User talk:Krakatoa

I am the former Frederick R. I merged in my old talk page as Frederick R below.

Chess articles

Thanks for your fine work improving articles on chess topics. I'm amazed at how much they've improved in the last few months (particularly the articles on the openings), and I think they will continue to get a lot better. Quale 5 July 2005 02:05 (UTC)

Thanks from me too, your work on these articles is excellent. Sjakkalle (Check!) 6 July 2005 08:54 (UTC)

Napoleon Gambit

I saw you talk about the Napoleon Opening on Quale's talkpage. THe talk-system on Wikipedia allows easy eavesdropping ;-) Actually it was I who brought nominated that article for deletion (Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Napoleon Gambit). When I nominated it, the article was quite messed up. [1] It appeared that someone had got this mixed up with Fool's Mate and Napoleon Opening, only the title had anything to do with the variation of the Scotch Game (the redirect was made after this was pointed out). You are right that this variation is extremely obscure, and that there is no need to sacrifice a pawn since simply Qxd4 gives White a wonderful game. But the bar for notability of chess openings has been set low, the precedent is the Hippopotamus Defence being kept with a clear consensus. Sjakkalle (Check!) 6 July 2005 12:58 (UTC)

I would actually vote to keep "Hippopotamus Defense," which I think is in fairly common usage (for an obscure line -- although Spassky drew twice with it in one of his world championship matches with Petrosian). But I've never heard of the "Napoleon Opening" and "Napoleon Gambit" except here, so they would definitely get the ax if it were up to me. Frederick R 6 July 2005

Sjakkalle, I was inspired by your article on the Napoleon Opening to write one on the equally ridiculous Parham Attack (2.Qh5). Frederick R 6 July, 2005

Thanks for the Parham Attack article. I didn't know that opening had a name. Oddly, just yesterday I had read an article that Hikaru Nakamura had played it in a GM tournament, but it never occurred to me that it could be made into an article. It's remarkable what googling "2.Qh5" will find. Actually Bernard Parham is an interesting guy. Apparently he won the 1967 Indiana State Championship and has been a fixture of Indiana tournament chess for 30 years or more. He advocates his "Matrix System", which supposedly applies vector analysis and geometry to chess. That's the origin of the crazy early queen moves.

About the hippo: I don't think the wikipedia article describes what GMs call the hippopotamus defense. The wikipedia article is based on a website by Adam Bogon, which applies the name to a Black system featuring ...Nh6, ...g6, and then ...f6 (possibly ...f5) intending ...Nf7. IMO, idiotic. I think GM usage of the hippopotamus refers to a cramped defense that probably usually arises from an English opening. I think I've seen Karpov games with it (on both sides), and other GMs have used it although I don't think it's currently in fashion. If you can improve the Hippopotamus Defence article, that would be great. Quale 7 July 2005 00:15 (UTC)

At the same time you (Quale) were writing the above, I was writing this:

OK, I take back what I said about the Hippopotamus Defence. Wikipedia's definition is completely different from mine. I would vote to delete the goofiness in Wikipedia on the subject. I would define the Hippopotamus as an opening system where Black fianchettoes both bishops, plays e6 and d6, and puts the knights on d7 and e7. I think you're right that the term also refers to an English line. I will try to add something to the Hippopotamus article when I have a chance to do some research. Frederick R 6 July 2005

Thanks. One of the fun things about Wikipedia is that it turns out that you can make decent, and even interesting articles about seemingly trivial things like 2.Qh5?!. Of course I had no idea that you had actually met Bernard Parham. All I know about him is from www.chessdrum.com and I hadn't visited that site before today. I forgot to mention that the easy way to time stamp your comments is to use four tildes instead of three, so when I do ~~~~ I get this: Quale 7 July 2005 02:07 (UTC)

Ah, OK, thanks for the tip. I had read that someplace, then forgot it. Here, let's give it a try: Frederick R 7 July 2005 02:11 (UTC)

