Talk:Lists of Olympic medalists

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[edit] Purpose of these pages?

What is the intention of these pages? There seems to be a lot of overlap between the type of content found on the "<sport> at the Olympics" pages and the "Olympic medalists in <sport>" pages. I suggest that we make the changes to redirect/merge this content into the "<sport> at the Olympics" set of pages, which are going to be much more accessible as they are usually wikilinked from more locations. Andrwsc 17:25, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

Object. I think, that "<sport> at the Olympics" should be an overview article, and such long lists will be extremely irrelevant there. E.g. can you imagine such an article to become featured article one day? :) The purpose of these articles is similar to the one of many other lists - to have all medallists in some sport listed in one place. If some of them are referenced from a few places, then we should go and reference them from more. Cmapm 17:55, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, I created/updated several Olympic sport pages that don't seem to be too long: Luge at the Winter Olympics, Short track speed skating at the Winter Olympics, Water Polo at the Summer Olympics, Softball at the Summer Olympics, Field hockey at the Summer Olympics, etc. Adding "Olympic medalists in luge" etc. would be extremely redundant, IMO. I think perhaps sports like Athletics, Swimming and Gymnastics could be problematic, however, so I can see the need for sub-pages linked from "Athletics at the Summer Olympics" etc. I just want to make sure that the "<sport> at the Olympics" pages are the main location of this content, and we don't duplicate content needlessly. This category (Lists of Olympic medalists) seems to be a parallel method of navigating through Olympic sports, and I found it confusing and redundant.

I agree that the "<sport> at the Olympics" page is intended to be the overview article, which is why I did not list all the team members for team sport pages. I think it is natural to click on the specific year (e.g. Water polo at the 2004 Summer Olympics) to get the complete roster of each medal winning team.

With respect to links, my comment was intended to refer to tables where the country, year, or sport name links to the appropriate "xxxx at the Olympics" page, such as what I've done in the pages mentioned above. I think the only place we can add a second link (to the "Olympic medalists in <sport>" page) would be in the "See also" section or in the prose of the article text, and therefore, it's going to be a bit "lost". Andrwsc 18:33, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

Ok, it may be obvious now, since I have been doing some massive editing of these pages in the past few weeks, but I get it now... We'll use the "Olympic medalists in sport" pages to provide the detailed list of all athlete names. The "Sport at the Olympics" pages will be used to summarize the sport across all Games, such as showing lists of participating nations, lists of events and medal tables. That organization works well, I think. Plus, several other editors have picked up the action and the "Olympic medalists in sport" pages are collectively in pretty good shape now! Still lots of work, but there is lots done. Andrwsc 07:00, 25 August 2006 (UTC)