Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports)

RfC about the meaning "major international competition"

Should the events names as "European championship" and "World Championship" be considered "major" for the purpose of WP:BASICSPORT? --Altenmann >talk 16:10, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

• No. It depends on the particular sport and the level of WP:SIGCOV that the winners receive. Before saying "yes", we would need to see concrete evidence that such winners almost always receive SIGCOV. Cbl62 (talk) 17:15, 13 February 2026 (UTC)
  • OK. Tighthening the question : limit to sports that have Olympic recognition? --Altenmann >talk 20:24, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

    I would say a presumption of notability could be afforded to "Championships organised/sanctioned by Federations that have Olympic recognition". In the case of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gohar Harutyunyan, which seems to have triggered this, we're talking about ISSF World Championships, which as Olympic-quota-awarding events are self-evidently notable (and also receive enough SIGCOV to prove it). Of course, such World Championships also include non-Olympic disciplines, but they are typically either Olympic-adjacent or former-Olympic disciplines. There may also be cases (e.g. in Fencing) where the global federation cycles different disciplines through the Olympic Games, giving them each a turn in the limelight, so at any given time, a discipline may not be an "Olympic discipline" for that specific cycle, so we need to be careful about saying "Is it Olympic"? Well, over what timescale? Not this time, but it was last time.", etc.

    It's a very fair point, because in the shooting sports in particular we have seen commercial events (mostly in the USA) which confidently proclaim that they will crown "the undisputed champion of the world", to which the rest of the world snorts and says "we would dispute that". Obviously the USA has an interesting relationship with the concept of "World Series" and we're right to be cautious of whether a World Championship is credible and of a high standard. In the case of the ISSF, we can say it does meet that standard - they have a small pool of high-standard disciplines. This is quite different to (say) the NRA of America organising a "World Championship" of State Champions in the US or something. Hemmers (talk) 12:38, 14 February 2026 (UTC)

• No per Cbl62. TheClocksAlwaysTurn (The Clockworks) (contribs) 17:37, 13 February 2026 (UTC)
• No, of course not. The most obscure games and competitions hold "world championships," and we don't give presumptive notability pass to quadball players, thumb wrestlers or flickerball teams. The whole point of NSPORTS is to identify criteria that if met, is a strong indicator that the subjects meet the GNG. It is not to provide loopholes through which athletes who manifestly don't meet the GNG can slide all the same. Ravenswing 20:02, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

Discussion

• I started this RfC after looking at the course of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gohar Harutyunyan. I made the following comment there: {"I am not a fan of Armenian shooters. However this AfD is a precedent for handling of other similar shooter bios, such as Anja Senti, Gilles Dufaux, Kateryna Samohina, Valentyna Honcharova, and many more. If this page is deleted then a list of similar shooters must be compiled to be considered for deletion, in the way I remember a huge number of cricketeers were deleted." --Altenmann >talk 16:10, 13 February 2026 (UTC)
• If we can't consider world championships as a major international competition at the highest level, then why do we have that quote to begin with? BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:12, 13 February 2026 (UTC)
  • Cbl62 makes a good point that this depends on particular sport, i.e., the sport itself must be reazonably recognized. I believe we had the same issue with numerous beauty pageants, of "Miss The Whole Wide World" ilk. --Altenmann >talk 20:24, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

OK. I went ahead and {{prod}}ded Arusyak Grigoryan, Anja Senti, Sarina Hitz, Lilit Mkrtchyan, Valentyna Honcharova, Silvia Guignard, Gilles Dufaux, and see what will happen. If you feel this is a right way to go, you may {{prod2}} them. --Altenmann >talk 21:05, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

RfC: Shooting Sports

There has been some discussion of notable target/sport shooters of late, and what is/isn't a major competition (per the nutshell). The target shooting sports are a highly diverse church and it is possible to attend a "World Championship" almost every week, half of which take the "World Series" definition of "World", or are of a highly niche nature or local/indifferent standard. Some of these (particularly in the USA) may gain SIGCOV independently anyway. But where there is doubt, it seems sensible to lay out some guidelines for what Championships are likely to be notable/have some genuine level of recognition, or confer notability on an athlete - even if you need to dig for sources in German and using non-latin alphabets to do so (since the target sports have an especially substantial following in Germany/Austria/Switzerland, China and Eastern Europe). This list is pretty conservative, taking its cues from existing entries under "Professional sports people". I'm sure it has the potential to upset lots of people through omission of their Very Important^TM favoured event, but as a first pass tries to work down from the Olympics/Paralympics and avoid controversy.