Notability and WP:VFD

Notability is a pretty controversial thing on WP:VFD. I would qualify as what many wikipedians would call a deletionist, since I think that editorial judgement and restraint as to what we choose not to give an article conveys important information that's lost when everything is included regardless of significance. Currently, inclusionists tend to get their way, in part because wikipedia has intentionally made it much easier to create articles than to delete them. I agree with this policy, but I don't agree that everyone and everything deserves an encyclopedia article. I admit that there are some advantages to a simple standard of "if it's verifiable and can be written in an WP:NPOV way, it can get an article". Unfortunately the encyclopedic notability standard I prefer is a lot more subjective, and since it must be applied case by case, it's more work, and people will disagree. Maybe subjective standards can't work in a world-wide collaborative community like wikipedia.

To be honest, I think most people who are truly notable don't care if they have an article in Wikipedia. They're too busy doing whatever interesting and important things they do that makes them notable to worry about vanity. The ones who want it the most are the ones who shouldn't get it. I figure that if the answer to the question, "Who would be hurt more if this bio article were deleted: wikipedia or the subject of the article?" is the subject would be hurt more, then the article is vanity and it should go. I think Wikipedia also has a problem with too much pseudoscience and crackpottery, and think that WP:NOR should be wielded like a giant hammer to crush that garbage. I also have a fairly low tolerance for fancruft. I enjoy a lot of fannish stuff in my real life, but I really don't think it belongs in WP. Of course I suppose some would consider my interest in chess trivia to be equivalent. Sjakkale (sorry, misspelled his user name and pointed to a Wikipedia:Doppelganger account) Sjakkalle is someone I respect who has a more liberal view of what should be included in Wikipedia (I'd say he's in the middle, not inclusionist or deletionist), and he's contributed a lot to the chess articles and has contributed to wikipedia for a lot longer than I have. Quale 7 July 2005 02:36 (UTC)

All of what you say sounds reasonable to me. I guess that means I fall in the deletionist camp too. Frederick R 7 July 2005 02:46 (UTC)

Polish Immortal

Thanks for adding the "Polish Immortal" to the Dutch article. I was thinking that maybe this game deserves its own article. If you look at Category:Chess games, we already have articles on a few famous chess games. (Also, regarding your user name change: I'm sure that sort of change is fine. Wikipedia used to move user names for people on request, but apparently it's technically difficult and that service has been suspended for quite a while and is unlikely to return anytime soon. I think you could change your old user and talk pages into redirects to the new pages if you want. Sjakkalle could advise as he is a very proficient wikipedian and an admin.) Quale 7 July 2005 21:15 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. I had had the same thought about the Polish Immortal when I tacked it onto the Dutch Defense article -- so I have now written an article about it. It's just a stub, but that's a start. I may add annotations (as you might imagine, it's annotated at various sites on the Internet) when I have some time. Krakatoa 8 July 2005 02:08 (UTC)

Very good. Because of WP:NOR, you will want to source provide a reference for any annotation or observation about the game that isn't obvious, even though you're probably a strong enough player to annotate it yourself. (I'm not a strong enough chess player to be tempted to do much original research--I just look up most of this stuff on the web or in books.) In addition to famous games, we also need more articles on famous chess tournaments. If you look at Category:Chess competitions, wikipedia has Hastings 1895 chess tournament but lacks New York 1924 and 1927 and a bunch of others.

I will try to write an article on New York 1924 when I get a chance. I like that tournament because old man Lasker scored 80%, winning IIRC 1.5 points ahead of Capablanca, who had crushed him 3 years earlier in their world championship match. Moscow 1935 was pretty cool, too. Lasker, age 67, was 1/2 point out of first, the only undefeated player, just behind co-winners Botvinnik and Flohr, and ahead of Capablanca, whom he crushed. I like Lasker better than Capablanca -- can you tell? Krakatoa 8 July 2005 20:21 (UTC)

I think the success that Lasker had and Korchnoi continues to have late in their careers is fascinating because it's so rare in chess. (Lasker and Korchnoi aren't directly comparable in all ways of course, since I think Lasker was World Champion around age 25 and Korchnoi didn't develop to World Championship strength until much later in his career. Korchnoi's gradual improvement into his 40s and 50s until he reached the World Championship level seems almost unique in chess.) Now that I'm on the other side of 40 I have more empathy than I would have 20 years ago. I think it's a shame that the current fashion for rapid play puts such a great premium on youth rather than experience.

