Talk:Bobby Fischer

Prompted by the discussion in #Article size from late 2024, I have started going through this article looking for things to fix, and in particular things to reduce. This is a halfway report.

Let me first correct my assessment of the books by Brady. His 2011 book, "Endgame", is not an update, let alone a repackaging, of his 1973 book "Profile of a Prodigy". It is a completely different project, a fully scholarly biography, whereas 1973 was more like an "authorized biography", with all the compromises that implies, even though Fischer ended up not liking it after all.

Endgame was published in 2011, after this Wikipedia article had already existed for years. I must give great credit to the editors who brought the article up to date at that time and later, which was presumably a major effort.

In the earlier discussion, an editor was concerned about the size of the article. But size is normally measured in "words" of "prose", and if you remove something from a footnote, it doesn't affect that measure. Many of my changes have involved removing a quotation from a footnote, so the needle has hardly budged.

The same editor was concerned about some of the lengthy blockquotes. I too am not comfortable with things like the quotation from Linder in the section Bobby Fischer#Grandmaster, candidate, author and the quotation from Kotov (via Plisetsky and Voronkov) in the section Bobby Fischer#1962: success, setback, accusations of Soviet collusion. Readers can get tired of more variations on "Wow this guy is good!" But so far, I have left them alone, partly because they were quotations that I hadn't seen before I started working in Wikipedia.

On the other hand, I have made quite a few changes to passages in which we first paraphrased and cited some source, and then (often in the footnote of the citation) quoted the same source. I don't know how this arose or what motivated it. Where I thought that the quotation did not add sufficient new material compared to the paraphrase, I have usually just removed it, in the spirit of MOS:QUOTE, "most of the content should be in the editor's own words". Bruce leverett (talk) 18:55, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

:I have finished going through the article, picking low-hanging fruit. I still do not like some of the lengthy blockquotes, but I have left most of them in place. As I predicted, the conventional "article size" measure has changed little, although the source byte count has decreased by almost 15K. Bruce leverett (talk) 20:32, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Could we get some more details on why Fischer didn't participate in the 1969 US Championship? This was a qualifying event for the Interzonal. The decision to allow Fischer to participate in the Interzonal was controversial, and was strongly opposed by the Soviets. It would be good to have some details about the meetings that took place and the circumstances leading to the decision to allow him to participate. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 08:16, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

:"[...] for several years Fischer had boycotted the tournament. His grievance was that it was too short: with only eleven rounds, a player who suffered a loss of form for one or two days could be put out of the running. The organizers said they could not afford a longer tournament. In 1969, FIscher was absent again [...]" Bobby Fischer Goes to War (2004), Edmonds & Eidinow, p. 82. --IHTS (talk) 11:58, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

::Brady 1973 discusses this on page 155-156, which largely consists of a letter from Fischer to Edmondson explaining why he wasn't going to play. His stated complaint was that he wanted the tournament to be longer (22 rounds "as in the Soviet Union, Hungary, Romania, and other Eastern European countries where chess is taken seriously" rather than 11). Edmondson wrote a reply, which didn't reach Fischer in time because he was traveling, stating that the USCF couldn't afford the longer format.

::Later, on page 173 of Brady 1973, there's a long paragraph about the process by which Fischer got back into the Interzonal. "Heated discussion erupted" at the FIDE Congress over Fischer. We definitely need to say more about this in this article.

