Template:Did you know nominations/Lithuania national basketball team


 * The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as |this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: rejected by Allen3 talk 17:04, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Insufficient recent expansion

Lithuania national basketball team

 * ... that Latvia completely stopped sports relations with Lithuania after a controversial basketball game loss by 36–37 in EuroBasket 1939?
 * Comment: Even the 1939 Baltic Cup (football competition) was cancelled because of a basketball game.
 * Comment: Even the 1939 Baltic Cup (football competition) was cancelled because of a basketball game.

5x expanded by Pofka (talk). Self nominated at 13:18, 8 March 2015 (UTC).


 * Symbol delete vote.svg Previous revision is forty-seven kilobytes in prose. Current revision is sixty-two kilobytes. Not even a fivefold. Of course, you can nominate it as Good Article. If promoted, issue is resolved. Otherwise, I don't think you can expand the article a lot. George Ho (talk) 20:22, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
 * It seems I understood the whole "Do you know?" nomination thing incorrectly (first time here). I thought that the main thing here is to extract the interesting fact from the article and nominate it. The article, of course, wasn't expanded five times on March 8. Though, I have been improving this article for quite some time. The "Interwar period (1920–1940)", "Soviet period (1940–1990)", "After the restoration of independence (from 1990)", "EuroBasket 2007", "EuroBasket 2011", "2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup" sections were written from almost or absolutely nothing. There is quite many text in these sections. Not sure if five times as without them, but possibly close to it. I still have plans to completely rewrite the "After the restoration of independence (from 1990)" section (describing the each competition individually, similarly to EuroBasket 2007) and to improve a few sections (such as the EuroBasket 2009 one) and only then nominate it for GA/FA. The article size in symbols will possibly become bigger almost twice. -- Pofka (talk) 21:30, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I see that the current revision is now ninety kilobytes. To make the article a good article, see WP:GAC. George Ho (talk) 20:28, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Umm... we don't count lists and tables as part of counting bytes per WP:DYK rules. Perhaps I should tell you that. --George Ho (talk) 04:21, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Pofka, are you sure you are not bloating this article a lot? The prose size is now more than one hundred kilobytes. But loading the page is getting a little longer? George Ho (talk) 20:31, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * That's probably the final version of it for now till the beginning of the EuroBasket 2015. I wished to cover all the major competitions the team has participated in by also including the important game moments and players/coaches comments of that time in it. I believe this really is helpful to perceive the exact atmosphere of what has been happening back then even for people who absolutely have no clue in basketball or were not fans of this sport/team back then. I think it is just incomparable when the article only has the score, main players and when it has extractions from various newspapers/magazines/articles and 70+ years old citations. All that information could have gone to oblivion. Some of the information I have published in that article never was written in English and would be quite difficult to find even for the native Lithuanians, not even talking about the foreigners (for example, the "Interwar period" section is based on an extremely rare 1989's Lithuanian book). Totally, it is now based on three books (some of them have ~350 pages) and dozens of internet sources (from which most of them are written in Lithuanian language and are almost unreadable for foreigners even by using the automatic translators). Though, I didn't described the less important tournaments particularly (such as the Acropolis Tournament and various USSR-organized competitions). Possibly this is the most detailed and the most informative article about this team ever written in English. My main goal was to make it fit the Featured Article criteria (no further expanding is required). Currently, I really don't know what else could be added as it already has everything you need/want to know about this team. The only problem of it is the references... It needs some fixing as mostly they are just bare URLs without author, publication date, but I'm just a bit lazy to do that now. Anyway, what are you thoughts? Does it have a chance to be among the greatest Wikipedia articles? -- Pofka (talk) 21:29, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Have you done articles that have become Featured Articles and read WP:FACR? Well, you don't need to add too much to make it FA, do you? You can condense (shorten) the article and merge two or four sections into one, can't you? --George Ho (talk) 21:41, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * No, I haven't. That's my first try to write such level article. I really tried not to go into the unnecessary details. If I didn't, the article could have even been bigger twice or even threefold. I doubt that the sections could be merged. I find it easier for the reader to read it this way as he can chose whatever tournament he wants to explore. Merging a few competitions into one could make it confusing. Though, I actually merged some parts of it. Two competitions are included in "Interwar period" at once and 50 years of occupations are condensed in "Soviet and Nazi occupation" section. These 50 years had a lot of competitions, but they were not very important and I simply omitted them. These competitions after the restoration of independence are way more important and requires more details, I think. -- Pofka (talk) 21:58, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * ... Anyway, I see large quotes used in text. How about quote or similar templates or  (see Help:Quotes)? Either helps readers more. --George Ho (talk) 22:04, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I used the large quotation boxes with borders in order to distinguish them from the other information. I believe it is easier to read them this way. Though, the less important quotations are written in simple text. The use of  and quote could make it more confusing because it is barely different from the basic text. Pictures makes some text distorted and it might be confused with quotations then.  -- Pofka (talk) 22:16, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm going to stop this here. I was slightly intrigued when George mentioned the original article prior to expansion was roughly 48,000 characters long (165k bytes). It's now 108k chars long (261.5k bytes) after almost a month, but still far off the 240k chars required (I don't want to think about the total size at this point). I wouldn't consider expanding the history section as bloating (although I'd probably nix the 'All time leaders' section per WP:NOTSTATS), but I do agree with George's assessment that such a large amount of text is likely to violate WP:ARTICLESIZE and make it more difficult for less accessible users to navigate. No prejudice against renomination once a few article splits have been made and it passes GA. Fuebaey (talk) 18:51, 27 March 2015 (UTC)