to have something done to our articles that would prevent bot edits being permitted on them. Unfortunately, these bot edits only spot "dead links" amongst the URLs contained in actual reference citations ... it would be a lot more useful if they would also detect when match report URLs become 404 page errors as well. Because almost all the match report links for seasons 2005-2009 have now become "dead links". I believe that is mostly due to the fact that MCFC match reports were linked in for these seasons and MCFC changed its server with the advent of the Thaksin Shinawatra ownership. Most of those reports have been faithfully copied over to the current MCFC OWS server but they now have different file and path names so they don't reconcile with the old URLs - which means each one of them has to be manually touched in order to be fixed.

If I'm going to touch a match report (because it's "broke") then I will collapse it as I "fix" it. Because locating new match reports, verifying and updating the current info., and making the "footballboxes" collapsible are best all done at the same time with the one "touching" of those reports. I know the pre-season match reports for those aforementioned years are broken for sure as they could only have used MCFC OWS reports in the first place (because virtually nobody else reports on those friendly games). Which, together with my rationale that pre-season games don't hold much interest for people once that pre-season is over and thus should be collapsed anyway, is why I intend to collapse them as I fix them first for those years. Verifying and collapsing about 6-8 match reports is about all I can manage in one session before my eyes start to glaze over, which means that full pre-season, and League and FA Cup competition match reports can all be replaced wholesale relatively easily (as and when I get to them).

The problem lies with the EPL games because collapsing and verifying 38 games requires quite a bit of sustained effort, and while I feel I can justify an article having a mixture of open EPL match reports mixed together with collapsed cup and pre-season match reports, I don't feel I can justify allowing a season article to only have some of its EPL match reports collapsed ... it's got to be all or nothing. The UEFA Cup run of 2008-09 falls somewhere in between those extremes, but that is only one season. These were my thoughts behind asking you how you felt about an article having a mixture of the two report formats ... or at least having that mixture for a short while until all the match report links can be fixed (in chunks of 6-8 reports at a time). Consider what I did for season 2006-07 a prototype for this process ... go take a closer look at the logistics of how I handled it.

BTW, I've changed my thoughts a little on this issue since I wrote the above. The change of year in the middle of the season seems like a sensible divide WRT collapsing half of the match reports in an EPL season (as I have now done for 2008-09). I originally was going to wait until I had collapsed the whole season in my sandbox before doing the substitution. However, I don't have the time right now to finish the whole process off, yet I see no reason why the fruits of my labor on the last half of the season cannot be posted in the interim. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 20:33, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Fair enough, no complaints. Your ideas make logical sense and I'm happy to run with them Falastur2 ^Talk 01:15, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

I assume the reason that seasons 2005-2009 possess all the "dead links" is that those articles were created contemporaneously in "real time" (just like we are currently doing with this season's article) and then closed out, while all of the articles for seasons prior to 2005 were created much later (than when the actual season occurred) in your own user space / sandbox and then retroactively introduced into article space only once they were complete. Which would mean that the guardian.co.uk match reports that are used in those articles (and that are all still good links) were only recently located and added to them. Am I correct in my assumption? Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 07:23, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

I see. As for the question about why the Guardian links, you're spot on. The main reason for the Guardian links was the level of detail afforded (i.e. as basic even as the times of the goals and who was subbed on/off, which was needed even for my earlier PSTs. I used SportingLife where necessary as a fallback because the Guardian links were missing 1-2 pages every season, and occasionally I needed just one bit of info somewhere down the line and SL was the only place that offered it. It should also be noted that SL offers match reports going back to 97-98 whereas Guardian ends its coverage in about 2000-01-ish, so at some point when I get back to writing up more season articles, eventually I'll be ditching the Guardian standard anyway. But essentially the only reason I chose them was because I searched for some time and they were the only news sources I could find offering not just the match reports I needed but also an easy way to find the match reports (that is to say, good luck finding an obscure match report from 2001 on the BBC's archives whereas the Guardian gives you a nice handy list of matches in order and filtered by season and team to search through). Falastur2 ^Talk 00:37, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

FYI, my foregoing comments do not mean that I am eventually going to collapse every match report in every past season article. For right now, I'm only committed to collapsing friendly games for seasons 2005 onwards - for the very reason that they are exactly that; just friendly games. I agree with you that the formats of the various season articles do not have to be exactly the same for every year. They should have the same overall structure and editorial style, but it must be possible to include new sections and information in them as new technology and web data make that possible - e.g., my own addition of "Kit usage" tables which, as I've explained elsewhere, cannot be taken back more than a couple of seasons.

OTOH, I looked at the fact that some of the extant season articles had what I've subsequently called "Points breakdown" and "Biggest & smallest" sections and decided there was no reason at all for that post-season analysis info. to only be in some articles but not in others. That was due much more to simple inconsistency rather than being a product of continual web growth. My first inclination was to simply nix the biggest and smallest attendance info. altogether on the basis that it was too similar to the stats. included in the new "Infoboxes" for all games rather than just the PL ones. However, in the end I decided what those stats. really needed was simply to be properly formatted and moved to the head of the PL section where they could be featured with all the other analysis, rather than simply being dumped in at the end of that section as if they were a mere afterthought.

"Points breakdown" and "Biggest & smallest" sections

Someone needed to knuckle down and produce these comparable stats. sections in the season articles that currently did not contain them, and so I volunteered myself for that task! :( BTW, I would appreciate it if you could supply a second pair of eyes to verify that I got all those new "Points breakdown" and "Biggest & smallest" sections correct. Of course I double and triple check my own work before posting it, but with that amount of new data something may well have escaped my attention. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 05:47, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

OK. I'll give your info the once over, after I've written an assignment due in tomorrow. Falastur2 ^Talk 01:44, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

And ??? Must have been a pretty long assignment! :) Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 20:33, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Bah, I honestly do not know how this slipped my notice repeatedly. However rest assured it hasn't, and I'm going over it. If I don't give a response before tomorrow it's because I didn't finish reading it before I went to bed, but I'm going to make your page my homepage so that it automatically appears in front of me next time I load my browser. That's if I don't respond to you today, that is. Falastur2 ^Talk 01:15, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

