Talk:List of chess grandmasters/Archive 2

Most recent federation
Why is just the most recent federation included. It's unjust for players forced under new federations, like Paul Keres for example. H2ppyme (talk) 20:27, 12 August 2018 (UTC)
 * I agree that this doesn't seem to be the best. I think the federation at the time the title was granted should be used, but other editors have been doing a lot more work on this page than I have and I think the people willing to do the work get a larger say in that kind of decision.  It would be possible to include the current federation in addition to the the federation when the title was earned, but I think only the original title fed is better because: 2 fed columns makes the table larger and looks dumb since most of the time the original title fed and current fed would be the same; for dead players "current fed" means federation at time of death which doesn't seem to have any point; for living players in the best case federation changes just churn the page with edits of little value that are necessary to keep the fed up to date, and in the worse case the page is not updated and the information is wrong; and finally if someone wants information about the player's current federation they should check the linked biography page or go to ratings.fide.com themselves.  Quale (talk) 06:38, 13 August 2018 (UTC)


 * "Most recent federation" is an absolute train wreck. Let's start with Jacob Aagaard who is listed as Denmark.  Bzzzt, thanks for playing.  The correct answer ( at the time of this writing since 2012 or earlier) is Scotland.  Quale (talk) 05:39, 9 September 2018 (UTC)
 * He’s been playing under Scottish colours at least since I created his article in 2007. Incidentally I don’t see the relevance of Keres, who’s been dead for over 40 years, to a discussion of this article. How often these days are players forced to change? More than one column would be overkill as the vast majority of players will never change their federation. Pawnkingthree (talk) 13:29, 9 September 2018 (UTC)
 * The current system has the advantage of easily being verifiable – for instance, it was easy to verify that Aagaard was incorrectly listed. I have no problem changing the data presented in that column if the new data (e.g. federation at time of title grant) is also easily verifiable. Cobblet (talk) 15:46, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
 * It isn't as easily verifiable if the GM is deceased, although that will never be more than about 10% of the list and the number of GMs whose most recent federations can be verified from the FIDE website or ratings list will continue to grow. The count of living GMs per federation is a statistic of interest, although I don't know if the last federation a GM had before death is of particular value. Quale (talk) 17:41, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
 * This is a problem for any table that includes nationalities, e.g. tournament crosstables. Nationality isn't always so black and white, and it might be better just to present all federations the player has represented (or countries they have lived in while active). Rubinstein spent most of his life in Belgium by the way. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 23:12, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
 * It's true that nationality is a difficult issue for some older tournaments, but it shouldn't be a problem here. (For Lone Pine International had some trouble determining whether Roman Dzindzichashvili should be affiliated with Israel or the US in 1980, but I think I got it right.)  All FIDE GMs have been registered to a national federation from the initial group in 1950 on.  (Pal Benko was stateless for a while, but I'm pretty sure he was in the US federation when he became a GM.)  I would prefer to use the federation when the title was issued since that never needs to be updated and never goes out of date.  With that, once a GM is added to the table an update would only be necessary to add date of death or to correct an error.  There could also be a few cases in which the player's name changed (marriage or divorce) or the preferred transliteration from a non-Latin alphabet changed.  Quale (talk) 03:56, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
 * – you're right – when you created this article in March 2008 you correctly listed Aagaard's federation as Scotland. The first FIDE ratings list that shows his GM title is October 2007 and it confirms that his federation was SCO, so Scotland was also his federation when his GM title was issued.  FIDE ratings lists from 2015 through 2017 show Aagaard's federation affiliation had changed Denmark, but since January 2018 he's with Scotland again.  The federation change to Denmark was noticed and this May 2015 edit added Denmark so Aagaard had two federations listed.  2015 saw a lot of maintenance on the page including edits to update federations.  SCO was dropped from Aaagaard's entry in this July 2015 edit leaving only DEN which was his federation at that time.  That edit also updated Caruna's federation and made several important name order and sorting fixes.  Quale (talk) 06:26, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

Javokhir Sindarov
Anyone know why Javokhir Sindarov isn't listed here? Perhaps I'm not familiar enough with the FIDE database to understand. His name is listed as the second-youngest ever GM in the chess prodigy article, but when I try to find him in the FIDE database, he's listed as an IM. His |FIDE rating card says his application for GM is "open," but if that's the reason he's not listed here, why is he listed as a GM in the chess prodigy article? BoneClock (talk) 14:07, 30 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Sindarov has earned the GM title but it will not be awarded by FIDE for another few months. He is listed as a GM at chess prodigy as players are listed by the age they earned rather than received the title. Hrodvarsson (talk) 02:59, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the clarification, . I thought it was an inconsistency between the two Wikipedia pages, so I'm glad I asked before "fixing" it. BoneClock (talk) 01:58, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Improving the table of GMs
In 2010 I wrote that I wanted to add FIDE ID to the table of GMs, and now a mere 9 years later it is done. In addition to possibly making the table easier to verify (click on the FIDE ID for any living player to examine FIDE records) and potentially more useful, I want to make it more practical to automatically process the FIDE rating list each month to discover new GMs missing from our table. To that end the table must be set up in a way that is easier to process by machine and possible to match against FIDE records without undue effort.

My full list of goals for this table is a work in progress at The List of Chess GMs Manifesto. The work that I think should be done next is:
 * 1) Verify the entry for every living GM either by hand from the FIDE Chess Profile (click on the FIDE ID link) or mechanically by comparing to FIDE electronic records.  Some data is not readily available from FIDE such as full date of birth, but sometimes the FIDE GM title application will have this information.
 * 2) Verify the entry for every deceased GM using dead tree sources such as Gaige 1987 (Chess Personalia, A Biobibliography).  We need to decide how to cite this in the article, for example is a brief entry in the Notes column such as JG1987 enough or do we want to include page numbers.  (Maybe we don't need page numbers.  Many ebooks don't number pages so citations without page numbers will become increasingly common, and it's blindingly obvious where to find players in an alphabetized biographical dictionary.)
 * 3) Do the programming to facilitate push-button generation of wikitext to add new GMs to the table and find a way to make the code publicly available (maybe on gitlab or github.  If you are interested in working in Python I have some code I've been working on.

Ideas to consider

 * I'd like to change the format of the Name column to "Last, First" for a few reasons including the following. It's much easier to verify the correct name sort in "Last, First" order, it matches the way the names are reported in our sources including FIDE rating lists and chess profile pages, we could remove the "data-sort-value=" from every table row, nearly all of the player bio links in the Name column would be piped wikilinks (we should probably make them all piped for consistency) which makes them easier to mechanically generate and process, and it's simple to mechanically and reliably convert "Last, First" to "First Last" but essentially impossible to do the inverse.
 * I tried to retain all the information in the old table, but "(FIDE)" after nearly every player name (now found as "FIDE" in the Notes column) is just junk and I think it should be ditched. The same for the Olimpbase link.  I think Olimpbase is a wonderful resource and we cite it for team chess results, but I don't think it's a great reference for this table.  (It could be listed in Further reading or an equivalent.)
 * Add a column for Sex. I would have done that in this first update that added FIDE ID but I forgot.  This is easy, so the only real questions are whether the column label should be "Sex" or perhaps "M/F" and where to put the Sex column (maybe after Federation).
 * Move honorary GMs to a separate section just as I did for revoked GMs. The difficulties with this are that we would have to be confident that we can identify all the honorary GMs and there are maybe a few cases where it's somewhat controversial whether the title awarded was honorary or not.  (Penrose is an example.  All the print sources I've seen say his award was honorary, but I think William Hartston says it was a standard GM award.)
 * Add a column for birthplace. This is another column that can't be mechanically extracted from FIDE electronic records so it would have to be researched and maintained by hand.  On the plus side once a player birthplace is entered it shouldn't ever change.
 * I'd like to change the handling of the Federation column as discussed in a different discussion thread above, but that can wait.

