Talk:List of chess grandmasters/Archive 1

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United Kingdom

Jacques Mieses is listed as being from the United Kingdom, but others are listed as being from England, Scotland, etc., not sure if there's a reason for this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 38.100.17.149 (talk) 14:59, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Dates receiving title

It would be great to include the date the player received the GM title, but this might be too hard to get for many players. Jeremy Gaige's Chess Personalia should have the dates for most GMs who earned their titles before 1987, but that leaves a 20 year gap. I'm sure FIDE has this information, but I don't know how to get it from them. Quale (talk) 09:46, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

  • The Bill Wall reference contains about 50% of these dates (year only). Chessgames.com also has a lot of them. I didn't include them in this initial list as it was enough work already (wrote a program to merge the three lists from the reference and filter out the doubles). Perhaps we should first try to fill in the missing dob (dates like 1975.0.0). Shouldn't be too hard for most of them. Voorlandt (talk) 09:59, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
    • Come to think of it, I really should have included them. But we can create an extra column and fill them in gradually I guess. Voorlandt (talk) 10:02, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
      • I am again impressed that you took on this task, since I know it's a lot of work. We can certainly add them later, and I agree that birth and death dates are more important and can be done first. When I wrote "dates" I was really thinking "years" anyway, as the precise dates titles were earned are far too hard to figure out. There's also the problem that there are two possible interpretations of the title date. Officially they were issued only at the annual FIDE Congress, so everyone got them at the same time each year. (I think now FIDE makes the awards several times a year. Grandmaster doesn't talk about this specifically, but it should if we can find references.) Often, however, the precise day that the final norm or rating requirement is met is considered the date the title was earned, even though the actual award might not be for some months. (I know I'm not telling you anything you don't already know (probably better than I do), but it might help someone else looking at this discussion.) The very large table on the page takes a while to load, but the cool sortable columns feature lets us do fun things like sort by country or by date of death, to see who is deceased and who is still alive. (I see that Maroczy got his title just in time.) Because these sorts are supposed to be stable, when we have the GM years we will be able to do neat things like sort by the GM year column first and then country column. This will group by countries and sort the players by year they earned the title within each country. Quale (talk) 10:24, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
        • The loading is indeed slow. So slow that the sorting by country currently doesn't work. Perhaps because the server is too busy? As the templates take so long to load, what do you think about removing the country templates, and just having the country name instead? I am sure it will load much faster then. Voorlandt (talk) 21:05, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
          • I thought about suggesting that, and I think trying without the country flags would be good. I don't know how much of a difference it will make, but it's worth trying. Quale (talk) 21:16, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
            • Ok I have removed the templates and saved, and then reverted. I think without it is a little faster, but it doesn't look so nice. Could you give the fast version a try? I am curious to hear what you think. Voorlandt (talk) 22:53, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
              • I actually meant removing the flag images also. They're colorful and I like them, but it adds about 1000 images to the page and might slow the browser table rendering down. Quale (talk) 07:01, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
                • Yes, that's what I tried, the test edit is saved as [1] It doesn't have the flags. (I reverted it until there some consensus whether it is better or not).Voorlandt (talk) 08:05, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
                  • Sorry, I misunderstood. I see now. I'm not sure how much faster it is without the flags. Maybe the size of the table will always be an issue. I suppose we might be able to put a csv file on wikisource and link to it. If set up properly, that can automatically open a spreadsheet when it is downloaded and performance then shouldn't be a problem. Quale (talk) 08:41, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
  • (outdent) Which title year should we use for http://www.fide.com/news.asp?id=1554? It's called the First Quarter FIDE Presidential Board 2008 but they met 21-22 Dec 2007 and the list was posted 24 Dec 2007. Fortunately for us there were only 3 GM titles granted Quale (talk) 20:11, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
    • BLR Maiorov, Nikita
    • RUS Askarov, Marat
    • RUS Bryzgalin, Kirill
      • I thought about these a little and decided that 2007 is probably more appropriate. Clearly they had met the title requirements in 2007. Quale (talk) 15:25, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
  • Another note, Xu Yuhua won the Womens' World Championship in 2006, which I think means her title date should be 2006. This page says the FIDE President registered the title in 2007. Quale (talk) 20:43, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Kazakhstan entries

Excellent list; I've already had fun sorting by country. I did however notice that there is a Bolat Asanov and a Bolat Assanov. FIDE has only an Assanov, but if one entry is erroneous, then I don't know which has the correct d-o-b? Most likely you have the answer. Brittle heaven (talk) 19:19, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Not sure what happened but Bolat Assanov had the same dob as Gerardo Barbero, so probably a copy and paste mistake when I was going through the doubles. Thanks for spotting this. Do keep checking, as I am sure there are more mistakes. What would be nice is also to get the countries right, currently, most are taken from FIDE, but it would nice to have either multiple countries in case of transfers or just the country of birth. Voorlandt (talk) 19:41, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

FIDE rating cards

We might also want to add a column for a link to the players' FIDE rating cards. This could be especially helpful for the redlinks. It will be very tedious to populate, but the links can be added incrementally—no need to do all the work at once. Quale (talk) 22:17, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Number

This may seem a silly question but is there an easy way of working out how many names are on the list? Also there's a note saying the list is incomplete; what kind of GMs are most likely to be missing? Pawnkingthree (talk) 14:00, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

It appears there is currently 1249 on this list(copy & paste to excel and count). A check on FIDE's website suggests a similar number. ChessCreator (talk) 14:29, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
I extracted the list from the three sources listed in the article. FIDE's advanced search gives 1129 grandmasters, but only displays the first 500 or so, so I extracted them in different rating classes 2600-2800, 2500-2600, etc... Odly enough, the result adds up to 1120. Which is the same number when you filter for GM's with rating 1500-3000. The problem is that some GM's currently don't have a rating as their federation forgot to pay their fees for instance (eg Chile). So potentially 9 GM's are missing from FIDE. (although Chile which has 3 GM's is complete, so say max 6 missing).
FIDE only has data available of living GM's, the deceased players were taken from the two other links. Potentially some of them are missing (but the list of them does not increase as long as we update from FIDE). I am quite confident we have most of the deceased grandmasters now, but one can never be sure! In the future, this list can be updated using the approved titles link on fide (eg [2] ).
When I put the template of incomplete list, I was primarily thinking of dates of birth and death and title approved. Currently there are 3 GM's without a birth year! (just click sort on birthdate to see them). Other GM's have the dob/dod year, but month and day are missing. It is easy to look for these GM's in the list by searching with your internet browser for .0.0 . On the dob/dod years, a lot of them can be found in chessgames and especially bidmonfa. The title-approved-year can often be found in chessgames, the Bill Wall website and on wikipedia (en.wikipedia but also de.wikipedia). There is a lot of work left, but many hands make hard work light! Voorlandt (talk) 19:43, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Fide's list includes David Bronstein who died in 2006, there maybe others.
The sort thing that you refer to doesn't show on the Firefox browser.ChessCreator (talk) 19:58, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Yeah FIDE is a bit sloppy, but that doesn't matter really, as we want all of them anyway! It does work on Firefox, I don't use anything else than firefox. Do other sortable tables work on your computer (eg Indian Chess Championship)?
Resolved, it didn't work, but I see the issue now, it's javascript. ChessCreator (talk) 20:06, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Just to alert those talking numbers - I removed Tamaz Georgadze (mirror of Tamaz Giorgadze), so there is now one less on the list. Brittle heaven (talk) 07:53, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Country Flag