---

Significant coverage is likely to exist for a sport shooter if they:

• Have had a podium finish at an ISSF or WSPS World Championship, World Cup or Grand Prix.
• Have had a podium finish at a Continental Championship or Games sanctioned by the ISSF or WSPS (i.e. where a World Record can be set), e.g. Asian Games, European Shooting Championships, Pan-American Games.
• Have had a podium finish at the Commonwealth Games or Commonwealth Shooting Federation Championships.
• Have had a podium finish at an ISMC/CISM World Games or World Shooting Championships.

---

Hemmers (talk) 10:05, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

You missed Olympics/Paralympics from your list. Of course, to reach olympics one must jump thru larger hoops, but the refs in the article may miss them. --Altenmann >talk 17:33, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

No I didn't. They were deliberately omitted as WP:NOLYMPICS covers them explicitly. As I said, I followed existing guidelines such as WP:NBAD, WP:NCURLING, WP:NCYCLING, WP:NSKATE, etc which all omit the Olympics. That's why I started at ISSF/WSPS - since they manage the Olympic/Paralympic disciplines and organise/sanction qualifying events. Hemmers (talk) 12:08, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

@Hemmers: is this a formal or informal RFC? In the first case you need some formal steps, per WP:RFC. --Altenmann >talk 17:35, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

Well informal I guess. It seemed more polite than just WP:BOLDly adding in a (likely uncontroversial) set of events, informed by existing criteria. Hemmers (talk) 12:09, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

Discussion

• We would need objective evidence that such athletes almost universally receive SIGCOV in multiple, reliable, independent sources. Without such evidence, most editors (myself included) would not suport such an SNG. Cbl62 (talk) 17:39, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

  +1. Nor would I. Ravenswing 09:17, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

• Honestly, attempting to add criteria to NSPORT is a waste of time – it will never get approved. If you don't show ridiculously extensive evidence that every single person passing it meets GNG, it'll get opposed on that basis. If you do show ridiculously extensive evidence (as was done for the NBA) that every single person passing it meets GNG, it'll get opposed because "we already have GNG". NSPORT is worthless and should arguably be deprecated. And it's not like someone meeting it means anything. In, e.g., MMA, if an article fails NMMA but arguably meets GNG, the argument is "delete because fails NMMA". Meanwhile, if the subject meets NMMA but fails GNG, the argument is, "delete because fails GNG; meeting NMMA is entirely irrelevant". We've deleted articles that pass WP:NTRACK frequently and even have deleted Olympic medalists before, even when no searches for sources were performed. BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:48, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

  Honestly, we should just delete everything on this page except the YOUNGATH and NTEAM sections. All we need is a line that says sportspeople have to meet GNG. NSPORTS has been in a skeletonized state of randomness ever since NSPORTS2022 depreciated the participation criteria. No one cites this page at AfD anymore except when they're trying to impose stricter standards than GNG ("fails NMMA"). My proposal to eliminate NMMA got archived without action, of course. At least the baseball "likely to be notable if they are Hall of Famers" thing was finally removed. This whole page is misleading at best. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 18:04, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

  And people still citing NMMA like it's gospel: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Imanol Rodríguez. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 15:19, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

  I've been advocating ditching NSPORT in favor of the GNG for a couple of years now. (Come to that, I've advocated ditching all the SNGs on similar grounds, including oft-abused ones like PROF and NGEO.) Ravenswing 09:21, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

  (Come to that, I've advocated ditching all the SNGs on similar grounds, including oft-abused ones like PROF and NGEO.)