Anyone willing to help with the #1 and #2 verification work or the #3 programming? Quale (talk) 08:06, 14 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I appreciate your work, but I do not really understand why you want to reinvent the wheel. On wikidata, we have almost complete information of all FIDE titles of all players. From this, we have a lot of automatically generated and updated lists (see d:Wikidata:WikiProject Chess/Lists). Furthermore, we have at de:Benutzer:Dsds55/Listen a possibility to automatically retrieve title changes at the FIDE database (see page history). Currently, the wikidata player items are kept up to date manually, but of course it would be helpful to have this automated somehow. 94.218.178.153 (talk) 19:47, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
 * So fix it. I like the idea of Wikidata, but I don't see any wheels being reinvented here.  What is the sourcing in Wikidata, in other words, how do we ensure WP:V is met?  There are other technical issues as well.  Does wikidata currently have items for 1862 GMs, and will it get any new GMs for June 2019?  Also, how do we get that wikidata into a table in en.wiki?  If I knew how to do that, I would work on it.  If you know how to do that, I encourage you to work on it.  I think wikidata is the future, but I don't know how to make it the present.  Quale (talk) 20:02, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I have inserted the Bot template to User_talk:Quale/List_of_chess_grandmasters. Sooner or later a bot should come and insert the list. Wikidata has currently 1828 GMs, less than in your list due to HGMs etc. It will get new GMs in June if there are approved some new GMs and someone adds the title to the items. This information can then also be used in the chess player infoboxes etc. The key is storing information once and retrieving it at many different usages. 94.218.178.153 (talk) 20:19, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Excellent, thanks. My reply came off more negative than I intended.  I think wikidata could provide a better way — and while I don't know how to do that myself, I'm willing to help if I can — but that means someone else (possibly you) will have to take the lead to show how we can do it.  It looks like you've taken that first step.  Quale (talk) 20:55, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I think the largest issue currently are the missing sources for many title years, date of births etc., which prevent the retrieval to en.wiki it seems. Di Felice has a lot of data, so adding "stated in: Chess International Titleholders" could do the job in many cases. However, this, I think, has to be done manually, similarly as you currently add the sources to the list here. Furthermore, as soon as the GM list was bot-generated here, you can look at it and decide what is ok and what needs to be modified. 147.142.63.186 (talk) 06:53, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I don't see the wikidata table working at User_talk:Quale/List_of_chess_grandmasters. The bot doesn't seem to have made an update, and clicking the Automatically update the list now link opens an empty tab that just spins waiting for tools.wmflabs.org. Quale (talk) 02:45, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes, this problem occurs sometimes if there are too much entries. I made a small adjustment. Could you copy this paragraph to a new page, e.g. User:Quale/List_of_chess_grandmasters Wikidata? 88.67.118.83 (talk) 06:17, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Even this early effort looks much better than I thought possible at this point. There are still a few things to sort out, but I think it's possible we will be able to automatically generate the table much sooner than I had expected.  Looking at the table, the first thing that I think needs to be resolved is the sort order.  It seems sorting by family name doesn't quite work because the wikidata for some players has their family names in Cyrillic.  What should we do about that? Quale (talk) 00:16, 5 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Ah, great, the list was added. To be honest, it's not an early effort, we have been working with such kinds of lists on german wikipedia and wikidata since 2015 ;) The sort order is indeed a bit tricky. Currently some heuristic is used to identify the most likely family name. The best way how the sorting can be corrected would be to add d:Property:P734 to every player item (some of them already have it). Then one could just sort by the statements of this property. This also necessarily includes the creation of the missing items of family names. This is all not complicated, but a lot of work, either manually or somehow supported by scripts. Regarding the sourcing: Of course it would also be possible to automatically include references or sources in general, but the source code of the list is already quite large (> 200 kB), so I would suggest to limit the list to the pure information. Note that I will not be able to respond until the end of next week due to business duties and holidays. Take your time to make yourself familiar with the many possibilities of wikidata ;) 147.142.156.98 (talk) 07:23, 5 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Family name is not explicit in Wikipedia, but it's easy to get an appropriate name sort or something close since the current table now has every name sort in the data-sort-value parameter in the first column. Because every table row is now formatted the same it isn't difficult to extract in code, and I do it in about 80 lines of Python using https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&title=List of chess grandmasters to get the raw wikitext.  The most work will actually be to match these to the appropriate wikidata item for each player since currently the table only has wikidata links for a few players (I moved the links to the Notes column).  I think we could match most of them on FIDE ID Number.  Perhaps a good next step would be to get the wikidata item for each player as a column in the current GM table since that should make matching easy in both directions.  There's no time limit on this, so if I get stuck it's OK. Quale (talk) 02:18, 6 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I am back, this time logged in. I added at the listeria table another column with the wikidata ID, I hope the bot will update the list soon. Steak (talk) 15:24, 19 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Listeria-Bot has added the wikidata IDs, you can now proceed to add the family names. Steak (talk) 21:02, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

Citing sources
The entries do need some cites, but this could be improved. I don't think the bare "FIDE" entries in the Notes column serve any useful purpose, and it should be possible to find some ways to abbreviate entries for other sources. Ideas are welcome. Quale (talk) 04:56, 12 October 2019 (UTC)
 * On a related note the "too long" tag is really querying whether the article should exist at all, since there's no good way to shorten it. I submit that the article is very much worth keeping and the tag should be removed. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 05:16, 12 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks, you were so quick to respond to this that you got your comment in while I was preparing a section to discuss just that point. Quale (talk) 05:44, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

Letter headings in the table
Even though I thought it was a really cool table hack, I removed the letter headings from the table. My reasons were ultimately selfish. In recent months I have run a simple Python script to compare the GMs table in the article to the monthly FIDE rating list to find the new GMs, and the letter heading rows broke the script. The script is very convenient since it finds the new GMs by comparing the wikipedia table to the latest FIDE rating list and formats the table row wiki syntax for the new GMs. I could fix the script to work with the letter headings, but they get in the way of any automated processing of the table data meaning that anyone else who wants to use the table data would also have to filter them out.

I like the letter headings some, but there were things I didn't like. very graciously discussed my concerns and gave me table hacks to address some of these things, but there remain two sticking points that don't seem possible to resolve. The benefits of the letter headings don't seem large enough to me to outweigh these costs. I thought that it would be nice to be able to do table maintenance by editing individual sections of the table rather than having to edit the entire table, but PrimeHunter pointed out that Show preview won't work on the sections because the sections are just incomplete fragments of the table lacking the table start and end. The benefits the letter headings give in finding names seem small since names are already in sort order. I would actually like to change the name format to "Last, First" which would make the sort order more obvious and I think would make letter headings even less necessary.
 * 1) Even when letter heading rows are set to sort bottom, it's somewhat ugly.  The letter heading rows really reflect only one sort, by name, and get in the way when sorting by nearly any other column such as M/F or reverse sorting by Born or Died.
 * 2) Automated processing of the table data is made more complicated by the letter heading rows.  The table is really easy to read using tools such as Google sheets   or the Python Pandas   function.  Letter headings introduce extraneous data that has to be filtered out.

If you want to compare the table with letter headings I did an edit with the improvements that PrimeHunter kindly provided. If you decide the letter headings provide a significant value to the article and want to restore them, please add the four new GMs for November 2019 to that version: Quale (talk) 05:38, 2 November 2019 (UTC)
 * data-sort-value="Garcia Pantoja, Roberto" | Roberto Garcia Pantoja || 3509265 || 1992-10-31 || || 2019 || 🇨🇺 || align="center"|M ||
 * data-sort-value="Pultinevicius, Paulius" | Paulius Pultinevicius || 12809390 || 2001-11-24 || || 2019 || 🇱🇹 || align="center"|M ||
 * data-sort-value="Rios, Cristhian Camilo" | Cristhian Camilo Rios || 4403940 || 1993-04-09 || || 2019 || 🇨🇴 || align="center"|M ||
 * data-sort-value="Salinas Herrera, Pablo" | Pablo Salinas Herrera || 3407128 || 1994-06-03 || || 2019 ||  || align="center"|M ||

Article too long
I don't think Very long is worth keeping in the article, although since it's a hidden category most readers will not see it. Nearly a decade ago there was discussion whether the page should be split either chronologically (e.g. 1950–2000 and since 2001) or alphabetically (e.g. A–L and M–Z). In 2010 the article page load was slow on the computers and internet speeds that were common. I think that concern became less urgent a few years later as computer capacity, typical internet speeds and the quality of browser implementations all improved. I think the Wikimedia implementation has improved as well, and the penalty for using macros is probably much less than it was. Today I think the article works reasonably well even on a smart phones over 3G even though the list has grown by about 40%. It is true that the article will continue to grow, but my guess is that network and phone and computing device capacities will grow faster so it might not be necessary to split this article anytime soon.

I think the biggest reasons keep the list in a single article and not split it are:
 * 1) A split would significantly reduce the utility of sorting by table columns. Born, Died, Year, M/F and even perhaps Federation are all potentially interesting sorts, but they would be less useful if the article were split.
 * 2) A split would make exporting the table data clumsier since it would need to be done in two pieces.  If you want the GMs table in a spreadsheet, take a look at Google Docs IMPORTHTML.  It's surprisingly easy and works well.  As a side note, the GMs table used to be the first table in the article but now it is the second table since Very long adds a table at the top of the article, so use  .  If you use Python the Pandas library can import the table in two lines (the first line is the Pandas library import) and many other languages can probably load the table pretty easily as well.
 * 3) No obvious natural way to split the list, although division by title year or alphabetically by surname would be most likely.

Do you think the article should be split, and if you favor a split, how would you split it? Quale (talk) 05:43, 12 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I agree that the article is certainly too large, but we don't need a column for notes and we don't need a column of external links. There are much better, more efficient ways of referencing the content than this. Onetwothreeip (talk) 00:30, 26 October 2019 (UTC)
 * 1. You're wrong. 2. What are the much better, more efficient ways of referencing content like this? Quale (talk) 03:02, 26 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Citations for multiple entries each. As many entries that can be cited to as few citations as possible. Onetwothreeip (talk) 03:06, 26 October 2019 (UTC)
 * The players have separate FIDE pages. It's much easier to click a link to their FIDE page than search for them at fide.com. And if something happens to fide.com then you can find archived pages with the url, e.g. at for . We could make inline references but there are currently 1695 player links. That seems excessive for a References section when you don't need the extra information in full citations. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:51, 26 October 2019 (UTC)
 * @Onetwothreeip - The list already uses some consolidated sources, but actually complete sourcing will require making the article larger regardless since most entries weren't really sourced before. The external links to the FIDE Profile pages can be used to verify the titles, title years, sex, and federations.  (Caveat on the federations as only the most recent federation is on the FIDE Profile.  The column header suggests that the list reports most recent federation but in fact that is not being maintained.)  Birth year can also be verified on the Profile, but the full birth dates need other sources as do death dates.  The old use of "FIDE" as the only source citation was not really satisfactory.  FIDE Profile pages are removed when a player dies and it doesn't give any help actually finding the FIDE Profile.  (Wikipedia does not always use the same player names that FIDE uses.  FIDE never uses diacritics, for example, and there can be other differences such as Bobby Fischer vs. Robert J. Fischer.  This issue is not purely theoretical since there have been two GMs named Alexander Zaitsev.)  There isn't any single source that can be used for every entry, but Di Felice can be cited for all the GMs through 2016.  To do that we have to verify 1500 entries by hand against Di Felice, so it will take a while. Quale (talk) 05:35, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I agree with the main points you make Quale in your original post, i.e. (i) loading time is almost negligible now, (ii) no good way of splitting (and splitting would make the sorting function much less interesting, e.g. now sorting by country makes it easy to see all GM's from one country). (iii) Not that this has been questioned, but the list as a whole is a very encyclopedic thing to have, and something we should be proud of it! In any case, for me the Very long can and should be removed.Voorlandt (talk) 07:07, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
 * , it's nice to see you on a chess page again. I remember when you created this article over a decade ago.  It seemed obvious that Wikipedia should have a list of all GMs, but I found the task too daunting to attempt.  Once you got it started there was no turning back, and we put a lot of work into it back in 2008.  Quale (talk) 05:56, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

Crisan
FIDE for many years continued to list Crisan as a GM in its rating list. Though it was recommended that his title be revoked in 2001, I don't think they actually followed through with it. Probably some legal threats, politics etc involved. It was only in 2015 that the GM title was removed from the rating list, but FIDE made no announcement about it. He was also jailed back in 2007 on fraud charges. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 08:12, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

April 2020 awardees
Since we use the monthly FIDE rating list and the online FIDE Chess Profile pages as our data source for new GM awards and FIDE records player names in ASCII, I have relied on the kindness of wiki-strangers to add the appropriate diacritics. There might be some name order issues as well.

