Template talk:Infobox figure skater/Archive 1

Syntax
From Jamie Silverstein.

From Beatrisa Liang (note how unused fields can be left out for easier editing):

Empty syntax

 * Currently, only the title and country fields are mandatory, the rest are optional.

Hints
country=
 * for the country field, use the ISO codes for countries:
 * displays

partner=Jayne Torvill
 * for the partner field, I like to format the text link in bold:
 * displays Jayne Torvill

Removal of thumbnail
The thumbnail looks really bad inside of the infobox. There should be a way to have the image without the the thumbnail. The caption can be place under the image. The problem is I don't know how to make the size variable. If anyone knows how could they please help me? rydia 05:47, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
 * The image thumbnail is OPTIONAL. You don't have to put anything there, it's just a convenience. The reason for only one type is for consistency, you don't want people putting variable sized images causing all sorts of formatting problems. Plus too many people have violated image size guidelines, and that had to stop. This infobox itself is for convenience only, you're free to create you're own and use that. Also, the caption is there to give proper credit to avoid image deletion. --Pelladon 18:23, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Rydia, you were right. I had been thinking the same thing.  I took the caption outside of the image, and removed the frame.--Esprit15d 19:45, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Removal of weight field
I've notice abuse and controversy over this field. Not to mention it's hardly used anyway. Any suggestions as to deleting this or possible actions? --Pelladon 17:49, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Changed Turned Pro to Retired
Field change. Feel the Retired field was more useful and general. --Pelladon 21:10, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Picture Size
The picture size either needs to be made smaller or be made into an editable option. The restriction to 200px makes some of the low-res promo pictures very pixelated. See Sarah Hughes. Sue Anne 20:11, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
 * I originally used a thumbnail to display the photo, but other users insisted on a frameless design. This caused smaller photos to expand to 200px to fill the frame. No easy solutions. Would reducing the size to 100px satisfy everyone? &mdash;Pelladon 19:34, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

I had a look at a few other Infobox's and what some of them (e.g. Infobox_Tennis_player) do, is require the wiki link for the image in the data for the template, rather than just the name of the image.

E.g. the usage of the template would look like this: {{Infobox Tennis player
 * image= [[Image:Andre Agassi Indian Wells 2006.jpg|300px|Andre Agassi at the 2006 Indian Wells Masters]]

rather than {{Infobox Figure skater This will allow more flexibility on each page - which I think is a good thing. This change would require changing every page that uses this infobox, but it's only about 50 pages - which I would be willing to do myself. --Gary van der Merwe 18:35, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
 * title= Sarah Hughes
 * image=Hughes_sarah.jpg

I tested this out using Sandbox - and it works well. Any objections to me making this change? --Gary van der Merwe 19:08, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

What we really need is this: --Gary van der Merwe 08:35, 26 July 2006 (UTC)


 * If you're willing to make all those changes, good luck. I just hope people don't abuse this option. Also you need to test the case for no image as well. &mdash;Pelladon 16:53, 27 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Done. Please let me know if there are any problems. --Gary van der Merwe 19:37, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Choreographer
I added a line to stick in choreographer information. Kolindigo 22:06, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Infobox for pre-ISU Judging System Skaters
I noticed that most of the skaters who competed during the old judging system don't have infoboxes. We should update the infobox to allow for results for those skaters as well.  Skeetidot 06:07, 22 April 2007 (UTC)


 * What sort of results do you mean? Kolindigo 21:17, 23 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Something along the lines of Best Results for Tara Lipinski, or results by event for Michelle Kwan or Chen Lu. Skeetidot 01:50, 24 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, there's always Template:Infobox Figure Skating Competition 6.0. The best/most recent results box as seen in many articles is not connected to the infobox and can be modified to remove the "total points" part of it. Kolindigo 03:19, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