  I'd throw NPOL, particular WP:NSUBPOL into that list. Thousands of two-line articles about someone who was elected to represent a tiny state district, did 2 years in the State Congress, did nothing of note other than turning up and voting how their party told them to, and then left, with their Resume duly padded with "served as State Representative". Most of those articles are just a rehashing databases like ballotopedia and votesmart. There's a real lack of consistency across WP about what is notable and what's not. Hemmers (talk) 12:40, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

  Honestly, attempting to add criteria to NSPORT is a waste of time – it will never get approved.

  Yeah, I'm getting that impression, which is a shame as it seems to be running counter to WP:Globalize and entrenches systemic bias. For instance, many of the most notable target shooters are of Chinese and Eastern European origin, but Anglophone editors are bad at finding non-Latin sources in Chinese Script, Kanji, Cyrillic or Arabic, which is what will predominate outside the Olympics. Heck, there was an AfD on Anja Senti and that's only a matter of finding German sources. Took someone participating in WP:SWITZERLAND to come in and trivially say "Hey guys, there's tons of coverage at Tages-Anzeiger and Berner Zeitung". It's one of those perverse outcomes where we look at GNG and say "Yep, makes total sense" (which it does. I don't disagree with GNG in principle), but then an overbearing interpretation of that means we end up deleting articles about people who are objectively notable (based on relatively reliable but not RELIABLE sources like IOC or ISSF Competition results), but where there are limited English-language references, and the native-language sources are more difficult to parse than French (which seems ot be a lot of people's limits for non-English sources). I would hazard that Encyclopaedia Britannica are quite happy to say "If the ISSF say this person is World Champion, then that's probably true. We don't need the NYT to tell us that too". It feels like we're lacking the nuance to find a sensible path between "Must be reported in anglosphere news" and "Stuff in everything including the "Egg-Rolling World Championship that I started last week". I mean, the standards I'm seeing demanded to write about athletes would actually support the deletion of articles like Premier League records and statistics, which is entirely built on database and WP:ROUTINE match results. There's a distinct double standards/popularity contest going on. Hemmers (talk) 12:28, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

• It occurs to me that a considerabe issue is the meaning of WP:SIGCOV. Most of medal winning spersmen do not have active public life beyond sport. Dull people, I must say. Still, dismissing their gold medals in significant events just because they do not have their sex life or parents discussed seems a bit disingenuous to me. If a person is redlinked in two dozen Wikipedia article, I guess they surely worth two dozen lines of bio. Here is what I wrote a minute ago in one AfD: Here is the complete SIGCOV rule: "Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material. Nowhere it says that the coverage must be 7 feet long, only "more than a trivial mention". detail about person's medals and how they were qualified for them IMO is hardly a "trivial mention". --Altenmann >talk 19:51, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

Nobody in the history of Wikipedia has to my knowledge ever argued that we need coverage of sex life or hair color. Nor does the coverage need to be book length but it needs to have substantive depth. Coverage of athletic accomplishments is fine so long as there is substantive depth rather than a mere recital of results. This is the rule that the community adopted with strong consensus in 2022 and by which we, as sports editors (myself included), need to abide. Cbl62 (talk) 00:21, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

""Substantial depth" is your overstrictification. The rule say about "Significant coverage", which "is more than a trivial mention". Gold medas is not "trivial mention". --Altenmann >talk 07:28, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

The words "gold medal" are not some arcane incantation that magically transmutes a single sentence into "significant coverage" ... especially when the footnoted example given in WP:SIGCOV explicitly sets out that a single sentence does not qualify. Ravenswing 09:25, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

"It occurs to me that a considerabe issue is the meaning of WP:SIGCOV. Most of medal winning spersmen do not have active public life beyond sport. Dull people, I must say. Still, dismissing their gold medals in significant events"