What's this suppose to show? Place of birth, country they got GM title, nationality? Susan Polgar is shown as Hungarian, which is where she was born but she is USA GM now and FIDE has her as USA. ChessCreator (talk) 20:10, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

  • Great question. I think we don't know. We have to figure out exactly how we want to handle this. My suggestion is that ideally we'd have first the country in which they earned the title, followed by any other countries that they later had any significant chess career in. Notice that this means that Fischer doesn't get an Icelandic flag. What do you think? Quale (talk) 20:42, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Also, a lot of GMs were born in the former Yugoslovia and got their GM title when there still was a Yugoslovia. But these are listed by the individual countries now. Is that how we want to do it? Bubba73 (talk), 21:25, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
Can we be clear what the country means and make it clear on the article what the country means. Someone just changed 'Igor Ivanov from USSR to Canada (he defected in 1980)', yet my understanding is the country it the nationality of birth hence Susan Polgar is shown as  Hungary and not  United States. ChessCreator (talk) 23:24, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
Anyone. ChessCreator (talk) 01:02, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
If we leave it as just one country per entry, that's going to lead to endless arguments as to which is "correct". I don't think it is all country of birthplace at the moment; the very first entry has Jacob Aagaard as Scottish. There doesn't seem to be any consistency. But if we start adding extra countries, that's going to alter the look of the table and could lead to unnecessary complexity. It's a tough one. Pawnkingthree (talk) 11:30, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
It's definitely not birth, because that wouldn't make any sense. If Irina Krush ever earns a GM title (looks pretty unlikely these days, but hypothetically), it would be beyond bizarre to list only Ukraine because she was born there. Reasonable ways to do it would be nationality when the GM title was earned, or nationality covering the bulk or end of the player's career. There's no reason why the country of birth couldn't be included as well as long as one or more countries determined by more sensible criteria are also listed. Right now we have Jacques Mieses listed as Germany, which is reasonable, although technically I think he had British citizenship when he was awarded the title. I'd say it should simply be nationality when the GM title is earned, plus possibly any subsequent nationalities during the player's active career. It would take some work to sort this out. Quale (talk) 19:26, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Vladimir Antoshin

Kazic has him down as 1963 for his GM title; someone has already entered 1964. Not a big difference, but worth noting here in case there is another source that can be consulted. Brittle heaven (talk) 20:25, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

chessgames.com and Bill Wall both have 1964. The latter says he was awarded IM in 1963. Voorlandt (talk) 21:23, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Hmm, a bit split this one - Golombek and Sunnucks both say 1964, Hooper & Whyld and Kazic, 1963. Probably best left alone for now. Brittle heaven (talk) 23:15, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
I might be the one who put in 1964 when I was going through the A's. Jeremy Gaige says 1964 with the IM title in 1963. Remember however that Gaige isn't inerrant, and not all of these sources are independent. Several sources saying the same thing might simply be copying each other. Quale (talk) 23:53, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Antoshin was awarded the title at FIDE Congress 1964 in Tel Aviv. SteMicha (talk) 20:40, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Mijo Udovcic

Another one in dispute - the current text says 1957, Kazic says 1962. Brittle heaven (talk) 21:04, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

This was probably one of my edits, took the date from chessgames [3]. However, Bill Wall, the german wikipedia and russian wikipedia agree with 1962 [4] and [5]. So feel free to change it, while you are doing these great additions! Voorlandt (talk) 21:21, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Yes, Golombek says IM title in '57, so this is probably where the confusion lies. Thanks. Brittle heaven (talk) 23:09, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Gaige agrees: IM in 1957, GM in 1962. Quale (talk) 23:55, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Also Whyld, Chess, The Records (1986), has IM 1957, GM 1952—an obvious typo. Quale (talk) 00:00, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Dates from FIDE

First kudos to Quale for adding all this data from fide. The fide site is such a mess! How hard can it be to have a simple list of GM's and dates approved on their website. Anyhow, I had a look with google and the history of the page and this is what we have for now:

Please add to this list if you find other pages. This list should then go in the references (but in a better format). I don't dare to do edits to the article now, as Quale is on a terrific role! How many times per year are titles awarded? There is also this [6]. I am not really understanding how they work, would be nice if someone could clear this out. Voorlandt (talk) 21:26, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

  • Calling FIDE's site a mess is being far too kind to it. I noted that in a report/minutes from one of the Congresses that the Qualification Committee chair asked for a ratings history database so that they could study issues like rating inflation. It seems they record their data on punched cards and do their computations on abacuses. (Just kidding about the punched cards and abacuses. I hope.) I'm done with editing for a while (off to a birthday dinner), so anyone who wants a crack at this article for a while can have it. I probably should have used Template:inuse on the article. This is exactly the type of article that is really annoying to get an edit conflict on, and sections can't help us. Quale (talk) 21:53, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
  • FIDE site is like a test of your ability to find something.
Have just added 'Xu, Yuhua' whom I found became a GM in 2007 by some strange way. Here is the info. http://fide.com/official/regbypresident.phtml ChessCreator (talk) 00:43, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, I had posted a question about this a little earlier near the end of #Dates receiving title. I'm not sure if 2007 or 2006 is the right date, since she won the Women's World Championship in 2006. Quale (talk) 15:27, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
  • The FIDE announcements that Voorlandt found are done, with the exception of one in 2005 that might not indicate actually titles as noted above. It seems to me that we might be short some announcements for 2005. If so, maybe they will turn up. Quale (talk) 16:30, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
I now added the above references to the article and compared them to the list in [7]. It seems that for 2002-2007 we are missing: 1st quarter Presidential Board, 2002; 1st quarter Presidential Board, 2005; 2nd quarter Presidential Board, 2005. It seems that some years had 4 quarters (meetings), others three. Voorlandt (talk) 20:41, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

GM Titles for Westerinen and Christiansen when?

Golombek suggests (the wording isn't clear) Westerinen 1965 and Christiansen 1977 and these dates are currently entered in the list. However, other sources suggest Westerinen 1975 (Whyld, Brace) and Christiansen 1981 (Whyld). I think the latter dates are probably correct, but do we have a consensus? Brittle heaven (talk) 01:29, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

  • Gaige says Westerinen 1975 (not even an IM in 1965, IM date is 1967) and Christiansen 1977. In fact I was probably the one who put 1977 in for Christiansen as a day or so ago I went through A,B, and C in Gaige and made as many updates as I could find. Quale (talk) 02:46, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
  • olimpbase.org also has some information that might help, although it probably draws from one of the sources we have already consulted. Westerinen shows no title at the 1966 Olympiad, IM at the 1968 through 1974 Olympiads, and a GM at the 1976 Olympiad. Christiansen shows GM at his first Olympiad in 1980, and in fact also GM at the 1978 World Youth U-26 Team Ch. Quale (talk) 04:23, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
The Oxford Companion gives 1977 for Christiansen. No entry for Westerinen unfortunately. Pawnkingthree (talk) 19:49, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

The FIDE site rules :)

Well, at least there is something on the site that can help us finding the dob of the more recent GM's. It is this link [8], then you can click on a certain meeting, giving a link such as [9], and then one can click on a player, such as [10], and finally, you can click on the title application, which usually contains the full dob, such as in [11]. Voorlandt (talk) 19:50, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

  • I was going to mention the title application stuff but you beat me to it. The title applications are great. Not only do we get date of birth, but also birth city. (Gaige used title applications as a source for Chess Personalia even though they weren't on the web in 1986.) Now if only FIDE would tell us if and when the applications were granted.... Quale (talk) 20:05, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
  • One can look for a specific player on that subpage using google with site extension, for instance: "Buhmann Rainer site:www.fide.com/titles/apps.asp", gives you only hits within these title application site. Should speed up searching a bit. Now if I only had a bit more time on my hands.. :) Voorlandt (talk) 20:24, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Fide file download

FIDE file, assisted with Excel. If this is useful, let me know will then do 'I' thru 'Z'.

