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The result of the move request was: Page not moved because no consensus reached (due to confusion over the correct year span format to use in this and related articles). Re-opening discussion on project page prior to new RM. ( non-admin closure) Rodney Baggins ( talk) 23:03, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
– To match renaming of snooker season articles, with same reasoning. See Talk:2019–20 snooker season#Requested move 3 January 2020. Rodney Baggins ( talk) 14:01, 15 January 2020 (UTC) —Relisting. Steel1943 ( talk) 19:44, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
To start off the looking, I see that WST.tv (ex-WorldSnooker.com) predominantly uses YYYY/YYYY or, more often, "news expedient" YYYY/YY abbreviations, and seems to largely reserve YYYY–YYYY or YYYY–YY format for television match-airing schedules, as in the prominent "Click here for the 2019-20 calendar" links (though like most news-style publishers they pretend that en dashes do not exist and use hyphens not en dashes in such constructions, and use em dashes for other uses of dash, such as parenthetical and set-off clauses—like this). WP isn't going to care at all that they mis-use hyphens or abbreviate dates when inclarity might result; we can do better. But the preference for YYYY/[YY]YY in reference to snooker seasons in particular seems strong in snooker-focued material. I don't know if it's mirrored across the majority of snooker coverage, though, and aim to find out as I write this post [which took a couple of hours, though about half of that was Internet-connection downtime and calls to the ISP, argh!). BBC News [7] and The Guardian seem to prefer YYYY–[YY]YY, mostly short-form YYYY-YY [8] (again with the damned hyphen). The latter newspaper sometimes veers into the hyper-compressed YYYY-Y format [9], yet sometimes they also go the other direction and use full YYYY-YYYY style [10], albeit rarely. The public version of The Guardian and Observer style guide [ sic] doesn't actually address date ranges at all [11]. The BBC Academy style guide [again with the weird mixed case] at "Numbers" says: "When writing about any sporting season, or tax or financial years etc, our preferred style is 2010-11." (with annoying hyphen again) [12]. Assuming that their pedagogical "Academy" material for communications students matches what their staff actually does on the job, BBC (like The Guardian) would appear not to care whether there's a particular convention in a specific sport or other context, nor whether what is meant is a two-year 2019–2020 range (which is what that format tends to imply) versus a single-year 2019/2020 boundary-crossing range (or whether all readers already know one way or the other for the case in question), nor that "2001-02" is obviously ambiguous with a YYYY-MM date in many contexts. So, it's data, but I'm not sure how dispositive it is. In particular, the instruction to use YYYY-YY even in reference to fiscal years defies most other style guides that aren't news style. Curiously, The Economist Style Guide [written by people who know how to capitalize titles of works] also goes for YYYY-YY (at least as of 2015) [13], which seems like an especially poor choice for a finance-oriented publication, though it does not specifically mention doing this to fiscal-year data. I'm not sure they ever cover snooker anyway.
I predict [and will below add links showing what I find, as I find it] a fairly clean split between general news sources and snooker-specific ones, since the news sources do not appear to entertain the idea that two styles of date-range expression (for different purposes) even exist. And they're riddled with style oddities that are either endemic to British and sometimes broader Commonwealth news-style writing (e.g. dropping of full points after non-contraction abbreviations, which is contraindicated by non-news British style guides like New Hart's Rules and Fowler's Modern English), or are simply idiosyncratic house-style vagaries like "Dates that require AD or BC should be set as one unhyphenated word (76AD, 55BC), with the letters in small capitals after the number", which is different from what academic and other non-news-style guides want to see, in one to two different ways – spacing for sure, and the small-caps thing is only favored by a few of them). Anyway, The Independent also uses YYYY-[YY]YY style (usually abbreviated and with a hyphen, as we'd expect for the genre) [14]. However, even some general news sites use YYYY/[YY]YY formats for snooker seasons, including The Metro [15] and News Now [16].On the snooker-specific side, the organizations that actually define these seasons, WST/World Snooker [17], [18], WPBSA [19], and WWS [20] all rather consistently use YYYY/[YY]YY format (as shown on those links to their own websites and by what's aggregated from their feeds by Pro Snooker Blog, the editor of which also uses that format in his own material, including via @ProSnookerBlog on Twitter [21], though you have to load several screenfuls to find results with year-range strings). WST/World Snooker in particular sometimes uses full YYYY/YYYY format, even in tabular data [22]. SnookerHQ [23] use YYYY/[YY]YY formats. Inside Snooker mostly uses style [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], but not with 100% consistency [29]. Same goes for Snooker Hub [30], [31], [32], [33] (versus some YYYY-[YY]YY instances [34], and even at least two weird cases of the aberrant YYYY – [YY]YY [35], with an en dash but a needlessly spaced one); that seems to be a content aggregator with multiple sources, so many not have its own house style. Snooker Canada uses YYYY/[YY]YY [36]. I can't check EuroSport because of this nonsense, without using a VPN. IBSF amateur snooker uses seasons that don't cross a year boundary, so they just use YYYY [37] [38]. Snooker Central uses [YY]YY/[YY]YY [39] (including sometimes the extra-lazy YY/YY variant, which is rare [40], since it looks a lot like DD/MM, especially common in the US, or MM/DD which may be more common in Canada, etc.). Grove Leisure's GroveSnooker uses YYYY/[YY]YY frequently and consistently (e.g. [41]). Snookerbacker uses YYYY/[YY]YY including the long form [42], and the short form in tabular data [43]. I found one case of YYYY/Y at Pro Snooker Blog, which seems simply to be a typo since the rest of the material by the editor uses YYYY/YY. Snooker USA is the only snooker-centric site I can find taht consistently prefers YYYY-[YY]YY [44], but what they write generally appears to be following AP Stylebook, the overwhelmingly dominant style guide for American journalism (and widely divergent from other US style guides like Chicago Manual of Style), and American snooker isn't the same game, nor does the competition system related in any way to the originally British and now world-rules game, so it may be off-topic. Firmly on-topic, Snooker.org uses full YYYY/YYYY ranges consistently [45].
Splitting the differences, there are some sites that are sports journalism broadly, neither general news nor snooker-specific. SportsMole inconsistently uses YYYY/[YY]YYYY in a snooker article [46] but YYYY-[YY]YYYY in some other contexts like football/soccer [47]. I didn't find any snooker-specific hits with season year ranges at Eurosport [48], though I didn't drill down into all the article-body content (the site blocks US visitors, so I would need to use a VPN to get into it).
In conclusion, there really does seem to be a pretty consistent convention to use the / format in snooker-specific material, it's just ignored by various everyday, broad news sites because they insist on - across all topics and usage, as their house style, regardless of any clarity consequences it can have. To get at these results above, I used built-in search functions at the sites in question when they produced useful results without grueling effort, and otherwise used Google Advanced Search narrowed to specific domains. I avoided cherry-picking (even accidentally) to the extent possible, and have annotated above when I found inconsistencies. If the RS review had suggested that snooker material had largely abandoned the / approach in the intervening years since we last looked, I wouldn't argue against dropping it here too (despite it being a less ambiguous format for year-boundary-crossing single-year seasons). There is a general MoS principle to use a specific style (even if not MoS's default or the most logically sensible) for a particular thing if that style is overwhelmingly dominant in RS for that specific subject. And for WP:CONSISTENT purposes, we try to be consistent for "like" cases within a category first and foremost, rather than try to make everything consistent across categories if it contradicts all the sources (and thus reader expectations). Here, I think YYYY/YYYY format is what to use for snooker seasons (at least the pro ones), with the /, and with full four-digit years in all cases so that we don't have YYYY/YYYY in some titles and YYYY/YY in others in the same category.The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
I'd like to suggest merging the two articles for the ranking points. The
Snooker world ranking points 2019/2020 article doesn't cover anything that we can't also include in this article. Best Wishes,
Lee Vilenski (
talk •
contribs) 07:40, 3 August 2021 (UTC)
The new article looks very clunky and some of the tables are unsortable. Been going through the ranking articles year by year and this one looks very strange. I can't make much sense of it (20 October 2021) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.198.7.9 ( talk) 18:11, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
@ Lee Vilenski: What are your intentions towards other articles in this series? I appreciate the merits of your argument that given the overlap in content there is a strong argument for merging these articles, but it still seems slightly weird to have a single-article gap in an established series. At the same time I appreciate that the workload has a prohibitive effect on merging all of the articles, which would be the preferred solution. However, an elegant compromise would be a "reverse fork" i.e. merge 2020/21, 2021/22 and then just create a single article for all subsequent seasons? The standalone "points" series would come to an organic conclusion. Betty Logan ( talk) 13:27, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Snooker world rankings 2021/2022 which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. — RMCD bot 13:37, 7 June 2022 (UTC)