Also missing are some full dates of birth and some title application links I couldn't find at https://ratings.fide.com/titles_page.phtml.

In theory you can find the new additions by checking the page history, but in practice I find that a little clunky. Here are the 26 new GMs for April 2020:

Quale (talk) 05:58, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Every culture does names differently. Use of diacritics is "neither encouraged nor discouraged". MaxBrowne2 (talk) 09:43, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
 * I think I'm in agreement with that, and consider WP:COMMONNAME to be the deciding factor. My interpretation of the form that is most commonly used in English sources has evolved a bit over the last 15 years to being more amenable to diacritics in some names.  The push to rename Arpad Elo to Árpád Élő remains moronic thirteen and a half years later, and I still think that Peter Leko is the form commonly seen in English even although Péter Lékó is sometimes used in English-language writing.  And I don't want Icelandic chess bio page titles to include thorns.  But I've softened on diacritics in Vietnamese names, although perhaps they are still most commonly spelled in English sources without the diacritics.  I'm generally content to leave that people who understand it better than I do, and the same for Eastern name order issues that come up increasingly often since there are more strong chess players from China, India and Vietnam.  (But name order complaints made at Viswanathan Anand were also wrong, and particularly dumb since the largest English-language newspaper in the world uses that name order and it is published in India.)  Quale (talk) 04:34, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Dragoljub Minić birthday
Sources don't agree on Minić's birthday. Golumbek's Encyclopedia of Chess (1977), Gaige's Chess Personalia (1987), Kažić's Chess Personalia (1974) all say 5 March 1937. TWIC 546 says 5 April 1936. I'm not sure what source TWIC had for this date, but it may have been calculated to support this statement about his death: "Doctors said that he died from a heart attack approximately on his 69th birthday on April 5th 2005." I think this bit about the 69th birthday was also found in other online sources around 2005, although TWIC is the only one I've found that is still accessible.

Sometimes comparison to other wikipedias can be helpful even though wikipedia in any language is not a WP:RS. I find chess bios in the Polish wikipedia and the German wikipedia to be generally accurate, and the Russian wikipedia can be useful as well. In this case it doesn't really aid us since Dragoljub_Minić says 5 March 1937 and Dragoljub Minić and Минич, Драголюб say 5 April 1936. Chessgames.com says 5 April 1937, but chessgames.com chess bios are not reliable sources and that combination of month and year seems almost certainly wrong.

FIDE's record keeping isn't very good, but it thought Minić's birthday was 5 March 1937. For a few years around 1999–2005 many FIDE rating lists included some full birthdays. jan05frl.zip says ID_NUMBER NAME                        TITLE COUNTRY JAN05 GAMES BIRTHDAY   FLAG 14500477 Minic, Dragoljub                  h   CRO  2355    0  05.03.37    i

On the whole, unless we can find a high quality source that indicates otherwise, I'm inclined to say the preponderance of sources indicate his birthday was 5 March 1937. We can include a note saying that some articles on his death indicate he was born on 5 April 1936.

Does anyone have any good sources that would help decide this? Quale (talk) 04:50, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I'd go with Gaige as a default, and FIDE agrees in this instance. Mark Crowther is not always accurate, and he's certainly not a good writer. He may even have originated the incorrect birth date, which then spread over the internet as misinformation tends to do. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 05:09, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
 * The sources saying March 5, 1937 are more numerous and considerably more authoritative than TWIC, which seems to have just subtracted 69 from Minić's date of death. The Oxford Companion to Chess (1st ed.) also says 1937, though it doesn't give the exact date. (He isn't mentioned in the second edition.) Krakatoa (talk) 13:27, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree, it doesn't seem that much of a disagreement to me. TWIC looks like a bit of an outlier.-- P-K3 (talk) 13:34, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Birthplace and full list of federations
Last year I said it would be impractical or unwise to include birthplace and all federations, but I changed my mind. the article is missing quite a few birthplaces, so any help completing the list is appreciated. Birthplaces should be sourced in the Notes column, but if you have a birthplace without a WP:RS at hand you should add it along with in the Notes.

I wonder if the left to right order of the table columns couldn't be improved. The article has used the current column order for a long time. My considerations for column order are With that in mind, I'd like to get Title Year, Federations and possibly Sex further to the left, but I'm not sure what column order might be better than what we have now. Quale (talk) 08:05, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Name must come first.
 * FIDE ID seems to belong close to Name, probably adjacent which would make it the second column as it is now.
 * It's generally better to have the variable length columns and very wide columns at or near the end. Notes should definitely be last.
 * Columns that users are likely to sort should tend to the left side. Likely sort targets include Name, Title Year, Birthday, Sex and Federations.
 * Columns with similar looking data should be separated a bit if possible. For example, it wouldn't be great to have Title Year, Birthday and Died as consecutive columns.
 * Around 40 of the birthplace links are currently disambiguation pages. I use "Display links to disambiguation pages in orange" at Special:Preferences. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:44, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for working on those. I intended to get back to checking those, but I forgot that there is a good way to do that interactively.  (I have and will work on the page using some Python tools and the Wikimedia API, but your suggestion is much better for this task.)  My many misspellings of Philippines are especially embarrassing, although I introduced most of them in a single edit that did a global replace of $\phi$ from the previous article to the botched spelling. 05:20, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Federation flags
The previous look of the list used flags in the Federation column. Whether the table should use flags got some discussion years ago when the list page could take a long time to load and render at typical internet and computer speeds in 2008. At the time I argued strongly in favor of keeping the flags, but I changed my mind on that too. A belated apology to and others who thought the table did not need flags. The page is more than 5 times larger now that it was then, but even though modern network and CPU speeds make it load and render quickly the flags don't make it better. It only took 12 years for me to realize you were right. Old discussions can be found in the talk page archives, including Talk:List of chess grandmasters/Archive 1. Quale (talk) 05:28, 22 January 2021 (UTC)


 * No need to apologize. No big deal.  Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 05:32, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Slovakia vs. Slovenia
I noticed this issue being brought up in the recent IP edit and revert. Somebody should check whether players are being listed correctly under the Slovakian or Slovenian federations, e.g., I know the IP is correct in pointing out Beliavsky and Parma played for Slovenia, not Slovakia, even though the IP does not seem to be familiar with Wiki syntax. These errors were not present back when the article only listed federations and not birthplaces. Also, the correct spelling of Slovenia's capital is Ljubljana. Cobblet (talk) 04:30, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
 * That was my mistake, probably a global replace of as Slovakia rather than Slovenia.  Most of these had been fixed by others, so compared to the version before I replaced the flags with country names there was one more Slovenian to repair, Planinec.  I'll go double check to make sure I didn't confuse Slovakia and Slovenia in any any earlier federation chronology as well, since the check against the older version of the article won't show those.  The misspelling was also mine, along with some others that other editors have corrected.  There may be a few more to find and fix.
 * GMs of Slovenia from the Jan 21, 2021, version of the article:


 * Beliavsky, Alexander || Lenič, Luka || Parma, Bruno || Puc, Stojan || Tratar, Marko
 * Borišek, Jure || Mikhalchishin, Adrian || Pavasovič, Duško || Šebenik, Matej ||
 * Bukić, Enver || Mohr, Georg || Planinc, Albin || Škoberne, Jure ||
 * }
 * Quale (talk) 03:27, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I checked the Slovakia entries and they appear to be correct. Verified
 * }
 * Quale (talk) 03:27, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I checked the Slovakia entries and they appear to be correct. Verified


