User talk:ShabbatSam

helpme The administrator Marianocecowski has reverted dozens of my edits without any discussion at all. Does anyone have any idea why he would do this? How do I get that revert undone?

since you are a tennis fan, here's something for you
By the way, since you do seem to be a tennis fan, while this is not too relevant to your issues with the links I have entered that you have deleted, here are some that demonstrate the superiority of my site vs. any other site out there:

[Results for top players all at once]

[How are the Wildcards Doing]

I mention this because when I first was adding my links, I noted that one of the people clicking them did in fact immediately become a "power" user and pulled up a list of the Wildcards for wimbledon just as soon as the draw was released. ShabbatSam 04:05, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

SteveGhelper links
Hi: You have inserted a lot of links to the steveghelper sites on tennis player bios. It is, as you probably know, wiki policy to keep external links to a minimum. In the case of the links you have provided, I can't see that they provide information that is not available at the atp.com site. Hence, I would favor that we just use the atp links. Cheers! (PS: I watch your talk page, so we can discuss here) --HJensen, talk 07:36, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

my (first) response
Hi: I'm not sure if you are an actual tennis fan or not. So please bare with me. I joined the Wiki Tennis Project group a few days ago and don't see you listed there. And I am not sure how closely you looked at the Match Results or Ranking History for any of the players that I linked to. And by the way, just to make sure in case you are not aware of any possible conflict of interest on my end, SteveGHelper.com is my site. It helps men's pro tennis fans (such as myself) to easily search thru the mounds of current and past results and rankings on the popular SteveGTennis.com run by Steve Gocha. Steve personally updates his site every day with the latest tennis results and weekly with the latest tennis rankings. Steve is an ardent user of my site to search the data on his site, has a link on his site to direct his users to my site to search, and even uploads a copy of all his results files to my site daily to make my site faster (vs. going across the internet to read each of his files every time). One pro player (just one, that i know of), Richard Bloomfield, one of England's top players, has kept a link to my site on his official website for the last few years, since he discovered it, along with a personal note of thanks to me for creating it: http://www.game-set-and-match.org.uk/id30_m.htm

Ok, so I haven't really addressed the differences yet between the data available on my site vs. the data available on ATPTennis.com.

For example purposes, let's use the links I added to Aisam Qureshi's page. Have you heard of him? You would have to be a hardcore pro tennis fan to have ever heard of him. But I am not choosing him at random. I am choosing him as an example because according to my website stats as of this evening, since I added those links just a few days ago, more people have clicked the links on his page than on the page of any other player. 2nd on the list is Tim Henman -- understandable as this week is Wimbledon and Tim has been the best British player for the last 10 years or so. 3rd most clicked, Teimuraz Gabashvili. Who??? Roger Federer's first round opponent this week at Wimbledon.

So the links for Qureshi are:
 * Qureshi Recent Match Results
 * Qureshi World Ranking History
 * Qureshi Recent Match Results
 * Qureshi World Ranking History

If you click the Ranking History link, you can see his current ranking, how many ranking points he has, etc., for this week, then last week, then it goes back a couple weeks at a time, then a month at a time, then 3 months at a time all the way back to 2000 (which is the oldest data I got from Steve). I can tell you as a tennis fan that this info is extremely useful, especially in answering questions such as: "who is this guy? is he on the rise?  is he on the decline?  has he been playing at this level for a while?" I can also tell you that you be hard-pressed to answer these questions if you were to go to AtpTennis.com. They just this year added a feature to show Ranking History, but instead of giving you the kind of telescoping view of the player's history, they show you EVERY weekly ranking of a calendar year. You want to see where he was ranked in 2006, you select another year. This of course is their first attempt to deal with Rankings History, and it is certainly better than last year when they had nothing at all. But any real tennis fan looking at those two sets of data would certainly see the merit of what I display vs. what ATP displays. ATP does display Doubles Ranking history on their page as well, which I have never gotten around to implementing on my site.

The other question people have about a player is: "how has this guy been playing lately?" In other words, is he doing well or poorly? My Match Results link shows this week and the previous 12 weeks of results. Are those results available on the ATP site? Yes. Are they in an easy to digest format? No. ATP gives you a page that shows ALL results for a player for any given year, defaulting to this year, for Singles or Doubles, defaulting to Singles. You want to see his most recent results, scroll all the way to the bottom.

