Talk:List of driver deaths in motorsport

Sortable table?
Changing the format into a sortable table would be helpful. -- Matthead Discuß   00:09, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

I second the idea. I was about to ask why only the A-names were placed in tables. JBrenn (talk) 03:17, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. 2001:56A:7053:6E00:61BC:FB10:FC2F:9A9E (talk) 23:40, 10 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Done. DH85868993 (talk) 00:46, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

This article is so big it is causing technical problems
See Category:Pages where template include size is exceeded and Template limits for technical details.

Common solutions include:
 * Removing flags from competitors if they are competing as individuals "as individuals" and not representing a country, see MOS:FLAG for appropriate use of flag icons.
 * Splitting the article
 * Removing content
 * Redoing the brackets, tables, or both so the article has less HTML in the resulting web page

The simplest thing to do would be to split this into two articles, one for deaths prior to 1950 and one for deaths from 1950 onwards. Why 1950? Because History of auto racing uses that as a date of demarcation. This will be a lot of work. Another possible split that would be a lot less work would be to move this page to Driver deaths in motorsport prior to 2000 then copy just the 21st century deaths back to a new page with the current page name.

Unfortunately, any split would break the ability to sort all deaths at the same time by the sortable tables.

If the article is split, be sure to use copied, split article, or a similar template on BOTH this article's talk page and the new article's talk page to comply with Wikipedia's attribution policy. See Copying within Wikipedia for details.

Other than temporary fixes to get the page down to less than 2MB, changes should be discussed for at least a week first.

Pinging recent editors: davidwr/ (talk)/(contribs)  17:57, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I guess this is why they print "Motorsport can be dangerous" warnings on race tickets! --kingboyk (talk) 18:01, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm not at all in favour of splitting the article if removing the flag icons would resolve the issue, especially if they're not supposed to be used anyway per the MOS. Currently experimenting in my sandbox.
 * I can't tell from the following which number is the problem, which won't help if I try to fix it! Can you please advise? -

NewPP limit report Parsed by mw1348 Cached time: 20200211181614 Cache expiry: 2592000 Dynamic content: false Complications: [vary‐revision‐sha1] CPU time usage: 10.428 seconds Real time usage: 10.920 seconds Preprocessor visited node count: 206148/1000000 Preprocessor generated node count: 0/1500000 Post‐expand include size: 2097135/2097152 bytes Template argument size: 545585/2097152 bytes Highest expansion depth: 16/40 Expensive parser function count: 1/500 Unstrip recursion depth: 1/20 Unstrip post‐expand size: 1774870/5000000 bytes Number of Wikibase entities loaded: 0/400 Lua time usage: 3.659/10.000 seconds Lua memory usage: 9.58 MB/50 MB Lua Profile: recursiveClone                                   800 ms       21.9% ?                                                               320 ms        8.7% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::callParserFunction                300 ms        8.2% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::gsub                              300 ms        8.2% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::find                              240 ms        6.6% dataWrapper                                         180 ms        4.9% type                                                            160 ms        4.4% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::getExpandedArgument               140 ms        3.8% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::getAllExpandedArguments           140 ms        3.8% select_one                   100 ms        2.7% [others]                                                        980 ms       26.8% --> <!-- Transclusion expansion time report (%,ms,calls,template) 100.00% 8007.224     1 -total 34.73% 2780.727   642 Template:Cite_web 25.09% 2008.943   657 Template:Flagathlete 23.72% 1899.221   657 Template:Flagicon 18.52% 1482.939   657 Template:Country_flagbio 12.51% 1001.866   601 Template:Country_data_USA 11.66% 933.662    657 Template:Sortname 5.01% 401.509    657 Template:Flagicon/core 2.78% 222.462    657 Template:Yesno-no 1.98% 158.834    657 Template:Yesno
 * --kingboyk (talk) 18:29, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Post‐expand include size: 2097135/2097152 bytes is the issue. The resulting HTML size would be greater than 2097135 bytes if all of the templates were expanded.  The system just stops expanding them when it gets to the limit, substituting a link to the template itself.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  18:33, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Regarding removal of flag icons: Some sports seem to deviate from WP:MOS.  I would survey other racing article before removing flags.  If flags are NOT almost always used even when the racers are not representing their countries, then it's best to remove them.  Otherwise, discuss the removal on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Motorsport, using article length and WP:MOS as a proposed justification for deviating from a de facto topic-specific use of flags even if the manual of style says otherwise.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  18:37, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * In Formula 1, for example, the driver's national anthem is played when they win a race, even though they are racing for themselves and their team. I believe it's common in motorsport articles to have the driver's flag displayed in results tables. Even so, I would prefer to lose the flags rather than have to split the article in some arbitrary fashion. This will of course be discussed and I will inform the WikiProject about the problem we have here.
 * That said, I think losing just the flags from the circuit column would resolve the issue - would you mind having a look at the current revision of my sandbox - which is sans flags for the racing circuits - to confirm?
 * If removing just the flags of the circuits resolves it I would propose that as the solution and try to seek consensus. If not, we'll have to discuss either a split or removing the driver flags too. The driver flags use Template:flagathlete with Template:Sortname inside. I think I'd have to write a little C# program with a regex to replace those with the Sortname and the driver's country properly formatted unless there's already a tool which can do it. I'll not spend any more time on that until it's clear how folks want to proceed. --kingboyk (talk) 19:02, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I did not review it for content, but it's well below the limit. You can check the statistics of any page by editing it then clicking on the "twist triangle" labeled "Parser profiling data (help):" which is below the "publish changes" and other buttons. The same information is also available if you tell your web browser to "view page source" and look for "NewPP limit report".  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  19:16, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * A possibility that MIGHT work for this situation is to say "country:" followed by something like Regional Indicator Symbol like 🇺🇸 . Microsoft Windows users will see this as a funny-looking "US", users of other modern web browsers will see this as a United States flag. Users of systems older than 3 or 4 years may see this as one or two unknown-unicode-character placeholers.  Until Microsoft catches on and almost all readers are able to see actual flags, using Regional Indicator Symbols as flags is very unreliable.  However, they can be used along with a wikilink to indicate the country, provided that it's obvious in context that it is the driver's country.  Perhaps a better way would just be to use the country's abbreviation in English along with a Wikilink, like USA .  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  19:16, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Proposal
Rather than split the article in some arbitrary fashion, we should remove the circuit flags. Doing so apparently brings the page well back inside acceptable parameters.