 * Ftáčnik, Ľubomír || Slovakia
 * Jurcik, Marian || Slovakia
 * Likavský, Tomáš || Slovakia
 * Maník, Mikuláš || Slovakia
 * Markoš, Ján || Slovakia
 * Michalik, Peter || Slovakia • Czechoslovakia
 * Mrva, Martin || Slovakia
 * Pacher, Milan || Slovakia
 * Pecháč, Jerguš || Slovakia
 * Petřík, Tomáš || Slovakia
 * Plachetka, Ján || Czechoslovakia • Slovakia
 * Repka, Christopher || Slovakia
 * Stohl, Igor || Slovakia
 * Timoscenko, Gennadij || Soviet Union • Slovakia
 * }
 * Quale (talk) 03:47, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Ugh. I had made the same careless error with Czech Republic, replacing it with Czechoslovakia many times.  This is fixed now.  You can see the error again in the list that I had supposedly "checked".  (Michalik is Slovakia • Czech Republic)  Quale (talk) 04:41, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Pecháč, Jerguš || Slovakia
 * Petřík, Tomáš || Slovakia
 * Plachetka, Ján || Czechoslovakia • Slovakia
 * Repka, Christopher || Slovakia
 * Stohl, Igor || Slovakia
 * Timoscenko, Gennadij || Soviet Union • Slovakia
 * }
 * Quale (talk) 03:47, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Ugh. I had made the same careless error with Czech Republic, replacing it with Czechoslovakia many times.  This is fixed now.  You can see the error again in the list that I had supposedly "checked".  (Michalik is Slovakia • Czech Republic)  Quale (talk) 04:41, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Timoscenko, Gennadij || Soviet Union • Slovakia
 * }
 * Quale (talk) 03:47, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Ugh. I had made the same careless error with Czech Republic, replacing it with Czechoslovakia many times.  This is fixed now.  You can see the error again in the list that I had supposedly "checked".  (Michalik is Slovakia • Czech Republic)  Quale (talk) 04:41, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Ugh. I had made the same careless error with Czech Republic, replacing it with Czechoslovakia many times.  This is fixed now.  You can see the error again in the list that I had supposedly "checked".  (Michalik is Slovakia • Czech Republic)  Quale (talk) 04:41, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Ardiansyah
IndonesiaBase: "Many foreign media including FIDE mistakenly write that abbreviation ‘H’ in front of his name as his first. [...] His name is simply Ardiansyah or Ardiansjah in Indonesian old spellings." See e.g., this obituary, and also User talk:Quale. I cannot find any sources online to corroborate the name "Hasan Ardiansyah", and will change it back to the single name. Cobblet (talk) 05:46, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I remembered earlier discussion about Ardiansyah. My intent was to list player's names as FIDE does/did, but using accents where appropriate as FIDE is strictly ASCII.  You can see that in the explanatory text before the table:
 * "Player names are generally listed as they appear in FIDE records such as the FIDE Chess Profile pages, although accents are used where appropriate even though FIDE databases use only the English alphabet."
 * It may be that this policy is not the best, but if we want to do something else then that explanation should be amended to accurately describe what we are doing.
 * I decided to use the spellings FIDE uses because it makes it easier to verify the list against FIDE records, it's relatively easy to describe, and it settles questions of name order and transliteration that otherwise might be endless litigated. (To be fair, I don't think fights over transliteration have ever happened on this page, and although it has been a struggle in the past, chess bios haven't had many disputes of that kind recently either.)
 * One possibility in this case would be to use the spelling "Ardiansyah, H" which FIDE used in all rating lists from 1975 through September 2017 (although actually it was "H." from 1975 through Jan 1990, the period was dropped from July 1990 onward) and add your source as a note in the notes column. (Alternative spellings for a few players are already noted in that column.)  Even if we don't use the spelling FIDE used, we should put your source in Notes because the article claims "The Notes column includes all sources that were used to compile the information for each player".  Actually now that I think about it, I made that statement false for Ardiansyah already since I chose the spelling from 42 years of FIDE rating lists without explaining it, but the sources in the Notes column use "Ardijansyah, Hasan" (Di Felice) and "Ardiansyah, Hasan" (FIDE Golden Book).  Quale (talk) 06:58, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Sorry, clearly I was wrong when I said I used "Ardiansyah, H". That was actually what I intended to do and I mistakenly thought I had it in my work copy of the page before I put it here.  My intent was the FIDE spellings would be used, and that Ardiansyah would be listed as "Ardiansyah, H".  Quale (talk) 07:09, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * This isn’t a matter of spelling, but of FIDE making up a first name or initial that Ardiansyah never had. If your self-imposed policy does not permit you to correct blatant errors on FIDE’s part, as demonstrated by other reliable sources, then a new policy is needed. Might I suggest NPOV? Cobblet (talk) 07:26, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Cool your jets a little. Since FIDE solely controls GM awards, if FIDE thinks it awarded "Ardiansyah, H" a GM title in 1986, then in a specific sense then that's exactly what they did.  I think it's entirely believable that FIDE's record keeping could not manage players lacking a first name, but we have published reliable sources for Hasan, and I would certainly say that NPOV requires accounting for those sources as well.  Also as a practical matter readers will see H if they examine FIDE rating lists or books based on FIDE's records such as Di Felice and FIDE Golden Book.  That said, I think those sources are incorrect here and we should use the editorial discretion we are allowed to discount otherwise reliable sources when they appear to be wrong about specific facts.
 * As I considered this more since yesterday I realized that this is a rare occurrence and I think the best approach is to retain your correction to his name and explain in the Notes column that FIDE records have used "Ardiansyah, H" and that other sources have "Ardiansyah, Hasan". It should also include the good online references you provided to explain why we use "Ardiansyah" instead.  I'll make an edit of that sort to the notes column soonish, and you can review to see if it needs correction.  Quale (talk) 19:07, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Federations history
and anyone else interested in the Federations column - This edit quite reasonably questions whether it is a good idea to try to include a complete chronological history of player federations in the table, in particular when a player leaves a federation and returns more than once as with Jacob Aagaard (Denmark • Scotland • Denmark • Scotland) or Ivan Sokolov (Yugoslavia • Bosnia and Herzegovina • Netherlands • Bosnia and Herzegovina • Netherlands). I'm unsure of the best way to handle this, so I invite you to share your thoughts. What do you think we should do? Quale (talk) 20:05, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * 1) Federation column for most recent federation (old policy)
 * 2) I did not agree with this, but the article text was edited to say that the Federation column was the player's current federation.
 * 3) It wasn't true because the column wasn't maintained.  The people who decided that Federation should be the current federation were unable or unwilling to maintain it, and while I would have been able to maintain it I was also unwilling since I thought it was a bad policy.
 * 4) It would lead to bizarre things such as Spassky being listed as France from 1989–2013.  That was certainly true until he returned to the Russian federation in June 2013, but it gave a distorted view of the most important part of his career.
 * 5) The federation when the GM title was awarded has importance, at least sometimes.  The current federation can always be looked up with a single click on the FIDE ID unless the player is deceased, when the final federation they were with might be of even less importance.
 * 6) It leads to more maintenance and article churn compared to simply using the initial federation.
 * 7) Federation column for federation when the title was awarded (my previously preferred policy)
 * 8) Reduced maintenance and article churn, easy to verify at the time the entry is added and never needs to be updated.
 * 9) Important historical information.  If you want it, the current federation is easy to look up by clicking the FIDE ID link.
 * 10) Disadvantage: people would sometimes change an entry to the current federation if they noticed a random player was in an older federation.  But no one took the time to do this correctly and make it consistent across the entire table as noted above.
 * 11) Federations column lists all federations from the title award on (current policy I initiated very recently)
 * 12) What order should the federations be listed in?  Clearly chronological is the only sensible answer, but do we list all federation changes in order or do we only put each federation once in the list?
 * 13) All federation changes is complete information which retains accurate information on the federation of the title award and the current federation.  Disadvantage: it can become endless verbose, and these are likely to become even lengthier as federation changes are becoming increasingly common.
 * 14) Removing duplicates from the list makes list shorter but at the risk of not indicating the current federation. (An example of this now is Dizdarević.)  We could do a more complicated hybrid scheme where duplicates are removed unless the duplicate is the current federation which should remain at the end of the list.
 * 15) Use two columns, one for initial fed and the other for the current fed (another idea I considered)
 * 16) Disadvantage - The two columns would usually have identical values, which could look pointless and dumb.
 * 17) It would reduce the width of the table.
 * 18) It's significantly easier to use the data programmatically (Google sheets IMPORTHTML or Python Pandas read_html, etc.)
 * 19) It's very clear and easy to understand both for the reader and for the editors who will update it.
 * 20) Maintenance burden is reduced and verification is much easier.
 * Here's another option: two columns, the first for the current federation or (for deceased players) last represented federation, and the second for all other federations the player historically represented, listed chronologically, i.e., in order of first date representing said federation; don't list the same federation multiple times. For most players the second column would be blank. Cobblet (talk) 20:59, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * With nationalities being so flexible now (Rausis the Bangladeshi, anyone?) I'm starting to prefer just the original nationality. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 23:12, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I prefer the original nationality option too. As Quale says, it's easily verifiable and doesn't need updating. We could put in a hidden note to help discourage editors from changing the federations. P-K3 (talk) 23:19, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Even then you run into cases that don't fit neatly into that square little box, like Dimitris Anagnostopoulos/Demetrios Agnos, who grew up in London, was first registered to England, became an IM, then transferred to Greece and became a GM under that nationality and lengthened name.MaxBrowne2 (talk) 00:06, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

