Talk:2023 Mid-Season Invitational

Reversion of edits

@Pbrks, Snowflake91, Yue, Rrrrr18, and EmeraldDG: Can there be some discussion and consensus regarding putting flags and the roster section in these League of Legends articles?

Flags

As user Rrrrr18 has mentioned, he believes there aren't any violation of MOS:FLAGS. I would argue that the repetition of flags violates MOS:FLAGCRUFT, as the flags are unnecessarily repetitive and can be seen as nationalistic.

Having flags in the bracket now emphasizes the point "Bilibili Gaming from China defeats Golden Guardians from the USA" rather than the neutral "esports team Bilibili Gaming defeats esports team Golden Guardians".

Point being, nationality shouldn't be a focal point in the results of the matches, esports events are a global competition, but not all the teams officially represent the countries involved (especially players in LCS teams), unlike countries participating in esports at the Asian Games.

The qualified teams section should have flags as a regional identifier, however it is pointless to continuously litter the article with flags that are visually distracting and removes any form of neutrality for the article. The readers aren't going to suddenly forget which region a team is from, and they can always go the mentioned section to notify them as such.

Fact of the matter is, the results should not contain any nationalistic bias and references. This has been implemented well for esports articles by user Dissident93 notably in Dota's The International, in CS:GO for the Majors articles and in Valorant for the esports events, so it should be strongly considered in order to promote consistency for esports articles in general.

I have gone through the pages stated. After going through MOS:FLAGS again and reading a number of different articles from different esports events, I believe that your points and suggestions are valid. I agree that flags to be removed except for qualified teams sections. Would like to hear from others too so that we could all maintain the consistency for all wiki pages for LoL events. Rrrrr18 (talk) 17:13, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

My only disagreement is that having flags for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place teams in the main infobox does not constitute flag cruft. Quoting from a comment I left for SpyroeBM in a different thread:

“ Per MOS:INFOBOXFLAG: 'Examples of acceptable exceptions include ... infoboxes for international competitions ...' ... Obviously the less detailed parts of the manual of style such as this excerpt can be interpreted differently from editor to editor. I would argue, as others have before me with similar articles on more well-known competitions (such as FIFA and the Olympics listed above), that there is utility in easily identifying where each competitor is from in an international competition, especially if it is not obvious from their name(s). ”

I disagree with the suggestion that readers who want to know where a competitor is from should just check the article, as there is no reason to make it more difficult to attain simple information. I do not believe having three or four flags in a significantly-sized infobox is distracting, and they should not be omitted since they convey information that many readers would like conveniently shown to them.

An example I have been thinking of is Ding Liren winning the World Chess Championship 2023. It might be obvious to many from his name that he's ethnically Chinese, and from the spelling that he's from China, but having that flag next to his name is not visually distracting and terribly violating MOS policies on flag cruft. Yue🌙 08:21, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

First point

Regarding Yue's first point about the 1st, 2nd, 3rd teams, this argument and any concerns are valid. For example the UEFA Champions League which is a global (not international like the FIFA World Cup) event has the winner and runner up with flags, but the stats (top goal scorer for example) with the player (Robert Lewandowski, who is Polish) with no flag, while the FIFA World Cup has teams and players with flags all around.

I suggest and believe that the League articles should stick to the UEFA Champions League style, as the flag next to a name enters a grey area regarding cruft, and like I mentioned in my talk page flags should not be there next to names as not all teams in these events have players with the same nationality (Korean players in a Chinese team for example), and as far as I am concerned, there isn't any value in highlighting the player's nationality as the team that they play for is next to their name, which would be more suitable to identify them rather than just blatantly highlight nationality without any good reason.

Second point

Regarding your example about the World Chess Championship and Ding Liren, the flags are there to highlight what chess federation the player is playing under, and that it is a internationally sanctioned "World Championship", hence why the flags are there. Nepomniachtchi played under the FIDE flag due to the banning of Russian and Belarusian flags, but he plays under the Russian Chess Federation as a Russian subject. A more dubious example being Levon Aronian and Richárd Rapport, who are born in Armenia and Hungary respectively, but play under the U.S. and Romanian chess federations respectively so therefore in chess events they play under those flags even though they may not have citizenship of the U.S. and Romania.

As the World Chess Championship is a sanctioned international event, this brings me to my point about the fact that the teams do not officially represent the countries involved (for example T1 is based in Korea, have Korean players, but are playing to represent T1, not Korea in an official capacity). Worlds and MSI are a different case to the League event in the Asian Games, as the former are just global events, while the latter is an officially sanctioned international event, hence why the flags are there.

Conclusion

Personally, the flags are fine except for the MVP, location and venue section of the infobox, but ideally a general consensus to keep all of the esport events to an agreed standard would be the right move. SpyroeBM (talk) 09:31, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

Rosters

This section in my opinion is completely pointless. There is no sourced material on paper that meets guidelines relating to Wikipedia-approved esports sources.

User Rrrrr18 has mentioned the sources from team pages and lolesports, however those sources are not time fixed to the event, as future roster moves after the 2023 season will change said sources, unlike the sources used in the rosters section for example on the 2022 League of Legends World Championship, which are Upcomer sources and are fixed to the time of the event.

If readers want to find out more about the players on the teams, they can go to their teams' respective Wikipedia pages (that not all teams in this article have just to clarify) and check out the roster sources there, however as there is no source of rosters relating to MSI 2023, this part is technically unsourced and not warranted to stay in the article, plain and simple. SpyroeBM (talk) 16:03, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

I have searched through different approved esports sources and found out that articles from reliable sources only include participating teams. The only source that listed the rosters was from one of the source that was stated unreliable. If this is the case, I agree to remove the roster section and only include them if there is reliable source present. Rrrrr18 (talk) 17:13, 4 May 2023 (UTC)