::BTW here is a puzzle. On page 157, Brady says that the 1969 US Championship was won by Reshevsky, ahead of Addison and Benko, and the three of them qualified to go to Palma. Then on page 173 it says, "There was strong sentiment ... to allow Fischer to play if one of the three American qualifiers would drop out in his behalf." But on page 174, next chapter, Lombardy somehow enters the picture. Supposedly he was "next in line with the right to participate" and was asked if he would step aside. Why would they have needed to talk to Lombardy? ... After writing this, I found that Reshevsky was already seeded into the Interzonal because he had made the Candidates matches in the previous cycle. So the fact that he finished first in the 1969 Championship wasn't the reason that he got to the Interzonal. Bruce leverett (talk) 15:48, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

{{ping|Keeper of Albion}} On the one hand, WP:FALSETITLE is not "one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines", and does not justify sweeping through an old and popular article trying to "fix" it by removing every false title. Also, {{tq|When editors disagree about whether the use of false titles is appropriate in an article, the status quo should be followed until a consensus to change it forms.}} On the other hand, I have have already spent some time trying to reduce the journalistic atmosphere in Bobby Fischer, and some of these will help. In many cases there should be no title at all, because we are referring to a person whose name is wikilinked, or because the title is not relevant. In some cases the addition of "the" or "a" makes the sentence noticeably clumsier, and I will scratch my head over these. Bruce leverett (talk) 17:43, 16 April 2025 (UTC)

:I never claimed it’s "one of Wikipedia’s policies or guidelines." Have you fabricated a quotation from me?

:"does not justify" — I don’t need a justification per WP:BOLD.

:"old and popular" — Completely irrelevant. Sounds like an emotional argument, too.

:You can do as you please with this article and others in American English, but please keep the sensationalised journalese out of British English- or Oxford English-tagged articles.

:Regards Keeper of Albion (talk) 18:07, 16 April 2025 (UTC)

::That "fabricated" quotation was from WP:FALSETITLE. Did you read the whole thing? Bruce leverett (talk) 18:14, 16 April 2025 (UTC)

:::I didn’t call it fabricated. In fact I misunderstood your comment. Keeper of Albion (talk) 19:56, 16 April 2025 (UTC)

:A wlink on player's name isn't sufficient reason to remove e.g. "grandmaster" title from the viewpoint/consideration have read on WP before that WP articles need to be paper-print ready/might be printed to paper where there's of course no access to wlink tech. --IHTS (talk) 00:20, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

::It is, in fact, somewhat common in the non-chess historical biographies I have seen, such as Thomas Jefferson, to use "historian" (no article) as a title; for example, {{tq|Historian Bernard Sheehan argues that ...}} I have grown used to this, and so I was initially taken aback by the "false title" complaint. I would not say that using "historian" in this way gives an improper journalistic cast to a historical biography article; but somehow that is an exception to the rule, for I agree that our frequent use of titles (such as "grandmaster") and thumbnail introductions (such as "former world champion" or "Latvian chess master"), with or without "the", has an unpleasant journalistic flavor. Going around adding "the" to each one doesn't help.

::Referring again to Thomas Jefferson, I see that we use the "Historian" title whether or not the historian's name is wikilinked. I retract my earlier comment about not needing a title when the person's name is wikilinked. Although I have not found the "print-ready" idea to which you referred, I have gotten the impression from the overall discussion of wikilinks that they are not to be used as a substitute for actual article content, but only as a convenient navigation for readers who need some background.

::I am suspicious of giving thumbnail introductions to people who are only incidental to our story. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1285941094&oldid=1285940353&title=Bobby_Fischer this edit] for example. However I left in place "the defending U.S. champion" as a modifier for "Arthur Bisguier", because it is common practice in describing chess championships to identify the defending champion if he's present. Maybe I should have left in something about Reshevsky being a previous champion, but I have gotten very tired of reading "six-time" in U.S. chess literature to describe "ol' six-time" champion Walter Browne.

::I have also removed a couple of thumbnail introductions that I didn't like for other reasons: "grandmaster Andrew Soltis" (he was quoted not because he was a grandmaster, but because he was a popular chess journalist and author); "former world champion Garry Kasparov" (what, I need an introduction for this guy?).

::My choices here may be somewhat idiosyncratic and not necessarily the last word on this. I just wanted to explain what I was thinking, in a little more depth than I did in the edit summaries. Bruce leverett (talk) 02:51, 17 April 2025 (UTC)