If there is consensus for this approach, it can be done very quickly by checking and then - if the change is OK rolling back to - my revision of 18:14, 11 February 2020 (as I accidentally saved the change here rather than in my sandbox which was open in another tab!) --kingboyk (talk) 19:32, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Sounds good to me. DH85868993 (talk) 20:12, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree with removing the circuit flags as well.Kumboloi (talk) 20:23, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm okay with losing these flags but there is a loss of information. If you can replace the flag icon with the name or initials of the country, that would be helpful, particularly for tracks/events that do not have their own article.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  20:37, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The best I can do in Notepad++ with a simple regex is something like:
 * 🇺🇸 Paradise Mesa Drag Strip
 * becoming
 * (USA) Paradise Mesa Drag Strip
 * The span style I copied from Template:Flagathlete. Again, see my sandbox for what this looks like after applying the regex and then doing a bit if cleaning.
 * If you want the country name to appear as a tooltip, that's going to need a template and we're back to square one. If the country abbreviation needs to come after the track name it would have to be done programatically (not worth the time imho) or with some dark-arts level of regex. There's well over 600 occurrences of so I doubt anyone's going to want to do this manually.
 * The choice then is between losing the country code or something along the lines of this in my sandbox now based on your feedback. Given your point about losing info, I'm happy to go with the latter. How does it look to you? --kingboyk (talk) 21:36, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You could simply directly format the flag as a 24px image. Like this:, which produces this [[Image:Flag of the United States.svg|24px|link=United States]] Paradise Mesa Drag Strip.Tvx1 21:42, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Nice, but I wouldn't know how to do that without using templates, as the template interprets the 3-letter country code and optional year and displays the flag. --kingboyk (talk) 22:01, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Just use the code I put in my post. It doesn't use a country code. It just directly places the flag file and is formatted to provide link when clicking on it, just like the template does.Tvx1 22:05, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * If you want to do that in my sandbox to continue the changes I made (or start again in your own) go ahead, but it sounds like a fair bit of find and replace would be involved. I can't do that with regex as you need to know which flag file to use for which country code. It's a manual find and replace; that was the point I was trying to make. --kingboyk (talk) 22:28, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Ok. I had a go at replacing the flagicon templates in your sandbox with the code I mentioned. That should work now.Tvx1 23:59, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Great work. I'd be happy to roll with that version (or mine, whichever folks prefer). --kingboyk (talk) 01:21, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * the (USA) is good, later we can bulk-replace those with something better.  If the limits are significantly raised in the future, we can even restore the flags. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  21:50, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Consider that my proposed version then. If consensus is to go with it, I can do a histmerge to move the edits over from my sandbox and get rid of the mistaken edit currently in the article history. --kingboyk (talk) 22:01, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I fear that that would only provide a temporary fix. This article deals with an open-ended subject. The content keeps being expanded and there is no set end to these expansions. Thus inevitably we will arrive again at a point at which the maximum number of templates the article can manage is exceeded again. So I think splitting this article is inevitable. That being said, I have no objection to remove the flags from the circuits.Tvx1 21:38, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I had that concern. Sandbox version: Post-expand include size	1,562,794/2,097,152 bytes This appears to leave plenty of overhead for a few years at least (without meaning to tempt fate, given the nature of the list). I'm content to let the next generation of editors worry about splitting the list or removing the driver flags ;) --kingboyk (talk) 21:47, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