"Former" fields
I added "former" fields for coach, choreographer, and partner. I think the former coach and choreographer would be useful for retired skaters to make it clear that they are not currently being coached by those people, but they were coached by them, as well as being useful for notable former coaches and choreographers in general. Former partner for notable past partnerships for ice dancers and pairs skaters. Kolindigo 05:05, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Only for living people?
I was trying to update the infobox at Christopher Bowman when I realized that this template doesn't have any death parameters such as death_date or death_place, etc. I'll be having to switch that article's infobox to infobox person. You might want to consider updating this template to include such parameters. Cheers! 75.193.153.60 (talk) 20:37, 12 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Added. :) Kolindigo (talk) 22:08, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Weight, revisited
I agree with Pelladon above. This field is prone to abuse and misuse. Furthermore, there is no official weighing in for figure skaters like there are for other sports, and there is no weight on the ISU biographies. This field would be very hard to find sources for and I don't think it's necessary. I vote to remove it. Kolindigo (talk) 19:29, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
 * It has been over a week and no one has objected, so I am removing the field. Kolindigo (talk) 20:16, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Incorporation of medals
Instead of having 2 separate infoboxes, I suggest we incorporate the series into the infobox, like. I also like the idea of having a "start date", for when they started their junior (seems appropriate) career and/or when they started skating. As well as "level", "discipline" (I don't really like that word, but it's how it's phrased in Figure skating), and perhaps something to incorporate aspects of their pro careers, like Stars on Ice. All of these will be optional, of course, and I have no problem doing it. Any objections? — Skittleys (talk) 13:16, 17 September 2009 (UTC)


 * 1) Figure skating bio articles should have competitive highlights sections, which is a place to put all medal information. Olympic medals are unique, so deserve their own infobox. I don't know what would be gained by listing every major medal in the infobox. It's duplicate information, as well as long (which is why infoboxs that list the medals also have a show/hide option). Gymnastics bio articles and swimming bio articles, for the most part, don't have major sections about major medals won, and so that information in the infobox serves to give a summary of the athlete's career.
 * 2) As for a start date for junior and senior careers, that would not be possible. I'm not sure how it works in gymnastics, but in figure skating, skaters are permitted to "level hop". Skaters such as Ashley Wagner may compete at the World Championships one year and then at the World Junior Championships the following year. There are no start and end dates for levels, and listing when they "aged out" would be redundant, since we already list their birthdate.
 * 3) I'm also not sure how useful it would be to list the discipline, since many skaters have competed in more than one discipline in their careers. Whether the "partner" field is used indicates if the skater competes in singles. Is it useful information to indicate if the skater is a pair skater or ice dancer? For skaters since the introduction of Code of Points, the difference between pair skaters and ice dancers is indicated in the kind of personal bests they have.
 * 4) What kind of pro career information do you think should be put into an infobox? A list of tours they've been on? If you're talking about years they've skated professionally, I would think that would be a) hard to pin down exactly, and b) hard to source. Kolindigo (talk) 22:49, 25 September 2009 (UTC)


 * I've added code for incorporating medal templates, cribbed from infobox athlete. Any problems, please let me know. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 12:34, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

"Began skating" and World and PB rankings
I added a "began skating" field since the year is usually listed in skaters' ISU bios. Also added fields for World ranking plus rankings of personal best scores (since a World ranking on its own doesn't necessarily say much, ie. sometimes a good ranking only means that a skater has attended a lot of events. See Stacey Kemp/ David King: Pretty good world ranking but personal best rankings reveal a different picture). Aftesk (talk) 03:47, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Added fields for Current and former training locations because some skaters, such as Javier Fernandez, list a club in their home country but spend some of the season training in other places around the world.Aftesk (talk) 01:04, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

website parameter?
Should there be a website parameter? Many professional athletes, including figure skaters, have websites. I'm immediately thinking of http://kristiyamaguchi.com/, but there may be others. It's a standard parameter in infobox person, and figure skaters are persons. TJRC (talk) 18:38, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

Spouses
I was going to try this myself, until I saw in included things like hCards, etc. Could someone who does know discuss her or his own opinion, and if in agreement, adjust the following?

As a fan who knows nothing technical of the sport (although I saw the practice rounds of the 1992 ISU Finals in Oakland and regular rounds of the 1995 Nationals in Providence), I first talked personally, though only briefly, to Michelle Kwan when she was campaigning for her husband Clay Pell, in Providence. So I added that city (on very strong, but by no means conclusive, evidence, although I’m almost certain she does live in Rhode Island since I saw her coach and skate at a Christmas Tree lighting last year in Providence) to her infobox and tried to add her husband until I found that husband or spouse was (apparently) not a field in the Infobox (living or deceased).

