Template talk:1976 Pittsburgh Panthers football navbox

There is no such thing as a "consensus" national championship in college football. The hidden text comments in the description violate WP:OR. See NCAA Division I FBS National Football Championship and its the discussion thereof. Templates should be changed accordingly, but I will not force the issue because there is a common, but inaccurate colloquial acceptance of the dual AP/Coaches' poll championships as being "consensus". However, template consistency should not trump accuracy or violations of WP:OR. I'll leave it be for now, but I wanted to point out that the use of "Consensus" is inappropriate in a encyclopedic context and as such its use should be avoided. Ideally, all such templates should be changed to remove "consensus" accordingly, although it only really bothers me when the term is attempted to be applied to the pre-coaches-poll era. CrazyPaco (talk) 17:31, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't see this as a WP:OR problem as it is not making a factual claim, only establishing parameters for the navbox. In these types of navboxes, editors will try to add entire rosters when many players are not notable.  The consensus discription you disagree with parrots the article you cited, regardless of the discussion.  The very article you linked discusses the consensus issue here NCAA_Division_I_FBS_National_Football_Championship.  Major selectors (read:"Consensus" selectors) are in the official NCAA record book, as noted in the article.  Terms and items that may be colloquial and/or common usage are also encyclopedic and proper on WP.  The best alternative I see is to change consensus to the actual selectors, so instead of Pitt being 1976 "Consensus National Champs" they would be "AP, NFF, FWAA & UPI National Champs", but this would have to be done on all navboxes, as there is no reason to single out this one.  Getting rid of the link to the above article in the navbox header is overkill, though, IMO.  I understand your passion about the issue, but I just don't see it as something in need of fixing in regards to the navboxes.  Thanks.  - Masonpatriot (talk) 18:04, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The parameters for consensus status is original research because there is no real independent third party source that defines it...NCAA doesn't, CFBDW doesn't, etc. In contrast, for example, the NCAA does have a point system for determining when All-American selections are "Consensus", so you can accurately use the term "NCAA Consensus All-Americans" or some such similar wordage. Nothing really exists for national championships because the NCAA doesn't recognize any of them, they just list championship selections from what their consultants have determined to be the major selectors.


 * I don't disagree with anything else. Like I said, I don't have a major issue with combined AP/Coaches being termed consensus, because they are so widely recognized and accepted and actually fit the word "consensus" by its dictionary definition of "general agreement". However, I do have an issue when the term is applied prior to the advent of the two-poll system because it is historically inaccurate, and there are many editors out there have been using the term inappropriately without any historical context. Prior to your reply, I had reverted my edits to this template, because after thinking about it, yes, I agree with you and don't think it is worthwhile changing the templates. However, I would advise extreme caution in the use of the word "consensus" for anything prior to the two-poll era (1950) where its use becomes very problematic in my opinion, and it is even worse when used to describe championships prior to 1936. CrazyPaco (talk) 19:13, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * As I create new navboxes, my intention is to just use the AP National champion from 1936-1949. I agree that pre-1936 is a bit muddled, and, frankly, there may not be enough articles on WP for particular teams to even warrant navboxes. - Masonpatriot (talk) 19:18, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I think that is the correct way to go about it. I should have investigated what your intentions and precedents were first, and actually hadn't realized there were so many NC navboxes already constructed. My apologies for that. Your have done some very good work on these navboxes. CrazyPaco (talk) 19:36, 23 March 2009 (UTC)