Last week I was reading a few of Lasker's letters reproduced at chesscafe.com (they're halfway down the pages) and he certainly could be ornery. If you write about New York 1924 you might want to read what Lasker had to say about his experience when he explained why he didn't play in 1927--he wasn't happy at all. Still the life of a chess professional has always been hard, and I think it was even much tougher then. I think I can understand why he felt that tournament organizers showed favoritism toward a charismatic Cuban over him. Apparently Lasker thought that Capablanca had been rude to him during their negotiations for a championship match, and maybe the fact that Capablanca got some financial support from the Cuban government (I don't know if Capa actually worked as a diplomat) was irksome to Lasker too. Quale 9 July 2005 04:34 (UTC)

Openings

On to a different chess subject. The chess opening article is much improved over what it was a long time ago, but it still has some rough edges. In particular, the very beginning and the first section (Aims of the opening) need work. Those are the only parts of that article that haven't been rewritten in the last few months. (If you look at the article history and go back to say February of this year, you can see how far the chess opening article has come.) In particular, I really dislike this sentence in the intro: "There are a number of openings, some defensive, and some offensive; some are tactical, and some are strategic; some openings focus on the center, and others focus on the flanks; some approaches are direct, and others are indirect." It isn't false, but it doesn't sound encyclopedic. For the chess opening#Aims of the opening section it might be simplest to just paraphrase a list of classical opening principles given by Reinfeld or Fine and credit the original source, and this would also avoid the original research problem. We should mention that classical opening principles are frequently violated today, and current grandmasters have gone beyond even the territory staked out by the hypermodern school.

Finally the chess opening#Indian systems (1.d4 Nf6) section needs short descriptions of a few openings that I didn't write anything for, including Modern Benoni, Benko Gambit, Knight's Tango, and Bogo-Indian. I tried to describe each opening briefly in 1-4 sentences and keep the amount of discussion roughly proportional to the importance of the opening. Owen's Defense and St. George's Defense got only a single sentence together, and many of the irregular openings listed in the flank section don't get any discussion in the text at all. Looking at this again, the Semi-open section needs more, especially for the Sicilian, French, and Caro-Kann because they're a lot more important than is made apparent by the text of the article. Actually Open games needs work too, because the Ruy needs more discussion and the King's Gambit isn't mentioned in the text at all. Quale 8 July 2005 04:31 (UTC)

Yeah, I noticed that the opening article needed some work. I should be able to do some of that. How do I provide sources -- link to them in the article? Mention them in my description of the edit? Something else? Krakatoa 8 July 2005 05:35 (UTC)

Some people use refs right in the text footnote style, but in general I think this is unnecessarily picky for chess articles unless we need to provide a source for something controversial. Footnotes seem more useful for heavy philosophy and law, and maybe history and science. Also, I think it will be relatively unusual for a chess article to have more than about a half dozen references total, so it shouldn't be too hard for people to figure out. Generally I've just been putting the references I find most useful either in the "References section" or the "External links" section at the bottom of the article. There is a standard Book reference template that can be used in the references section. I find external links harder to deal with because there isn't a set standard way to format them. You can look at Wikipedia:Cite sources for the standard policy on this. It's linked near the bottom of the edit page whenever you do an edit. For the individual chess opening articles we could cite NCO, MCO and BCO for nearly every opening but I haven't been doing that. Usually one or two have more interesting things to say than the others, so I just list the ones that provided info used in the article. Naturally the chess opening article lists them all as references. The Oxford Companion to Chess comes up in a lot of chess articles because it has good historical info with bios and dates, and has a good reputation for scholarship. Quale 8 July 2005 14:11 (UTC)

Some technical notes

Hi Krakatoa! Sure, it's fine to make a new account as long as you openly declare it like you have done. It is when people create multiple accounts to vote multiple times that policy is breached (this practise is called "sockpuppetry"). Technically it is possible for the developers to merge the history from your old account to your new account, but since that is a time consuming process, that service has regretably been shut down.