While I know that gymnasts and figure skaters start very young [see Joan Ryan's Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters (1995)], I also know that living ones, especially semi-retired figure skaters (Ms Kwan now teaches, as does the happily-married Nancy Kerrigan in her native Massachusetts) do marry. In the case of pairs and dancers, often — at least during their careers — to each other, e.g. Ekaterina Gordeeva & Sergei Grinkov; but also often to people entirely outside figure skating.

From a typically winding hours-long Wikipedia and check-sources path — leading back in the end to learning that Joan Ryan's book, although not the author, already has a Wikipedia article — I learn that the same seems to be true of Infoboxes for other athletes and sportswriters. A totally different sportswriter named Joan Ryan [1941-2010] led to her husband, football great Frank Ryan, whose article I edited to reflect Joan's death and also (no dummy he, concussions or no) some of his academic and corporate links, after even more research into business, Silicon Valley and even health insurance.

Anyway, would someone who already knows the technology and agrees with me add a spouse line to the infoboxes that don't already (like politicians) have one? I could take a tutorial on Wikipedia, I suppose, but it would take so long, with so uncertain a result, as not to be worthwhile to anyone else.

Thanks,

—— Shakescene (talk) 11:53, 8 February 2017 (UTC)
 * User:Shakescene, seems reasonable, since infobox sportsperson has a spouse parameter. so, now done! Frietjes (talk) 15:16, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

System change? Historical vs. current Personal Bests
There is a lot of confusion regarding the Personal Best fields in the infobox. The ISU changed the scoring system and all PBs and World Records scored prior to 2018-19 season are now considered as historical. The ISU biographies and statistics for skaters only include PBs scored under the new system, which for some skaters are deceptively low. (There haven't been many competitions in this system yet, and the current system generally ends up scoring a bit lower than the previous one).

This creates several problems:
 * there is currently no standard across skating Wikipedia as to how update the PBs and it is generally very messy;
 * some skaters have their old historical PBs (which will probably remain higher for a while) listed as current PBs, which is misleading;
 * some skaters have a mix of their old and current PBs listed, which is confusing because the numbers are no longer comparable;
 * some skaters have been record holders for both eras of scoring, which leads to many edits intended to highlight achievements for both eras in the PB fields, but which end up   visually confusing.

There are two options: either changing the template to include fields for historical personal bests/records (which I think would be preferred for skaters competing in both eras), or consistently including only current PBs in the infobox, which is what I've been trying to do, but it leads to discussions like this one and to back-and-forth edits. 3a4t (talk) 10:53, 28 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Career best scores
 * The issue mentioned above is still there in 2022. On Hanyu's biography page, users keep changing his personal best scores from the +5/-5 back to the +3/-3 system (latest edit today). And to be honest, it is indeed difficult to justify a revert, since none of Hanyu's current personal best scores is his career best. Same goes for Javier Fernández, where the current infobox only lists historical PBs, although he competed in the +5/-5 system as well. So there seems to be no consensus among authors at the moment.
 * I have the following economical suggestion: In case that a skater has competed in both systems and the historical personal best score is higher than the current one, we use the historical PB with a footnote listing the PB scored in the +5/-5 system. This solution has the advantage that the infobox template doesn't need to be changed, and it affects only few articles. I can ask SkatingScores for a full list, so that we don't miss any skater who is affected.
 * Example: Test infobox Yuzuru Hanyu
 * Record scores
 * There seems to be no uniform formatting of world record scores either. My recommendation is to label current (WR) and historical (HR) record scores as such, and link to the list of highest (historical) scores articles:
 * Example 1: Aljona Savchenko, pairs Combined total 245.84 (HR)
 * Example 2: Gabriella Papadakis, ice dance Combined total 229.82 (WR)
 * What do you think about these solutions? Henni147 (talk) 15:33, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

