WikiSports

This is a **proposal for a new** Wikimedia sister project.
WikiSports
Status of the proposal
Status	procedurally closed
Reason	Not meaningfully different enough from Wikipedia etc. to justify keeping open forever, and there has never been any enthusiasm anyway. Dronebogus (talk) 11:14, 30 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Details of the proposal
Project description	WikiSports will be an open and crowdsourced sports almanack that will be a combination of Sports statistical and chronological information such as player statistics and detailed match reports.
Is it a multilingual wiki?	Yes, it will hold pre-set terms that will be easily translatable, and therefore only require one multi-lingual wiki.
Proposed tagline	The Open Sports Almanack
Technical requirements
New features to require	Form-based, responsive tools for match reporting, and handling of duplicate event entries for popular matches.
Development wiki	To-do
	v; t; e;

WikiSports is a proposal to create a free and open sports match reporting website that will allow any match of any sport to be recorded in detail.

There are plenty of free sports statistics websites such as ESPN or just Google/Apple that provide statistical information and live reporting on sports. However, they focus on specific sports that they cover, the quality of information differs depending on the website, and they usually only cover sports at the professional level.

WikiSports would allow reporting at almost every level. As long as there is some organisation and record to the match, it would be welcome. Games between amateur clubs would be welcome, but the match between you and your friends on a Saturday afternoon would not be.

Match Reports can be created after the fact if there is a recording of the match somewhere to report on, or a news article to reference. Match reports can also be created live. If you're attending or watching a game, you can record match events as they happen, marking timestamps as the game progresses with event details such as "Goal scored" by "Player 6" of "Home Team" at "Timestamp" into the match.

This would require some very basic, but extremely responsive form-based tools that could input new events as quickly as those events happen. This ease of use is essential to the site being successful. Depending on the match coverage, reporting may be as basic as the results, or as finely detailed as every pass of the ball at each second, or every tackle. This responsive web-app will have the most common events of the sport you're playing, ready to allow you to enter details on the fly. "Goal", "Penalty", "Stoppage".

Outside of the core function of match reports, detailed statistics would exist. Team details such as season reports and team vs. team histories, player statistics and movements. These could be created manually where match reports are scarce, or generated where there are complete match reports of a season, or most likely, a combination of the two.

WikiSports should integrate heavily with Wikidata for its statistical information, Commons for match photos/videos, and Wikipedia for player and team biographies. Wikipedia already holds a massive amount of match information, but it's not very easy to add, and is not a core function of Wikipedia to record every match. Wikipedia could refer to WikiSports for its existing sports coverage.

I believe sports are a massively important cultural item of humanity, and recording the events of sporting matches is just as important. Sports have been around since before recorded history. Through the ancient Olympics, to the modern Olympics, there is something to record and report on. In WMF's quest to record all of human knowledge, I believe the history of sporting events is a worthy inclusion.

Proposed by

Original Proposer

Zerce221 (talk) 22:33, 10 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Re-opened by

Supertrinko (talk) 03:43, 26 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Existing projects

ESPN
Google Sports
Wikipedia (Coverage of major matches only)

Domain names

WikiSports.org (Taken by website that appears dead, so may be able to claim)
WikiSport.org

People interested

Supertrinko (talk)
Zblace (talk)

Discussion

Support

Support - As person who re-opened this. Supertrinko (talk) 03:43, 26 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support - Meet the people where they are.--Pharos (talk) 19:05, 19 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support - Could be good at least for storing results.--Zblace (talk) 19:08, 19 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support --Isaac Kanguya✌ (talk) 13:33, 17 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Neutral

Neutral - Fuzheado - I'm open to hearing about the possibilities of normalizing the data from multiple sources in this area, but I worry about long term maintainability. (talk) 19:05, 19 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Fuzheado: In terms of maintainability, I don't think it's a new issue. We already record a large amount of sports data and stats on Wikipedia. This proposes moving the data to WikiSports, making adding that data easier to add, edit, and making it a single source of truth, then Wikipedia or other sources can reference WikiSports. Just as on Wikipedia, large sports events will be meticulously detailed, medium sized tournaments might just have end result scores recorded, and maybe very small local tournaments will only have tournament winners recorded. That I think is acceptable. At any stage users can expand on areas of interest to them as is currently the case. The idea of WikiSports is to make that as easy as possible for them to do. Supertrinko (talk) 00:36, 7 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Supertrinko excellent points! --Zblace (talk) 07:56, 3 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

Oppose There are already sports articles on Wikipedia. Is this really necessary? If you believe that an almanack is really necessary, I have ideas for modifications.

- Expand the almanack. Sports isn't the only thing in this world. Also, in the main page of the extended version you can add sections where everything is. I'll give you an example, for illustration purposes.
- [list of years]
- (when any year clicked) Math/sciences, Literature, Arts/music, Sports (all pertaining to that year)
- (When math/science clicked) math, biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy
- (when literature clicked) [articles about fiction made that year]
- (when arts/music clicked) art, music
- (when sports clicked) contestant scandals, [list of sports]
- etc.Username142857 (talk) 10:49, 1 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Username142857 you wrote strong oppose (though arguments of existing articles can be used the other way around also, as this could be a way to balance better what goes where), but than you describe modification and alternative proposal which both sound like you are more neutral or regular oppose. I like the Almanack idea for sports, entertainment and many other industrialized fields that over dominate media due to strong commercial interest and PR push. --Zblace (talk) 07:54, 3 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed it! Username142857 (talk) 08:42, 3 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose For now, anyway. I feel like Wikidata could be utilised further to make this a reality within Wikipedia itself, if it expands far enough, then a dedicate site could be created for it.Jamzze (talk) 19:52, 27 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]