That's a good idea. The single column could also be for the federation when the title was earned and the other column could list subsequent federations. (The title year and federation columns are adjacent which gives a visual cue that the federation is associated with the title year.) Either way a mostly blank column is streets ahead of the first fed/last fed thing I floated which would be mostly duplicates. It might also be feasible to use the existing Notes column to list subsequent federations rather than adding a new column for it. For example, The notes column is already wide so this additional info probably wouldn't increase the Notes column width too much, and it's the last column at the right side of the table which makes its width slightly less bothersome. Overall it would make the table less wide than it is now, especially if duplicated federations are left out as you and MaxBrowne2 suggest. Another variation of this would list only the current federation in the Notes column and only if it is different than the initial fed, something like "currently representing Scotland" and omit the other federations. A few minutes after I created this long talk page section I realized I should have indicated Aagard's federation history much more compactly as (Denmark • Scotland)2. That notation could abbreviate a few of the other entries too, but doesn't help for several players with repeated federations like Shirov: Soviet Union • Spain • Latvia • Spain. To return to a serious possibility, the column could also be made narrower by using three-letter country codes. I kinda dislike them since clearly I can't reliably remember the difference between SLO and SVK, and those aren't even obscure like some of the others. Quale (talk) 08:00, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's necessary to list all their back and forth nationality changes any more than it's necessary to list their changes of address. Certainly no need to mention a country twice. Aagard is to all intents and purposes a dual national. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 10:56, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

want to use accents and all?
It would still be a bit unusual for an English speaker to talk of "Venezia" rather than "Venice". For many years the BBC resisted "Beijing", preferring "Peking". You'd have to be a bit of a snob to insist on "München". How far do we go with this? MaxBrowne2 (talk) 09:09, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * For place names and country names my intent was to use the MOS:COMMONNAME as we do for the article titles for these places. It's probably arguable whether Reykjavik in English is commonly spelled Reykjavík or not, but I didn't want to have to try to litigate this for dozens or hundreds of place names so I tried to spell it the same as the Wikipedia article for the place.  That's the same reason the table uses Mexico instead of México.  When looking for 1,930 birthplaces I certainly missed some things.  For example, I didn't know that Anvers is Antwerp, so I robotically typed "Anvers" into the cell and only checked that it wasn't a red link.  (I did know that Roma is Rome, Munchen is Munich, etc., so those shouldn't appear in the table.)  Many of those should be corrected now, but there are probably a few left.  I'll make another sweep or three of the article to try to catch any remaining slips by looking at all the links in the article that go to redirect pages.  If you see examples of this, feel free to correct them.
 * A perhaps bigger question is what to do with birthplaces that have changed names. Saint Petersburg is the obvious example since it has had three well-known names, and two are used in the table.  The typical examples are Soviet place names such as Kharkov and Kiev that have been changed.  (Often the Soviets changed them first, so they sometimes are returning to their previous names.)  Generally I tried to use the name that was current at the time of birth, but I'm sure I don't have that right in every case.  I'm also not sure this is the best policy—maybe we should use the place name that is current instead.  One difficulty is that some of the places are probably better known in English under their Soviet-era names, even today.  We could also use parentheses to indicate the modern name, "Leningrad (Saint Petersburg)".  Thoughts?  Quale (talk) 20:24, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Probably neither solution will please everyone. Just pick one and be consistent, I guess. I'd only show the city name in each case though, and hide the country/subnational division where those are used to disambiguate the article title, again for consistency's sake. I scanned the list and noted the following cases where you might not have followed your stated intentions: Kharkiv/Kharkov, Dnipro/Dniepropetrovsk, Chernihiv/Chernigov, Chernivtsi/Chernovtsy, Zhytomyr/Zhitomir, Chennai/Madras, Mumbai/Bombay, Chelyabinsk/Cheliabinsk, Nizhny Novgorod/Gorky, Yekaterinburg/Sverdlovsk, Chișinău/Kishinev, Nur-Sultan/Astana/Akmola. Cobblet (talk) 09:44, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Obsolete IDs

 * If the old Ids which were reassigned later are to be removed, others also must be removed, namely those of the GMs that died before 2005 and have an ID included in the list (all those were reassigned). However, I think they should be kept, because just because it was reassigned later does not falsify the fact that those GMs had this ID. It should of course not be linked to the FIDE page, but this is not the case currently, so the status quo is imho fine. One may perhaps add a note to those reassigned IDs to avoid confusion of the reader. Steak (talk) 08:05, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * There already is a note about the reassigned id, I put it in a few years ago when I originally added the FIDE IDs to the table. If I had noticed other cases I would probably have left those ids off just as I did with Oll, and I may do this at some point. The problems with including Oll's old id are that it violates uniqueness of the id column which would then have duplicate entries, and it complicates matching the ids against FIDE rating lists.  This matching complication exists with Ladva as well, but as a practical matter Oll had id 4500024 on only two rating lists, July 1998 and January 1999.  Ladva has had that id on all 127 lists since January 2008, a number that is growing by one per month.  It's easier to special case trying to match Oll in two rating lists when he already needs special case matching for the 24 lists from 1983 through January 1998 when there was no id.  It isn't hard to imagine ways to avoid inadvertently matching Oll's id to Ladva's records, for example by noticing that Oll wasn't alive in January 2008, but in my view the extra complication of trying to match Oll by id in two lists is not worth it.  (The problem of inadvertently matching Oll's records when searching for Ladva's id will exist regardless, but I don't want to make more problems.)  As a practical matter Oll's id is not helpful when trying to find him in the historical FIDE rating lists, but Ladva's id is very helpful when searching for him both historically and today.  But this is just my opinion based on my view of the pragmatics of trying to deal with FIDE's not great data, it isn't an objective fact.  If you have a different opinion, I respect it.  Quale (talk) 03:46, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for this elaborate answer. I agree with most of your points, especially since on wikidata we have the same matching problems for duplicate IDs with available Elo rating databases, e.g. this one. In this database, the problem was solved by manually changing one of the duplicate IDs (the older one) to a different value. This we cannot do, but anyways storing on wikidata or wikipedia a duplicate ID is not useful in this case anyways, so one may also just delete it from the list. Steak (talk) 20:01, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