So it looks like so far those who have contributed are happy to make an initial change of removing the problematic flagicon templates from the circuit column. We currently have 2 revisions to choose from: country codes or non-templated flags. I repeat my offer to integrate the change which has consensus, with a clean edit history, if and when required (just give me a ping if I'm needed). --kingboyk (talk) 01:29, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm good with either one as a medium-term solution. davidwr/ (talk)/(contribs)  15:07, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm not seeing much potential for controversy here so whilst we could wait for more input and then ask an 'uninvolved' editor to close the discussion I think that would be unnecessary bureaucracy and we should just get on with it.
 * Shall I bring Tvx1's conversion of flag template to flags over, then, or do you two perhaps want to continue working in my sandbox on the athlete flags problems identified below? --kingboyk (talk) 00:06, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * As I said, I'm good with either Tvx1's work or with removing them. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  00:29, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Ah too late now I'm afraid, as further edits have been made to the article since it was copied to my sandbox and therefore I can't bring the sandbox revisions over in a history merge without effectively undoing the new edits which have been made here. Tvx1 you'll need to redo the changes you made in my sandbox, here. --kingboyk (talk) 01:39, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I've decided to revert my edits. This should have opened the way to merge your sandbox revisions here without undoing anything. We can deal with the incorrect flags afterwards.Tvx1 17:30, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