There are a few GM with very long names(over about 25 characters?), in some cases that can prevent them being listed at all as a GM. Not sure what 'i' can means in final column, but the column is BORN flag. ChessCreator (talk) 22:59, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

"i" means "inactive". --MrsHudson (talk) 16:15, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
Quale has earlier suggested that we should add a link to the FIDE site. So perhaps we can add an extra column with the links above. Since both lists are in alphabetical order it should be doable (if we all help). But perhaps we can wait to see what others think. Can you tell us where you found this list on fide? Voorlandt (talk) 18:20, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
You can find on fide.com in menu, Rating, Download, then what is currently the top option
'Download full list of players (not rated included)(TXT) (Updated: 15 Mar 2008, Size: 3 141 338 bytes).' It's a zip file and contains about 100,000 players. ChessCreator (talk) 00:46, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

GM date for Alexei Shirov

What is the correct date that Alexei Shirov received the GM title? The table in this article says 1990, but his biography says 1992. Quale (talk) 00:03, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

This says 1990. Another source 1992, although it looks like it originated from wiki. ChessCreator (talk) 00:20, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, that's a good find. I hoped that someone had a copy of Fire on Board. I found an image of the back cover which clearly says 1990. I'll change the date on his bio page. Quale (talk) 04:31, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

GM title date for Vladimir Malaniuk

The table on this page says 1988, but our Vladimir Malaniuk page says 1987. Maybe this is a difference between the year the title results were earned and the year that FIDE made the title award? Quale (talk)

Jonathan Penrose

Penrose was just removed from this article, saying that he is a GMC. However, chessgames.com claims he is an Emeritus GM [12]. See also [13]. I looked for the year title, but was not able to find it. Voorlandt (talk) 07:53, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Penrose was appointed HGM (Honorary GM) in 1993. Later, around 2003, FIDE abolished this title, so HGMs now are marked as normal GMs. SteMicha (talk) 09:14, 2 October 2011 (UTC)
Thanks. We had had 1998 as the title year in this list for some reason. Jonathan Penrose isn't up to date with this information yet, so I should fix that too. Quale (talk) 16:13, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

Aron Nimzowitsch

Is Nimzowitsch a GM? Seems there was a 1929 essay by Nimzowitsch called 'How I became a Grandmaster' which somewhat implies he was. However the Aron Nimzowitsch article does NOT say he was. Which leave things unclear.
'A.N.’s least known work is the relatively short essay “How I became a Grandmaster”, which appeared in Russian in 1929.' ChessCreator (talk) 20:23, 21 March 2008 (UTC) Niemzowitsch was using the term in the informal sense which prevailed until 1950. Had the formal title existed at the time, he would certainly have been an automatic recipient. MaxBrowne (talk) 06:11, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Lars Karlsson

I'm guessing not Lars Karlsson the handball player. ChessCreator (talk) 01:36, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

|Lars Karlsson (chess player) added. ChessCreator (talk) 01:40, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Titles vs Year, a graph

This is a graph made from the info in this article. We are pretty complete 1950-1960 and 2002,2003,2004,2006,2007. Quite a few are possible missing from 1965-1970, 1981,2000,2001 and 2005. Anyway, this graph isn't looking good, without too much effort it follows an exponential curve! I think once finished, this graph could be nice addition the GM article, or would that qualify as OR? Voorlandt (talk) 17:14, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

That's a great graph, and I think that even addition of missing years (we are actually complete 1950–1968 since Sunnucks has a complete list of awards by year) won't change the overall shape. Unfortunately the graph confirms our worst fears—FIDE has been minting new GMs by the truckload since 2000. I don't know if using it in an article would constitute WP:OR. It is based directly on verifiable data which should be OK, but any interpretation of what it means (including the exponential fit I suppose) needs a WP:RS source. It is nice to know that barring misfortune I should live to see FIDE award more than one GM title a day in 20 or 30 years. The number of new GMs from 2007 is just stunning. Quale (talk) 06:54, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the comments. 2007 was an exceptional year, also due to the apparent large amount of players who where awarded the gm title conditionally in preceding years. I also should have mentioned that I didn't include 1914 and 1950 in the graph, in order not to ruin the fit. Did you check 1950–1968 from Sunnucks? From the history it seems nobody entered them explicitly. About 300 players are missing a title year now. I am confident we can find the title year for the majority of them. Do you know of any other written sources with list of title years? One possible source might be the FIDE rating lists, eg from [14]:
(Inserted here out of date sequence as a direct reply to a question): I did check against Sunnucks, and you had already entered the title years for all GMs from 1950–1968. All the entries agreed; I found no discrepancies. I probably should have said something here on Talk, because with no changes there was no edit summary to indicate I had done the check. Something I should have done but will do now is check the other way—I went through Sunnucks' list by year and checked the entries against your table, I should also have sorted the GM list by title year and checked against Sunnucks to make sure we don't have any extras. ... Just did this, we are complete with no extras through 1968. As for other sources, Gaige's Chess Personalia should be nearly complete for GMs earning titles on or before 1986. I've gone through A-G adding title years from Gaige. I will pick up at H and try to get the rest. This will leave our toughest gap from 1986–2001 where we don't have any complete sources at all. Ulimately we should probably bite the bullet and just contact FIDE to see if they can help. Quale (talk) 17:51, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
Grechihin's record for becoming a grandmaster turns out to be 60. Johan Hut found that he was an IM on FIDE's rating list of 1 January 1998, and a GM on the list for 1 July 1998.
So having the FIDE rating lists (say top 1000) from the different years would be a great help. Does anyone know if and where they are available? Voorlandt (talk) 08:09, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
According to the Olimpbase editor (see current homepage intro), benoni.de provides ratings back to 1990, although I havn't tried to use it myself - [15] Brittle heaven (talk) 14:24, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
I don't think that the basic graph is OR since the data comes from reliable sources. It just presents that data in a different format. The extrapolation to exponential growth probably is OR, unless someone has stated that somewhere. Bubba73 (talk), 16:22, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
I agree on the OR interpretation of Quale and Bubba, but we should only post the graph if we have an (almost) complete list of title years. benoni.de does provide rating data, but it doesn't list the title next to each rating. So I don't think it is useful here. A similar site, is http://chess.vrsac.com/ , it has very good dob info and rating graphs also back to 1990. Voorlandt (talk) 17:06, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
Nice graph and hope that a variation of it can be used in some way. Just showing Gm titles by year would be good information. ChessCreator (talk) 21:06, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
GM titles per year

I uploaded this graph, showing the number of approved grandmaster titles per year. It is based on the complete grandmaster list in the german wikipedia. Maybe you want to use it in the article. Greez SteMicha (talk) 21:28, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

The German list has title years that don't agree with our sources. Our sources indicate that Furman was the sole member of the GM class of 1966. For example, the German list has Lubomir Kavalek as a member of the class of 1966 as well, but FIDE and Anne Sunnucks and Jeremy Gaige all say his GM title was awarded in 1965. Vladimir Liberzon and Wolfgang Pietzsch are dead so they can't be found on the FIDE site, but both Sunnucks and Gaige have them as part of the ten-member class of 1965. It's possible that this is a difference in the year that the title requirements were met compared to the date of the FIDE Congress that confirmed the awards. Quale (talk) 05:29, 2 October 2011 (UTC)
I have opened a new section regarding the 1966 awardings at Talk:Grandmaster (chess). But besides that, do you agree with the graph? SteMicha (talk) 16:30, 2 October 2011 (UTC)
I didn't look at the whole thing. There are probably errors in the title years in List of chess grandmasters too, and there are 65 or more GMs missing from this list anyway. I'm sure the graph based on the list at the German wikipedia is pretty good. Quale (talk) 22:10, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

page loads slowly?