Alright, so I had the time to check 07-08 through to 09-10 before I got too tired to continue. No mistakes spotted so far except for in the 08-09 section, you missed the 4-2 loss against Villa on the opening day as a biggest loss (two goal margin) so I added it for you. Incidentally, I'd noticed you've been using {{0}} {{0}} {{0}} {{0}} to simulate indentations where you need to have several lines for the same thing (i.e. multiple 2-0 losses etc that make the text wrap). I just thought I'd let you know that, in the same way that you can, say, use piping to go from having a flat link to WP:Wikipedia change to a text link to the same article you can use piping in that invisible zeros template to use one zero to fill in multiple gaps. All it requires is the number of zeros you want to add, piped after the initial zero template, i.e. {{0|0000}} does the work of four individual {{0}} templates. If you don't quite understand, or want an example in action, check out my edit to the 08-09 article: I replaced (some) of your multiple templates with a single template each in that article. It saves character length that way, and saves server strain as well as it makes the article call the zero template from its own space on the server far less times, in essence reducing the number of pages called for a single article loaded. I haven't done the others yet as, well, I'm simply too tired, but if you don't get there first I'll clean it up tomorrow. I was also thinking that on a few of those articles, the dates are still in the old format from when you could use a nifty template to turn [[2011-01-15]] into the auto-formatted 2011-01-15 but that autoformatting is now effectively disabled as there is an official bot going around deleting all the square brackets to leave just the date format, as a result of a policy decision to stop using that formatting. We should probably go through an change everywhere it says, for example, 2011-01-15 to say "15 January 2011". That's something I can do tomorrow too, and doesn't affect every article (thank goodness...). Also, very minor point but I thought it might raise that "vs." is the American abbreviation for versus, whereas the British abbreviation is "v". Extremely minor point that many will not even pick up on - I think we're so used to seeing both examples that most people don't even realise there's a difference - but I thought I'd throw that out there anyway. If you don't consider it worthy of attention, then neither do I, if you get my drift. Anyhow, I'll continue looking through tomorrow. Everything else I've read so far is dandy. Falastur2 ^Talk 03:04, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

I quite understood your information on piping (due to your example edit) and have accordingly replaced all the other similar cases of many multiple concatenated "invisible zeros" (used to create leading blank spaces in the text in the corresponding sections of the other season articles) with the alternative piped construction instead. Thanks for the "heads up" on that.

WRT the missing 4-2 defeat to Villa in those stats. ... good catch. However, I think you may have just caught your own omission (assuming it is you that originally added those end-of-season summary stats. to about 50% of the extant season articles) because all I did with those articles was move the data that was already there higher up the "Competitive games" section and format it. Of course, I did give the information the once over as I did that formatting, but it is still not quite the same process as identifying the results that meet the biggest and smallest criteria from scratch. I cannot now remember exactly which seasons for which I produced those stats. from scratch and which seasons I only formatted and quickly checked what was already there, but I'm fairly sure that season 2008-09 was one of those that was already done (because it was mostly the older seasons that were missing this analysis). Let me know if you find any issues with the other seasons (2001-07) once you've checked those too.

WRT converting dates from the digital format (i.e., 2011-01-15) to the more common English format (i.e., 15 January 2011) I have been doing that conversion manually as I collapse each match report (it is one of quite a long list of changes I do for every match report I "touch" and it is all those changes and checks combined that take the time and effort involved in the collapsing, and NOT the actual change to the template code which is quite trivial in comparison). By my reckoning only four of the seasons (2004-08) still contain this date format in their uncollapsed (i.e., NOT pre-season) match reports. If you feel like going ahead and converting those dates please do so because I currently have no intention of collapsing the match reports in those seasons (because I only collapse the reports if I add in the carding information). Another change that needs doing IMO is appending GMT or BST (as appropriate) to all the kick-off times (which is another one of the many things I do or verify for the reports I collapse), while the season 2003-04 match reports don't even show kick-off times (and thus require even more work).

Finally - and please don't take offense at this - your point that "vs." is American and "v." is British is absolute twaddle. All four versions of the abbreviation - vs., vs, v., v - are used interchangeably on both sides of the pond. I use whichever version takes my fancy at the time; or more exactly, whichever one best fits the style of what I'm writing. I think I made the choice to use "vs." in those "biggest & smallest" stats. simply because that is what you (or whoever originally dumped those stats. in the articles) had used. If not, I changed it from "v." or "v" to "vs." because it is only used to prepend the opposing team rather than appearing between two competing teams. IOW, I would probably normally write "Everton v Liverpool" but in those "b&s" stats. it is "v Everton; v Liverpool" etc. that is required, and the "v" just by itself at the beginning of the clause looks a bit wimpy to me. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 07:21, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Alternating article formats

I noticed that you went ahead and archived the following chunk of text that was buried in the middle of our "Kit usage" tables discussion. It addresses one of the issues that I'm still awaiting a response back from you on - I would really like to know what you are seeing at your end. It was completely OT (off-topic, NOT Old Trafford!!) for that discussion, but at the time I could not be bothered to start a new section. Perhaps now is that time since you have just archived that discussion (which I have no problem at all with your doing so because everything else in that section, other than the topic below, seemed to have run its natural course). Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 04:14, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

... If you observe carefully you'll see that on the occasions those two (GK strip) titles wrap (and they still occasionally wrap despite your changes) the football collapsibles take up two lines instead of one. You'll also notice that all the collapsible table icons in the stuff I introduced in the new player registration and eligibility sections at the very end of the article display slightly differently than they normally do (i.e., when the titles do not wrap and the football collapsibles take up only a single line).

There is no rhyme or reason why this happens as far as I can determine. I can open up two tabs in the same browser window and connect each to the MCFC Season 2010-11 article, and the article will display the one way in the first tab (e.g., no title wrap, single line football collapsibles, etc.) and the other way in the second tab. So it is not caused by a problem with any software on my PC (because the same software is simultaneously displaying the article both ways). So the differences have to be caused by something at the host server end. I suspect that Wikipedia is hosted on a number of closely coupled servers that load share their processing; press SEND on this screen and your message gets processed by server A, press send on this next screen and that transmission gets processed by server B. If the servers are running identical software (which they should be) such load sharing should appear completely seamless to the user. OTOH, if servers A and B are running slightly different software releases (or even more perniciously, exactly the same software but with it configured slightly differently on each) then that situation might account for such differences.

That's the only explanation I can come up with for what I have observed this last couple of months. I would love to know what you are seeing at your end. Of course, differences in what we both observe can be explained by differences between our PC platforms (e.g., Mac versus PC, different Windows products, different releases and service packs for the same Windows OS, different browsers, different releases of the same browser, etc., etc.). But when the same article displays two different ways in adjacent browser tabs (so that those kinds of PC environmental differences just listed are all eliminated) then that is pretty funky IMO. This issue is really way off topic for this section so I'd better stop here. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 03:28, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

If you are observant, you will have noticed that when the collapsible match reports only occupy a single line all the titles on the l.h.s. of my new article "Infoboxes" are left-justified, while on those occasions when they occupy two lines all the titles on the l.h.s. of those "Infoboxes" are centered. The Wikipedia server that supports the single line collapsible "footbalboxes" seems to support a slightly finer font point size (hence everything displayed on the user's PC screen when the articles are being supported by this server appears tighter, and accordingly the text wraps differently, such as it did in the titles at the bottom of those GK "kitboxes"). But it is not just a font size difference that distinguishes the two host servers - they also appear to use different formatting rules too. Hence the centering of those "Infobox" l.h.s. titles versus their left-justification. This duplicity of presentation is driving me crazy! I get something to look correct on one server and then the slightly different font size and formatting rules used by the other server(s) goes and screws it up. For instance, I had to widen the "Infoboxes" in all the season articles by one element so that some of the longer lines on the r.h.s. of those boxes did not wrap when the server supporting the larger font point size was the one to which I was connected. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 04:14, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

I have to say that I'm struggling to reproduce this issue, and I think that it's down to my screen resolution. In that I now use my PS3's high-def 22" widescreen for my PC, I am viewing Wikipedia at 1680x1050 so it takes a whole lot fatter tables to start wrapping on my monitor (exception of things like those kit boxes, where the width of the table is prescribed and thus is not affected by my huge resolution and still is prone to mucking up).