I think redirects are what you were looking for. To make a page "point" to another you write:

#Redirect[[Target article]]

After merging two articles together, a redirect should be left behind and there should be no deletion. In part this is because the GFDL license requires the author(s) to be attributed and the easiest way is to preserve the page history in a redirect. Also, redundant redirects may be useless, but they are also quite cheap and harmless. Sjakkalle (Check!) 8 July 2005 08:06 (UTC)

Checkmate

I saw your good edits to checkmate. I don't like this sentence: "Traditionally, when checkmate occurs (or is thought to be inevitable) one lays one's king down on its side to indicate that the game has ended (by checkmate or resignation of the game)." For one thing, the word "checkmate" is used twice, and it seems to me that should be avoided. Secondly, I've never seen any knoledgable person tip their king in resignation AFTER they've been checkmated.

I don't think that you wrote the original sentence, but I think you would be a good one to revise it. Bubba73 00:17, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, Bubba73. I don't like that sentence, either. I am actually partly responsible for it -- I added the "by checkmate or" terminology at the end, since the way it was written it read that someone who was checkmated tipped over his king to indicate resignation. Huh? But as you suggest, the whole notion of tipping over one's king after being checkmated is weird: the game is over and the "checkmatee" need not (and in my experience does not) knock over the king to acknowledge that. I would accordingly have been inclined to take out any reference to tipping over one's king after resigning, except that the previous writer actually posted a photograph of a knocked-over checkmated king. I will try rewriting the sentence to say that one normally tips over one's king to indicate resignation, but that one can also do so if checkmated -- although it's really not necessary.

In my opinion, the whole "tipping over the king" discussion probably should be axed altogether, since it's not really directly related to checkmate. First, one does not normally tip over one's king to indicate that one is checkmated, but rather to resign. Second, one resigns when it is apparent that one has no chance of winning or drawing the game -- even though actual checkmate might be many moves away. Krakatoa 00:41, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Légal Trap

Thanks for spotting that we already had an article at Legall's Mate when I created a second article. It is merged now. The score between us now stands at 1-1. :-) Sjakkalle (Check!) 12:58, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Blackburne Shilling Gambit vs Giuoco Piano

It would be fine to say Italian Game instead. At first I didn't put Blackburne Shilling under anything at all, until I remembered that Burgess had called that trap the "Oh my god" trap in his Mammoth Book of Chess. In that book he puts it in the GP section, which is understandable even if not precise. I just followed his lead for convenience. Really all the lines after 3.Bc4 could be considered one opening, and the Evans Gambit, GP, and Two Knights could be considered variations. They're certainly more strongly related than all the lines after Black's second move in the QGD. Quale 19:05, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

Yes, that last is an interesting point. The different "flavors" of the QGD (2...c6, 2...e6, 2...Bf5, 2...Nc6, 2...c5, etc.) are radically different from one another. It's odd that they're all nominally one opening. I took your suggestion about Italian Game, writing a (very un-original) article about it, adding it to the Chess opening article, changing the terminology in the Giuoco Piano article, and recategorizing the Blackburne Shilling Gambit under "Italian Game" in the Category:chess traps article. Krakatoa 23:46, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

I just looked at the Mammoth Book of Chess again and found that I didn't even accurately report what Burgess wrote. He does define the Italian Game just as you did in the new article you wrote. (I think sometimes Italian Game is used only as a synonymn for Giuco Piano, but I think the definition you use is more useful and better.) In the book index, his "Oh my god!" trap shows up under Giuoco Piano, but when you turn to the referenced page you find that Burgess put it in the Italian Game section, just as you proposed. I had only looked in the index when I made my earlier statement. Interestingly Burgess didn't seem to know about the Blackburne Shilling Gambit name for the trap, but I didn't either until I read your excellent article. I also put something on the Hungarian Defense talk page about something I had put in the article originally that was probably just wrong. Take a look and see if you think we should fix up that article, since 5.c3 doesn't seem to be an especially good reply to 4...exd4. Quale 00:13, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