The article page seems to load slowly. Could the flags be slowing it down? I thjink the flags could be omitted, and also link only the first use of a country name. Bubba73 (talk), 16:49, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

I did one test edit without flag templates, and links. It doesn't seem to load much faster, try [16]. My guess is that most time is spend on building the sortable table (which requires java/script) together with the actual loading of the page (80K).Voorlandt (talk) 17:02, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
Yes, it is probably the sorting that makes it slow. Javascript executes very slowly, but I do like that sorting feature. Bubba73 (talk), 17:24, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
It takes about 8 seconds to sort, so that is slowing it down. I don't know if it is possible, but if you can tell the wikitable to NOT sort until someone clicks to sort it, and enter the names in alphabetical order, that would mean that it wouldn't have to sort initially. Failing that, putting the names in alphabetical order might speed up the initial sort. Bubba73 (talk), 20:36, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
I don't find this page slow, the top of the page appears pretty quick and while it takes about 8 seconds to fully load, anyone viewing for the first time would most like take a while before scrolling down. ChessCreator (talk) 21:11, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
I just tested it twice and it took about 20 and 26 seconds (resp) to load. Bubba73 (talk), 21:23, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
If removing the flag noticeably helps the speed loading then I'd be in favour of it's removal. The flag can be a maintenance issue anyway as with a list this size changes to countries might occur quite often. ChessCreator (talk) 21:53, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
Now I don't think it is the flag, it is the sorting that takes so long. Bubba73 (talk), 22:33, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
I asked about the sorting method, and they said that it can depend on the browser. This page is slow in IE 7 but fast enough in Mozilla Firefox. Bubba73 (talk), 23:44, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
Firefox has a faster Javascript implementation than IE, and supposedly Javascript will get even faster in Firefox 3, due shortly. I don't know if that will help on this page. Quale (talk) 23:57, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Alexander Khasin

There may be a birth date discrepancy for Alexander Khasin. We have 1951.4.29, but Gaige's Chess Personalia has "Khasin, Alexander Sholomovich, Soviet Union, born 16-06-1951, IM 1964, GMC 1973". I'm not sure if this is the same person, and even if it is Gaige is outstanding but not infallible. (We have corrected a couple of dates from Gaige in our articles already.) Quale (talk) 18:43, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for checking things. These kind of lists are extremely prone to errors, and it is good to have extra sources. I did some googling, and could only find 1951.4.29 (Nicbase, Bidmonfa, Bill Wall, chess.vrac.com). From what I could find it is the same player, eg from nicbase: Alexander Sholomovich Khasin FIDE number 4101189Birthdate 29-4-1951 Either they all copied from each other, or else the info in Gaige is wrong. Voorlandt (talk) 19:42, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
The confusion may not end there either, as Kazić (International Championship Chess, Batsford, 1974) gives an Abram Khasin b. 15.2.1923 with an IM title obtained in ... yes you've guessed it ... 1964. The chances of there being two A. Khasin's obtaining IM titles in 1964 will be slim. Kazić, a FIDE official whose book is endorsed by Euwe (FIDE President at the time) would have worked directly from FIDE's records. Having said that, we all know what a shambles FIDE's records can be, and no-one is immune to the odd typo or mistaken translation. Brittle heaven (talk) 23:07, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
I also meant to add that the Gaige info seems highly dubious - I don't think IM titles were achievable by 12/13 year olds in those days. Brittle heaven (talk) 23:24, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
Oops, not Gaige's fault. Quale is extremely fallible. The IM and GMC dates are for the adjacent entry "Khasin, Abram Iosifovich, 15-02-1923 Zaporozhe, Soviet Union". That explains Voorlandt's finding. The Alexander Sholomovich Khasin entry just has the birth date 16-06-1951 and the comment Elo: 2350+. The birth date discrepancy remains but I introduced the title dates by mistake. Sorry. Quale (talk) 23:55, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

FIDE's website sucks

FIDE overwrote/reused the url for the old 1st quarter Presidential Board Meeting page (found here in a google cache) with the 2nd quarter Presidential Board Meeting. I added a link to the 2nd quarter page in the article references, only to discover that the 1st quarter page added a couple weeks ago had been the same. We need to figure out what to do about this. Maybe complain to the FIDE webmaster. Quale (talk) 19:20, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

I found something quite useful. This website http://www.mark-weeks.com/chess/ratings/ has all the ratings per year, starting from 1971 to the year 2000 in a downloadable txt! Unfortunately, only the ratings from 1999 onwards have a grandmaster flag. The site refers to fide.com for the other rating list, and I was surprised to find them there!
Together with the 1999 and 2000 file from mark-weeks, these lists allow us to fill in all missing gaps and complete 2000-2008. (including the precise year for all the conditionally awarded titles). We have 300 missing title years now, and I suspect we can complete at least half of those by comparing these rating lists. Voorlandt (talk) 19:18, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
Ok there is one problem with comparing the january lists. Previously I put all players with no title on jan 1 YYYY-1, but a title on jan YYYY, as having achieved the title in year YYYY-1. However, if the player gets a conditional title (on rating), and that player only achieves 2500 rating on the january list, the title should be YYYY. I have corrected those instances now. I will do some more edits now (using all 4 quarters, and in case the title changes OCT-JAN, I will look at the rating. If a rating >2500 was achieved before, then the title year is YYYY-1, otherwise YYYY. Voorlandt (talk) 19:15, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Krunoslav Hulak

The FIDE Yearbook 1976/7 shows his GM title awarded at the Haifa Congress (held 29.10.76 - 9.11.76) - not in 1975, as shown in the article. I think this may need changing unless there is any conflicting evidence? Brittle heaven (talk) 21:53, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Okay, as no objections, I've changed it to '76. Brittle heaven (talk) 21:59, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Flags?