FIDE idiosyncrasies
I disagree with Quale's latest attempt to harmonize all the names with what is given in the FIDE database. FIDE is inconsistent and error-prone when it comes to name orders, spelling, punctuation and other issues of orthography. We should be following WP:TITLE, WP:NCBIO, and MOS:ID. Cobblet (talk) 06:29, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Russian names are transliterated differently depending on where they live. In the Yusupov/Jussupow example I think I'd prefer "Jussupow" (the standard German transliteration) because he is a German citizen. He was a strong GM but his name didn't come up often enough in English publications for "Yusupov" to be firmly established. On the other hand "Korchnoi" was so well established in English publications that subsequently they rarely used "Kortschnoj", the spelling of his name in Switzerland. "Alekhine" would normally be "Alekhin" (or "Alyekhin") in English but the e on the end is a standard French transliteration. Anyway I agree that we should use the spelling used in the majority of reliable sources even if it disagrees with the spelling on the FIDE website, and even if it's a non-standard transliteration like Nepomniachtchi. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 07:09, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * FIDE transliterated his name as Yusupov for the first 19 years of his career and his name is still transliterated as Yusupov in English books he has authored since, even when published by a Swiss company. You're welcome to take up the matter further at Artur Yusupov (chess player). Whatever name we choose here should match the title of the player's article, if there is one. Both should follow the relevant Wikipedia policies, and while they will often agree with FIDE's orthography, in many cases they will not. Cobblet (talk) 07:41, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Re Jussupow / Yusupov, obviously my personal preference does not trump consensus and it's not a cause I want to devote any energy to. I've tried to explain that putting a flag in the next round of a knockout bracket before the winner is known is unprofessional looking, not done by any reputable sports publication, takes no account of possible double disqualifications, and makes about as much sense as entering "Alexander" in the next round when Alexander Medvedev plays Alexander Bublik, but wikipedians just don't seem to be able to help themselves with the flags. So I've given up that cause. But I'm still right. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 08:32, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I considered Cobblet's view, that perhaps the table should use names that Wikipedia would use in article titles, and I respect that idea. I have not gone in that direction based mostly on practical grounds, but I am also mindful that FIDE awards these titles and these are the names and transliterations that FIDE uses in their official records.  Also keep in mind that the table entries in no way constrain any article titles.  In fact, since the displayed entries are in Last, First order the article titles will usually be different except in a few cases of names following Eastern name order.  I stated the intent to use the names as found in FIDE records directly in the article (explanatory text above the table), and have taken steps in that direction for a while, including using Jussupow instead of Yusupov.  (There is a note in the Notes column giving the earlier form of his name.)  A brief aside concerning Jussupow.  Yusupov's books are pretty well known in English, and I was surprised to see that FIDE records have used the German transliteration Jussupow for 30 years.  Maybe I was the only one who didn't know.  To miss that seems like I haven't been paying attention.
 * Cobblet is absolutely correct that FIDE is inconsistent and makes many outright errors. I can say that having consumed FIDE rating list data over the last decade that the quality is improving, although it's certainly far from perfect.  One of the main reasons I think the table should follow FIDE closely is that we can benefit when FIDE makes a correction, but only if we can pick them out of the noise of 200 less important differences.
 * After your revert there are 231 name differences between the table and FIDE records. Some of those are spurious, for example FIDE applies the Dr honorific to some German GMs who presumably are physicians.  I did not make those edits and have no intention of following that practice here.  This left a manageable number of about 20 differences that can easily be eyeballed for any needed corrections.  In the 200 or so name differences that remain, there are a few types of changes.
 * Some are changes in name transliterations that may or may not reflect the preferences of the player (eg Evgenij Agrest vs. Evgeny). Compare this to Vasyl Ivanchuk vs. Vassily.  In general I don't think we can know the individual's preference, so the sanest course is to simply follow what FIDE's official record says.  I really don't want to litigate every individual entry that is affected with this kind of thing, and simply following FIDE would work best.  It also helps anyone who wants to compare the entry to FIDE's records.
 * A lot of changes are additions or subtractions of middle initials, or use of a period (full stop) after the initials or not, or sometimes spaces between the initials or not. There were also some changes where the player usually goes by their middle name but FIDE decided recently to include the first initial (eg James Plaskett vs H James Plaskett).  Certainly those could be left alone and I understand the concern that this could lead to a large number of edits every month, but in fact I had not rectified the table to the names FIDE uses for about 3 years or more so my changes were more than 3 years of updates.  (More because even 3 years ago I had not fully aligned the table to FIDE, for instance with Jussupow.)  It is a bigger issue to not sync the names.  Leaving them adds to the list of name differences that must be examined every month to find significant changes.  Since there seems to be little to no harm in following FIDE here, this again helps make the table maintainable.
 * A few edits were more consequential as they fixed outright errors. Some of them were botches (probably by me, since I certainly could have entered "Domínguez Pérez, Lenier" instead of "Leinier"), others were mistakes that FIDE made that were subsequently corrected.  An example of a FIDE mistake that they fixed is "Rajpara, Ankit" to "Ankit, Rajpara".  So now after the revert this name is wrong and it is sorted incorrectly as well.  I was aware of this at the time I made the edit and had it been convenient to do so I would have separated the two or three edits that affected sort into a separate edit to prevent the fixes from being reverted.  Unfortunately it is very difficult to pick two or three consequential edits out of a list of 231 name mismatches, so I simply worked my way through the entire list.  This is work that should be done again and again and again.  FIDE fixed this error and we should too, but you're making this unnecessarily difficult.
 * Leaving 200+ name mismatches compared to FIDE records vastly increases the labor in finding significant name fixes. Actually the fact that there are only 230 is because I had done some work to true up the names several years ago, although obviously I left some alone like Yusupov.  The only reason I was able to find corrections like Leinier, Ankit Rajparam and Saptarshi Roy is because I reduced the list of differences with FIDE to a manageable number.  Even if you can find the important fixes in a very long list, trying to make only significant changes also leaves open the question of what is significant.  I don't want to be arguing that over a list that will have 2000 names in the near future.  We should just follow FIDE except in cases where they are almost certainly wrong (Ardiansyah) or in cases where they follow practice that is directly opposite Wikipedia's bent (use of Dr honorifics).  Having WP:COMMONNAME arguments over a list of 2000 names is a nightmare scenario, and it's easy to avoid.  And I wouldn't suggest that we slavishly use the name of the Wikipedia article as the display name for the GM in every case that the GM has an article, either.  Those names are sometimes idiosyncratic and not infrequently "wrong" (for some sense of what is right and wrong).  I've corrected a few GM article titles over the years, but certainly not all.  And it won't help for the 600 or so GMs who don't have articles, and it seems more sensible to follow a consistent rule for all.  Quale (talk) 22:50, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Germany, Poland and other European countries commonly use the title "Doctor" for anyone with a Ph. D. in a regular as well as academic context. Presumably most of them are not medical doctors. Miroslav Filip, a lawyer, is sometimes named as "Dr. Miroslav Filip". MaxBrowne2 (talk) 23:02, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * My own experience with FIDE is that it's easy to fix your name. I emailed them requesting that they include my middle name in their rating list to distinguish me from another player with a similar name, and the website was updated within a few days. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 23:06, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * First of all, Quale, none of the errors you've referred to were present in the last version I checked in 2017. I don't know who introduced the errors afterwards, but I'm not the one who made your life difficult.
 * Second, we don't stop following Wikipedia policies merely for convenience's sake. WP:BLP says, "We must get the article right." And FIDE is unfortunately not the kind of high-quality source BLP says we should be "very firm about", particularly when it comes to non-Western names. There is no excuse to not get people's names right on this list when their name is spelled correctly on the rest of Wikipedia. There is also not much point fussing over whether we use the current or former names of peoples' birthplaces if we can't even be bothered to get their names right. On the other hand, if after figuring out a GM's COMMONNAME, you realize the article title is wrong, change it! That's just improving the encyclopedia. I did a lot of work figuring out COMMONNAMEs for this list back in 2015–2017, and would be happy to continue doing so going forward.
 * Third, if you're able to check this list against FIDE's every month to quickly flag 230+ differences, it should hardly require any extra effort to check that list of differences against a list of established COMMONNAMEs that are different from FIDE's names, to arrive at FIDE's actual changes. It's just one more comparison. Again, if generating that list of COMMONNAMEs is the problem you don't want to deal with, I'm happy to help. Cobblet (talk) 01:27, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
 * First, I'm sure you're not trying to claim too much credit for not making a mistake in 2017 on Saptarshi Roy, given that he became a GM in 2018. Your work seems to be careful and accurate, and I think it is entirely possible that you would not have made an error on his name if you had added it. I have a question about your WP:COMMONNAME claim.  Your 2017 list has Bosko Abramovic, but that page is a redirect that has linked to Boško Abramović since 2012, five years before your list.  Which is the WP:COMMONNAME for Abramovic/Abramović, and why?  If "Bosco Abramovic" is in fact the common name, then does it not follow that we must rename his bio page?  If you realized in 2017 that Boško Abramović was the wrong article title according to common name, why did you not move the article?  (As I'm sure you surmise, the diacritics in Boško Abramović don't come from FIDE, but they are found in Di Felice.  The question of whether to include diacritics in names is probably not fully settled except perhaps in cases where the person is well known by the English speaking world, but there was something I stumbled across not too long ago mentioning the dilemma in the context of sports.  I think it was tennis, but other international sports face the same question.  I believe the decision was to use diacritics in those names.)
 * Second, WP:COMMONNAME controls the titles of articles. Please point to policy that dictates what names are used in tables.  In this case, the table is of titles awarded at the sole discretion of FIDE.  Using the names that FIDE uses seems entirely appropriate in that context, and if you have actual policy that prohibits this, produce it.  That you have a different preference is not policy.  Insinuating that I am not following policy here is offensive, and particularly so when you are wrong about application of that policy.  Keith Arkell is currently listed by FIDE as Keith C Arkell, and your claim that "Keith C Arkell" is wrong because it isn't the common name doesn't hold water.  Common name is the reason that the article is at Keith Arkell, but I am not aware of any policy that prohibits using "Keith C Arkell" in the appropriate context.  In fact his bio page gives his name as "Keith Charles Arkell", and by your reasoning that wouldn't be permitted either.
 * Another offensive claim is that I am making the names "wrong". Please point to specific examples in the edits you just reverted that made wrong names "right".  MaxBrowne2 says that it is easy for a person to get FIDE to update their records, so there is reason to believe in many cases current player names are what the player wants FIDE to use.  Cobblet's opinion on a player's common name supersedes the wishes of the living person?   WP:BLP may come into play here.  The table reports on FIDE records combined with some other sources when needed to complete data not available from FIDE.  Sources for all data in the table are given except for a relatively small number of federation changes, although unfortunately that issue will continue to grow.  Changing the names to things perhaps not found in any citations in the article leads to possible WP:V issues, and I have put quite a bit of work into making all the claims in the table verifiable and cited.
 * And of course today the table doesn't list common names at all. Wikipedia bio article common names are "first last", but I changed the table to "last, first" to follow the way that FIDE records usually give the names.  This makes it much easier to compare the names to FIDE records, and also has the side benefit of making the name sort order more readily perceptible.  YMMV, but I find it easier to find GMs by name in this long table when names are displayed in last, first order.  We could change it back to first last, but I am not in favor.
 * Third, where do we get the list of established common names against which to check the list? I guess your position is that you will tell us what the common names are.  You gave your answer as of 2017 and are willing to perform the same determination for the 152 GMs who have been added subsequently and for all future GMs.  I think this is a bad idea for several reasons, some of which I have already listed.  Disconnect between table names and FIDE names makes it harder for others to verify the entries.  Common names are often not clear and are subject to wikilitigation. (When you explain how to choose a common name between Bosco Abramovic and Boško Abramović, I may ask you why Evgenij Agrest's common name is Evgeny Agrest.  I guess the answer is because you made that determination in 2017, but how do we know that you were right?  How do I know that Ilia Smirin's common name is actually Ilya Smirin?  Serik Temirbayev's name is now listed by FIDE as Serikbay Temirbayev.  Is his common name still Serik?)  My list of established common names would be my list, how does anyone else know what it is?  Does everyone who wants to verify the table have to develop their own list?  What if my list and your list are different?  If entries in our separate established common name lists are wrong, how do they get corrected?  Any change in FIDE records would be dismissed by the established common name list, and it isn't apparent to me how errors could be found or corrected.  FIDE records provide a source for the names we use, how do you source the common name as divined by Cobblet?  I will finish by saying that I find it a little presumptuous for you to assume what is easy for me to do.  I expend extra effort when I think the outcome is worth that effort.  In other cases I think that extra effort is unwarranted when it is needless or in pursuit of the wrong goal.  Clearly I think that extra effort here to use names not found in the controlling source is unwarranted and in pursuit of the wrong goal.
 * Really, in the end your position is simply that the table should use what Cobblet says is the common name, regardless of what the cited sources say. I think perhaps you don't see it that way, but if so, can you explain how your position is different than "the table must use the names that Cobblet determines are the common names"?  Quale (talk) 06:28, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
 * You know I know that Wikipedia operates by consensus-building. Calling it wikilitigation is your prerogative. Accusing me of wanting to decide anything unilaterally is not. At no point have I asked anyone to take my word on anything for granted.
 * Nor did I ever say my work in 2017 was perfect. If I could not figure out which spelling of a name was more common, I think I usually went with our article title if we had one, although I clearly missed Abramović's (but not Agrest's). I'm aware I made no attempt to standardize the list's use of diacritics. From the results of your work it would appear that neither you nor Di Felice tried to do so, at least not with respect to Serbo-Croatian names. (If Wikipedia has a specific guideline for them, I couldn't find it.)
 * MOS:ID applies to articles generally, and calls for using "the term that is most commonly used by recent reliable sources" where it can be clearly determined, and for following the person's own usage where it cannot. MOS:NAME again applies to articles generally, and while it is not so direct, it says things like "Wikipedia uses names as reported by reliable sources", "Use initials in a personal name only if the name is commonly written that way", and "Any subject whose surname has changed should be referred to by their most commonly used name." These guidelines make reference to WP:TITLE and WP:NCBIO, which set out the principles for choosing the most commonly used or otherwise most appropriate name for a subject.
 * Specific examples of errors by FIDE: "Kore Akshayraj" (wrong order), "Mohamad AL-Sayed" (caps), "Dimitri Anagnostopoulos" (the given name is Greek, not Slavic), "R. Rajpara Ankit" (wrong order – see GM title application,, , , , , ), "Mikhail Al. Antipov" (non-standard semi-initialism, possibly used by FIDE to minimally disambiguate his name from other Mikhail Antipovs), "Mhamal Anurag" (wrong order), "Keith C Arkell" (missing period is contrary to MOS:INITIALS; as a secondary matter, I'm not convinced Arkell's name is "commonly" written with the middle initial as the guideline says), "Jón L Árnason" (ditto), "Jayaram Ashwin" (wrong order), "Yuri L Averbakh" (MOS:INITIALS). That's just the A's. Spending the effort to fix these things to conform with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines is not only warranted, but necessary. By the way, it was User:Sophia91 who added Saptarshi Roy's name correctly in March 2019 per his GM title application. Cobblet (talk) 11:56, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