The main reason you are struggling to reproduce this issue is that you haven't comprehended a single word of what I wrote above explaining it to you.  :( It has nothing whatsoever to do with screen pixel definition. What exactly do you not understand about "the same article displays two different ways in adjacent browser tabs (so that those kinds of PC environmental differences just listed are all eliminated)"? There is absolutely no way you can get two different screen resolutions on two adjacent tabs opened within the same IE window on the same PC and displayed on the same screen. I'm sorry, this is all very exasperating for me because sometimes you are simply quite unable to see the woods for the trees! Pixel definitions and how they are utilized in displaying the same data differently are purely the province of the client platform (viz. your or my PC) ... thus if a Wikipedia server sends exactly the same data to both your PC and my PC (which it does, for instance, when we both connect to the current MCFC season article) it can be displayed in very different ways depending on all the individual environmental factors associated with our respective PCs that I listed in my original (reproduced) chunk of text above, not to mention quite a few other factors. However, simply connecting to the same Wikipedia article in adjacent tabs in the same browser window ELIMINATES all of those factors, thus making this phenomenon a server issue NOT a client issue.

It is much more likely that the reason you have not reproduced this issue yet is because you have not simultaneously opened enough browser windows (or tabs within the same window) that are connected to the same article, so that the differences in the way the data is displayed in MULTIPLE IDENTICAL CLIENT ENVIRONMENTS becomes immediately apparent (because of the stark contrast between the two methods of display when moving straight from the one window to the other, plus also the ability to go right back again to the previous window in order to verify that you really saw what you thought you saw!). You can feel as smug as you want about your own screen resolution but I'm afraid it is a complete red herring WRT this issue. Besides the chances are quite high that my own "PC environment" is somewhat higher tech. than your own, because when it comes to adopting new technology Britain lags the States by quite a few years. :)

Why do I make multiple connections to the same article? I'm so glad you asked! :) One connection to do the edits in; one connection to display the original version of the article (so I always know what my starting point was, because this gets lost once you've done a few edit previews); and possibly also one version to serve as a source for the links to other articles (so that I can verify that those links are good or dead or irrelevant, etc.). Also, I might originally have three or four windows/tabs simultaneously connected to the articles about three or four different seasons, but if I navigate back and forth in each of those windows/tabs using the "previous" and "next" season links, some or all of them could also end up displaying the same season article. The reasons for MY establishing multiple connections to the same article don't really matter. The issue is that YOU need to similarly establish multiple connections to the same article from within the same PC and browser, and leave those connections open over a period of time, if YOU are to also notice this phenomenon. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 00:19, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

No, I understood you clearly the first time. My point was that I couldn't find it happening to me no matter how many tabs I opened so I figured there had to be a reason why it happened to you and not me. I've seen numerous cases in my time of problems to do with formatting not occurring until you view the page in a condensed resolution so I guessed this might be a cause. I apologise for having a different idea from the way that you would have approached this issue - clearly I am not as clever with computing as you are. With retrospect I now know that this was not the reason - the reason is that it does not happen with my browser. I tried opening 30 tabs simultaneously and I painstakingly studied every millimetre of the article and found no differences between any of them. I then tried the same in Google Chrome and found no differences. I then tried it in Internet Explorer 8 and observed the differences between left and centre align in the infobox, though I am still yet to see any double-lining of the collapsible football boxes. Clearly this is a problem that is down to the way that browsers interpret web code (that is to say, the inconsistency only seems to appear within IE) but then IE always did have a reputation for displaying pages in stupid ways when encountering certain irregularities.

On another topic, please tell me what I can do to earn some respect from you, because I'm running out of ideas here. No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try to always act polite and treat you as more than just my equal but even my better, no matter how many times I write replies to you warning you that I am taking offence and then delete them entirely and just refuse to comment so that I don't offend you by acting harshly myself somehow I always seem to earn insulting language from you. Frankly I'm quite deeply hurt by the abuse and I'm really not sure what I am supposed to do. OK, I see that I annoy you for some reason - perhaps because I'm not the smartest tool in the shed and I'm wording my replies to you in such a way that it makes it seem like I'm incapable of comprehending you. Alright, in future I will try to comment precisely in answer to your wording and not use any of my own ideas where we are discussing yours so that I can't cause confusion. All I ask is that, if I do something to upset you in future, that you tell me that I have done so in plain, calm language without any of the language that makes it obvious that you look down on me in our conversations. Please? Falastur2 ^Talk 02:54, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Consequently, none of the match collapsibles ever wrap for me and everything always looks uniform. I am assuming here that those which wrap onto a second line are the same ones as have teams or locations with a lot of text, which exceeds the space it should have on a 1240px width monitor and thus has to wrap to display - for example the Wolverhampton Wanderers game, am I right? Thus, I can't get a graphic example of this and am having trouble picturing the problem. I see what you are saying however. I had never considered that there might be a difference in how certain servers render the pages they are tasked to load, but considering it I guess that it's entirely possible that happens. Honestly I'd never had one box display in two different ways, though, so I'd never had cause to ponder it. Perhaps you could take a screenshot of this stuff happening and link me to it so I can check it out?

No, when this happens, ALL of the collapsed "footballboxes" simply take up two lines instead of one, with the second line being completely blank ... there is no wrapping of text as in the case of the "kitboxes" (when I made the title of the GK strip a little on the long side), or in the case of the "Infoboxes" (when lines such as the one displaying SWP as the leading goalscorer wrap in the one case but not the other ... or used to, as I've already fixed that situation by making the "Infobox" 29 elements wide instead of 28). I should have thought of taking the screenshots before now but I just assumed that everyone else was also experiencing this (but perhaps not specifically noticing it until I pointed it out, because many of the subtler server differences have to be compared side by side in order to be detected). Now I'm coming to realize I might be one of the few Wikipedia editors (or perhaps the only one!) that connects multiple times to the same article for the reasons explained above. The screenshots have duly been taken and I have saved them to OpenOffice, Word and Adobe Reader format files. Where would be the best place for me to upload/link them so that you will have mutual web access to them, and which file format would you prefer? Alternately, I could simply send them to you as an email attachment. But I kind of like the idea of solving this issue while still remaining anonymous (i.e., as MLITH) ... for no other reason than the (possibly perverse one) of I'm a problem solver by nature and I enjoy the challenge. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 00:19, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Just upload them to imageshack and paste the link(s) here. Imageshack requires no registration and the image will be hosted remotely so there'll be no trace of your identity left. Falastur2 ^Talk 02:54, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Given my lack of problem with all this stuff, I'd always considered the matter scientifically - that a certain table will always display in one manner, with the same typeface, size, etc, and thus problems with wrapping were wholly to do with when the number of pixels from a line of text exceeds the space allotted. The only way I've encountered of defeating it is to use a single word, as the programming of html does not allow single words to be cut up, even to the point of forcing webpages to break their tables and expand the page off-screen if they can't wrap solely to make sure that the whole word is shown (most notable in cases where javascript is accidentally displayed, and thus you get a whole unbroken string of font commands with no gaps, that can force the webpage to extend several screens wide). In the case of Wikipedia, and specifically Wikitables, Wikipedia responds by expanding the tables beyond how wide they are supposed to go to ensure that whole words are fitted in. Thus I used the trick that I did, inserting invisible zeros, to trick Wikipedia into thinking that my wording was a single word and that it couldn't break it up and wrap. I never saw this go wrong, and I'd be surprised if Wikipedia found a way round it, so your comment about the GK kit boxes still sometimes wrapping baffles me a little - again I'd have to say that without a screenshot I'm unable to act as I can't tell precisely what the problem is.