I think it might be better if the article didn't have the flags. I don't think they help. But see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (flags). Bubba73 (talk), 22:32, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

I've looked at WP:MOSFLAG—is there anything in particular on that page that you think is important here? Quale (talk) 23:07, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
I think it says to not overuse them. I asked here: #Slow - what method? to see if the sorting was slowing the page down. It was recomended over there. Bubba73 (talk), 23:45, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
Yes, although that alone isn't enough to provide much guidance. It says not to use them in prose, not to use them to replace text, and not to use them for places of birth or death. Many wikipedians dislike flags and would like to see them all go away, or almost all. For them, a single flag on a page is overuse. Other wikipedians like flags. Probably most editors are somewhere in between. Voorlandt did version of the page without flags. I tried it and didn't find any real obvious improvement in performance (loading or sorting). You can try it out to see if it helps for you. There is a link above in the very first section that you can use to find an unflagged version. If experiments show that removing the flags helps, that would be a good reason to make the change. Quale (talk) 00:14, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
On IE7, the flagless version comes up in about 8 seconds for me, versus about 20 for the regular article. At 20 seconds, a person gets to wondering if the Internet locked up. I'm using a cable modem, 6 megabits/second download.
I don't think the flags help this article. Bubba73 (talk), 00:23, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
I think flags should be expanded or abolished. To given an example, someone is born in Ukraine then part of USSR, becomes a GM while in USSR, plays chess for the USSR national team, later plays for former soviet republic(i.e Ukraine) and then after giving up chess moves out and becomes citizen of another western country (i.e Spain). What flag do you put? Spain is just misleading as it has nothing to do with the chess career. Use of just USSR or Ukraine does not give full picture. ChessCreator (talk) 23:36, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
On Bubba73's point, I tried it again also, and I must have done a slipshod job testing it before because my results are similar to his: with Firefox 2 about 20 seconds to load with flags, 10 seconds without. Personally I'm willing to put up with this because like the color they add to what is otherwise a rather dull looking table, but I understand the desire to make the page load more quickly and I won't make a fuss if the majority would like to remove the flags. (An 8 second page load is already so slow that the difference between 8s and 20s means less to me than would the difference between a 2s page load and 5s, if that makes any sense.) On ChessCreator's point, I agree that we need to handle the countries in a more sophisticated way, but I think we want to do that regardless of whether we keep the flags or remove them. I think we really want to keep at least the countries even if we ditch the flags, but we may need to allow two or three countries to be given. The first country would be the one in which the player earned the GM title. Subsequent countries would be other federations played for, so we would not have "Robert J. Fischer United States / Iceland". I guess this might give us "Roman Dzindzichashvili Israel / United States" which would look a little odd. I guess this needs careful consideration. Quale (talk) 01:32, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
I'm in favor of getting rid of the flags. I don't think they add anything to this article, and if someone does want to see what the country's flag is, they can click on the country. As far as taking 20 seconds to load - I that is clearly too long. IF a page takes that long then I get to wondering if the page is down (404 error), etc. Bubba73 (talk), 03:03, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
I personally don't mind too much having the flags removed. Although lately this page is loading pretty fast on my comp (2-3sec). It used to be slower (but never 20 sec though), perhaps my computer has part of it in memory? In any case, if the flags are replaced, the countries should be written out in full and each of them fully linked (linking only one, it would turn up in a random position after sorting). If someone undertakes this, beware of copy past from a text editor, as my text editor removes some of the accents! Voorlandt (talk) 21:48, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Lead

List requires a lead. WP:LEAD, would suggest that it clarifies what the definition of a Grandmaster is for use in this list.

Thanks whoever did it. ChessCreator (talk) 01:01, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Date sorts

Right now sorting on the date columns doesn't work right because we omit the leading zeros in the month and day fields. There are a couple of templates that can be used for date sorts (Template:dts and Template:dts2), but after taking a look I wasn't real keen on either of them as they force a default dd mm yyyy format if you don't have a date preference set. On the plus side, they do respect the user date preference if set. (Or they say they do. I don't have a date pref set and I didn't test it.) Another way to fix the date sorts would be to add the leading zeros. Any thoughts? Quale (talk) 06:44, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I would prefer to have zeros inserted (shouldn't be too hard, find and replace eg '.1.' by '.01.' etc), since more templates will make the page even slower to load. Voorlandt (talk) 16:49, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
That's logical. I made the edit. (At one time there was a limit on the number of templates that would work on a single page. That limit was either eliminated or greatly increased. I think this page would have exceeded it we had had it at that time.) Quale (talk) 23:52, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

The 5 awards from 1914

I question the inclusion of the 5 players from the 1914 St Petersburg tournament in the list (namely Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Tarrasch and Marshall). No doubt they were among the top players of their day and were of Grandmaster strength, but so were Nimzowitsch, Reti, Schelechter, Spielmann, Teichmann, Janowsky, Treybal, Junge and several other players who died before 1950. The awards were made by the Tsar of Russia, not by FIDE or any chess body, and should be considered as a state honour rather than a chess title. MaxBrowne (talk) 08:48, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

I think I agree with you. Edward Winter even questions that they were awarded in 1914, as reports of the titles being conferred appeared much later, casting some doubt on historical accuracy. Despite the title being the same in name, they are as you say, distinctly different awards. Hence, treating them as identical entities in the same table seems incongruous, at the very least. Whilst Kazić's list of Grandmasters (International Championship Chess, Batsford, 1974 - pp. 308-314) consists specifically of FIDE awards, it is very noticeable that these early honours don't even get a mention in a footnote. He obviously doesn't consider them in the same light at all. Consequently, I would vote for extracting them and creating a separate table within the same article, or elsewhere with a note and a link. Brittle heaven (talk) 09:43, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Now that those 5 have been excluded, perhaps we could have a new article on GM strength players from the pre-FIDE era? Not sure what we'd call it... besides "the 5" I'd include the 19th century players Steinitz, Morphy, Zukertort, Anderssen, Staunton, Pillsbury, Charousek, Blackburne, Paulsen, Harrwitz, Kolisch, von der Lasa. Underrated players who were probably of GM strength include Amos Burn and Paul Lipke. MaxBrowne (talk) 23:29, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

The article Grandmaster (chess) already explains this issue. SunCreator (talk) 14:44, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Put the total number

Put the total number of gms at the top plz. thank you —Preceding unsigned comment added by GSP-Rush (talk • contribs) 03:16, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

1328 as of August 14 2009. SteMicha (talk) 21:11, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Merge of Canadian Chess Grandmasters

Agree, the list on this page can be sorted by country to provide the same information, and any Canada-specific information can go on those articles, e.g Chess Federation of Canada or Canadian Chess Championship. Greenman (talk) 23:52, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. SunCreator (talk) 16:14, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Honorary Grandmasters

Should they be on the list ? Teschner , Canal, etc. are, but Lehmann is not ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.49.112.113 (talk) 00:23, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

I think the intent is that they should be included. I'm sure that some people might consider the honorary titles to be somehow less than the titles earned through norms or specific championship tournament wins, but in at least one sense they're a lot more special than the regular titles as there are a lot fewer honorary titles awarded than regular titles. Perhaps we should mark the honorary titles somehow, but only if we're pretty certain that we can identify all of them. Quale (talk) 03:25, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

In line citations

If this article must have in-line citations, I would suggest we add an extra column and just link to the FIDE rating card, as Quale suggested in an earlier section on this page. As he also suggested, it will be an immensely tedious task.--Pawnkingthree (talk) 12:51, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

