Talk:Anna Lapushchenkova

In response to the 'Lacks in-text citations' tag
When it comes to articles on tennis players that can be sourced entirely from their records as found on lengthy pages provided by the ATP or WTA and ITF, it is my belief that in-text citations would be a complete waste of everyone's time. It would take hours to go through an article like this and reference every assertion to one of only three or four relevant source pages that are all listed as sources already at the end of the article. One would end up with list of about a hundred and fifty to two hundred reference notes all of which go to one of only three pages. This would take up a vast amount of space and would not even be useful, since these are long pages with a host of disparate information and in-text referencing to them would serve only to link the viewer back to reams of tables of results containing many hundreds of disparate facts. It is the purpose of these kinds of articles on Wikipedia to pick out the important facts of biographical relevance from those tables and present them in prose in their proper biographical context and perspective.

Of course, if sources external to the WTA and ITF (etc.) sites that provide additional information of biographical importance are discovered then it is fine and proper for someone drawing facts from such additional sources to reference them with in-text citations. However, this article to date does not take any information from external sources other than those cited at the foot of the page, and to pad out the article by multiplying the number of links to these same three pages fifty to a hundred-fold would be superfluous, contrary to good sense, and to the detriment of overall presentation. Philip Graves (talk) 15:22, 5 March 2008 (UTC)


 * While I understand your position on this, the references for this article are extremely poor. The vast majority of the information in this article is unsourced. As a biography on a living person, the standards for citations are very high. If you have additional sources for this article, please include them in a references section and remove the tag.


 * The policy does not say that every single sentence needs a citation. The problem here is that there is a lot of information that has no indication as to where it came from, and may in fact be original research, which is completely inappropriate for a BLP. One good reference per paragraph should be sufficient. — BradV 16:06, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

As I said before, there is to the best of my memory from writing this and a significant number of similar articles on tennis players on Wikipedia no original research here at all - everything is drawn from the WTA and ITF profile and activity pages for the player listed at the end of the article, and all references would go to one of these. If you cannot see this straight away, please take a closer look at the source pages, extend the time allowance on the ITF activity page to go back as far as the article does in time, and everything should become clear. While the ITF activity page can be expanded to include results going back years and years, the URL at the top does not change to allow a direct link to the expanded version of the page, so this is impossible and the best that can be done when editing a Wikipedia page that draws results from the expanded version of the page is to refer to the generic URL for the initial unexpanded view that covers only a certain number of months until the present. Besides, even if it were possible to directly link to the expanded view going further back in time, it is not possible from this expanded view to focus the browser in any one single result or tournament. Therefore, any differentiation between source reference URLs for different results throughout the entire career of any female tennis player is impossible using these records. In the WTA equivalent, one has to select a particular year to see all the activity for that year. Again, the URL does not change, so no direct link specific to the year is possible, and therefore once again, no differentiation between source reference URLs for different results throughout the career of the tennis player concerned is possible. So if I were to follow your instruction, I would in effect be duplicating one of the three general source links already provided at the foot of the page in embedded reference format for a random sentence in each paragraph. This would lead to triplication, quadruplication or quintuplication at the very least (probably many times more multiplication on more substantial articles, depending on the total number of paragraphs) of those existing links to the unexpanded versions of the player activity pages, and nothing more. I feel this would be untidy and distracting when all the information in this article can already be easily verified by following up the three links given in the Sources section. It would also set a precedent for the re-modelling with numerous duplicated links to the same equivalent source pages of all other tennis player articles on Wikipedia, which would in my opinion demand many hours of timewasting activity on the part of contributors merely to duplicate links that already exist on these pages.Philip Graves (talk) 06:51, 6 March 2008 (UTC)