BTW, just for the record, the GK "kitboxes" that used to wrap no longer do so because I shortened the string I was using - from something like "Goalkeeper 1 (home)" to something much shorter, such as "GK strip 1" - thereby removing the issue. This was done as much because the GK strips are not exclusively home or away strips, etc. (so I decided that title was something of a misnomer anyway) as to solve the "too long string that wraps" issue. My original long string either wrapped onto two lines or not depending on which server I was connected to (as with all the other format issues I've described - and, obviously, it did not wrap on the server I originally did the edit on otherwise I would not have saved the edit after previewing it) and once you inserted the "null character(s)" to fool the server into not wrapping the text, it still continued to sometimes wrap for me (depending on the server to which I was connected at the time). At that juncture I had not put all this together as being the consequence of there being two (or more) Wikipedia servers operating slightly differently ... but it was the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, that initially made me aware of this issue. However at that time I still assumed, like you, that it had to do with differences in clients NOT servers (despite the fact that I had done nothing to change my client PC environment in order to observe the display of both formats!). Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 00:19, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

That's all I can really say for now - sorry I can't really be more help. I have to concede that my large resolution has on occasion made me prone to forgetting that others do not have the width that I have and thus what fits into a page for me does not for others - I was sorely tempted, for instance, on one occasion, to make the goalscorers tables under the PST five columns wide to add another column - assists, perhaps; I forget now - before realising that if it barely fitted on my monitor it would be causing untold chaos on a smaller screen. I could reduce my res to check out the issue, and I might, but I know from experience that Bad Things Happen when I try condensing my res on this PC (windows tries to reformat everything to the smaller res, and it mucks up a lot of my settings, indeed even moreso when I revert back to 1680px) so I'm reluctant to. Falastur2 ^Talk 02:21, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

To return back to something you mentioned above, I can see a record of "assists" as possibly being an interesting and useful addition to the various season articles. However, not done as an additional fifth column in the current "Goal scorers" section, but rather as a whole new section that parallels that section, with columns for "All competitions", "Premier League", "Europa League" (when relevant), "League Cup" and "FA Cup" (with these latter two being combined whenever they are currently combined for the goal scorers). Do you have the data to create such sections? How many seasons back could we go if we added those stats.?

BTW, I dislike the term "assist" ... in my day players would "make" a goal and the player that "made" it would not necessarily be the player that was the last one to touch the ball before the goal scorer did. He was the player whose piece of skill essentially created the goal scoring opportunity or move, while the goal scorer was the one who finished it off ... other players might have been involved in between. Also, some goals are essentially solo efforts (think Tévez's goal against Chelsea this season) and thus do not have an assist - or, if you prefer, the goal scorer "makes" (assists) his own goal - so to award an assist to the player that tapped the ball to the solo goal scorer in those circumstances is a bit of a misnomer IMO. OTOH, as imperfect as they are, the "assist" stats. do allow the players that we all (subjectively) know are "making" the goals for the scorers - e.g., Bellamy last season, Silva this season - to be (objectively) identified. What are your thoughts on this? Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 04:36, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

To reiterate, there is NO need whatsoever for you to play around with the configuration of your PC monitor's screen resolution settings as this is NOT a screen resolution issue, although it might be possible that some screen resolutions (higher or lower, I've no idea which) may somehow make some of the server format differences disappear when displayed ... such as the line wrapping (which is ultimately caused by applying a different point size to the same text font). However, no amount of high or low screen resolution will cause the same text to be centered instead of left-justified! Once again, let me know how to best make the screenshots available to you. Also, for you to observe this phenomenon on your own PC (rather than via screenshots from my PC) you will have to leave your multiple window connections to Wikipedia up for awhile, not just bring up multiple connections for a couple of minutes and assume you will immediately observe what you are looking for. If you pay for your ISP usage by the minute then I realize that will not be economically feasible. I pay a flat usage rate per month for unlimited use. When I'm done at the end of the evening - actually, like you, sometimes in the early hours of the morning - I just put my PC to sleep with my active sessions intact.

I don't for a second believe this modus operandi has anything to do with my observing what you are not ... this phenomenon is not a function of "time connected". However, it may be more realistically a function of being connected at certain times of the day when the network routing algorithms switch their determination as to which is the best server to connect a user to in order for them to access Wikipedia. IOW, it might not be an issue as to which one of multiple tightly-coupled co-located servers services your Wikipedia transaction - viz. a load-sharing issue - but a case of whether your page access request is routed to the Wikipedia server(s) in the U.S.A. (which I believe is/are located in Florida) rather than the Wikipedia server(s) in the U.K. (which I believe is/are located in Ireland) - viz. an optimal routing issue (which has nothing to do with the physical distances between the client and various destination servers, but is a function of how much network traffic is being handled by the intervening routers and switches).

I am located on the north of the east coast and thus logistically (if not geographically) equidistant from the two servers (if I have them located properly) and I may consequently see my transactions shared between the two server locations more often than you do being based (I am assuming) in Manchester, where any such server-sharing you may witness may be between the Ireland server and a comparable server located on the European mainland. That two servers located in different continents may be hardware or software configured to work slightly differently makes much more sense to me than that two co-located servers would be deployed that way, especially since Wikipedia is run on a tight budget and can't afford to keep upgrading or changing out its servers in the same manner that a for-profit commercial company can. Whatever the reason (the foregoing is all speculation on my part), I have now experienced a number of times the situation where a window connected to a Wikipedia season article operates in one format all day long, at which point I may move, say, from the actual article tab to the "View history" tab, and then use my browser "go to previous page" option to return me back to the article again, only to find that it has now flipped formats - which kind of blows my mind!
Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 00:19, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

P.S. For the record, a signature left in invisible text does not render - and since it's only available to read in the editor anyway, it would only render as html if it could anyway. However, I acknowledge that you probably signed your comment by force of habit rather than meaning to leave your name, so I'll leave it at that.