I added references but the edit won't save. The list is very long and perhaps exceeds maximum number of references on a page? The only compatible long list that I know of is List of gay, lesbian or bisexual people and that is split into twenty pages. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 14:36, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
Articles with a lot of references take a long time to load, for some users at least. This one takes about 53 seconds to load for me. Each part of the list of chess books takes about 35 seconds for me. So I think it needs to be broken into parts. Bubba73 (You talkin' to me?), 02:32, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
In that case I would suggest doing a similar thing and splitting the list alphabetically; we have over 1300 entries already and it's only going to get longer.--Pawnkingthree (talk) 14:50, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
Yes, split it. I even wonder if the list should exists. It's basically the Category:Chess grandmasters with red-links that as a list is hard to maintain. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 15:17, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
Well, what do I know, it didn't take quite as long to put those citations in-line as I thought:) It has made it even longer to load though, so splitting is now essential. Another quibble, the reference is for "living grandmasters" so is not applicable to all on the list. --Pawnkingthree (talk) 15:34, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
Yeah, I know. Going to take a while to sort out. I don't know a way to work out which ones are not on the FIDE list...without checking each one. I doubt also if everyone on FIDE is living, but that is minor. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 16:37, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
I still think the article is worth keeping; it has more information than merely categories provide. Also I like the option to sort by birthdate, country etc. But of course that feature would be lost if the article was split. Seems we can't win.--Pawnkingthree (talk) 15:37, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
Yeah, no solution either way it seems. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 16:37, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
What is the point of these inline citations? They all seem to link to the same two references. Just one link in the reference section should be fine though. I like the idea of another column with the fide link. A while ago, I started updating the list (haven't finished yet), comparing with [17], which I compiled from wiki. We could simply copy and paste the link in another column no? Would be more useful than the inline citations. Also, splitting this list just to have these 1000 duplicated citations seems a real shame, as you lose a lot of sorting info. One last point: I am immensely against this list being deleted from the english wikipedia. It is very much encyclopaedic and a good alternative, to be preferred over having an article on every GM (like the Polish wikipedia seems to be doing). After I created this article, not that long ago, swiftly 8 other language wikipedia's have taken it over. It seems they value it and I am sure a lot of user do too. Regards, Voorlandt (talk) 22:17, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
I agree with Voorlandt on every point. No need for inline cites. Just explain in the references section which entries each ref applies to as I did in the parenthetical remark about Gaige. As noted by others, splitting the list would largely destroy the advantages of being able to sort by column. I don't think the article needs to be split yet, but unfortunately at some point it will be necessary. Splitting by last name ranges would be the worst idea, unless multiple lists were kept with other partition criteria. Splitting by title years might work well because only the most current article would need to be updated. (A "GM Titles Awarded 1950-2000" list would be complete now and wouldn't need any updates.) Quale (talk) 23:48, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
The point of the inline citations is to comply with WP:VERIFY policy and also reduce hoaxes like this. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 00:00, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
BTW the two references should be split up and the corrections made because as Pawnkingthree brought up many are not on FIDE's list of "living grandmasters". Regards, SunCreator (talk) 00:00, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
I'm afraid I don't follow. Many hoaxes have been removed from this list when it didn't have inline cites. All you generally need do is check http://ratings.fide.com, and that doesn't require an inline cite. In fact I don't see how inline cites would help to reduce hoaxes in this list. I also don't follow the claim "the references should be split". It looks to me like references 1 and 2 are the same. Why are they split now? I'm guessing it's because the references mechanism can't handle a very large number of uses of a single ref. I don't see the problem with "living GMs", as the list makes it perfectly clear which GMs are alive and which ones aren't. I expect to find GMs that are alive at http://ratings.fide.com. I don't expect to find dead GMs there. If a player was a GM before 1987, he or she will probably be found in Gaige. Finally, I am somewhat familiar with WP:V. I took a quick look at it again, and I don't see anything in it that requires inline cites. In fact, WP:CITE#General reference says "If a source supports a significant amount of the material in an article, it may sometimes be acceptable to simply add the citation at the end. It serves as a general reference, not linked to any particular part of the article." Quale (talk) 01:27, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
Inline citations. From WP:V: "This page in a nutshell: Any material challenged or likely to be challenged, and all quotations, must be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation. This applies to all articles, lists, and sections of articles, without exception." Regards, SunCreator (talk) 02:03, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
  • I don't think being a GM is something controversial, it can be easily verified. Inline citations are just bloating the article. I also don't see why it would help against hoaxes, people can still add any name with [1] or [2] behind it, it doesn't make it easier to verify whether this is or this is not a real GM. So can we please remove these inline citations?
  • This '"people can still add any name with [1] or [2] behind it", doesn't suffice. If the hoaxer had added that I would of checked the FIDE site and realized it was false and challenged/removed it. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 20:43, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
  • If the article needs splitting, splitting according to title year 1950-2000 and 2000-present year is a very good idea!
Regards, Voorlandt (talk) 09:02, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
I was against the in-line cites too - I was the editor who reverted when the tag was added, and like Quale, I thought they weren't required. But that phrase "any material challenged or likely to be challenged" concerns me - that's exactly what happened with the hoax added yesterday. I agree it looks cumbersome as it is now, but I'm just wary of going against policy.--Pawnkingthree (talk) 20:29, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Page loading speed

My Toshiba netbook struggles trying to render this page, and it takes a full minute to open the "edit this page" link. The amount of back-references on the FIDE cites is too high, I'll just say that the two FIDE cites appear to be used in a total of 1500 different places. I have switched most of the references to Wikipedia:Citing_sources#Parenthetical_reference. This should restore the page back to a level where all browsers can handle the page well. --Enric Naval (talk) 07:27, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Slowness of page loading and slowness of edit is, I believe, all about the flag and country templates. There are 220 of them. The article itself is only 98K and would normally be fine but the country info here makes it slow. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 14:42, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
According to this discussion further up, it's the sortable tables that are the problem.--Pawnkingthree (talk) 16:50, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
Hadn't thought about that. Yes, removing sort makes it much faster. Is that preferable or is the sort version better? Regards, SunCreator (talk) 17:02, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
I would prefer to keep the sort function; as commented above it's one of the article's most useful features.--Pawnkingthree (talk) 17:30, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Referencing deceased players

If Fide remove deceased players from there list who should be used as a source instead? Regards, SunCreator (talk) 02:10, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

(moved)Answering your question below, a good source for deceased players is [18] and [19], which contains all players that appeared in the FIDE list since 1971. After 2001, the rating lists can be downloaded from FIDE. Regards, Voorlandt (talk) 09:02, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
That's a good source for some, but what about the GM's before 1971 and GM's since 2001 who have deceased? i.e Igor Vasilyevich Ivanov. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 19:00, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
Would it be correct to assume Jeremy Gaige's 'Chess Personalia' has all GM's who became a GM before 1971? Regards, SunCreator (talk) 19:05, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
Yes for the ones before 1971. For the GM's who got their title after 2001 and also died after 2001, the FIDE rating lists from 2000 to 2010 are still available from FIDE (eg http://ratings.fide.com/download/jan01frl.zip), so he/she will appear on one of them. Regards, Voorlandt (talk) 22:15, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
Major update done. Only Igor Vasilyevich Ivanov remains without a reference. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 03:01, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
He is listed on the July 2005 FIDE rating list as a GM: 2000288 Ivanov, Igor V g CAN 2407 08.01.47. http://ratings.fide.com/download/jul05frl.zip Voorlandt (talk) 14:22, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. Added that source now. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 14:40, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

How do we know

Shukhrat Safin has no article on Wikipedia at the moment. In this GM list article he is listed as deceased 2009-09-20. Is that true? How do we know that? His FIDE card still exists. Olimpbase nor Bill Wall gives anything on deaths. Chessbase Megabase 2008 is given as the year 2008 and Jeremy Gaige's book 1987 both before the decease date. How do we know this deceased information? Regards, SunCreator (talk) 03:26, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=5781 Voorlandt (talk) 14:12, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
Added Chessbase reference. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 14:40, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

GM for life

This article says 'Once achieved, the (GM) title is held for life'. It says for life, not forever, so why are they GM's when they decease? I think this is what FIDE is getting at with removing GM's from there list when they are no longer living. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 13:43, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

