User talk:Blue Square Thing/Archive 12

Your editing
I honestly think that WP:CITEVAR is more honored in the breach.

Of course there are reasons for it. I arrived here in 2003, and everything needed to be hammered out. Asking for some stability in referencing styles, of which there are many, would cut out some of the flip-flopping editing wars. That was two decades ago, and I suppose the idea that it might lead referencing into a dead-end ruled by cryogenics wasn't at the front of people's minds.

There are always trade-offs here. I don't often get into big debates, but typically when I do it is with those who take a one-sided view, favouring one aspect of a trade-off. I think it has rightly been pointed out to you that de minimis can apply.

I have noticed also that you are not careful about the point made in WP:EDITING where it says "be particularly cautious about removing sourced content", amplified in the nutshell there. You just aren't, and you need to follow good practice in that matter.

Adds up to "not a good look". You make a practice of standing on rights when it comes to cosmetic changes, but you remove referenced content that others think should be there, summarily. Please be more generally helpful, in a broad-minded way. WP:PRESERVE, to my mind, is more mission-critical for us than CITEVAR. Charles Matthews (talk) 07:00, 7 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Hello Charles. I've just seen this - not logged on since mid-December etc... I'll split my reply into just in case you or anyone else wants to reply.
 * Firstly, citevar. You're probably right of course. I could argue that it's actually about respecting the choices that the editor who made the initial or substantial edits made, and that respect for those sorts of choices and efforts is actually at the core of what we should be about. But, well, I don't think I care that much anymore to be honest. It's interesting to note that an obvious serial-sock has apparently taken to using the same tool, almost certainly in an attempt to provoke a response from me. It's part of the long-running harrasment of me that goes back years now. Given their recent actions and the similarities with previous socks I could probably go to SPI with this if I felt like it - so just be aware that there's a pattern that, when you dig into it is obvious. But I've given up caring - they'll only be back with another sock and get up to the same thing, so what's the point? You could probably convince me that it would make a difference if you really wanted to, but I'm not sure it will Blue Square Thing (talk) 10:19, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
 * And then removing cited information. This interests me much more. I know I've removed plenty of cited stuff. Generally I would hope that I could justify that removal, even if others were to disagree with it at times. So, for example, removing over detail or trivia, or removing the names of infant children under basic privacy stuff, for example. I might have even justified that in edit summaries. I'm sure there are cases where I've removed things that others might have a legitimate argument that I shouldn't have. I might have even argued with them about that in the past. Again, I'm probably at a point where I no longer care that much to argue or to try to deal with what those sorts of things again - I spent a while this morning gutting my watchlist and have more gutting of it to do. I might still make infobox error corrections and so on, but other than the set of articles that I can do something positive to, right now I don't really care that much anymore I'm afraid.
 * But thanks. You've made me consider something. None of the negativity above is, fwiw, anything to do with your comment. I'd already arrived at those conclusions. The socking just confirmed that I'm taking the only approach that I can reliably consider.
 * Thanks for tagging me in on a discussion on your talk page btw. As I suggest above, I'm now at the stage where I no longer want to play that game. Blue Square Thing (talk) 10:19, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

2024 ACC Women's Premier Cup
Hi - Hope you are doing well. I don't know if you have reviewer rights, but wondered if you could help with Draft:2024 ACC Women's Premier Cup? An editor created this in draft space a while back (or maybe it was moved there), but I think it is good enough for the mainspace now. I had already created 2024 ACC Women's Premier Cup as a temporary redirect to Associate international cricket in 2023–24, so I cannot move the editor's draft to mainspace (without changing its title, then adjusting the existing redirect to that). I understand from the editor that it has been awaiting review for some time. Is there anything you can do to help? Thanks. Ps: Looking forward to another season on despair at Canterbury! Bs1jac (talk) 14:42, 24 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Hi. I don't think I have reviewer rights - pretty sure that I don't anyway. Sorry about that. Despair though? All that needs to happen is that they play all their matches in September surely? That'll fix the problems :-) Blue Square Thing (talk) 10:21, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Contentious edit summaries
. There is an issue concerning you that I must bring to your attention. Forgive me, but my colleagues and I thought you had quit the site after seeing the mail from Charles above and I wrote to him for advice. As you have returned, I can now raise the issue with yourself as was our original intention.