Does that help you answer the question, "how has this guy been playing lately?" Somewhat. Does showing the most recent 12 weeks of results, with most recent first, do it better? Absolutely.

Aside from that, I doctor up each match result line with a set of useful links. At the time, the ATP site, had virtually nothing similar to my info. But now they have many similar links, with one exception. Their match results line gives the World Ranking of the opponent for the match at the time of the match. That is also something that was done FIRST on my site. But on my site, that world ranking is, of course, a link to that player's world ranking history page. The best you can do with the ATP page is to click the player's profile link, then click the Rankings History page, then deal again with the reams of data that the ATP page throws at you to try to make sense of it. And why do you want to make sense of it? Because you want to know, about his opponent, "who is this guy? is he on the rise? is he on the decline?  has he been playing at this level for a while?" Yes, those are the same questions you originally had about the first player. And now you have those same questions about the opponent. And my results give you one-click access to the answers to those questions.

Anyway, I do appreciate the opportunity to explain myself here. I can understand not wanting to have wikipedia populated with redundant External Links. And I do appreciate the value that the ATP profile link gives, and have personally added that ATP link as well to almost every page I encountered that did not have it already, whenever I added the Match Results and Ranking History links.

But I strongly disagree that these links add very little of value to that already provided by the ATP profile page. (On the other hand, Tennis Insight and Tennis Corner profile links seem to me to be more redundant, except for maybe being more geared towards the needs of gambling addicts than tennis purists.)

I'm sure you are aware that if google the name of any tennis player, the first link that comes up now almost every time is Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia has the responsibility now as the 900 pound gorilla to provide people with the most useful information possible, and to direct people to the best sources of additional useful information. With respect to people searching on current tennis players, they are more often than not searching because they really have no idea who this player is, and they want to know quickly who he is. And not necessarily, "what city was he born in? what's his father's name?  etc." or even, "what was his best ranking as a Junior before turning Pro?" No, the questions they want answered, I would posit, most frequently are "who is this guy? who has he beat lately? who has he played? is he on the rise?  is he on the decline?  has he been playing at this level for a while?"

The two links I have been adding to wikipedia pages answer those questions better than any other links you could provide, anywhere. ShabbatSam 02:12, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

my 2nd response
Ok, my apologies for not knowing yet how to deal with wiki link templates yet so that my links above for Qureshi that used templates displayed my user name instead.

As I was writing the above reply, I was going to note that in comparison, no one has clicked the links I made for Roger Federer, so in being thorough, I went to go check the links for Federer. And they were gone. You had deleted them. After reading my note about NOT doing that until first at least doing me the courtesy of discussing it first.

I commend you for at least explaining yourself with a note here engaging me in dialog. But it is quite frustrating to see that you deleted the links without discussing it first.

I also apologize for my questioning your tennis connection, as I can now see from your contributions page that you do have a strong interest, at least in Roger Federer.

Anyway, in terms of supporting my above argument about the utility of my links, I will note again that no one ever clicked the links I put on Federer's page. Of course, now that I review the history, I note that between you and Mariano Cecowski, those links were online for all of 10-12 hours total.

However, the links on Andy Roddick have been there for 9 days, and have generated just 7 clicks in 9 days. In contrast, for people coming to SteveGHelper.com from sites other than wikipedia, Roddick is one of the most common players people search for.

On the other hand, Qureshi's links were clicked over 150 times in the last 3 days and will undoubtedly be clicked hundreds more times in the next few days (since he won his first round match and is still alive at Wimbledon). And the links for Kristian Pless were online for just 10 hours before you deleted them. They were clicked 5 times during that time (which was the middle of the night when all good tennis fans are asleep and resting up to watch Wimbledon all day in the morning).

The point being that for someone like Federer (0 clicks) or Nadal (3 clicks in 25 or so hours) or world #3 Roddick (7 clicks in 9 days), people might find the wikipedia article to be sufficient.

For most of the other players out there, my links give instant gratification to those who click them. And my link titles tell them exactly what to expect: Recent Match Results and World Ranking History. They might not even KNOW that this is info they crave. So vs. the ATP link, they deliver MUCH, MUCH greater value (especially since, for most players, wikipedia is already delivering the most relevant profile info that is a copy of the ATP page).

Anyway, as far as Federer goes, I don't particularly care much. I think a lot of people look up Federer for celebrity reasons. (E.g., I just mentioned this to my brother, who has been working the radar gun at the US open for the last 10 years, and he said, "i look up federer on wikipedia if i want to know how much money he's won this year ....")