Just so you know, I'm fully aware of the invisibility thing, but I usually create hidden text in visual mode first (so that I'm confident it will be displayed correctly should it later be "unhidden") before applying the HTML "hidden text" codes to it as the last thing I do. As such, the hidden text requires to be properly signed even though that signature - particularly my complex highly visible glow-in-the-dark one! - is a complete waste of time so long as the text remains hidden. That said, it was probably still a bit redundant to include my signature on a piece of "read-it-then-delete-it" text - so yes, that was due to force of habit ... but the habit of properly constructing hidden text, not simply the habit of signing stuff! Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 00:19, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Ben Mee and Chris Chantler

I'll throw up a new article for Chantler in a bit, but unfortunately I fear it will be AfD'ed pretty quickly, just as I fear for Ben Mee. Unfortunately re: Angelos and the others, Wikipedia policy on who deserves an article is quite clear: they need either senior caps or to have played a league game for a club in a fully professional league. Until Tsiaklis gets a get for Anorthosis Famagusta, and until Mee and Chantler get their full league debuts, they are not deemed worthy and are at risky of speedy deletion - and there's virtually nothing I can do about it. This, unfortunately, is why Bebe gets an article and Tsiaklis doesn't - Bebe has played in the Premier League twice. Falastur2 ^Talk 23:11, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm fully aware how many times Bébé has played for United - 6 in all, but only 2 in the PL. I was being somewhat facetious when I mentioned him (because I'm yet to be convinced he is worth the seven million or so SAF payed for him ... but only time will tell in that regard). There was a time when MCFC fans were renowned for their great sense of humor ... in my day one had to have a bit of a perverse nature in order to support City. Clearly the next generation of City fans (your lot) are a humorless bunch that take yourselves (and life) way too seriously. Might I suggest that you need to chill out a little here. I'm also fully cognizant that my views differ from the Wikipedia consensus that I was never a party to ... but I'll wager you a lot of money that my knowledge of football is much better than theirs, whoever they were.

Chantler just played tonight in the Europa League which, last time I checked, is NOT an amateur status or semi-professional status competition, and which is clearly superior to the Premier League (since only the top PL teams qualify to play in it, a criterion that rules out 65% or more of the teams in the PL at any given time). He should be safe from AfD. I fully understand, and always understood, that Mee and Angelos didn't meet that criterion ... I just disagreed with it for the reasons I've taken the trouble to share with you over the past few weeks. The current definition of "notability" used by Wikipedia is more than a little illogical IMO ... but that is just my opinion and I don't have the time or inclination to do anything about changing the current bizarre consensus. The fact remains that a player that has played only a couple of games for Hereford United is NOT "more notable" than a player that has played for his country (at any level) because the former only has parochial "notability" amongst a few thousand Hereford fans whilst the latter has played on the world stage. I also realize that whatever criterion is chosen as the threshold to justify having a Wikipedia article will probably lead to some silly anomalies, which is why I have no intention of putting any time or effort into trying to change the current status quo (assuming that I could).

I just broke away from composing this message and noticed that someone has already created a stub of an article so perhaps all you ultimately need to do is flesh that one out a bit. You can somewhat ignore my edit to the "Reserves_and_Academy" article ... I blindly replaced "Christopher Chantler" with "Chris Chantler" (after seeing that name linked into the main MCFC article and simply assuming that you had just created it while I was writing this message) but it is the wrong Chris Chantler. By the time I got back to the main article it had already been changed to "Chris Chantler (footballer)" ... but I think I prefer your full name version (with a redirect for "Chris Chantler") to that one. Hmmm, the perils of editing in real time! :( Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 01:40, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Apologies. I find it extremely hard to distinguish between emotions (i.e. between sarcastic humour and being totally serious) over the internet except when the language makes it totally impossible to confuse the two, which is probably why I insist on using emotes to show when I am being tongue-in-cheek so often, despite not liking emotes.

Actually, it is very difficult to correctly construe any sort of intended "tone" associated with the written word; it's not just a problem for irony and sarcasm. Or perhaps to be more correct, it is very hard as a reader to not detect (impose) a tone on what you read that was never intended by the writer. It is my belief that 90% of the the disconnects that happen over the internet are created at the receiving end by someone detecting nuances (to which they take exception) that the writer had no idea were present, or if he knew they were there, that they would be interpreted in a manner other than the one he intended. I tend to use irony, satire and sarcasm a lot. Irony will never meet your "except when the language makes it totally impossible to confuse the two" criterion because irony consists of saying the opposite of what you really mean. Irony can only be detected (decoded) by applying context to what is said/written. Not all irony is funny - or at least intended to be funny - but much of it is because the humor lies in the "release of tension" when the recipient suddenly realizes that the words make a lot more sense (i.e., fit the context of everything else that is being said) if their surface meaning is completely inverted. In face-to-face communication the clue for the listener to correctly make that inversion often resides in a smirk, raised eyebrow or a change of voice tone by the speaker ... and, of course, it is all of those sorts of clues that do not exist in internet communication.

OTOH, you cannot rely solely on those sorts of visual and audio clues in order to detect irony and sarcasm otherwise you would interpret everything that Carlo Ancelotti said - because of that almost permanently raised left eyebrow of his - as being sarcastic. Also, there are absolutely no clues being given when the City fans sing, "Boring, boring City"! You just have to understand the context (of City's recent performances and media criticism) in order to appreciate the irony ... anyone not understanding that context will simply believe the fans are mercilessly berating their team; because the fans only sing that when the team is playing particularly well. :) So is there a similar context for internet communication? Here's a clue. People that do not respect you, or even despise you, will normally not invest anywhere near as much time and effort communicating with you as I have done. It is much more likely that they will just ignore you ... because that requires a lot less time and effort! Thus your lack of responses to my inquiries comes much closer to meeting your label of "abuse" than anything I may have done in not choosing exactly the right phraseology or managing to achieve quite the right tone in my messages. If I want to piss someone off, one of the most effective ways to achieve that goal is simply to ignore them. :)
Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 09:54, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Fair enough. I always tended to lean towards viewing a lack of response as a withdrawal from the debate rather than a calculated plan to annoy the other - when I'm trying to stick the proverbial middle finger up I do it by unleashing a rant in full force, instead. But I take your point, and I agree with the principles - it is virtually impossible to accurately read what someone is trying to say from just text. From now on I will read your comments as if read in an ironic voice. Falastur2 ^Talk 00:21, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

I didn't mean to imply that ALL lack of response is a "calculated plan to annoy the other" - clearly, many dialogues come to a natural conclusion (so no further response is required). "Withdrawal from the debate" (as you put it) may occur because one of the parties loses interest or is unable to continue (for whatever reasons) ... although if I'm in that position I will still make the effort to briefly let the other party know I'm unable to continue rather than just leave them hanging. If someone asks me a question (that is obviously not a rhetorical one) that I cannot (or am unwilling to) answer then I will similarly let them know I don't know the answer, or that I'm unable to respond as they would wish, rather than simply pretend that the question never occurred in the first place. It's all about observing common courtesy. Also, I never meant to imply (if indeed I did) that everything I write is ironic or sarcastic. I was merely pointing out that when writing to others "conversationally" - as we are doing here - I tend to write to them in almost the same manner that I would communicate to them face-to-face, and thus do not consciously censor myself from using "tongue-in-cheek" turns of phrase that I would normally use when speaking (where the words can be reinforced with facial expressions, etc.). Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 02:01, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