Comment: Not to sound overly mathematical, but Wikipedia often deals with issues of converting monetary amounts and similar data from "old numbers" to 'new numbers'; for example, something cost $10 in 1801 but now costs $287 in converted numbers. Has anyone thought of somehow converting the old scores into the new scores equivalent, and just use a scale factor to move from '3' to '5' as its equivalent (scale factor would be 5 divided by 3 as a multiplier factor). Has anyone seen anything like this? ErnestKrause (talk) 15:41, 29 December 2022 (UTC)


 * In figure skating, a conversion like this is not that simple because the ISU not only expanded the GOE scale but also lowered the base values of the technical elements, limited jump repetitions and the 10% bonus to three jumping passes among other changes. If all these adjustments are taken into consideration, the final segment scores are comparable between the two systems. One exception is ice dance, where the TES scores in the +5/-5 system are generally higher than in the previous system.
 * That's why I would prefer to list both, the current and historical PB if that was possible. It is bad and misleading to only list the current PB, especially for skaters who achieved much better scoring results in the previous system like Fernández and Hanyu. Henni147 (talk) 16:18, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
 * That said, I'm not sure there's any difficulty in listing both as is your preference. This will only apply to the 'old timers' since the new skaters will only have 'new' scores. ErnestKrause (talk) 16:24, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
 * If we are at it. There was also a system change in ice dance, with the compulsory and original dance being merged to the new short dance (in 2010 if I remember correctly). We may allow that infoboxes display those results as well if ice dancers competed in both systems. Henni147 (talk) 16:33, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

RfC on Template:Infobox person
This message is to notify you that there is an RfC ongoing on whether to add pronunciation info to, a discussion which may also affect this template. Your comments on the matter are appreciated. The discussion can be found here. Thanks! 0x0077BE ( talk ·  contrib ) 17:14, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

Retired
I did not do anything to the template. However the date "Retired" seems to be inaccurate. When a skater finishes competing as an aktive sportsmen in ISU competitions is not actually the same date as retiring from work. Many skaters also continue to work in the sport as a coach, a judge or even compete in adult championships. Any suggestions how to rephrase "Retired" to be more specific? Uwe Langer (talk) 20:37, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
 * The comment for that field says "retired from competitive skating", so I would say that would be a descriptive, but long, label. another other option, would be to put add a footnote to that field. Frietjes (talk) 15:07, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
 * The comment for the field "retired from competitive skating" only exists in the template documentation page, therefore common readers won't ever know this means retire from competition. I think @Uwe Langerhas made a really valid point, and we should rethink the term "retired". Briq Sm (talk) 22:12, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
 * The current "retired" attributes failed to represent many skaters who remain active in their figure skating career after finishing the ISU competitions. According to this page, this term was previously called "turned Pro", then changed into "retired". Another topics also discussed that "retired" term can't represent many skaters. Therefore the proposal is to add two new attributes "Competitive career" and "Professional career", so editors can choose to use "retired" to describe skaters who truly left the figure skating world, or to use
 * "Competitive career": Date A to Date B;
 * "Professional career": Date B to Date C,
 * to describe the true situation, as not to mislead readers that this skaters has retired. Briq Sm (talk) 21:53, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree with, the smartest solution would be to offer both options: "retired" for those skaters who did not pursue a professional career and the alternative mentioned above for those skaters who skated at both competitive and professional level. The adjusted template could look like this:

{|align=center
 * Retired=1998
 * Competitive career=
 * Professional career=
 * Retired=
 * Competitive career=2004–2022
 * Professional career=2022–present
 * Retired=
 * Competitive career=2004–2022
 * Professional career=2022–present
 * Professional career=2022–present


 * }
 * The link to the terminology explanation is optional, but I think it's useful for readers who are not familiar with these terms in the context of figure skating. Henni147 (talk) 08:30, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 8 February 2023
I'd like to request an addition of the two attributes  and. Currently, the template only contains the option, which is not suitable (even misleading) for skaters who concluded their competitive career but are still active as professional skaters. The full discussion of the issue can be read here. Henni147 (talk) 16:47, 8 February 2023 (UTC)