On 18 January, I came across this edit summary which mentions The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians (the ACS) in an unfavourable light. A few of us discussed this and are agreed that your remarks are untrue and could damage the reputation of the ACS which does NOT "discredit" people who write about cricket. As far as the work in question is concerned, it was serialised (albeit under an alternative title) across several issues of The Cricket Statistician in 2005/06. The ACS is unlikely, we think, to publish anything that is inaccurate or badly written, and a serialisation of someone's work must be a seal of approval. Basically, the complaint about your remarks, which you repeated in fifteen other summaries on the same day, is that you make the ACS appear to be some kind of oracular entity that routinely condemns anyone and anything it does not like. Nothing could be further from the truth. The ACS is not the Daily Mail or any other tabloid. If someone submits a piece of work that is below standard, they are let down gently and encouraged to keep trying, a practice that you personally should adopt on this site.

Given my long-term systems experience, including internet work, I did not expect Charles to be able to remove your edit summaries without going to a great deal of inconvenience and we have agreed to let the matter rest. It is good, of course, that Charles as one of the site's longest-serving sysops is aware of your attitude and behaviour in respect of matters like WP:PRESERVE, which is editing policy, and the minor guidelines like the cite/date variations. Perhaps now that he has raised these matters, you will in turn raise your own standards and stop writing edit summaries that are at best annoying and at worst insulting. I see that you claim above to be the victim of harrassment but, on face value, it seems you have been the recipient of criticism rather than any kind of victim. On the other hand, it has been said that you are a serial offender in terms of WP:GRAVEDANCING, which is probably the worst form of harrassment there is.

I could produce a list of your transgressions that would seriously breach the site's length guidelines, but I will concentrate on a gentleman called Pat Cummins who, as you know, is one of the world's greatest cricketers. I would invite you to review all of the edits in Mr Cummins' article between 16 and 18 February 2022. Your comment about crore as "a form of counting things that no one outside India has the foggiest about" is not only untrue but also an insult to all Indian people, especially The Hindu newspaper which was the reliable source for the information. As was pointed out to you at the time, the source reported the fee paid to Mr Cummins as crore and did not mention Australian dollars, so your replacement of crore with a $A conversion breached both WP:PRESERVE and WP:OR. Your notion that no one outside India knows about crore is challenged, shall we say, by the undeniable fact that people all over the world know exactly what it is.

Elsewhere in your tirade about the Pat Cummins article, you claimed to have improved the quality of the writing but you introduced a set of laughable errors including a complete misspelling of Kolkata. Errors like that do not improve the "flow" of a narrative; rather, they impede the flow. You also made the somewhat hypocritical claim that you had found "the ref that some idiot removed". Your breaches of WP:PRESERVE have involved the removal of countless valid refs and it is a serious breach of WP:CIVIL and WP:NPA to call someone an "idiot" when that person was acting in good faith but may have made a mistake, especially if they were a new editor.

I was a little surprised to see Charles' comments about the citation and dating variations, but he is absolutely right. You seem to think these guidelines are of paramount importance and yet there are many examples of you breaching them yourself. I daresay I have breached them too since I discovered the MOS:NUM script that resets date formats but I would never make an issue of something so trivial if anyone reverted. You have a similar approach to infoboxes in that you will amend variables in those but completely miss errors in other parts of the article that are arguably higher priority. Then there is the inclusion of CricketArchive in External Links. You frequently make a point of removing that on the grounds of ELNO#6 but, while I accept that you are technically correct, wouldn't it make more sense to move the CA reference into the narrative? It is, after all, a direct source to the most salient points of a biography in that it verifies the fact that the person concerned is or was a first-class cricketer. I spotted a few of these only yesterday and I restored the CA references in the lead after the introductory sentence(s) where it is actually useful for WP:V purposes.

