QBWiki talk:Style Guide

Made this page to standardize some of the formatting things. In particular, I noticed that people are using different systems for "years active" in the infoboxes. I think it makes sense to have them span calendar years (and thus overlap when a player moves schools) - e.g. a high school player who matriculates in 2012 and immediately beings play at their college would have years that looked liked (x-2015) and (2015-y). -Kevin Wang (talk) 09:45, 4 July 2021 (CDT)

moved from the page itself into the discussion page

The "2016 means 2015-2016 academic year" convention was definitely a formal rule on the wiki at some point, though it appears not to have survived one of the site transitions. I'm not married to it and if the final decision is to go the other way, that's what I'll use, but the older way seems to make sense for a few reasons and I'd like to have at least some discussion before everyone starts changing things to the new format:

• Academic years are what we care about because that is what quizbowl, an activity dependent on high school and college enrollment, is based on. The fact that someone was in school and played in 2015-2016 is important for establishing that person's timeframe; whether they played any tournaments in the calendar months of fall 2015 specifically is not, and finding this information in order to report dates accurately may be difficult or impossible for some people whose years of participation are otherwise known.
  • In line with the above, reporting that, e.g., someone who played exclusively fall tournaments in the 2017-2018 academic year ended their career in "2017" creates an ambiguous situation as to which and how many academic years they played in, which again seems to be the thing we actually care about in recording these years at all.
• Other activities whose seasons span multiple calendar years use agreed-upon single-year conventions for simplicity's sake. For example, the NFL season that began in September 2019 and concluded with the Super Bowl in February 2020 is called the "2019 NFL season," and a player who retired in that year is said to have played "through 2019" even if they participated in games in January 2020. The team that is playing in the NBA Finals this week against Milwaukee is the "2021 Phoenix Suns" even though their regular season started in December 2020.
• Because this was a site convention in the past, many page titles and text references follow it already, most notably the various pages for things like "2019 Stanford" and most of the choices about which "players active in..." categories to use. It's more realistic to get people to use the existing plurality convention in the future than to expect anyone to actually go back and change thousands of references to the new style, and we should try to keep things consistent. Matt Weiner (talk) 12:06, 4 July 2021 (CDT)

I don't feel strongly about any of this, and I might not grok all the places it's relevant, but I think I like maximum explicitude, for example, "2004–2005 through 2007–2008" to indicate the years I was in high school. Regarding the naming of pages for team-years/program-years like "2019 Stanford", I think those pages usually focus on the results at national championships (which took place in the latter year), so those more or less work as-is. Jonah (talk) 18:26, 4 July 2021 (CDT)

I think there's always going to be some inexactness in date ranges rendered in shorthand. I think that the various "active" categories serve as a way to unambiguously designate which competition years a player was actually active for (and they should certainly be used) so I think this is ultimately just a question of which of inclusive or exclusive dating looks/feels nicer. -Kevin Wang (talk) 17:13, 6 July 2021 (CDT)