But as you get further down the tennis food chain, probably as soon as you get outside of Federer, Roddick, and Nadal, people are clicking onto wikipedia because they want to quickly find out just who these players are (e.g., my Djokovic's links have been clicked 14 times, more than Federer, Roddick, Nadal, and Davydenko combined).

And I think I have demonstrated that for most players, these links deliver the answers to those questions better and quicker than any other sites or pages a tennis fan could explore.

I'm not going to re-enter the links you deleted for Federer, Pless, and Hewitt (who also got no clicks in 5 hours before deletion) until I hear back from you. I am not looking to get into any kind of war over this. I am a longtime wikipedia user, but this is the first time I decided to edit any pages, which I first did about 10 days ago when Tsonga made it to the 3rd round at Queens, when I had not heard anything from him in a long time. So I looked him up in wikipedia and also on my own pages, and at that point I felt the data on my pages would be useful to anyone looking him up online. When people did find the info useful enough to click around to my site and then do additional searches on my site, I decided to add links to other players reaching the quarters of the main tournaments. And then I think I added links to all the players getting wildcards into wimbledon, then I continued to add to players I felt would be of interest to people, which is almost the entire wimbledon draw.

Thank you for your time. ShabbatSam 03:53, 27 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I took the time and effort to leave my initial message on your talk page around the same time I deleted the links. So you have no need to get frustrated here, and ususally people don't have to explain when they delete users' personal home pages. So I think I did more that you could expect. As for my tennis interests, those are utterly irrelevant for the issue. My opinion on the relevance of any link on Wikipedia is as valid as anybody else's. Tennis fan or not! This is a question about Wikipedia standards and not one of passion for a subject. My opinion is that Wikipedia should only provide links of high relevance. I have deep respect for yours And Steve G's work, but I am not sure that the main arguments about better functionality than ATP.com is a valid one (and please do not use number of hits as an argument for the Wiki relevance of a link). ATP.com is, after all the authoritative place to seek information. Please check out WP:EL on general policies. Among other things, links to be avoided are "Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a Featured article."
 * I must say that the burden of proof is yours, so it is actually you that may have caused frustration by adding links without explaining their relevance. To begin this discussion now is a bit late. It should have been undertaken before the links were systematically added. In any case, my opinion is just one. Why not take your arguments to the tennis portal, and seek a consensus there? That is the way to do it, when your general plan is (as stated on your user page) to put your links on each and every tennis bio.--HJensen, talk 06:20, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
 * In addition: This looks imo vastly superior than this. So I would think one should revert the links to all these steveGhelper links.--130.225.116.203 09:26, 27 June 2007 (UTC) (=HJensen not being able to log in, sorry).

Revertions
Hey, sorry I didn't reply before; I'm on vacation right now. I see other users have updated you on the spam policy of the wikipedia. Sorry I didn't leave a message on your talk page when I reverted those edits. Good wiking, --Mariano (t/c) 08:42, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

Email
Sorry, I didn't check my email. In the future, if you have some questions about my edits on Wikipedia, please ask/tell me on my talk page. --Göran Smith 03:06, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Kevin Anderson (tennis)
A proposed deletion template has been added to the article Kevin Anderson (tennis), suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but this article may not satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice should explain why (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the  notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page. Also, please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. If you agree with the deletion of the article, and you are the only person who has made substantial edits to the page, please add  to the top of Kevin Anderson (tennis). JASpencer (talk) 21:28, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

re: What Constitutes a Stub (Tennis article question)
Please see my response on my talk. Basically, it's a case of me not thinking. --Spyder_Monkey (Talk) 21:49, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks
Thank you very much for all your advices. --XMartín <small<(talk) 22.56, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Request for wider input on discussion at WikiProject Tennis
Hi, there is an extremely long and muddled discussion going on at WP:Tennis about the tournament tables found on tennis player articles (i.e. this type of table), and I'm notifying you as you identified yourself as a member of the project. The dispute is over the "Tournament Name" column, with the options being to either use the "sponsored tournament name" - in other words, the name involving the sponsor, for example Internazionali BNL d'Italia - or the "non-sponsored tournament name" - in other words, Rome Masters. I appreciate that this conversation is very long and convoluted, so a brief summary can be found here, which is also where I request the discussion continues. Thanks, rst20xx (talk) 23:08, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:31, 23 November 2015 (UTC)