FIDE ID, Notes columns size reduction
Given the excessive size of these columns from the external links they hold, which one should we remove? It is generally against Wikipedia policy to have a list of external links (WP:DIRECTORY), and this list effectively has two. Onetwothreeip (talk) 09:49, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't see a compelling need to link every FIDE ID number to the corresponding FIDE profile page. Cobblet (talk) 10:24, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I like that feature. Why wouldn't we want it? MaxBrowne2 (talk) 11:23, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It does seem go against the guidelines for external links within articles. The profile page links are better off at the players own articles. P-K3 (talk) 13:20, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * How would removing those sources specifically make this article better or improve the encyclopedia? I don't mean "it has to be done to meet a guideline", I'm asking for a specific way in which removing thousands of sources from this list would make the encyclopedia better.  How about the requirement to meet WP:CITE?  Before I added that information to the table almost none of the 1600+ (now 1900+) entries were sourced.  Onetwothreeip removed over 1300 sources from the article.  That has to be some kind of a record.  (The article text explains that the FIDE Profile can be used to verify some of the information in the table, and that the Notes column contains the remaining sources.)  Finally there's also the fact that the FIDE ID makes it possible to mechanically and reliably find updates to the table and verify much of the data that's there.  Without the id there is no good way to match entries to FIDE's official records.  This not only makes mechanical verification harder (nearly impossible, in fact), but it makes manual verification harder too.  You can see what the table looked like before including sources and it's simply better now unless you are more concerned with whingeing about external links than you are about WP:V.  I do think the width of the Federations column should be addressed as discussed earlier on this talk page, but I don't have anything ready for that yet.  Quale (talk) 16:28, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I believe P-K3 is referring to WP:CS:EMBED – eventual linkrot is a concern in addition to article length. I believe neither one of us is agreeing with Onetwothreeip's removal of sources, which was obviously inappropriate. Nor are we suggesting to delete the FIDE ID column altogether, just deleting the embedded link. The article already explains how the FIDE ID can be used to verify some of the information presented, so in my view WP:V is satisfied. All that being said, I understand you don't believe article length should be an urgent concern, and linkrot won't be an urgent concern as long as you're around to maintain the article. Which is fair enough. Cobblet (talk) 17:15, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Those really aren't sources though, they are external links. It's a misuse of external links to use them as references. Two external links per entry is simply unnecessary, and contributes greatly to the excessive size of the article. This is clearly a kind of list where one reference should be necessary to support the inclusion of many entries, if not all. Article size is certainly a primary concern of this article. Onetwothreeip (talk) 21:00, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * How much more reliable can you get than the organization that awards the titles? Literal reading of wikipedia rules gets silly sometimes. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 08:02, 7 February 2021 (UTC) I am also mystified by how removing the links improves the article. Common sense, Ignore All Rules etc. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 08:47, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It's not a matter of reliability, although secondary sources are generally more reliable. This has nothing to do with who is the source either. If we had one citation from FIDE which references all the information, that would be far more preferable to one FIDE citation for each. Onetwothreeip (talk) 09:42, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * No such citation is available. Max, I assume you're also volunteering to keep the links updated should FIDE's site change someday. We can ignore rules; we can't ignore linkrot. Cobblet (talk) 09:02, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * What about Di Felice, Gino (2017), Chess International Titleholders 1950–2016? Onetwothreeip (talk) 20:50, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It has no info on FIDE ID or birthplace and is only current to 2016. Cobblet (talk) 22:56, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Di Felice does have info on birthplace, in fact it's the only source for birthplace the table has on many records. But the title application can be helpful even if the information is also in Di Felice since online sources are easier for most people to access.  Di Felice isn't inaccessible, but it isn't a book that most people have at hand.  I have also tried to use the title applications to confirm information in Di Felice as well.  There are a few dozen notes that explain discrepancies between birthdates, birthplaces and title years in the various sources, and this cross checking has allowed us to correct some mistakes in our data.  Quale (talk) 03:49, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Some general thoughts. Despite my slightly prickly response, I think Wikipedia guidelines are important, and I think it's good for editors to point out places where they think guidelines have been violated and to question whether that's appropriate.  I do draw a distinction between policy that must remain inviolate (verifiability, NPOV) and some guidelines that must or at least should be applied with some discrimination.  I agree that link farm articles are not good, but it's possible that I might consider some uses of large numbers of external links to cite is appropriate in specific cases.  There are other aspects of the way that WP:EL is often applied by some editors that I probably do not agree with, I'll mention one of them in a minute.
 * This list is large and it poses challenges. My goals in decreasing order by priority (most important first): Verifiability (WP:V and WP:CITE), accuracy and completeness, and maintainability.  The current state of the article is the best that I know how to meet those goals, but I haven't stopped looking for ways to do it better, both in ability of editors to manage the table and the usefulness of the table to encyclopedia readers.  This discussion shows that other editors are thinking about how to make the article better too.
 * Addition of the FIDE ID was very important for all three of those goals. At first I thought the id was necessary to ensure accuracy and maintainability and I considered putting it in the wikitext in an HTML comment.  In a comment it would not have been visible to readers, but programs could read the wikitext and use the ids to verify and update the table.  Making it link to the FIDE Chess Profile also allows it to be used to cite some of the table data.  There was a weak attempt to do this in the old table before the ids were added by sticking "(FIDE)" in the name column after hundreds of player's names.  I hated that and thought it was worthless, actually worse than worthless, as it polluted the name column with garbage.  It was also not verifiable since there was no way to reliably look up the player on the FIDE ratings site and that site did not verify most of the information in the table.  You could verify that the player was a living GM, their current federation and possibly their year of birth, but title year wasn't on most FIDE Chess Profile pages at that time and neither is the month and day of birth.  And this assumes that you can find the page.  I suspect that most readers would have had a devil of a time finding Artur Yusupov on FIDE's site since he has been registered as Jussupow for the last 30 years.  (That specific case could be fixed by changing the spelling of his name in the table to Jussupow and in fact I have done that, but who was going to do this kind of maintenance and how were they to discover those name changes when they occur?  You might say theoretically that it could be done without FIDE IDs, but as a practical matter we have 12 years experience with this list and that maintenance was not being done.)
 * In meeting the goals set out above, the title applications are less important because they don't help maintainability, but they are still valuable for verifiability and accuracy.
 * One general rule about external links is that bare external links are not placed in the article body. Where ELs are appropriate they are wrapped in ref tags so that they appear in the footnotes.  Although the list does have some ELs in the footnotes, the FIDE ID and Notes columns don't obey that restriction.  I considered whether it would be possible to put the chess profile links and title app ELs in footnotes, but it doesn't seem practical given their vast and growing number.  One way I view this is a concession to practicality, I also view tables as not being article bodies per se as some rules are (or should be) more flexibly applied there.  One example is the YYYY-MM-DD format dates we use, even though these are discouraged by MOS:DATE.  (In a table these are more compact than other allowed formats, and they sort better as well.  Sort is important here as readers are perhaps likely to want to sort the date columns in this table.)
 * Another example of "rules" that I don't apply strictly in tables are MOS:LINK restrictions against repeated links and against linking common words. I am encouraged to see that today MOS:REPEATLINK allows links to be repeated in tables as an exception.  I'm pretty sure it didn't say this a few years ago.  It was common for drones to go through tables with hundreds of entries and remove all the repeated links.  Of course when you sort the table by a different column the linked entry may no longer be the one closest to the top, and in a large table it may be hard to find the earlier entry that was linked.  I'm sure we still have articles in Category:chess national championships where someone insisted on pointlessly unlinking two biography links for a three-time winner just to meet this supposed prohibition against repeated links.  Dolts.  The prohibition against linking common terms is another rule that has limited applicability to tables and lists.  I have seen people unlink New York in a table column while leaving links to smaller cities undisturbed.  Also idiotic.  In some table columns the only sane procedure is to link all of the entries or none of them.
 * As far as the issue of link rot goes, the table has had the FIDE Chess Profile links for a few years, and the only profile links that have gone dead that I am aware of are for GMs who have also (unfortunately) gone dead as well. (FIDE did change the URL of the profile pages when they revamped their website recently, but as far as I know the old URLs still work.  In fact we were using the old URLs for many months after the new site debuted featuring new profile pages.  At first both the old profile pages and the new ones were available at different URLs, but now you get the new profile page either way.  I changed the profile links to use the new URLs.)  We have less experience with the title application links, but as far as I know those have been stable for at least several years if not longer.  In any case, Wikipedia already has tools and mechanisms to deal with dead links.  A large number of links on one page doesn't necessarily make for a greater maintenance burden than the same number of links on different pages.  The only sensible measure of concern is whether the links are useful and improve the article.  Junk ELs are a burden even if they are still live, and being overly fearful that a valuable link might someday go dead is a waste of energy absent some reason to think that it is likely to go away (perhaps something on a random blog, or files that are regularly replaced with updated versions).  Actually I guess Wikipedia has some mechanism to request archiving of pages to protect against ELs going dead in the future, but I've never used it and I don't know any details.
 * Finally, I don't consider that size of the list is a primary concern. (I listed my primary concerns above.)  I understand that OnetwothreeIP is primarily concerned with the size of the page, but I would need to know more about specifically what issues the size of the article causes to offer any opinion about that.
 * Anyway, that long airing of grievances doesn't mean I'm right about anything, but I hope it explains how I view it and how the table came to evolve to its current state. Quale (talk) 05:18, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The main issues are clearly consequences of the article's unusual construction. Firstly, there is no article that needs thousands of sources, and this article is no different. If we are finding that there is information here that needs to be individually sourced, then clearly this information is too much for this article. As this is a list article, we are more than able to place the responsibility of displaying relatively minor information onto articles for each entry. Listing each entry's birthplace is an especially odd choice which clearly doesn't belong here.
 * It is without question inappropriate to have thousands of external links in an article. If these really are references for the article, then they should be formatted as references. A simple link to the FIDE website where any grandmaster's profile can be found is sufficient.
 * As one of the largest articles on Wikipedia, size will certainly be an issue. Even for a list article, there are acute problems with loading and editing the page, and the sheer amount of information in the article itself. Onetwothreeip (talk) 09:22, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Who says it's without question inappropriate to have thousands of external links in an article? (Aside from you, I mean.)  A simple link to the FIDE website is not sufficient because any grandmaster's profile cannot be found there.  FIDE has profiles only for living GMs, and the number of deceased GMs will continue to grow.  Furthermore the FIDE website does not provide a reference for all of the information in the table.  This exposes the hazards of someone who does not understand the subject matter or the available sources making sweeping claims about that subject matter and its sources.  Also, if thousands of external links are inappropriate, what is a link to a FIDE profile if not an external link?  Your argument is inconsistent. You are welcome to try to format the references as footnotes, but you should probably try that in a sandbox first to see how it works before making the edit here.  I haven't done a survey of the largest articles in the encyclopedia, but the nature of things is that something will always be among the largest.  As long as there are larger pages I don't see a compelling need to eviscerate this one.  There are also other possibilities to reduce the size of the page including splitting it into two articles by player name (e.g. A-L, M-Z).  I considered that in the past and even mocked it up years ago, but on the devices and networks I use the page loads 10 to 50 times faster today than it did ten years ago.  Please explain more precise details of the acute difficulties loading and editing the page.  You seem to not had too much trouble editing it, although work such as excising columns from tables can be difficult or tedious without the assistance of tools.  Quale (talk) 02:56, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I've already referred to WP:DIRECTORY. Thousands of external links to FIDE profiles would be inappropriate, yes. It would be a different matter if they were references, rather than external links. This article certainly doesn't need thousands of references either. This is the largest article on Wikipedia. The issues with pages being large are detailed extensively at Article size. There is also no need to include the birthplace of the list's entries, but this information should be included in the individual articles. Onetwothreeip (talk) 00:31, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I've already referred to WP:DIRECTORY. Thousands of external links to FIDE profiles would be inappropriate, yes. It would be a different matter if they were references, rather than external links. This article certainly doesn't need thousands of references either. This is the largest article on Wikipedia. The issues with pages being large are detailed extensively at Article size. There is also no need to include the birthplace of the list's entries, but this information should be included in the individual articles. Onetwothreeip (talk) 00:31, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