This is the crux of it. When it comes down to it, almost all sports coverage is - to a greater or lesser degree - WP:ROUTINE. 99% of the coverage for the Winter Olympics is pre-planned reporting of the winners and results. The only stuff that deviates from ROUTINE are doping scandals and coverage of people talking about how sorry they are for cheating on their girlfriend. They might wrap it up in a lot of fluff, but it's basically just a wordy version of a results table. So where do we draw the line? People would get really pissed if I started marking Premier League records and statistics, Premier League Player of the Season or List of NBA rookie single-season scoring leaders for AfD. But these are all lifted from database sites or else from ROUTINE coverage (e.g. a newspaper article reporting match results, and also noting it's a record). By the standards being applied to some athlete articles, these do not meet GNG. Worse yet, some of those articles probably constitute WP:ORIGINALRESEARCH. But we've given them a pass for <reasons>.

Despite having edited WP for 15 years, NSPORTS2022 passed me by. I don't necessarily disagree with the arguments put, although if people were shoehorning in athletes who had not in fact won a major honour, then they didn't meet the presumption of notability anyway and needed to hit GNG. It's becoming clear that the outcome and the way the outcome is being implemented via AfD is strongly biased towards US/Anglophone editors and has the (unintentional) systemic effect of excluding athletes from smaller countries or lesser-reported Olympic sports (if you win a medal the same day as the Men's 100metre final... you will not be on the front pages tomorrow. The sprinters get the front page. All Olympic events are equal... but some are more equal than others). An American wins a World Championships and you'll be able to find reporting in newspapers on both coasts. It'll be trivial to find articles in LATimes, NYTimes, and USAToday. Someone from a country of 3 million wins a World Championship and people are saying "Oh, well, the reporting isn't SIGCOV. Their national papers have a smaller circulation than the papers in my local metro. They can't be that notable.". It's an appalling double standard.

I have not read every argument made in NSPORT2022 because that would take too many hours, but the two proposals which got consensus, whilst removing participation-based notability, also don't amount to "delete all the things". They were basically designed to avoid arguments about whether a State HS football tournament amounted to a "major honor" and whether every 16year old on the winning team is now notable (short-answer: no). We've replaced those arguments with different arguments and lawyering over what constitutes SIGCOV. The fact this is bleeding over into "This World Champion in an Olympic sport who is named in a dozen other WP articles isn't notable because the Armenian press is a bit thin and Հայոց գրեր is hard to search in Google" is a slap in the face to everyone trying to progress WP:Globalize and related projects like WP:Womeninred. Especially when other areas of WP are carrying on with garbage like WP:NSUBPOL, which shoehorns in thousands of non-notable state politicians whose reference section amount to an election results article and a link to VoteSmart. (Yes yes, WP:WHATABOUT. Well Yeah. What about...?. I make no apology for grousing about double standards being embedded in our policy and guidelines!) Hemmers (talk) 13:53, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

I agree that it's a slap in the face to anyone who hates that WP:V and WP:N are core policies of the encyclopedia, yes. The fact on the ground, though, is that they are. However aggrieved you are at the arguments against notability in the Harutyunyan AfD, the counter to that isn't that people weren't able to find media citations in the Armenian press. It's that people have thrown up a half dozen cites repeating no more than the same sentence or two. (Seriously, if the fellow's own national press doesn't give enough of a damn about him to provide SIGCOV, how exactly is this the fault of the Anglosphere press?)

With that, if you're groused about NPOL, its talk page is over thataway. As with NSPORTS2022, decisions are made by those who show up. Ravenswing 16:14, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

• We should be moving away from SNG (like we did with WP:NFOOTBALL being abolished)... GiantSnowman 12:20, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
• My general perspective is that the SNGs help with determining who (and equally importantly who should not) have a stand alone page. I believe the SNGs serve as proxy for who should be included in this project. Without NSPORT, I fear Wikipedia ceases to be an encyclopedia of notable figures and becomes a more akin to a directory of professional athletes, with the only bar being whether a writer decides to add a few paragraphs of biographical color in a story rather than if there is significant coverage of the athlete's accomplishments and legacy (WP:ANYBIO). And, since notability is not temporary, abandoning the SNG could lead to the creation of stand-alone pages of people without significant accomplishment (youth or second-tier athletes) who may receive coverage within a single season, but are otherwise low-profile for the rest of their lives. --Enos733 (talk) 18:35, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