I agree fully on your comments about the status of the Europa League as a tournament, incidentally, but the sad fact is that the EL and even the CL are not counted as they are cups, and WP:NOTE only accepts leagues (even though those two competitions have "league" in the title). If I were playing the part of a trigger-happy speedy deleter and being particularly perverse I could even cite that several of the teams from the tiny nations - for example, UE Santa Coloma of Andorra - aren't professional clubs and thus the tournament cannot be fully professional. (Note: I'm not saying I agree with this theory.) You could counter-argue that technically the Europa League is a different tournament from the qualifying stages (hence why goals scored in qualifying don't count towards the golden boot) but really that would just be milling water and I doubt those trigger-happy deleters would care a jot. There is unfortunately a prevalence of attitude towards Deletionism here which is very hard to get around. Being an Inclusionist myself, I find the attitude irritating in the extreme, but I've learned to just go with the flow and stop trying to win AfD arguments on questionable subjects.

I too favor Inclusionism over Deletionism - if only because I feel that most of the deleters that take great pleasure in removing the efforts of others never appear to have created very much themselves. I'm all for tidying up the Wikipedia article space and deleting redundant, mediocre and non-conformant material, but there will always be those that will abuse the rules and guidance that is in place to allow this to be achieved and misapply them instead to perfectly innocuous material. I also feel too much straight reversion occurs. If I see something that I disagree with I will usually try and modify the material that is there to meet my standards rather than simply remove it. If I cannot modify it to get it to where I feel it needs to be then I will usually try and create an alternative text to replace it with. People that just revert (undo) stuff because they disagree with it, rather than make some attempt to constructively replace or mould what's already there, bug the shit out of me.
Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 09:54, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

I try to include useful information via rewrites where I can, but I don't tend to be a natural article expander - which is perhaps unusual for me, as I have no problems with writing prose. When I'm not writing stuff up into tables and graphics and such on Wikipedia, I have to admit to feeling a little out of my element. Therefore I must confess to a slight tendency to deleting text which has been added and I don't agree with. In fairness though, if I find that I can't actually categorically refute the statements made by other users in an edit I am considering reverting, I will leave it in the article and let better minds than mine cast judgement. Falastur2 ^Talk 00:21, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

For the record, I saw the speedy deletion coming, and acted first. User:Falastur2/Angelos Tsiaklis. Eat that, Deletionists, you have no rights to deleting stuff in my userspace.

I guess if I was to present an argument to the contrary on your Hereford example, by the way (for the sake of argument anyway) I could point out that it's probably accurate to say that more people both attend a Hereford United game than an England under-21, and more people take note of the score. Youth international football is near totally ignored here, and willfully so. I still don't agree with the mindset, I just felt a compulsion to present the other side of the argument. Whatever.

If you can accept that there is a certain degree of perversity in that British mindset (WRT the general lack of attention paid to top-level youth football) then perhaps you will also understand me when I say that such perversity of mindset (in many other situations) becomes a lot more apparent once you live outside the country and start to observe your fellow countrymen from the same perspective that foreigners do. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 09:54, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Oh, I surely do, and I think that youth internationals are sorely under-appreciated. However, I was making that statement to indicate where the attitude of a player not being considered notable if they have "only" played at under-21s level for their country comes from. Falastur2 ^Talk 00:21, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

For the record, in line with my "populist" style of naming conventions, I went for "Christopher" rather than "Chris" because I read something (I really can't remember what it was...I had it in my mind that it was the City OS) that called him "Christopher" so I surmised that was his name on the team-sheet and thus his "playing name". Given all the references I've seen to him as just "Chris" now, I'm inclined to prefer the shorthand. I'll go and work on that article now. Falastur2 ^Talk 02:10, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Mancini stats

How are you? City going well at the moment, we're up there with a shout come the end of the season if we stay where we are, shame about the loss tonight though. Everton had a miracle to keep that lead.

Basically, I got all the fixtures from the MCFC here: [1] and simply counted all the results up since Mancini joined. Perhaps a bit tedious.

There might be a discrepancy because I counted up the competitive results, not the friendlies played this pre-season with Mancini at the helm. Hence why there might be more GF and GA for your table? Or I could of made a mistake and missed a match out. Stevo1000 (talk) 23:24, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

It is strange, I had exactly the same feeling about the Everton game too. There a cursed chalice for us, and Cahill scored at the same end again for the umpteenth time. I think the odds were 5-1 for an Everton win which I thought were generous, if I weren't a City fan I'd of had a flutter. And I dislike Everton, very bitter about us for peculiar reason, many City fans observe that strange trait too.

I did cursorily count up Mancini's record on the fixture list on the MCFC website last night, so I could be wrong too. I just counted them up now and my game count was at 53 - when I counted it up last night it was 50, and your match count is 54 - so I'm confused. Perhaps explains why maths and arithmetic was never my strong subject at school. Stevo1000 (talk) 00:46, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

1967–68

Thanks for the assistance, and for sorting out the trail of debris I seemingly never fail to leave in my wake. Keep an eye on the Main Page on Sunday – there a topical double DYK in the pipeline. Oldelpaso (talk)

Edin Džeko

Hey MLITH. I didn't make the change myself as I know how you feel about reverting your edits, but I felt that I should point out that Dzeko hasn't actually completed his transfer yet, and it looks like it won't be completed until tomorrow or Saturday. Usually I find it advisable to wait for the contract signature and the signing to be announced on the official website, because with the best respect in the world - I've seen transfers collapse at this point in the proceedings. Players can fail their medicals (admittedly Dzeko has passed his) or quickly turn around and seek improved terms and be rejected at this stage, and if that happens the entire thing can be called off - it's not too late for the transfer to fail. Even worse, sometimes reports of medicals being completed actually turn out to be false - note there are no pictures of Dzeko in England yet - and it's not unknown for foreign club websites to claim that transfers have been completed when they haven't: Brazilian clubs are particularly notorious for announcing that they've signed players when they haven't, in an attempt to pressure the sale onto the other club's management. There's probably a 99.9% chance it will go through right now but you can't be sure.

As I say, I've made no change to the article so there's no compulsion on your part to do anything to fix this. If you disagree with me then fine, and I won't complain if you choose to keep the thing up there. There's even a chance that the transfer will be completed before you read this. Heck, there's a chance it could be completed before I finish writing. However, I just thought I should make my thoughts on the matter known to you. And I write this will total levity of mind: I'm not in any way offended or concerned that you made the change and I honestly don't mind if you disagree with me (just writing this given our previous discussions about how hard it is to tell over text what mood the other person is writing with :) I'm actually excited about the transfer myself, and really hoping to see him sign quickly). It simply is that from my experience I know that general Wikipedia practice is to not publish transfers until the official site has announced it and there are pictures.

