User:Quale

Recently I've been working almost exclusively in the Chess Wikiproject to improve articles in List of chess topics. Although I'm not a strong chess player, I have a fair library of chess books that I can use for research. Aside from some article work I can do using the dead tree references I have at hand, I mostly focus on work that can be assisted by writing simple programs, for example, plumbing FIDE data for information on grandmasters or comparing articles under to pages listed in WP:WikiProject Chess/Index of chess articles.

Changed opinions
Since I started editing Wikipedia in 2005 it's probably inevitable that I have changed my opinion on a few matters, but looking at old Talk pages I find that sometimes I advocated positions that I don't hold now and don't even remember having held previously. Some examples:
 * In 2005 I wrote "I wasn't around when WP removed Category:Female chess players and I don't watch the cat deletions anyway, but I probably would have voted to keep." This is surprising to me, since when Category:Female chess players was resurrected in 2015 I opposed it and had forgotten that the category had ever existed before.  Today I don't know whether I favor or oppose the female chess categories, but I do think that if we have female categories the men should be put in male categories so that they are given equal treatment.
 * In 2006 I wrote "Pachman, Benko, Vukovic, and Barcza are equally well known and in English their names are never spelled with diacritics" which isn't even an opinion, it's just untrue. "Luděk Pachman" was and is used in some English sources, although Ludek Pachman is also commonly seen.  I still stand by my opinion that the article title for Pal Benko should not have diacritics, but it seems I had changed my mind about Luděk Pachman by 2011 ("since Luděk Pachman is pretty well represented in English language sources I think this is an appropriate spelling").  My opinion on Vladimir Vuković and Gedeon Barcza has softened as well, and I'm content with the article titles as they are now.  I do remember opposing the move of Arpad Elo to "Árpád Élő" since that was absolutely moronic, but today I see that I was wrong about some of the other page moves.
 * In April through May 2018 there was extensive discussion at WT:CHESS concerning "Notable games" sections in chess bios. I didn't remember that this had ever been discussed at WT:CHESS before, but in 2007 I wrote "Personally I think that our "Notable games" sections aren't really appropriate".  Most chess Notable games sections were bad in 2007 because they weren't sourced and didn't describe what is notable about the games.  A decade later there are many more chess bios and many more notable games sections, nearly all of them bad for the same reasons they've always been bad.  Even though there's been no real sign of improvement over a very long period, today I don't reject the idea of the notable games section itself and I don't remember ever having opposed it.  The bad notable games sections should be improved or removed, but I think we should try to have good notable games sections in as many chess bios as we can.

Subpage index

 * Special:Prefixindex/User:Quale/

CS

 * User:Quale/Recursive-descent parsing

To do
Some work to do on chess-related pages:

To investigate
I have noticed several bios of politicians, etc. are in Category:Dutch chess players when no mention is made anywhere in the article of chess. I wonder if someone editing Dutch biographies has used the Dutch chess players category to indicate that the bio is of someone notable who happens to play chess, rather than the correct use of the category for people notable as chess players. Need to ask if we have a chess editor familiar with Dutch chess who can sort this. Also it's possible that if these articles are based on https://nl.wikipedia.org/ then the Dutch Wikipedia might choose to use its Category:Chess players by nationality subcats more liberally and non-chess editors on en.wikipedia couldn't be expected to know that.

Just looked at Johan van Hulst which is a good indication that my concerns may be unfounded since he is a Dutch former politician who won a chess tournament at age 95.

To create

 * Bios:
 * Patrick Thomas Duffy
 * Chess federations
 * Hellenic Chess Federation
 * Strong chess tournaments:
 * individual tournaments in Golombek, some should have articles
 * Baden-Baden 1925
 * Bad Kissingen 1928
 * Berlin 1928
 * Bled 1961
 * Budapest 1896
 * Göteborg 1920
 * Kecskemet 1927
 * London 1872, 1922, and 1927
 * Madrid 1973
 * Mährisch-Ostrau 1923
 * Marienbad 1925
 * Milan 1975
 * Moscow 1936
 * Paris 1924
 * Pistyan 1912 and 1922
 * Podebrady 1936
 * Prague 1942, and 1946
 * San Antonio 1972
 * Scheveningen 1923
 * Semmering 1926
 * Semmering-Baden 1937
 * Skopje 1967 and 1976
 * Sliac 1932
 * Teplitz-Schönau
 * Vienna 1922
 * Zandvoort 1936
 * Other tournaments
 * North American Open Chess Championship (2006 results)
 * Ciudad de Dos Hermanas (I don't know the history, but I think there are several of these, perhaps not all encyclopedic. The 14 rapid events through 2008 probably are.)
 * Accumulation from many sources to produce Category:Years in chess articles for every year
 * 1998 in chess (TWIC 217)

To improve

 * Articles that need references:
 * Maróczy Bind
 * Poisoned Pawn Variation
 * Articles that need expansion
 * Groningen 1946 chess tournament
 * Willard Fiske (good material in The Oxford Companion to Chess)
 * Isaac Rice
 * Manhattan Chess Club
 * Marshall Chess Club
 * Mar del Plata chess tournaments
 * Pretty good articles that can be improved:
 * World Chess Championship 1948
 * World Chess Championship 1963 Petrosian–Botvinnik
 * Lone Pine International – fix errors noted on Talk:Lone Pine International
 * Poor articles that need a complete overhaul or major expansion and sourcing:
 * middlegame
 * Articles that need work but will be a real chore:
 * User:Quale/List of FIDE Grandmaster titles awarded 1950–2000
 * User:Quale/List of FIDE Grandmaster titles awarded 2001–present
 * chess strategy
 * chess tactics

Random

 * A little bit about New York City chess clubs in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec. 18, 1887, p. 10: "The following are the addresses of the chess clubs now in active operation in New York and Brooklyn: In New York—Manhattan Chess Club, 22 East Seventeenth street; Columbia Chess Club, 156 Second avenue; Jeffersonian Chess Club, 101 West Tenth street; La Bourdonnais Chess Club, Columbia College; Turn Verelu [sp?] Schach Club, 66 East Fourth street. In Brooklyn—Brooklyn Chess Club, 109 Montague street; Philidor Chess Club, Meserole and Lorimer streets."
 * An account of living chess (called animated chess here), this performance said to be the first of its kind in NYC: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 11, 1883, p. 6.