My ACS friends have no wish to take matters further and I would rather work on improving articles and categories so I suggest we draw a line under this, but it is to be hoped you will take notice of Charles and improve upon what is certainly, as he says, "not a good look" to become, as he also says, "more generally helpful in a broad-minded way". Batagur baska (talk) 15:22, 26 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Hi. I was about to log off for at least a week, possibly longer. But as I'm still here it would be rude to ignore this entirely. The point you make about moving CA references into the article I tend to agree with, but I doubt I'll be doing anything very much in the way of removing them anymore anyway. I'll try to remember to do so.
 * In terms of the ACS, you might want to consider John Goulstone's response in 140 of course. I'm not sure how that tallies with your opinion of the ACS being unlikely to publish anything that's flawed, but there you go (it even provoked an editorial comment in issue 139 didn't it?). Feel free to add references to Leach's work from the ACS journal, but it would probably be a good idea to mention any issues that Goulstone and others have made are taken into account when you do so.
 * With regard to the other stuff, sure, I've said some stupid things in the past. I've tried to be better at doing that over the past couple of years, but I make mistakes because I'm not perfect. I'm sure I could devote hours to digging out old diffs to show all sorts of things, but I won't insult your intelligence.
 * Now I am probably logging off for a bit. I'll see anything you leave here eventually. Perhaps Blue Square Thing (talk) 16:01, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Well, it should be remembered that Mr Goulstone has had his critics too, especially after he wrote his heavily flawed book about Hambledon. The work entitled In the Mists of Time was commissioned by Peter Wynne-Thomas and Keith Warsop, co-editors of the journal at the time, and it included considerable input from both of them, Mr Warsop in particular.
 * Mr Goulstone certainly deserved credit for his primary research but he had an unfortunate tendency to resist later findings and analysis. I'm sure, however, that any valid points he had to make were taken on board when the online version was updated; but I don't suppose any writer takes notice of invalid or inappropriate advice.
 * Incidentally, the online version was self-published and it should not be used on Wikipedia for that reason. Not now, that is, because I understand it would have been acceptable in the 2000s before WP:RS was tightened up. Unfortunately, as is the case with the so-called "microstubs", things which were valid when done are left exposed after goalposts have been shifted.
 * On the subject of stubs, I have been trying to categorise them in a more useful way to help those who wish to identify the ones needing expansion, although many are hopeless cases. The big problem I've encountered is a huge number of non-stubs wrongly classified. I will try to deal with those next but, like yourself, my availability is limited. Batagur baska (talk) 01:43, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

10 wicket haul
I have gone through the cricinfo website and I did not find any instance of a player taking 10 wickets in a limited overs game at any level (Odis, T20IS, List A or Domestic T20S) can you please let me know which game are you referring to when you say that a player has taken 10 wickets in an associate game? 042 rahul (talk) 05:11, 7 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Hello. Mahaboob Alam. Nepal. 2008 at World Cricket League level 5 iirc. Cricket Country has an article on it and it's in Guinness World Records.
 * Have you found *any* reference at all to 10 wickets in a one-day match being n/a by the way? From memory, every CricInfo or CricketArchive profile I've looked at records this as 0 rather than n/a. Doesn't it? Unless I'm wrong, which is possible. Thanks Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:19, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

Rahul Dravid Medal Table
Greetings. I have reverted your deletion of the medal table on Rahul Dravid; it is not new that coaches have their medals added. In other sports as well as in cricket (Gary Kirsten). I have also left an edit note in the page’s history. You are requested not to remove them again. Pharaoh496 (talk) 10:28, 7 March 2024 (UTC)


 * Hello. Thank you for taking the time to leave this message here. I couldn't find any other examples for ages, but then I did note some association football World Cup winning managers with medals tables. It's interesting that all of the ones that I could find were collapsed rather than extended, and I think that might be one way forward on this.
 * It is worth adding that the issue of medal tables has been discussed a number of times at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cricket, including most recently in this discussion, where the overwhelming consensus was that there should be very limited use of medal tables in cricket infoboxes - essentially retaining only Commonwealth Games or Olympics medals. There have been other, similar conversations in the past that have, from memory, essentially come to the same conclusion.
 * To be honest, if the tables were collapsed I'd have less of an issue with their use. For what it's worth I do rather think they make infoboxes look fairly ridiculous - the Dravid one in particular. But that's my opinion. Blue Square Thing (talk) 09:27, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
 * All right. The thing is that I have not seen most players without medals, and its a good alternative to have them collapsed. Respecting your opinion though, in my opinion it looks like a complete tournament achievement list in particular for all played / coached tournaments. Lets parley if this becomes a discussion. Pharaoh496 (talk) 10:43, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Infobox cricketer is used on 32,098 pages (as of 1 March 2024). Medal templates are used directly on 231 of those. It's used as a module on perhaps other 12 - it's difficult to tell exactly how many and that could be a lot more or no more at all. So almost certainly less than 1% of cricketer infoboxes.
 * Because of the way the infobox is set up it's actual an invalid parameter to use, although because of the inheritance from infobox person it doesn't raise a direct error flag fortunately. The best solution - and you might choose to raise this at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cricket - is probably to formally include the parameter in the infobox documentation, as is done at Template:Infobox football biography. This has the expand parameter automatically set to no, which has the effect of collapsing the boxes. That doesn't work with every way that the medals template has been added to other infoboxes, but it does work for footballers and cyclists and that might end up being a "solution" that most people might agree with. Blue Square Thing (talk) 11:43, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I will surely have a look at it, thanks, till then lets let them stay Pharaoh496 (talk) 11:46, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Jos Buttler
Jos Buttler has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. As you participated in a GA re-assessment for this article in 2018, I thought you may be interested to know about this section GAR. Joseph2302 (talk) 14:38, 5 April 2024 (UTC)