 * Looks good. Would you mind making the changes required to Template:Infobox figure skater/sandbox? &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:38, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Sorry for the delayed reply. It took me some time to add the new parameters and re-numerate the existing ones. I hope that my additions to the sandbox are fine? Thank you very much in advance. Henni147 (talk) 18:25, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Couple of comments:
 * It is not clear what sort of data should go in "Competitive career" and "Professional career" but I assume we are talking about dates? In that case, it might be clearer to include a new header (something like "Active years")?
 * I moved "Retired" after the new fields so they should be in chronological order
 * &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:50, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, the flip in order makes sense. And yes, my idea was to use the new parameters as follows:
 * Competitive career: 2004–2022
 * Professional career: 2022–present
 * Personally, I don't think that a separate header is needed. The current header "figure skating career" should do, but it would be good if that one was available not only for the embedded version but the infobox itself as well. All parameters related to skating should be bundled under that header and personal information listed above. I think, that's the best solution.
 * Footnote: I have developed a more compact alternative to list world standings and season's bests, which is currently available as a separate template: Figure skating WS and SB. It is already in use on the page of Yuzuru Hanyu, but it might be worth a thought to implement it directly in this infobox template here, since it's useful for other skaters too (especially those with long careers). The current WS and SB lists make the infobox very long, see Shoma Uno for example. Henni147 (talk) 10:17, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Happy to add those two new fields. I was just concerned that they would be misused if people didn't know what sort of data to put in there. As we know, people rarely consult the documentation. A parameter like "years-active" might be clearer, but I don't know how to split between competitive and professional cleanly.
 * Other proposal: sounds interesting. Suggest you start a new thread and include some examples? &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:44, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
 * A more clear wording for the parameters could be:
 * Years competitive: 2004–2022
 * Years professional: 2022–present
 * Note: Currently, professional figure skating redirects to the terminology section of the figure skating article, but I plan to create an extra article about professional figure skating, when I'm finished with Hanyu's page series. So it might be the smartest solution to link to the redirect page now, which will later be edited.
 * Regarding the new thread: you mean a new section here on the talk page with different example tables? Yes, I could do that. Henni147 (talk) 10:22, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
 * I think, the parameters "years competitive" and "years professional" can now be added to the infobox template as shown above. I can later add a short comment to the template documentation regarding the use of the two parameters. Henni147 (talk) 19:12, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Created Template:Infobox figure skater/testcases. Testing: new competitive= professional= retired. Also added to whitelist . I have seen no failings. DePiep (talk) 13:03, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much for creating the testcases. One question: I agree with MSGJ that the parameters "competitive career" or "professional career" might lead to misunderstandings in their use. "Years competitive" and "Years professional" might be more clear wording, indicating a timespan as entry. What do you think? Henni147 (talk) 18:00, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
 * To me, outsider, yes "years" is way more simple & inviting (to edit). BTW, stick to lowercase and underscore, so use years_competitive= years_professional= retired.
 * Try to prevent documentation input prescription (about usage, prerequisites, spelling, ...): noone will read that -- which is OK too with "years". DePiep (talk) 18:10, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, this sounds like the best solution. Thank you very much! Henni147 (talk) 11:05, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Apologies for not following up, and thanks to DePiep for helping with this! &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:08, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
 * All fine. I advise to finalise this parametername-changes (edit sandbox), and have it done. I think H147 would be happy to move forward :-) DePiep (talk) 06:29, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Adjusted the sandbox now. I hope, my changes are correct. Henni147 (talk) 12:30, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Looks like by now, all questions have been fleshed out. No need for further soft detail questioning.
 * See (incl. whitelist for check-unk-param), /testcases. I propose to move it. -DePiep (talk) 12:43, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
 * ✅ * Pppery * it has begun... 03:10, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

Implementing new template for world standings and season's bests into the infobox
As suggested above, I added two examples for the use of the Figure skating WS and SB template that I developed for skaters' infoboxes (see the template documentation). Those two examples should cover most cases that can occur. I also adjusted the template itself a bit, making it more accessible for screen readers and the markup code easier to use in practice. This new template makes the listing of world standings and season's bests more compact and shorter, especially for skaters with long career like Javier Fernández. His current WS and SB list is pretty long and cannot be collapsed in mobile view. Henni147 (talk) 19:06, 15 February 2023 (UTC)