✅ Tvx1, you'll need to manually redo your edits "British drivers represent the UK in motorsports" and "Paul Jessen" (you changed to "Weimar republic"). Sandbox changes have been integrated; my earlier accidental save has been zapped; and I manually restored the section header that David had added. --kingboyk (talk) 19:02, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * No problem. It was a small effort search and replace edit anyway. I'll try to fix the flags over the next few days.Tvx1 19:52, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Stage 2 Proposal
Why not limit the article to only drivers who have their own articles? This whole thing suffers far too much from recentism which is odd since as it states in the lead, motorsport is becoming safer over time (And I'm NOT including Manuel Quintana as a driver with an article!), so by limiting it to those drivers notable enough to have their own article we don't get huge long lists of more recent drivers who with the greatest respect, aren't very notable. As a secondary point, regardless of the decision above to remove flags, we definitely don't need BOTH a flag and an abbreviation of their nationality for each driver so if it's decided to keep the flags we should remove the abbreviations. A7V2 (talk) 21:41, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * That would not provide a solution because this an open-ended subject. Even if you do that, as the decades pass by we would inevitably reach the technical limit again.Tvx1 21:44, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Technical comment, not a comment on your proposal (a proposal which does not have to be mutually exclusive with mine of course, i.e. we could do both): With regards to flags, we appear to be OK on article size by just removing the flag of the circuit. Therefore to keep things simple I've just proposed removing the country flags and optionally replacing with a country code, and not touching the driver column whatsoever. By "things" I mean 1) this discussion, 2) the alterations - the driver flag templates are rather harder to replace without writing code. --kingboyk (talk) 21:51, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * But that would really only buy us time. As I mentioned, the subjected is open-ended. The article and its table will keep being expanded and eventually the remaining templates would exceed the limit again. And in all honesty, I feel that this table can become to long to be useful to navigate through.Tvx1 22:00, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You're either younger than me (sadly likely) or more pessimistic (unlikely) :) I would hope that technical advances here would outpace driver deaths, and that we should worry about a solution for today, today. By which I mean: reduce the template load by zapping the circuit flags, and no split. Looking at trimming the list too? Sure, no problem, we can do that too. --kingboyk (talk) 22:22, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm not convinced by this argument. Then literally every list which is as yet incomplete on Wikipedia suffers from this problem. We can take the argument further that even if we split the list say chronologically, then eventually the list of lists will become very long (in say, a thousand years or so) but this is not a helpful line of thinking. We should deal with the now and potentially the list could be split chronologically or by type (rally, grand prix etc. or whatever) but per (edit: not WP:LIST! See Notability for what I meant) wikipedia shouldn't contain indiscriminate lists, hence my proposal. A7V2 (talk) 23:08, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * A reasonable limit would be that either the person, the event, the death itself, or maybe the location meets Wikipedia's notability requirements even if there is no article about the person, event, death, or location yet. If a particular entry has no red- or blue-links, at least one of the entries should be at least a red-link or it should be considered for removal.  However, removing these instances won't buy us much.  What might buy us some breathing room is if we took a look at the entries that had no blue-links and said "are those red-links proper red-links?  Is it about a notable person/track/event/etc.?"  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  21:57, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * There should definitely be some semi-formal standard for inclusion imho (e.g., as you say, notable driver and/or notable race and/or notable crash). I would suggest zap the photos to resolve the immediate technical issue, and work on the inclusion rules and editing the list as stage 2. --kingboyk (talk) 22:33, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes I definitely meant this as a more longer term solution to be in conjunction with other things and I probably could have chosen beter words than "Alternative Proposal"... and yes probably if the race or the incident have an article it should be included too, but I don't know about including just if the location is notable as there have been 10s of fatalities at several locations (eg the Nurburgring). A7V2 (talk) 23:08, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Sadly true, and I concur. I would disagree with including deaths just because they happened at a notable circuit too. The driver, the race/series, or the crash itself would need to be notable imho. Which circuit the fatality happened at is probably totally irrelevant actually. If Jim Clark had been killed in an illegal road race down my street we'd want it listed here; if I was killed while racing a 2CV around Spa we certainly wouldn't! --kingboyk (talk) 23:44, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * So we don't over-complicate things/delay gaining consensus for the immediate action, perhaps you would like to rename your section to something like "Stage 2 proposal"? --kingboyk (talk) 23:48, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I've renamed the section.A7V2 (talk) 04:09, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Sorting issue
Having checked the different properties of the article because of the above discussion on the quantity of templates, I noticed that the sorting on date doesn't work properly at all. Instead of actually sorting by date, clicking on the sort button of the date column actually sorts the content alphabetically on the name of the month.Tvx1 21:54, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Hmm, it's working for me. I click on "Date of accident" and I get Attilio Caffariti, d. September 10, 1900.  The next one is Eliot Zborowski, d. April 1, 1903.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  21:59, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * If I try it, I get all those who perished in April first, then those from August and so on...Tvx1 22:01, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Hmm, it could have something to do with your preferences and skin. Some of the older skins may have bugs.  It could also be your web browser, it's support of scripting and such may have bugs.  Try on a different computer with a different web browser.  Also try without being logged in.  If you are using a mobile web browser, try either desktop mode or the Wikipedia app.  If it is a skin, you will need to file a bug report. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  22:13, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Hey, at least we don't have a huge list
Wikipedia once had a list of over 2500 people in the Line of succession to the British Throne. It didn't use many templates though, it was under 300KB in its "Post-expand include size". davidwr/ (talk)/(contribs)  22:31, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Probably because no flags were needed as they're all German! :) /jk --kingboyk (talk) 22:49, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * From different incarnations of Germany with different flags though. ;) Tvx1 00:34, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Flag errors
While doing some sandbox editing yesterday in search to reduce the amount of templates we use without a considerable loss of content, I noticed that there are lot of errors in the usage of the flag athlete template in this article. These include present-day Italian flags being used for events that happened in the kingdom period, wrong flags of Germanies used for the different incarnations of Germany (I haven't checked them all, but I would be generally surprised if none of the listed German driver was actually East German), Czechoslovak drivers listed as having had Czech Republic nationality, incorrect usage of the "variant" parameter, 21th century Libyan flags being used for what was at the time Italian Libya, etc. I'm happy to fix as many as possible myself, but the quantity that needs being checked is so considerable that some extra eyes, if only to doubly check each other's edits, would be welcome.Tvx1 19:15, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Can you provide a list of countries and years, like so?
 * Country; ISO; years for flags (most recent is default); additional notes
 * Italy: ITA; 1861, 1943, 2003; see also: Free Territory of Trieste (1946-1954) and its successor countries
 * With a list of things to check we can punch through it.
 * davidwr/ (talk)/(contribs)  19:56, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Well these are the ones that spring to my mind immediately:
 * Italy: ITA; 2003 see also: Kingdom of Italy (1861-1946) and Free Territory of Trieste (1946-1954) and its successor countries
 * Czechoslovakia: CSK; 1918; succesor states: Czech Republic (1993-present)); CZE and Slovakia (1993-present)); SVK
 * Germany: DEU see also: German Empire (1871-1918), Weimar Republic (1918-1933), Nazi Germany (1933-1945); 1935, Allied-occupied Germany (1945-1949), Saar Protectorate (1947-1956); SAA, West Germany (1949-1990); FRG, German Democratic Republic (1949-1990); DDR; 1949 and West Berlin (1949-1990)
 * United States: USA; 1896; 1908; 1912; 1959; 1960
 * Libya: LBY; 1951, 1969, 1972; 1977; see also: Italian Libya (1934-1947) and its successor countries.
 * Hong Kong: HKG; 1959 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tvx1 (talk • contribs) 23:00, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Also there are/were UK driver inconsistencies you were going to sort out again - unless you've already re-applied those changes and I've missed it, in which case my apologies in advance. --kingboyk (talk) 02:57, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's true. Basically, all instances of ENG, WAL, SCO and NIR should be replaced by GBR. Only the British nationality is used in motorsports.Tvx1 19:00, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Regarding the first column. Nearly every flagathlete template used there currently has a year added to it. But they are all incorrect. They do not correspond to variants of those nations' flags. The years actually appear to simply be the birth years of the affected drivers.Tvx1 19:10, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Flag table
This is a cheat-sheet of flag codes and years so the flags in Driver deaths in motorsport will be correct. For a list of country aliases and flag variants for a country, go to Special:PrefixIndex, set the namespaces as Template, and set the prefix as Country data name of country.