That line is there just to make it clear that there are no circumstances in which you can be demoted from GM status - it doesn't matter how far your FIDE rating declines. The same line appears in Grandmaster (chess). Do we really need to try to distinguish between "for life" and "forever"? I would have thought you could still be regarded as "GM Joe Bloggs" whether you are alive or dead, in the same way that Sir Winston Churchill is still Sir Winston Churchill. Also, I see you have put a cite tag on "there have been 1,328 Grandmasters." That figure was taken from simply adding up the people on this list. I thought it would be useful as the table doesn't have a number field. But I don't have an outside reference for it.--Pawnkingthree (talk) 17:13, 22 March 2010 (UTC)
Now I think about it, that figure is obviously contradicted by the "this list is incomplete" tag. We could just change it to "this list contains the names of 1328 (or whatever) GMs, but should not be regarded as complete." (Assuming that is still the case - maybe we have tracked them all down by now?)--Pawnkingthree (talk) 17:32, 22 March 2010 (UTC)
We are definitely missing some of the more recent GM's. A couple of months ago I started verifying them against the FIDE list, and they should all be there up until the "D". For A-->C I found quite a few new ones. For the ones still to be checked see User:Voorlandt/Sandbox (the original list was compiled in January 2010 from the FIDE site - feel free to remove names from that list if you have verified them).Voorlandt (talk) 20:40, 22 March 2010 (UTC)
Interesting list and have checked a few. Xie Jun is duplicated on that list. I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to add the FIDE Chess Profile for each player, given that you have them available on that list. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 00:32, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
There are some dupes on List of chess grandmasters too, and a lot of missing GMs. I've been working on annotating every entry possible with a FIDE link. To do this I merged an extract of all players marked as GMs from the full FIDE players list at http://ratings.fide.com/download.phtml into the list we had in the article. In addition to the hoax I removed from the article, I found a few dupes and a few entries that were sorted incorrectly. I didn't pay close attention to the sorts, so I'm sure there are a few sort problems in my lists too. I just made SunCreator's update to Negi's title year to my experimental subpages. I also found a bunch of GMs missing from our article. By my count we are missing at least 64. You can find them by sorting my lists on Country, as I didn't put in date of birth, country, or title year for any of the missing GMs I added. (Country is readily available from the players list, but I didn't think to include it when I did the merge. It can be added easily because the FIDE rating card links will go straight to pages with the needed info.) The pages are still experimental. I'd like to move all the references and cites into the Reference column (to get rid of (Gaige, 1987) in the Name column), and perhaps the FIDE links should be formatted differently. (Maybe something like FIDE 8603677 instead of just 8603677.) Because the pages get large with the addition of 1400 external links, I split them into two articles. Perhaps the names could be improved too:
Quale (talk) 01:39, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
Well done that is coming alone nicely. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 01:58, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Well, I would't say that GM title is always held for live. Do you remember Alexandru Crisan and the discussions about removing his title? And there's another player who maybe got stripped of the title: Adrian Negulescu. On german wiki we are not sure if he was appointed GM title in 2000 and lost it in 2002. Maybe you know something regarding that question. Greez SteMicha (talk) 20:36, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

My guess is that the January 2001 rating list just has an error when it shows Negulescu as a GM. Similarly Ennio Arlandi is erroneously marked as a GM on the April 2001 list. Previously Toh Li Cheng was shown as a GM on the October 2007 list and G B Prakash was a GM on the April 2008 list, but FIDE prepared revised lists in June 2010 that corrected those errors. There are dozens if not thousands of mistakes on the FIDE rating lists over the years, and I just assumed that these were isolated errors. Of course I have no proof, and you wouldn't expect these kinds of mistakes as recently as 2007 and 2008 when FIDE should be doing less of this work by hand. Quale (talk) 06:18, 2 October 2011 (UTC)
Hm, but what about the approval list in November 2000, where Negulescu is marked as "Pending"? Is it possible that the GM title was provisionally noted on the elo list, and later Negulescu didn't get the title for some reason? But why was the title pending at all? Notice that it isn't because of rating, because that's marked as "conditionally rtg". SteMicha (talk) 16:26, 3 October 2011 (UTC)
Crisan's title appears to have been revoked. The July 2015 FIDE list has him with the GM title and a rating of 2588; in the August 2015 list he has no title and a rating of 2132. MaxBrowne (talk) 07:49, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
It would be good to get this confirmed by a secondary source. This guy needs a Wikipedia article - he's certainly notable for his quite breathtaking levels of deception if not for his strength as a chessplayer.--Pawnkingthree (talk) 14:56, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Hoaxes and errors

Who is Billy Joe Mills that Quale removed, is that another hoax or error, it has been in the list a long time? The date Parimarjan Negi became a GM was also given as 2005, I've since amended that to 2006. It's an important figure for him because he is the second youngest GM so far. I noticed a website using this information and it's not pleasing to show up our errors. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 22:45, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

That Mills entry was added on 25 April 2009. The only Billy Joe Mills I've been able to find on Google is definitely not a GM. It is indeed very embarrassing that such an obvious hoax survived for nearly a year and appeared on other websites before any of us noticed.--Pawnkingthree (talk) 23:56, 22 March 2010 (UTC)
Chess articles are a favorite target of vandals. Bubba73 (You talkin' to me?), 01:40, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
Sure seems like it. I agree that it's embarrassing. I've been thinking about this a bit and I think the size of the list and the rate at which new GM titles are awarded in the last decade really means that we should go to a mechanical, database driven means of verifying and updating the list. It looks like User:Voorlandt has done some work on this, and I've got some ideas on how this might be arranged. The inputs would be publicly available lists from FIDE along with hand-prepared exception entries. (A number of exceptions are needed: FIDE doesn't seem to record honorary titles (at least not always), our article links are often named differently than the player name in FIDE records, we often have month and day of birth where FIDE only records the year, FIDE doesn't include deaths, we want to use specific references such as Gaige for some entries, and of course older titles may not be recorded on any available electronic source from FIDE.) The outputs would always checkable by hand. The vast majority of the entries are living players and could be checked with a single click on the link to the FIDE rating card. FIDE ID numbers could be useful in the list even after a player dies and her rating card is no longer available online, as it is can be used as a key to find the player in old ratings lists. Quale (talk) 01:55, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
For the future we could use Webcite and archive off all living players so we have a FIDE page if they die. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 02:16, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
Note on that hoax article--its viewcount was extremely extremely low (e.g., 7 views in Nov. 2009, so low its likely all bots). That's typical of hoaxes, no one knows these articles exist.--Milowent (talk) 03:37, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
The hoax name in the list was referred to by another website that had more then a few viewers because there is numerous comments to the article. I would estimate based in the number of replies many hundreds of people read the article. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 03:54, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Thomas kapitaniak should be in the list, he is a relative unknown but a GM nonetheless, he wrote many books on unorthodox openings —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.64.103.156 (talk) 02:32, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Need a reference that he is a GM. He doesn't have an article and FIDE doesn't list him as a GM (but they don't list deceased people). Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 02:39, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
And my copy of ChessBase doesn't have any games by him, so I can't check his rating. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 02:45, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Don´t be so stupid and believe this IP, there is definitly no GM named Kapitaniak. And sure, FIDE does list deceased GMs, not all, but a few:
  1. Istvan Bilek
  2. Juri Shabanov
  3. Istvan Bilek
  4. Shuxrat Safin
  5. Alexander Panchenko
  6. Eduard Gufeld