  Before 2022, NSPORT had exactly been responsible for Wikipedia being a directory of professional athletes. The oft-cited fact was that at one point, one in seven of all biographical articles were of soccer players alone. Now yes, there's a danger of second-tier athletes who got coverage for a single season alone having articles. But isn't that true of any field of endeavor? A general famous for one major battle alone. An author who had one major bestseller. An otherwise unremarkable politician who'd never make NPOL who was assassinated, and therefore had a great deal of coverage. Ravenswing 22:05, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

  I don't disagree, but there was a floor of what I describe "real-world notability." Making it to a top-tier professional league is a globally notable feat, and for many of the most popular (western) sports, there is sufficient coverage of those athletes. The challenges, as I saw them, were 1) this assumption of significant coverage does not extend to all sports and even across top-tier leagues equally (especially in non-western countries) and there were disagreements on what a top-tier league was. 2) We had some editors who were intent on rapidly creating articles based on statistical databases without any other significant coverage.

  So, the community rightly rebelled against the "did one thing for a day" floor as equating to notability. However, in my mind, we (unwisely) do not have any real-world guidance for when a subject should have a stand-alone article for athletes. Now I know some editors prefer to just base everything against GNG, but I think it is more helpful to editors for us to articulate when we generally might have stand-alone pages and when a subject might have "coverage" but probably doesn't need a stand-alone page that exists into perpetuity (see how we treat youth athletes) (see also WP:LOWPROFILE). - Enos733 (talk) 00:07, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

  Making it to a top-tier professional league is a globally notable feat Nope. Being a starter in a skill position for one of the big-name leagues -- the top four North American pro leagues, one of the top half dozen European soccer leagues -- that's truly noteworthy. But there are any number of benchwarmers in the Moldovan Liga or the Nationale 1 Masculin or the KBL that no one's heard of outside their own fanbases, if that. The judgment calls in these sports were made by a very narrow number of editors, most of whom pumped up their own sports and declared ever-increasing number of criteria to be presumptively notable.

  Heck, take NHOCKEY for example. It was altered some over the years, but it was my draft that was initially accepted, right after NATHLETE devolved to the individual Wikiprojects. That made my personal opinion the fundamental decision maker for notability for literally thousands of biographical articles. Now I think I did a good job, but neither you nor anyone else should be trusting my naked word as to my qualifications to make that decision ... and I hate to think how many SNGs around Wikipedia similarly stemmed from one or two energetic people.

  That's the bottom line here: that in the absence of doing colossal work to determine whether a certain (subjective) percentage of meeting the criteria actually meets the GNG -- work just about no one is prepared to do -- it's just going to be spitballing, and it's going to be subjectively set mostly by people with partisan blades to sharpen, and likely by the loudest voices in the room. NSPORTS2022 was a massive wakeup call: that the community decided, with a good deal of justification, that editors from the sports Wikiprojects can't be trusted to make those calls in isolation. Ravenswing 07:51, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

  I don't want to massively overhaul the community's decision that participation does not equate to a stand-alone page. What I do advocate for is that we should develop something more akin to an essay - providing guidance to editors about when we do (and when we do not) expect stand-alone articles. I really don't want to be in a position to evaluate the merits of thousands of minor league baseball players or EFL League One players, or (insert league here), because they happened to have some coverage of their exploits as a youth or collegiate athlete and a few paragraphs of biographical material as a professional. - Enos733 (talk) 21:19, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

Purpose of NSPORT

Serious question. What is the purpose of this page in the post-NSPORT2022 landscape? Nothing gets kept at AfD based on criteria listed here. Likewise, nothing gets deleted based off of anything here either. I'd simplify this guideline by just saying all sportspeople have to pass GNG. Although I'd keep the YOUNGATH part and some of the stuff in the organizations section. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 21:25, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