 * Thanks. It's clearly an utter disaster just now and nowhere close to what I'd look for in a GA. I'll comment briefly there. Blue Square Thing (talk) 14:40, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

Dispute resolution
User:Batagur baska has taken me up on the offer I made to support dispute resolution, with respect to your conduct. My idea is email mediation, which is a format rather than a process. The two parties communicate, not directly, but through the mediator.

The point is for the mediator to clarify exactly what is at issue between the parties. It would be good, therefore, if you could email me from my User talk page. Charles Matthews (talk) 09:47, 30 April 2024 (UTC)


 * That sounds like an interesting idea. Sorry for not seeing this earlier - I'm here a lot less frequently and have been run off my feet in real life with one thing and another. I should have time to drop an e-mail into your box at some point over the weekend or next week - but if I forget, please remind me. You should note that I just reverted an edit of theirs (this diff) with a neutral edit summary. I think there's good reasons for doing that. Other than that I don't think I've reverted any edits of theirs at all recently. Blue Square Thing (talk) 06:02, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

. Charles Matthews (talk) 09:19, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

. Charles Matthews (talk) 05:40, 11 May 2024 (UTC)


 * I'lll reply when I get a chance, hopefully this evening. Blue Square Thing (talk) 09:23, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

. Charles Matthews (talk) 17:59, 14 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Apologies if you've noticed this already, but in the least surprising development ever, BB had been found to be a sock of BlackJack. He deserves no attempt at dispute resolution. Spike &#39;em (talk) 15:18, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Charles was kind enough to let me know in an e-mail. Hope you're well; not seen you around so much. Blue Square Thing (talk) 07:45, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm good thanks, hope you are good too now that the cricket season has started. WP have seen fit to block my w**k IP address as it's behind a proxy server, and I'm still taking things easy. Spike &#39;em (talk) 09:32, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Taking things easy sounds like a fine move to me Blue Square Thing (talk) 14:43, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

"Dark (MCC cricketer)" and others listed at Redirects for discussion
The redirect [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dark_(MCC_cricketer)&redirect=no Dark (MCC cricketer)] has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at  until a consensus is reached. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 15:21, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

Hambledon — The Men and the Myths
Good afternoon, BST. Looking through my files over the last few days, I came across this book review, which you might find interesting.

While Ashley Mote would never have got my vote, he did write one very good history and he did publish an excellent replica of Nyren.

The points he makes are all spot on — gratuitous swipes; inaccuracies, gaffes, and glaring errors; lack of a big picture; incomplete index; confusion; "a monopoly of wisdom"; lack of vision; a passion for unadulterated detail, pedantry, and minutiae; obsession with Hambledon or Hampshire; failure to grasp significance; should stick to research. When Goulstone took his gratuitous swipes into the ACS journal, several (though not all) of his comments were later found to be inaccurate or to have the missed the point because he couldn't see the big picture. I was told by Douglas Miller and others that Goulstone hated Ashley Mote, especially after The Glory Days of Cricket won prizes, and really did consider himself to possess a monopoly of wisdom on early cricket.

I tried reading the Hambledon book many years ago and, like many other people I know, I completely agree with Ashley. I dismissed the book as the worst work on cricket I have ever seen. The prose is so turgid and contradictionary that you have to read many paragraphs two or three times to try and understand the point being made. As Ashley said, there is no big picture and no background — if you don't know the setting is Georgian England, you could easily think it is sometime in the last century. The stuff about nomenclature and the identity of Thomas White leave you shaking your head.

As a source for the Hambledon era, Goulstone's book is, shall we say, utterly unreliable. If you are interested in writing about Hambledon, ignore Goulstone completely. Haygarth is the best source while Ashley-Cooper and Ashley Mote are both good enough. Nyren should be used with caution — check what other writers say. You can also get some good background from the likes of Altham, Birley, Bowen, Buckley, Major (who also never got my vote), McCann, Underdown, Waghorn, and Webber. To name a few.

I'll say goodbye now. I have begun a new writing project that will take all of my spare time for the next year or so. Good luck. 92.30.242.247 (talk) 12:26, 28 May 2024 (UTC)