These two dead GMs are not even listed as Grand Master:

  1. Valentin Arbakov
  2. Aleksander Wojtkiewicz

And FIDE lists the following two Honorary GMs mistakenly as "Grand Master":

  1. Péter Dely
  2. Jonathan Penrose

Maybe you should throw an eye on the german grandmaster list, we have, i´m proud to say :-), managed it to get the list complete and to a featured list status! Greez, SteMicha (talk) 20:03, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

I think that's a good idea. I don't know if the German list would meet the requirements for a featured list on EN since I think citation requirements are stronger here, but it is a lot better than this list on EN. When I looked at the German list in detail a few months ago it was still missing a small number of players who had been awarded titles recently, but you may have added them since then. I like the way that the German wikipedia puts honorary GMs in a separate list. (We had an interesting discussion recently on Talk:Yakov Estrin about whether Estrin was awarded the honorary GM title. The article still needs to be fixed, and I should do that if no one else does it first.) The list here is missing a lot of names, probably at least 60 GMs. One obstacle I had trying to use the German list is that player name spellings in German often differ significantly from those used in English and by FIDE and I'm not good at figuring out the different transliterations. Quale (talk) 21:34, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Section split

I wasn't paying close attention when the change was made, but I'm not a fan of splitting of the article into sections by first letter of the last name. The best thing about having the GMs in a single table that is sortable by columns is that you can find interesting information using those sorts. For example, you can sort by federation, birth date, or title year. When the table is broken up into 26 pieces as it is now, the column sorts are absolutely worthless. To quickly find a name I recommend Control-F instead of a table of contents. That won't work as well when browsing on a mobile device, but this page is probably a lost cause on small devices in any case.

The page needs a complete revamp anyway. I have a several-year-old idea how we can semi-automatically extract the information from FIDE rating lists to better keep the page up to date, but I didn't put much work into it. I haven't done any work on it at all in a couple years, and it isn't in working condition. Quale (talk) 07:19, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

agree about the split, I much preferred being able to sort on DOB, year title awarded etc. MaxBrowne (talk) 08:12, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
Well I made the edit and it got reverted. The sort functionality is pointless when only people whose names happen to begin with the same letter are included. Bottom line - it's better the way it was before. MaxBrowne (talk) 12:25, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
Just discovered this Talk thread. Table back the way you want it. (The purpose of breaking it up was two things: Easier searching on a name [click on the TOC index and takes you to the last-name section where easy to spot the name at that point, then obviously click on it; with Control-F, you have to type a name or name-part, if you spell wrong you get "Not found" etc., or you get a hit on something else not intended]; and speed [at least on my computer, it's a big table and takes a long time to load, especially when updating any table entry.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 12:48, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
Good change, Max (+anchors)! (Didn't know anchors could be used outside secnames, especially intra-table.) Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 00:24, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Number of living grandmasters

In determining the number of living grandmasters, note that doing a search on the FIDE rating list will only give an approximate number. On the one hand the FIDE list includes at least two dead GM's (Robert Byrne and Igor Kurnosov), on the other hand at least two GM's have been excluded from the list (Sebastien Feller, Arnaud Hauchard). MaxBrowne (talk) 06:46, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Sorting of "van" and "de" names

It comes down to this: the Dutch phone book will have Van der Sterren under S, but an English or American phone book would have him under V. This being the English wikipedia, "de" names should be under D, "van" names under V etc. MaxBrowne (talk) 02:01, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Missing names

Vladimir Talla, awarded 2nd quarter Presidential Board 2009, 15-18 June 2009, Krakow, POL, is missing in the list. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.5.186.254 (talk) 14:27, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

I've been comparing the list to FIDE's list for the past few weeks and updating it as I go. It's a tedious process and I really hope when I'm finished we at WP:CHESS can make a habit of keeping this list up to date. That means filling in the details any time a new GM is announced by FIDE, and noting any GM deaths in this table as well as their wikipedia article. MaxBrowne (talk) 10:22, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

"The highest title"

This article states that "Apart from 'World Champion', Grandmaster is the highest title a chess player can attain." Besides being unsourced, this is not true. While it is unquestionable that "Grandmaster" is a higher title than "FIDE Master", the "value" of the World Champion title is not set in stone. In theory, if all Grandmasters, by some giant coincidence, died in one day, an International Master could win the World Championship. In that case, there would be 1 World Champion and 0 Grandmasters. Therefore I will rewrite the lead. Toccata quarta (talk) 07:37, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

I don't understand what you want to say. World champion is higher than grandmaster, no matter, how many grandmaster there are. 85.212.21.79 (talk) 20:36, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
"World Champion" is a different kind of title. It's not permanent, and it does not necessarily denote the best player in the world (just the winner of whatever event is designated the "World Championship", however flawed the process). Carlsen, Anand, etc will still be grandmasters whether or not they hold the title of "World Champion". After FIDE's antics in the 1990's and 2000's, many regard the title of "World Number One" (i.e. highest FIDE rating) as more presitigious than "World Champion". MaxBrowne (talk) 07:21, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
World number one is a ranking, but it isn't really a title. Even though FIDE devalued the world championship for a time, even the weakest world champion has always been stronger than the average GM. World champion will always be a higher title than GM. I agree with the anon, because I don't understand Toccata's point. Quale (talk) 08:20, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
The titles "Grandmaster", "International Master", "FIDE Master" etc are a kind of continuum. "World Champion" is outside of that, just as "Russian Champion" is. MaxBrowne (talk) 00:31, 10 December 2014 (UTC)
You can also look at it from this perspective: The winner of the world chess championship automatically gets the GM title (a regulation which is of course practically irrelevant). But a GM does not get automatically the world champion title. In this sense, the GM title is considered (at least by FIDE) to be higher (in which sense whatsoever) than the WCC title. Steak (talk) 09:06, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Rating highs

Can you please add highest FIDE rating achieved for each GM on the list? ImTheIP (talk) 13:19, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

No. MaxBrowne (talk) 13:30, 28 December 2016 (UTC)
But only because pre-2001 rating data has not yet been imported into Wikidata, although there are no current plans to do so. Cobblet (talk) 13:49, 28 December 2016 (UTC)
GM's pre-1970 didn't even have ratings. It's way too much work for a meaningless statistic. MaxBrowne (talk) 13:57, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Titles awarded conditional on achieving a 2500 Elo rating

I recently noticed that Daniel Howard Fernandez (ENG) is included here, and indeed, the award of his title is confirmed on FIDE's Fernandez datacard, at their website. However, I believe that his GM title was awarded on condition that he makes 2500 (currently 2496). And I doubt if he is the only example of this circumstance on our list. Perhaps this has been discussed previously and I am unaware of the outcome, but my own opinion is that we should continue to reflect FIDE's list and consciously accept these 'sleeper' GMs on our list. If this is agreeable, then I would suggest that a suitable note is added to the article intro, so that readers are not misled into believing that all title awards are necessarily yet active. Any thoughts? Brittle heaven (talk) 13:43, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

In such cases FIDE does not indicate the player is a GM unless the player has actually achieved 2500 at some point, which Fernandez did in October–December 2017. I strictly follow FIDE's website with respect to who is on the list. Cobblet (talk) 15:26, 21 January 2018 (UTC)
Oh, right. The award was recent, so I imagined that he hadn't had time to cross the 2500 barrier and drop back below. That explains it. Thanks. Brittle heaven (talk) 19:55, 21 January 2018 (UTC)
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