I've always thought it odd that soccer was singled out, and other sports get a 'pass' here... GiantSnowman 21:34, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

At least baseball was finally put out of its misery. After NSPORT2022, the only thing left at NBASEBALL was "likely to be notable if they have been inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum." Gee, you think? ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 21:42, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

I agree with you, and have felt for years now that the GNG should be the sole determinant. But the issue's been debated several times over, and there's yet to be anywhere near close to a consensus to deprecate NSPORTS. Ravenswing 21:50, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

It basically already is depreciated. Nothing listed here ever affects anything at AfD. Every AfD is just people debating whether the subject passes GNG or not. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 21:55, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

If you find an athlete without an article that you believe meets any of the NSPORT criteria, you are encouraged to create that article, including all required sourcing to support the NSPORT criteria, so that it can grow with the assumption it can eventually approach the GNG expectations for significant coverage. For example, the standard catchall for NSPORT, played in a professional sport with at least one source showing significant coverage, is good if you come across an article about that athlete, and you build out the article with that source, but no others (outside sport statistics). If someone tries to AFD it, first they better should through a thorough BEFORE search that no other sources exist, or otherwise that's a bad faith nomination; But assume they fail to find sources, we should still generally allow NSPORT to be respected the first time at AFD, because it can take time to find additional sourcing. Subsequent AFD attempts should be handled less favorable to keeping if no further sourcing is found. Masem (t) 22:53, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

That's not how it works in practice. It is rarely possible to prove that the nominator did or did not do "a thorough BEFORE search" (I've seen times when editors have made ridiculous quantities of sports AFDs that were accepted because they just stated "before was performed", when there was zero evidence of it and they refused to give any further details), particularly when the subjects are from pre-internet, non-English countries, and we even delete articles that pass NSPORT when they have one piece of SIGCOV (but not two) – see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Adam Cooper (soccer) for the first example that came to mind. I don't think I can come up with a single post-2022 AFD where we decided to keep because "NSPORT [should] be respected the first time at AFD" when GNG sources were not found. And even if that was the case, the nominator would simply wait a brief time and then nominate it for deletion again because then NSPORT would suddenly become worthless because the subject is AFDed a second time. BeanieFan11 (talk) 00:33, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

If no one at the AFD goes "how thoroughly did you do BEFORE?" or ask "This person predated the Internet, did you search offline print sources?" or put forth other similar questions, then the admin is going to have to look at the arguments that presented. Admins are not going to beg the question of a BEFORE, that needs to be done by the !voters.

When I say "the first time", that usually means that the page creator or other !voters insist other sources exist, the article currently meets NSPORT, and the BEFORE didn't do a good enough job to capture that. That should be fine to keep, but that does mean that if AFD does come up again and no one has worked any bit to prove there are other sources, that likely means the presumption of notability failed and deletion is reasonable. But that should not mean that the person that nominated it for AFD can go "oh, its been a week, time to nominate again." There needs to be a reasonable period of good faith to let the article creators and editors find sources, so a rapid AFD is not appropriate at all and should be mentioned in the !keep. But if an article was nominated 5 years and no further sourcing has been found in that time, that's more than enough time for good faith to progress to AFD. Masem (t) 03:28, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

When I say "the first time", that usually means that the page creator or other !voters insist other sources exist, the article currently meets NSPORT, and the BEFORE didn't do a good enough job to capture that – how would one prove "the BEFORE didn't do a good enough job to capture that" in such a circumstance? BeanieFan11 (talk) 04:09, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

If we are talking any athlete pre-2000 and no attempt at a print source search was made, that's a quick proof. other situations are more complicated but generally as you move away from more recent athletes or those outside the US or UK, you cannot just rely on a web search and more likely need access to local sources. Masem (t) 15:18, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

