User:Dennis Bratland/Draft MOS:SPORTFLAG RfC

RfC to either strengthen or remove 'official representative' requirement for flag icons in sports
Proposal replace MOS:SPORTFLAG with one of the two options below, either not strictly official, or official, or to reject both and make no change at this time.

The point is to say clearly whether or not the current practice of most sports-related WikiProjects of using flag icons on virtually all international sport topics is or is not consistent with the MOS guidelines, and to resolve confusion and contradictions by consolidating the flag icon rules for sports in one place if consensus favors treading sports by a different standard than other topics.

Not strictly official option:

Official option:

There are three options here and that means ranked voting (it's not a vote but work with me here) isn't out of the question. Closing discussions and Consensus don't have specific guidance on how we do that, but the editor closing this discussion could take such preferences into account, if the information is given to them in a way they can use. If you abhor official, you might say you favor no change but prefer not strictly official if your first choice isn't going to happen, along with a brief explanation.

Generally other editors would appreciate keeping lengthy comments to the discussion section and keeping your !vote rationale concise. Survey answers often attract replies, but starting discussion threads outside the discussion section isn't going to win you any popularity contests. Just saying.

If Official is chosen, most of the mentions of sports can be kept. If Not strictly official is chosen, mention of sports in most places will be removed in order to avoid contradicting the sports flag icon guideline. This would include deleting 6 of the 7 places where Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Icons discusses sports, keeping the 7th as it deals with logo copyrights, not flag icons. Click [show] for specific text changes.

Please !vote for either * Official, * Not strictly official, or * No change. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 05:06, 16 May 2021 (UTC)

Discussion (Sport flags)
Manual of Style/Icons is just a guideline, and what, if anything, should be done about articles that don't conform to the MOS is outside the scope of this discussion. The focus here is what the MOS is even trying to say, so that anybody can read and understand it with a minimum of confusion or any need for expert interpretation. Editors who are ignoring the MOS now the can continue to ignore it if the MOS changes. Some editors do take the MOS seriously, and compliance becomes unavoidable to meet the criteria for WP:Good articles and Featured articles. Adopting not-strictly-official would make it obvious that a few articles don't conform, while the status quo now is rather fuzzy. Choosing the official option would codify that a very large number of articles are outside the MOS. Many editors would dislike either outcome, but all would benefit from guidelines that are unambiguous and consistent.

Grouping sports topics in three classes or categories in this table illustrates the distinctions drawn by the proposed options, and comparing these categories with current practice helps to illustrate what problem is solved by revising the MOS. Our goal should be to tune the wording to make it easy for any editor to know which of the three categories a topic falls into, and to establish a broad consensus as to where we want to draw the line for flag icons.

In the first category, both the National Football League and United States Auto Club (USAC) are primarily national, not international, and reliable sources don't commonly display national symbols for each competitor. The current version of the USAC article has upwards of 250 US flag icons, and three non-US flags. This doesn't meet even the least restrictive MOS rules, and the use of flag icons in this class would require a blanket MOS:FLAG exception for sports.

Both Major League Baseball (US) and the English football league system (UK) include, just barely, more than one nationality, but reliable sources do not commonly display US flags for the 29 American teams and a Canadian flag for the one "representative" from that country, nor are flags necessary or meaningful to highlight one or possibly two not strictly UK-national English football league teams.

The second category has competitions which are international in scope, and which we can verify that high-quality sources routinely identify competitors with flags and national symbols. We can even cite sources that refer to competitors as "representing" their nations, but in an apparently figurative way, much like The Beatles "represent" the UK as the face of the British Invasion, or Marylin Monroe being called a sex symbol who "represents" women. With few exceptions, the current versions of articles on topics like Grand Slam tennis or Grand Prix motorsport use flag icons.

Direct evidence that competitors are official representatives is lacking, or at least is controversial among Wikipedia editors, and has been a subject of debates for many years. There is little agreement as to what a citation to support this would look like, and it relies heavily on subject experts parsing the language in carefully selected sources. Evidence that reliable sources predominately use national symbols is overwhelming and uncontroversial. Edge cases that help define this boundary include Formula One driver Lance Stroll, whose Canadian nationality is commonly emphasized by sources, meeting the first criterion, but he wasn't selected to represent Canada by Canadian official, not meeting the second criterion "selected as representatives and entered in the international competition by an authority or sanctioning body for that sport or event of that country."

The third category includes many Olympic Games style competitions, where we can verify in Rule 41 of the Olympic Charter that competitors are representatives of nations, and cite sources that state directly that these representatives are chosen by officials of that nation to fill a defined quota assigned to each nation. In the case of motorsports, we can verify in both primary and secondary sources a distinct difference between traditional international motorsports like Formula One the new FIA Motorsport Games "in which drivers—in contrast to the historically transnational norm of motorsport—competed under their national flag."

A similar dividing line can be seen in motorcycle sport, between FIM's Grand Prix motorcycle racing or FIM Superbike World Championship compared to various world cups like the Speedway World Cup, or by contrasting FIM Trial World Championship with Trial des Nations.

--Dennis Bratland (talk) 21:25, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Why is this needed
Below is a sampling of some of the longest disputes over flags in sports spanning more than a dozen years. The MOS of 2008 or 2013 isn't all that different from the current version. Small changes in wording have been tried, but the essential boundary lines haven't really changed. The disputes over these boundaries haven't changed much either. Editors 10 years ago were reading the same rules and reaching the same contradictory interpretations as they do today. The same arguments, often citing the same facts from the same sources, are repeated, across different topics and WikiProjects, and the acrimony and bitterness of the early days looks much the same as today. There's a whole sub-genre of WP:ANI and WP:3RRN disputes between editors who want to remove or insert flag icons.

What this suggests is maybe the problem is the boundary between appropriate and inappropriate flag use is poorly defined, or fails to represent global consensus. For those reasons, it might be better to seek a new consensus around one of two new boundary lines between appropriate and inappropriate flag icon use, in the hopes that editors who read the MOS will disagree less over what it means.


 * 2008 Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Icons/Archive 4
 * 2009 Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mixed martial arts/Archive 4
 * 2011 Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Motorcycle racing/Archive 2
 * 2012 Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Icons/Archive 11
 * 2012 Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mixed martial arts/Archive 8
 * 2013 Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Tennis/Archive_13
 * 2014 Talk:Manchester United F.C.%E2%80%93Arsenal F.C. brawl (1990)
 * 2015 Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Formula One/Archive 43
 * 2015 Talk:Joe Calzaghe
 * 2017 Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Formula One/Archive 46
 * 2017 Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Rugby league/Archive 24
 * 2018 Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football/Archive 121
 * 2018 Talk:2019 Monte Carlo Rally
 * 2019 Featured article candidates/2018 World Snooker Championship/archive1
 * 2021 Template talk:Infobox racing driver

--Dennis Bratland (talk) 18:40, 31 May 2021 (UTC)