Talk:Magnus Carlsen

Two different birth years

1989 in the introduction and 1990 later. 76.236.30.55 (talk) 02:53, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

Girlfriend

Under the personal life section there should be something about his girlfriend. Briaboru (talk) 06:55, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

See talk:magnus Carlson/Archive 2#Love life. Bruce leverett (talk) 21:35, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Tata Steel Chess Tournament

Is mentioned at the start of the 2004 and 2006 sections. In the 2005 section, it is missing.

The phrasing at the start of the 2006 section can be mistaken as his first group B was in 2006. His finish in the 2004 group C allowed him to play in group B for the first time in 2005. Tbuonodono (talk) 04:27, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Article size

At over 12,000 words, WP:TOOBIG recommends that the prose be spun out or removed. After skimming the article, I think lots of the "Chess career" section can be reduced, so that each individual year is 2-4 paragraphs. I also think the "Notable games" section should be removed entirely, and if they are notable should be included in the "Chess career" section.

Is a subject-matter expert willing to go through the article to determine what can be removed and spun out? Z1720 (talk) 18:42, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

Since Carlsen is still alive and still active in his chess career, people are still appending things to the section about his career in almost journalistic fashion. This isn't good for an encyclopedia, but it's really impossible to control it until the dust has settled. I don't think we should lose any sleep over the size of this article until then.

I have argued elsewhere in favor of having a "notable games" section in a biographical article about a chess master. This is/was also the general practice in print encyclopedias, most recently Hooper and Whyld's Oxford Companion to Chess. I admit that it's not easy to choose notable games from the oeuvre of someone who is still active in his chess career, and the current selection in the article about Carlsen is far from ideal. But we are getting far afield from the issue of article size. Bruce leverett (talk) 05:03, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

@Bruce leverett: It could be several decades until Carlsen finishes his career, and readers are accessing his article now. While editors are constantly adding things to the article, I think it is also prudent for some to start trimming the information now so that it can be accessible to readers. I am happy to do this myself, but other editors have undone these undertakings in the past and I do not want to have hours of work undone. For the notable games, while other encyclopedias might do this I do not know if it should be done here, especially since this article is already so long. Also, since Wikipedia has its own definition for notability, my opinion is that only games that have their own article should be included in this section, if it remains. Z1720 (talk) 16:28, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

WP:N does not require that everything mentioned in an article must be notable enough for its own stand-alone article. For a game to be included as a "notable game" in someone's biography, there should be significant coverage of the game in reliable sources, i.e. one should find the game in many or most published biographies of the person, or in anthologies of historical games. For modern players, the published biographies and anthologies haven't come out yet, so it's more difficult to judge notability. A good example of a notable historical game is the last game between Lasker and Capablanca in the St. Petersburg tournament of 1914. I would never dream of writing an article about this game, but everyone who studies chess learns about it.

I do not have a solution to the problem of long biographical articles about modern players such as Carlsen. Most likely, I would not have any more success trimming the article than you would. Looking at articles about Grishchuk, Mamedyarov, and Vachier-Lagrave, I see different approaches; none of them are quite as long as the article about Carlsen, but they aren't under nearly as much scrutiny as the Carlsen article, so what works for them might not work for Carlsen. Bruce leverett (talk) 20:54, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

I did an example edit for 2010 of what cutting the prose might look like. Things that I cut include who Carlsen's opponents in every tournament were, results from preliminary rounds other than the finals, and information about other competitor's results. This cut about 300 words: doing similar edits in other sections might yield similar results. Since this was 14 years ago. these sections can be further trimmed to keep only the most important tournaments, and to emphasise career highlights and lowlights. Z1720 (talk) 21:48, 24 December 2024 (UTC)