So, for example, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Katsunori Iketani (where an editor falsely made the baffling claim to have searched every offline source in existence, but obviously did not), Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Vladimir Kryukov (rower), Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Abdulieh Janneh, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Masini Situ-Kumbanga (2nd nomination), Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jamal Abdi Hassan, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kouami N'Dri, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Henri Ndinga, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Chen Zhehan, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hussain Ali Nasayyif, among many many other times where pre-2000 athletes meeting NSPORT were deleted with zero effort to search local sources? BeanieFan11 (talk) 18:23, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

I'm checking those and expressing concerns of the nominator's BEFORE work is not discussed in most. Its up to those wanting to keep it to ask and point out if the BEFORE work is not sufficient, but at the same time, even if you say "please keep, we'll need to search offline sources for this", and no one that wants to keep it actually does that over the next few years, you don't get to argue that again. SNGs are presumptions of notability to allow standalone articles to be created that they could be fleshed out more, but when this is pointed out and no one makes any steps to do that, its a good reason that the good faith presumption has been broken. Masem (t) 20:33, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Its up to those wanting to keep it to ask and point out if the BEFORE work is not sufficient – And if I had asked in those AFDs if offline sources were searched and received the obvious answer of no, would that somehow have magically changed the outcome to keep? even if you say "please keep, we'll need to search offline sources for this", and no one that wants to keep it actually does that over the next few years, you don't get to argue that again – none of the linked discussions were cases where that happened. BeanieFan11 (talk) 21:43, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Agreed. My instinct to anyone who comes out with a "Keep: we need to search for sources" is to reply "Great, you have seven days before the AfD closes. Feel free to do so." In the 168 hours from start to finish on an AfD, if someone can't spare an hour to find sources, they can hardly claim to care all that much. Ravenswing 21:51, 27 April 2026 (UTC)

The subject of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Marianne Van Brussel passed NOLY but got redirected anyway just yesterday. The closer specifically discounted the NSPORT arguments. Every single thing on this page is just leftover stuff from the pre-NSPORT2022 days. No one ever did any research to see that this achievement-based criteria had enough SIGCOV either. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 05:25, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

A perennial question e.g. Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports)/Archive 58 § Why no mention of football (soccer), american football? Some have seemed to find small pockets of usefulness. —Bagumba (talk) 01:52, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Can you cite me one AfD where someone actually used NSPORT to sway the decision one way or the other? Every AfD is just people debating whether someone passes GNG. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 05:27, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Whenever I see someone saying 'meets NFOOTBALL' in a soccer AFD, me or somebody else says 'NFOOTBALL doesn't exist' and that's the end of it. GiantSnowman 07:47, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

In that link I provided above, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kyle Hill was mentioned. —Bagumba (talk) 20:40, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

That probably would have been kept with GNG anyway. It definitely wouldn't have been deleted. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 21:57, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

WP:YOUNGATH (as in [] and []) and WP:SPORTSEVENT (as in []) are most definitely still useful for ensuring that we don't have mass articles on junior athletes or mundane games. I agree that the rest of NSPORTS should go. Let'srun (talk) 20:59, 27 April 2026 (UTC)

I forgot WP:SPORTSBASIC, that is also fairly useful in terms of preventing new articles sourced to databases. Let'srun (talk) 21:07, 27 April 2026 (UTC)

The pre 2022 standard was effectively "did it for a living for one day" and most felt that that was too lenient (for an alternate to GNG). Once that was gone there wasn't a workable criteria left or created in place of it. My guess is that folks would be open to or even welcome development of criteria that are more discerning than the pre 2022 criteria to make nsport usable. North8000 (talk) 13:29, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

One challenge in subsequent attempts is sort of considering this to be "this is what you need in order for it to have an article" standard vs. what it actually is which is "this is what you need to bypass GNG". This makes folks too hesitant to set a higher bar in the SNG. So ideas which set a higher bar don't get support from folks who lean inclusionist during drafting, and if the latter have their way you'd end up with something which wouldn't adopted. North8000 (talk) 13:37, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