Anyway, all the best. Falastur2 ^Talk 17:13, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

I totally agree with everything you said. One only has to look at the current Steve Sidwell transfer situation to see that the proof of your words can be garnered from the eating of that particular pudding, so to speak. :) BTW, while on the subject of Christmas puddings, many happy returns and I hope you and yours had a good festive season ... nothing beats a good week or two of festering IMO! The only reason I added the new entry now was to make sure it was set up correctly ... we can always adjust the date or even remove the entry should things pan out differently (God forbid ... because I too am very excited about this transfer given the recent disappointments of both RSC and Addy). My motivation for adding him now (while I was putting in some Wikipedia time) was driven mostly by the recent clueless attempt by Chris Chantler's mum (I'm guessing here!) to infiltrate her son into the City first team squad simply because he appeared for 30 seconds in a meaningless game (did he even touch the ball?!), followed by yesterday's attempt to implant Luis Guilherme into the City EDS team simply because he is on a trial spell with the Academy!

I felt that if I (or someone such as yourself) did not add Džeko correctly now, I would probably log on to Wikipedia tomorrow to find some nutjob had added him to the Academy or the MCFC Ladies team! :( I also see that someone has just added Kelvin Etuhu to the EDS squad. The only reason I haven't reverted that piece of nonsense already is that I first want to find a better RS citation (than one from Sky Sports) for his release as a free agent back in December. Any help you can give in that area would be much appreciated.

Another motivation for adding him prematurely was that, as of this morning when I read it, Dzeko's personal Wikipedia article already reported him as having signed for City (with that update being supported by a citation to a piece of speculative gossip posted a couple of days ago on goal.com - which IMO is not a reliable source for anything!). I'm also fully aware that the BBC Sport article citation I used to support my own update is also speculation (or perhaps "a report on current status" might be a more accurate description) but I will substitute that ASAP with reference links to MCFC and BBC Sport articles (that actually confirm the transfer as being complete) like I normally do.

Finally, I did write an immediate response to your last message on "assists" statistics but I didn't quite get the post to where I wanted it to be, so I saved it, fully expecting to finish it off the next day. Unfortunately, because of Christmas, etc. I became busy due to "real life" commitments, and it seems that every day since then my online Wikipedia time has all been taken up with reverting or correcting the nonsense perpetrated by others (see above) or creating that new timeline section in the articles, etc., so I have still not been able to return to it yet. However, I still intend to do so. Please hang in there!

Oh, and as for how I feel about your (or anyone else) reverting my edits, if you strongly disagree with them, then go ahead and do the reversion. I thought I had made it quite clear that my upset over the "singular versus plural when referring to group entities" issue was primarily due to the fact that you took time to tinker with that non-issue when you had tons of messages I had written to you that you were simply ignoring. And still are. It is beyond me how you can believe that a message from me containing a direct question (such as soliciting your opinion on something) brings an interchange to a natural conclusion requiring no further response from you. However, I do not intend to flog that particular dead horse any further. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 19:53, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Two days ago Sidwell had agreed terms, passed his medical and was on the verge of signing for West Ham. Yesterday it was reported that Mick McCarthy had managed to snatch him out of the clutches of Gold and Sullivan and lure him to Molineaux instead. Today he has passed his medical at Fulham and it is Mark Hughes that is gloating over his imminent signing. Which club next? If he's such a hot property WTF is Houllier willing to shed him in the first place? At this rate it will be David Moyes that will end up signing him and he'll be doomed to spend the rest of his career at Goodison! :)

I have tried to find a supporting reference somewhere on the web for the MotD magazine award to David Silva in December but can find nothing. Nada. Nil. Zilch. Not even a mention of it here! That magazine site is not very user-friendly WRT searching for information ... in fact, it is one of the lamer and more puerile sites I've come across, so I'm also very surprised the BBC has associated its name with it. If no reference to the award can be found on the web site that actually made the award what does that say about the overall significance of that award? IOW, if MotD magazine cannot even be bothered to make sure there is a page on its own site that documents and explains its various monthly awards, how seriously should the rest of us take them? I'm very close to deleting that award entry, more for lack of any true significance than for lack of citation.

I have added brief descriptions to some of the awards in the past few season articles to clarify the process that determines why and how that particular recipient (player, manager, grounds staff, etc.) received the award. Could you do likewise for all of the awards that still lack such a synopsis? Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 20:30, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Sorry about the delay - I've been busy with various things over the last few days, such as attending the Stevenage v Newcastle game (contrary to your earlier guesses about me, I'm not actually Manchester-based - I've lived in Herts since birth, my mum moving down here from Cheadle Hulme after marrying my dad, hence the City connection) and various other things that have kept me out of the house and unable to devote much time to Wikipedia at any one point. Falastur2 ^Talk 17:56, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

I actually watched the Stevenage game live on Saturday afternoon (my time) and was rooting (excuse my Americanism) for Stevenage and thought they thoroughly deserved to win the game. Was that you standing next to Ken Follett in the crowd? :) It's a pity your mum missed Kompany's and Boyata's visit to Cheadle back in December (I'm guessing here!) but Cheadle I know very well since I spent a large chunk of my childhood there, particularly that part of it when I used to be a regular at Maine Road. I don't really know why I chose to watch that game, after having sat through the earlier Sheffield United - Aston Villa match, rather than watch something more obviously enticing from La Liga or Serie A, but that's probably the indefinable lure of the FA Cup. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 01:39, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Regrettably no, it wasn't me, I was right behind the goal. I did take some pictures of the pitch invasion, though, and I noticed the guy who punched a Stevenage player is on one of them, though in far too low detail to be of value to the police. And yes, we rarely go back to Cheshire these days, especially considering my granddad is dead, and my (step) grandma has moved to Wales to leave the painful memories behind. We went to Cheadle Hulme to visit my uncle a few weeks back, but that was the first time in a couple of years. I will be visiting the velodrome next door to Eastlands next month though (my dad is big on bicycle road racing).