I see that, since this discussion, the links from FIDE ID's to FIDE profile pages have been removed. I gather that there was some concern about link rot. Wouldn't it be possible to write a template that would construct such a link? Then, if and when FIDE restructured their website, Wikipedia could keep up by modifying the template, rather than modifying thousands of links by hand. I ask this, without knowing much about what is and is not possible with templates. Bruce leverett (talk) 01:45, 16 April 2021 (UTC)
 * We have such a template now, FIDE, but I don't think a template is needed for this article. Maintenance of the links was simple and fear of link rot fear is not a strong argument, so I would simply discount it.  I haven't changed my opinion that the links are necessary inline references and I intend to restore them soonish.  I disappeared from this article for a while really only because I think I shouldn't be so disagreeable when I disagree, which is to say that I need to use calmer language even when I have a strong disagreement.  In this case and the concurrent dispute regarding player names I think it's highly unlikely that I will be able to change the opinions of my opposition.  This is actually very common on Wikipedia, but there's no value in heated rhetoric in such cases.  I think that with some time away I may be able to engage others with strongly opposed views more peacefully.  If I can do this I hope it will be less unpleasant for everyone.  I know it would be less unpleasant for me.  Quale (talk) 03:50, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Who was the 100th chess grandmaster?
That's what the were for,. — 𝐆𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐚 (talk) 01:41, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Full stops after initials
Should displayed player names always use full stops (periods) after initials? The most common American stylistic choice is to use periods after initials, but in the UK often they are not used. FIDE is inconsistent on this, having both "Adhiban, B." and "Akash G". If we were concerned about national ties then we probably wouldn't use them for GMs from the UK, but fortunately national style isn't applied that way here. I'm sure GM Arkell would recognize his name spelled as "Arkell, Keith C.", but he might more likely use "Arkell, Keith C" himself. This is also the way that FIDE styles Arkell's name.

My inclination is that the table should simply present these initials they appear in FIDE's records without trying to "correct" them by adding full stops that are not needed. This affects about 31 GMs.

In a small number of cases where FIDE uses the full stops it does not use a space between multiple initials, for example "Laxman, R.R.", "Sethuraman, S.P.", "Van der Wiel, John T.H.", and "Westerinen, Heikki M.J.". I think we could reasonably space the initials or leave them unspaced as FIDE does. On the balance, I think I would also just leave those the way FIDE styles them, although it's fine to add the spaces instead. Quale (talk) 04:28, 6 May 2021 (UTC)


 * I've already pointed out the existence of MOS:INITIALS to you. It mandates consistently using a period and a space unless "an overwhelming majority of reliable sources" use a variant style. I've neglected to use non-breaking spaces though – I'm happy to fix that, pending further input from others. Cobblet (talk) 05:04, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't think that MOS:INITIALS is the dominant consideration here, or at least I don't think it should be, although I can understand the opposite view. Even if it is controlling, are you sure all edits to add full stops are correct?  The sources in the article don't support them.  As a somewhat random example, examining google results I don't see any styling of "Visakh N R" that uses full stops.  Do we have evidence that this is not the style used by the overwhelming majority of reliable sources?  In that case we could perhaps use Narayanan Rajeshwari, but that might run into other concerns.  Quale (talk) 03:21, 14 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I've already admitted not all my edits follow MOS:INITIALS 100% accurately, and welcome further corrections. But I see no reason to not follow it at all. Why would we not strive for a consistent presentation of biographical information in this and other Wikipedia pages? Meanwhile consistency with FIDE's records, which arbitrarily do not follow the practice of the players themselves in many cases (as demonstrated in the GM application forms which this article uses as sources) and are downright erroneous in some (sometimes to the point where they're plainly not intended to be an accurate rendering of a player's name, e.g., "Chao b Li" for 李超), serves only to perpetuate those errors.
 * To address the case you've identified: "Visakh N R" is definitely not the style used by the "overwhelming majority" of reliable sources. "Visakh NR" is at least if not more common and, importantly, is the choice of the player himself. Some sources do in fact use periods. I see reasonable grounds to treat "Visakh NR" as a self-published name change per the guideline. I see no reason to default to FIDE's choice of "Visakh N R", although at least it got his name order correct: a rare achievement for FIDE when it comes to Tamil names. Cobblet (talk) 04:50, 14 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Saying that FIDE getting Tamil name order correct is a rare achievement is clearly exaggeration and I'm afraid that I think your outlandish view poisons your opinion here. FIDE has made more mistakes than it should, but it is by no means rare when it gets it correct. I also note that other sources have issues too, such as which uses "N R Visakh".  With this example from [The Hindu]] in mind, your level of opprobrium seems extreme. Concerning a different question, I think we might choose to not value consistency with other pages in Wikipedia above all other concerns for multiple reasons.  One of them is demonstrated by why I think it is better for this list to use "Robert James Fischer" rather than "Bobby Fischer". Quale (talk) 04:29, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I appreciate the care you've taken with respect to verifying birth dates and GM title years. All I ask is that you take the same care with respect to personal names. It's your choice to perceive that as "outlandish" and "extreme opprobrium". Cobblet (talk) 06:24, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

Changes to Article Need Consensus
I thought it would be worthwhile to start a new section so that maybe this discussion can continue in a constructive way. Making major changes to an established and well-written article without a discussion by editors that have not worked on the article is counter-productive.VarmtheHawk (talk) 22:05, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Well written? You've got to be kidding me. You might want to check out the featured lists and see what a well written list article looks like. None of them have names listed in the format of Surname, Forename, and none of them have random biographic information that has no relevance to the topic of the list. All my warmest wishes, ItsKesha (talk) 23:28, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
 * As we want to have an inclusive scope of all of the names in the list, I believe the best way to reduce this article is to remove or simplify some of the columns in the gigantic table. What column should we work on first? zsteve21 (talk) 22:26, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * You're assuming a problem that I don't think exists. I have no desire to reduce this article. Quale (talk) 05:17, 14 October 2021 (UTC)  Well, actually that's not really true.  If we can find a way to provide citations for every entry that is more compact than what is done now, that would be very good.  But I don't currently have any ideas on that front.  Quale (talk) 05:25, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * The birthplace column is unnecessary, or lacks sufficient necessity to be specific, and distracts from the other information in the article. This is the first column that should be addressed, by being removed. This kind of specific and spurious information belongs in the biography articles, not here. Onetwothreeip (talk) 07:24, 14 October 2021 (UTC)