• I tend to believe that a purpose of an SNG is to set floors of what is acceptable (this means placing a higher floor than GNG). In NSPORT, we have provisions about youth and amateur sportspeople, we have higher expectations about individual games than GNG. To me, this guidance is helpful to editors, and I think we can find a way to rewrite NSPORT that makes sense (post NSPORT2022). --Enos733 (talk) 15:09, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

My guess is that folks would be open to or even welcome development of criteria that are more discerning than the pre 2022 criteria to make nsport usable: I disagree. Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports)/Archive 53 § Proposed amendment to basketball guideline demonstrated that anyone who has played 1 game in the NBA had an existing article that included reliable, significant, independent coverage that satisfied GNG. Yet some opposers blindly rejected it because some blokes might then re-create SNGs incorrectly claiming their neighbourhood footballers and cricketers are notable too for appearing in one match. Still others claimed that proving that 100% of NBA players were notable only showed that it was "easy" to source without needing an SNG. Invest time drafting new sports SNGs at your risk. —Bagumba (talk) 21:26, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Notability for "nation at the Olympics"-type articles?

See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Sports#Notability for "nation at the (year) Olympics"-type articles? ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 14:16, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

Remain supplementing only GNG?

Didn't wanna continue further at but rather see quick closure or archiving of that discussion at WP:VPP about (IMO) a well-intended but troubling proposal. Enough about that...

As I see, WP:NSPORTS is a GNG-only supplemental guideline, isn't it? And shall it remain that way without broadly supplementing other parts of WP:notability, like WP:NLIST, and/or WP:SAL and/or the WP:NOTSTATS policy? George Ho (talk) 05:34, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

I would support re-designating it as an explanatory essay, much like Wikipedia:Notability (academic journals) or Wikipedia:Notability (weather). They do not supplant GNG, but offer additional protection from deletion for likely notable topics, which is basically modern NSPORTS. NSPORTS now only serves to confuse newcomers. Ca ^{talk to me!} 08:25, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

The proposal to demote it into an essay met a huge opposition nine years ago (discussion link). Wondering whether the consensus will consider taking the "essay" status idea seriously, especially after talks about amending the whole guideline. George Ho (talk) 14:14, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for linking to the previous discussion. Since the last discussion, I believe I have some novel arguments in favor for re-designation as follows:

a) NSPORTS is in tatters. Since 2017, Guidance on on very common sports like baseball and football has been removed by consensus and never been replaced .

b) Re-designation as an essay would reduce the rigor of consensus needed to add new guidance, especially on football and baseball.

c) Culturally, NSPORTS's biting power has weakened since 2017. Ca ^{talk to me!} 14:25, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

Regarding point (a)... and (b), in case NSPORTS shall remain its "guideline" status still, with all due respect, the 2017 revision lacked rules about those in orienteering and was less detailed about those in motorsports.

Also, the five sports from the 2017 revision—what could've been essays WP:notability (baseball), WP:notability (gridiron football), WP:notability (association football), WP:notability (Australian rules football), and WP:notability (rugby) —I'm beginning to think that you've been disappointed in NSPORTS's (current lack) coverage of popular team sports, haven't you? Indeed, the five sports that I originally wanted to write individual essays about are team sports. I'm perhaps self-tempted into creating WP:notability (team sports) as an essay and WP:notability (individual sports) as either an essay or a redirect to WP:NSPORTS. (Meanwhile, I may create the previously-intended five that I struck down as redirects to the "team sports" one.)

Speaking of individual sports, how NSPORTS's biting power has culturally "weakened" may be... subjective. Indeed, the criteria on individual sports have held up, surprisingly. George Ho (talk) 00:02, 9 May 2026 (UTC)

There's already an active topic about this above. Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports)#Purpose of NSPORT. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 14:28, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

I'm unsure how "active" that thread is right now. The last comment made at that "active" thread was eleven days ago. Unsure whether I want to make it re-active. I'll rather await the thread to be bot-archived ten or eleven days later then. George Ho (talk) 23:34, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for mentioning that other thread, nonetheless. George Ho (talk) 00:03, 9 May 2026 (UTC)