Nimzo-Indian

I agree 100% that the article should be Nimzo-Indian Defence, with a redirect from Nimzo-Indian. We have the same problem with the Bogo-Indian. Since articles already exist at the redirects and they have had edits, we can't do the move ourselves. Probably the best bet is to ask User:Sjakkalle to make the move, as he's an admin. He's also a chess player, so he'll understand why the full names are better. (I wrote Defence above instead of Defense since it looks like that article was originally created using British spelling. The wikipedia practice is to conform to the spelling that was used to create the article. If the article is about a clearly British subject, British spelling should be used, and the reverse if it's a U.S. subject.) Quale 01:20, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

Ah, OK, I didn't realize an admin had to do the moving. I figured it was just another thing that I didn't know how to do. I'd noticed some time ago that someone (maybe Sjakkalle, I dunno) had renamed the Lilienthal article "Andor Lilienthal" (it had been "Andre Lilienthal" or some such) and figured anyone who knew how to do it could rename an article. I'll suggest to Sjakkalle that he rename the Nimzo and Bogo articles. Thanks. Krakatoa 18:07, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

OK, I'll move them. Usually also non-administrators can move these articles using the "move"-tab. The primitive copy-paste moves should be avoided since they don't move the article's history. There are three restrictions on moves:

• Anonymous users (not logged in) cannot move.
• If an article already exists at the target, it cannot be moved there. (The article must first be deleted by an administraor to "make way")
  • Exception: If the only thing at the target is a redirect pointing back to what you are trying to move, and there is no further history, it can be moved there anyway.
• Anybody moving an article to "(article title) on Wheels" or "(article title) is Communism" will be in serious trouble... (For an explanation of this one see this page.)

I see that the redirect at Bogo-Indian Defence has a prior history so I'll need to delete that one first.

Incidentally, I'm not a particularily strong chess player, my national rating is at 1188, and after the last rated tournament I played, it's amazing that I still have rating points left... The contributions I have made to these articles is from knowledge gathered from various books and web-references which I've only been able to apply limitedly in actual games.

By the way thanks for your overhaul of the Ruy Lopez article, it looks much better now! Sjakkalle (Check!) 08:04, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for moving those articles, and for enlightening me on the "move" procedure. I agree that the Ruy Lopez article looks much better, but I'm not the party responsible for that. (I only made some pretty minor edits.) I believe (and my glance at the history appears to confirm) that Quale deserves the credit. Krakatoa 19:21, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Ugly chess diagrams

Do you have any ideas what to do about the ugly chess diagrams (Template:Chess diagram) that are being advocated? I don't want to start a war over this, but they're popping up in chess articles all over and I think they are distinctly worse than the diagrams they are replacing. I dislike the new diagrams for several reasons. Although the green and buff colors of the old diagrams are perhaps not ideal, I think the contrast of the brown on brown proposed replacement is too low. Standardizing the diagram sizes at fixed regular and small sizes is good, but I find the regular size smaller than I like. The coordinates around the board of the new diagrams are rendered as bitmaps rather than actual font characters and aren't very pretty. Coordinates on all 4 sides of the board are redundant when only 2 sides are needed and take extra space. Finally, the biggest complaint I have with the new diagram template is fortunately easily fixed: the use of multiple boxes around the board is ugly, and simply adds unnecessary visual clutter. Zero boxes is the correct number. Over use of boxes is a classic novice's mistake in typography. Unfortunately the low contrast and cluttered appearance were deliberate design decisions, so I fear that it may be difficult to change anyone's mind about these. Quale 22:41, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

I completely agree with you. As you evidently noticed, I reverted the "Blackburne Shilling Gambit" article when someone changed the green-and-white diagram to one of the crappy brown diagrams. I don't know what to do about it, though. I'm not familiar enough with Wikipedia to know how these sorts of issues are resolved. Krakatoa 22:53, 1 September 2005 (UTC)