Chess Informant (CI) - the publisher - doesn't just publish the Informant - the book. Case in point: the fourth edition of the Encyclopedia of Chess Combinations. This is an old-style CI book: there's no English (or any other natural language) in the body of the text; all you'll find are diagrams, chess notation, and their standard symbols. (One exception: at the top of the page the theme covered on that page is given in English; non-English readers are likely to find the equivalent in their language in the table of contents.)
If you are 1900 and up though, it's worth considering because the puzzles are sorted by themes, which is relatively rare for advanced tactics books. In my view both kinds of tactics books are valuable: those where the puzzles are divided up by themes and those where one has no advance idea of what to look for. There are 10 themes in the book, each further subdivided into three sub-sections: "combinations with attack on the king", "combinations to achieve equality", and "other combinations". The 10 themes, with my occasional explanations and/or comments in parentheses, are:
Encyclopedia Of Chess Combinations 4th Ed
The biggest names in chess, Garry Kasparov among others, used to say: " We are Children of the Informant." And new generations of world-class players are keeping that tradition alive today. We have been reaching out to the entire chess world for half a century.
It is no exaggeration to say that Chess Informant were pioneers in the development of modern chess publishing. We raised the standard of professionalism in both the speed and quality of our published analysis which led to other companies also smartening up their act.
In the chess prodigy article, before the era of FIDE ratings and titles (1950), it lists Morphy, Capablanca, and Reshevsky. Afterward, it goes by age of earning the GM title. Becoming a GM is a great achievement, but it is a lot easier to do it now than in the 1950s when Spassky and Fischer did it. I think there needs to be another criteria (in addition to that one), perhaps reaching the Candidate's tournament. Fischer and Magnus Carlsen did this at an early age, but are there any others? What do people think about other criteria for prodigies? Bubba73 (talk), 01:28, 6 January 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
2. Stalemate and Zugzwang have a little discussion of non-chess uses but then the great majority of the article is about chess. This has been discussed at Talk:Stalemate. Should the articles be split into chess and non-chess? If so, which should be the "main" article, i.e. have the titles that are used now? If not, should the articles be revamped to mention the non-chess uses but otherwise be about chess? That is, at present, almost all of the articles are in a section "Stalemate in chess" and "zugzwang in chess". Bubba73 (talk), 17:22, 21 January 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Do we need to put links to chess pieces (such as [[rook (chess)rook]] in all articles? I've been putting them in most articles, but I wonder how much they are needed. Clearly they should be in articles such as chess, Rules of chess, and chess pieces, but are they needed in, say, French Defense? If someone is reading about the French Defense, they probably already know what a rook is. Bubba73 (talk), 03:09, 1 February 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
However, there is a huge space between the "must have" category and the "AFD material" category, there lots of subjects where it would not be an outright embarrassment to have no article, but still noteworthy enough that an article can be supported. Most GMs today are fairly unknown, yet holding the most prestigious chess master title in the world is certainly a claim for notability, and we are then talking in the order of a thousand biographies. Then there is the subject of national champions, in most countries with a fairly well-organized chess community, the national championship is a prestigious event. The Norwegian chess championship, a fairly small championship, is officially recognized, with the champion receiving the royal trophy, and subject to a fair amount of press attention. Should not winning a tournament like that confer notability?
One final note about article quality is that there is nothing inherently "unencyclopedic" about an article being a stub or an orphan for a long time. Go to any paper encyclopedia and you will find plenty of short articles which would have been rated as "stub class" here on Wikipedia. Sjakkalle (Check!) 08:03, 15 February 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I've written a Windows program to generate chess diagrams for Wikipedia articles. You can download it here or go to my website and pick Downloads and get it that way. It runs under Windows, and it automatically puts the code for a chess diagram in your clipboard, or you can copy and paste it. Select the piece on the left and then click on the square. This new version 1.01 fixes some bugs and has some enhancements.
I hesitate to bring this up yet again as it seems that the project doesn't have a clear consensus on what chess subjects are notable enough for wikipedia articles, at least in the case of biographies, but I'll dive in anyway. We are again starting to see the creation of a number of articles on obscure chess openings. Personally I support an article for each of the 20 opening moves for White (we already have these), even though some are obscure. The problem arises that Black as 20 responses to each of these moves, and most of the 400 combinations have a name. Except for the popular openings, these names are typically obscure and often there are several names used with no commonly established nomenclature. (This could lead to conflicts over which obscure and not generally accepted name is used for the page, although I haven't seen this to be a problem.) And there are many obscure openings past move one that have been given names, so the potential for these articles is actually a few times more than 400. Appendix I to The Oxford Companion to Chess lists 1327 named openings and variations (and this is not an exhaustive list as there are a number of named variations missing). The Companion is a reliable source, but I would consider those mentions to be trivial in the sense described in the next paragraph unless the opening also appears in the main text of the book.
I don't follow WP:N closely, but a view that I think is gaining support is that before a subject is considered encyclopedically notable, it should have at least two non-trivial mentions in independent, reliable sources. Precisely what this means in this context would have to be established, but viewing it from the negative side I would say that trivial mentions include appearing in a directory-style list (e.g., list of ECO codes) and unreliable sources include the vast majority of websites. If we were to use a standard like this, ideally at least two such sources would be provided when the chess opening article is created. We've been a little too lax about verifiability in some of our articles, as the discussion at Talk:Wade Defense shows. I should also say that the requirement is a minimum, and not every chess opening that has two non-trivial mentions should necessarily get an article.
On the other hand, given the fairly strong inclusion stance I've taken on biographies, maybe these are OK too. In the past this project has been attacked for articles that were "how-to's". Ironically a large number of articles on very obscure openings weakens this argument, as few of these lines are ever discussed in instructional books on chess. Quale (talk) 08:25, 23 February 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I recently learned that the musician Sting played a game against Kasparov. game here. Have added category 'English chess players' to Sting's page however changes for it don't seem to appear here. Is there something else to do to make it appear? ChessCreator (talk) 20:47, 29 February 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
No doubt this is vanity on my part (since I'm primarily responsible for having written the article in question), but I'm wondering if there's any chance that Swindle (chess), with a little further work, could be nominated as a featured article? It's a pretty thorough treatment of the subject, I think. Krakatoa (talk) 10:30, 3 March 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Recently there has been an article created Vladimir Georgiev(Vladimir Ivanov Georgiev ), however, I'm unsure if this is the same person who is a chess GM (see Chess World Cup 2007 and 36th Chess Olympiad) or whether it's someone with the same name and therefore misleading links. ChessCreator (talk) 11:58, 3 March 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
We have had Category:Chess images for quite a while, although it isn't heavily used. I created and partially populated a subcategory, Category:Chess player images, to use for the many images of chess players that have been added to articles recently. These are purely administrative categories to help keep an inventory of chess images (kind of like List of chess topics helps watch chess articles). The chess player images category could use a good introduction, pointing out that many of the images are non-free fair-use, and so can't be used in other articles without careful consideration of the license. Someone who better understands image licenses could help by writing that warning. Quale (talk) 17:55, 3 March 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Recently User:Quale and User:Brittle heaven have created excellent articles of the type 1999 in chess. A tool is used to search the deceased chess players in a particular year. Anyway, to cut a long story short, here are all the chess players which are currently not in a category of the type Category:1975 births:
There can be exceptions where people used the BD template (I used xml scanning to search for chess bios not containing the string "births"). Needless to say, would be good to add such a category to all of them! (shouldn't be too much work as most of them already have the birth date in the article). Please delete from this list when you add the article. Voorlandt (talk) 20:16, 18 February 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply] 2ff7e9595c
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