I take it you mean Cheadle Hulme, and not Cheadle, of course? I've never lived in the north to know whether Cheadle Hulme is known as just "Cheadle" but I do know that there is a Cheadle relatively nearby to Cheadle Hulme, and I think it's more associated with players' houses that Cheadle Hulme is. Falastur2 ^Talk 01:11, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

No, I usually say what I mean and mean what I say. For those who live in the area there is little distinction drawn between Cheadle and Cheadle Hulme. The OSC branch visited by Kompany and Boyata was the Cheadle branch; I have no idea if it serves both the Cheadle and Cheadle Hulme areas or whether there is a separate Cheadle Hulme branch - it's probably the former. I believe the Cheadle political constituency also covers most (if not all) of both areas, although modern day political boundaries can differ quite significantly from historical borough boundaries and old church parishes, etc. (which are usually what determine the names of local areas in the first place). If my memory serves me right, both contemporary districts can be traced back to the lands owned by the de Cheadle family back in the times of the Norman Conquest, but like most areas that exist on the periphery of large metropolitan cities, they've been partitioned and conjoined, annexed and redistricted many times since then as the area became first suburbs of the nearby town/city of Stockport, which in turn has become just another southern borough of Greater Manchester. The players' homes that you mention probably all exist a little further south in the Bramhall / Alderley Edge areas that still remain in Cheshire. Cheadle was in Cheshire when I lived there. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 02:54, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

The MOTD magazine thing, if I'm to be honest, came from Facebook. The club official group unveiled that he'd won the award, and even showed the framed magazine they were sent with his picture on it. It is aimed at the younger reader though, and you're right that their website haven't announced it yet (though from my own search they do tend to publish these things eventually so I'm guessing they will in due course) but yes, I have no source for it right now - other than FB which is hardly the kind of thing you'd want to quote in a Wikipedia source citation. If you wanted to see the picture, you can see it here (doesn't need a FB account). It's really no biggie as far as I'm concerned if you don't view the award as irrelevant, though. I just felt like it was fairly notable, but it's far from a certain add so delete by all means, especially if no citable source is forthcoming. Falastur2 ^Talk 17:56, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

It's the potential irrelevancy factor that concerns me, NOT the lack of citation. As I have repeatedly stated in our prior communications, it is a vast misunderstanding amongst most Wikipedia editors that EVERYTHING must be anally supported with an RS citation. Only contentious statements require citation - to prevent their immediate reversion by editors that disagree with them. And just because something has been backed up with a citation does not make it correct or non-POV and thus immune from any future reversion. IMO the ultimate determining factors are truth, accuracy and objectivity (i.e., lack of biased POV or agenda); thus when a statement or fact in an article is obviously true and accurate in everybody's viewpoint it doesn't need to be justified with a citation - which, for instance, is why we don't provide citations to justify upcoming game fixtures (e.g., the FA Cup replay against Leicester City or the Europa League games against Aris) or any of the information in the article Infoxbox (such as highest and lowest attendances, etc.). I didn't provide any citations to back up that timeline in the new "Historical league performance" section, yet nobody has baulked at it or challenged it because it is obviously true, accurate and not aimed at furthering some kind of biased agenda ... thus it's uncontentious.

My main concern WRT to the MotD magazine award is that it may possibly come across to others as being "a little desperate." Meaning that the editors of the article will be perceived as scraping the bottom of the barrel in order to desperately find something to list because there are no truly significant awards to feature - such as BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards or the old UEFA European Footballer of the Year and FIFA World Player of the Year awards (now the new FIFA Ballon d'Or awards), and so on. I feel somewhat that way about the Etihad awards but at least the MCFC web site is accessible (for the purposes of voting) in many different countries so, in theory, the awards are not just the product of a nepotistic fanzine process. The fact that the award was presented to David Silva, when he has also just walked off with the last three Etihad awards, also makes this uncitable juvenile e-magazine award a little redundant too. Lack of citation can always be used as a good blanket reason for removing this award entry (should we decide to do so) but that would not, and should not, be the "real reason" for removing it IMO.
Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 01:39, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Fair enough. I agree, after some thought. It is a relatively pointless citation, and it seems as City become hotter property, the ground swell of little-known awards is becoming a flood. Only a season or two back, you'd never even hear of half these awards. I'll remove it tomorrow if you haven't already, unless you have a change of heart on its validity? Falastur2 ^Talk 01:11, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

Exactly. What next? Beano and Dandy awards for Tévez and Balotelli !? :( IMO the award is much more about the magazine than it is about MCFC or David Silva. I'll leave it for you to delete it (for lack of citation) since I don't like reverting the efforts of others (even when I know they agree with the reversion!). Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 02:54, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

I'll do what I can for the other article descriptions when I get a chance later today, though what you've done seems fine. Only thing I'll raise issue with is that I'm not sure that I recall the Thomas Cook player of the month award (i.e. the POTM from two seasons ago and more being voted on on the official site. I seem to recall that there was far less interaction from reader to website in that era. I'll add whatever else there is to add though. Falastur2 ^Talk 17:56, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

More specifically, here's what I'm seeking. I have absolutely no idea how the Tuttosport Golden Boy award is determined ... do readers of that Italian sports paper (I believe it is printed daily) vote for the player, and if so, by what mechanism do they cast their votes; do the sports editors on the paper decide it by committee; or does the paper poll a number of perceived "experts" in the sport for their opinion; or is it determined by some other method? Similarly, for last season, who votes and how for the LMA and PFA awards? Perhaps there should be a brief Wikipedia article on each of those awards just as there are for the monthly Barclays manager and player awards - then we can link to it by way of explanation. Furthermore, for the OSC awards (which have now been incorporated into an Etihad end-of-season gala ceremony) when and how does the voting take place. I assume one has to be a registered member of the Official Supporters Club in order to be able to vote, but when does one vote and how (e.g., only on the night of the gala, or throughout a prolonged period near the end of the season, etc.)? Finally, re season 2007-08, I also have no idea how the Football Association of Ireland awards are determined. My attitude is this, if I, as a pretty knowledgeable football fan, do not know any of this information, then what chance does the intelligent uniformed reader (the person at whom a Wikipedia article should ideally be pitched) have of knowing it? Which is why I feel it should be addressed in the interest of good encyclopedic methodology. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 01:39, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Got you. The Tuttosport award I am fairly sure is decided on by a committee of the editors of the magazine, though I have no sources to back that up. The LMA and PFA awards are done on the basis that every member of the organisation (that is, serving managers or professional players within England) get to vote on every category, I am fairly sure. I'm surprised they don't have their own articles, considering they are given equal notability with the Barclays Player of the Month and the Player of the Year, but I guess that's the way Wikipedia works sometimes - sometimes things slip through the net, or the people with the right knowledge don't actually use Wikipedia. I don't actually know how the end of year OS awards work, in all truth, except for the Player of the Month which is done by online vote on the website I am fairly sure - I am sure I have voted in it before. I tend to view the official club awards - the end of year ones I don't know about as well - as being eminently notable, though, in the same way that BBC MOTD magazine's award is perhaps not really notable. FAI awards I am pretty sure are decided on by a committee representing senior officials in the Irish FA, but don't quote me on that. I'll try to look into it and see what I can find in the way of concrete details. Falastur2 ^Talk 01:11, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

FYI, there already exist Wikipedia articles about the League Managers Association and the PFA Fans' Player of the Year and PFA Players' Player of the Year awards, just not the LMA's "Performance of the Week" awards nor the PFA's "Fans' Player of the Month" awards. My recommendation would be to add a new section to the LMA article to cover awards dished out by that body and to create a "PFA Fans' Player of the Month" article that parallels the current one about the annual awards. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 02:54, 16 January 2011 (UTC)