Please make changes and sign the change log at the bottom.

Editing log. The most recent date in this section will be used by archiving bots, so make sure this section ends with a signature.
 * Initial version davidwr/ (talk)/(contribs)  00:26, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Added missing Germanies and added Russias and Soviet Union Tvx1 18:12, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Flag icons and Wikipedia limits
There is a reason you see things like  scattered throughout the article.

Replacing these "expanded" flag icon templates with the actual flag icon templates can cause the page to come closer to or possibly exceed Wikipedia's post expansion include size limits.

If you must replace them, do NOT use flagicon. Instead, use the module-wrapper template flagg with cxxlo or use Module:Flagg directly. Basically, instead of, use  , replacing AAA with the appropriate 3-letter code.

As far as flagathlete goes, that template is begging to be re-written as a WP:Lua WP:Module. davidwr/ (talk)/(contribs)  19:08, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

What "mess" - attention non-logged-in editor
You have been saying that I and another editor are "making a mess" by "reverting" - please describe the "mess."

Also, please note that the reason the flags were "expanded" with this edit last February was because the page previously exceeded Wikipedia's technical limits, causing templates at the bottom of the page to stop working (broken revision). See WP:PEIS for details.

Any "undoing" of this expansion must be done in a way that won't "break the wiki." The way you are doing it, by simply going back to flagicon, is all but guaranteed to cause problems. Please use flagg or Module:Flagg instead. davidwr/ (talk)/(contribs)  03:28, 16 October 2020 (UTC)