This is WikiProjectcue sports, a collaboration area for Wikipedians interested in improving coverage of cue sports. New participants are welcome; please feel free to participate!
Welcome to WikiProject Cue sports. Some Wikipedians have formed this collaboration resource and group dedicated to improving Wikipedia's coverage of cue sports (pool, snooker and billiards) and the organization of information and articles on this topic. This page and its subpages contain their suggestions and various resources; it is hoped that this project will help to focus the efforts of other Wikipedians interested in the topic. If you would like to help, please join the project, inquire on the talk page and see the to-do list below.
Goals and scope
Goals
Clean organization of all relevant articles and categories, including their relationships to each other
Promulgation of base article layouts that are consistent and clean, with formatting conventions, for all cue sports articles (via article "templates")
Scope
The scope of this WikiProject may be relatively hands-off in the case of cue sports subtopics that already have their own "child" WikiProjects (e.g., WikiProject Snooker), whom this WikiProject will work closely with.
Tabletop non-ball (puck-based) cue games, such as novuss, descended from cueless disk-flicking boardgames like carrom
Possibly also non-billiards, non-cue games that are ancestrally related and which are not (unlike golf) already covered by an extant WikiProject. Examples could include croquet, lawn bowling, bocce and other non-team lawn games, and their indoor progeny, such as shuffleboard, curling, bowling, pachinko, non-cued variants of carrom, etc. Definitely lowest-priority, however.
33%: Basic project structure complete, some but not all needed templates created, category structure complete, many missing or incomplete key articles identified, much article cleanup done.
Internal pages: Something like: [2][3]). Such pages are not fluff, but can be good places to find recruits for the project, possibly including subject-matter experts, especially if cross-referenced to the project. Also, Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Cue sports (cf. [4][5][6]).
Create timelines, both textual and graphical. See link for various guidelines and examples. We need an overall one for cue sports generally, and more specific ones as we drill down into more specific topics (timeline of nine-ball, timeline of Willie Mosconi's career, etc.).
Form sections: Exhibition game needs section on cue sports; could later form a new article with "Main article..." xref to it. What other general articles need cue sports sections?
Images: improve articles with images from commons; create pics and add them to commons as GFDL/CC-by/PD.
Add: {{Sport overview}} to main articles of cue games that are real sports; medal table tags where they apply (see Ding Junhui for example).
Insert: Cue sports events (tournament results, etc.) into the "year in sports" categories (e.g. 1965 in sports), using {{subst:Cue sports heading}} if that year doesn't have one yet.
Note: To watchlist this to-do list, click on "watch" at top right of this table. Watching the page it is transcluded on won't watch the to-do list.
Editing advice
Authoring & editing
Style and naming conventions
All articles and categories within the scope of this WikiProject should adhere to WP:Manual of Style (cue sports) style and naming convention guideline. The super-short version:
The game is "nine-ball" (likewise eight-ball, one-pocket, etc.) — not "9-ball". (Exception: "blackball" is fully compounded, almost universally)
Non-compound-noun game names are not hyphenated (bank pool, carom billiards, English billiards, straight rail)
The ball is "the 9 ball" (likewise the 15 ball, the cue ball, the solid balls, etc.) — not "the 9-ball" or "the nine ball".
Scores and rankings are given as numbers, per long-standing sports statistics tradition — "1st place", "3–2 victory", "ranked number 45".
Other numbers should be spelled out: "a six ball game-ending run on the 9 ball in the fourth round of the match, to finish for a 5th place finish", or "the number twelve shakebottle pill was right next to the 9 ball, and I don't know why it was there because we were playing nine-ball; maybe it's because we'd already had seven beers each and had been playing for four hours".
Don't use (gramatically optional) compound adjective hyphenation with numbers, as it is too easily confused with a game name — not "a nine-ball run", even if you would write "a highly-skilled player".
Please see the actual guideline for more details and the rationale for this level of consistency control; it genuinely is important for article intelligibility, especially for non-native English speakers.
If he/she/it isn't important, don't make an article (or section) on that topic.
Don't pollute articles with games you and your friends made up, rules variants peculiar to your home town, novelty games, gimmick equipment, spam or non-neutral statements.
There's no need to split out into an article everything that possibly could be an article; no one needs a four sentence "article" about cue tip chalk.
Use the Glossary to make links
Articles within the scope of this Wikiproject will inevitably be using terms of art specific to the cue sports. A good resource for making links to words that are not self-explanatory for the uninitiated is the Glossary of cue sports terms. In order to make such links, a special template is used, as follows:
{{Cuegloss|Word or phrase you are linking, exactly as its heading appears in glossary|word or phrase you want to display}}
Thus, if one wanted to wikify "apex ball", the following markup would be employed: {{Cuegloss|Apex|apex ball}} (because the entry for "apex ball" in the Glossary is "Apex"), which when saved would look like this: apex ball.
Using the glossary to define terms will greatly reduce redundant "definitionitis" in article after article, enable newcomers to the topic to find consensus-edited definitions in a central location, and keep old hands from becoming bored to tears reading things they already know. However, try to avoid overloading articles with specialized terms; people should not have to use the glossary several times per paragraph to understand an article.
When it is necessary to disambiguate player names, use "John Q. Public (pool player)" or "John Q. Public (snooker player)" for either of those particular disciplines, or "John Q. Public (billiards player)" for all others. If the player is notable for more than one discipline, use "John Q. Public (billiards player)", unless the player was mostly notable for either pool or snooker. If the person was notable both as a player and for some other role in the field, use the "player" disambiguation unless the subject was most notable for a non-player role, e.g. "John Q. Public (pool referee)" or "John Q. Public (billiards promoter)". If the subject was more notable for something else than a cue sport but was also at least marginally notable as a cue sports personage, use the field he or she was more notable for, e.g. John Hennigan (poker player). Regardless, do not use truncated forms such as "John Q. Public (billiards)", "John Q. Public (pool)" or "John Q. Public (snooker)"; per Wikipedia:Naming conventions (people), a player is a person (a player) not a billiard, a pool or a snooker.
For non-biographical articles, use "(billiards)" (e.g. Pocket (billiards)), as a disambiguator unless something more specific is warranted, in which case use "(snooker)" or "(pool)". There will be no need to disambiguate further, as in "(carom billiards)", except under the most unusual of circumstances, which should probably be revisited for some other solution anyway, such as an article merge. Prefer natural disambiguation when practical, e.g. Cue stick, not Cue (billiards), though the latter redirects to the former.
To the extent possible, all cue sports articles should be based on the WikiProject Cue sports basic article template or a more specific one [forthcoming] (That said, these templates are only suggestions, not an official Wikipedia Guidelines. The templates are [will be] here to help you focus and to get you going, especially if you aren't yet certain what to write or in what order, or where to begin. But mainly, we just want you to write articles!)
Cue sports conceptual hierarchy
Cue sports articles and categories are arranged in relation to each other by way of the following hierarchy. This hierarchy is not perfect in every way for every conceptual purpose, but is entirely adequate for our purposes here. Note that some items appear more than once; see in-section footnotes for explanations. See "Major articles" and "Major categories" for extant actual major articles and categories.
Key:
[Bracketed] items show relationships to other sports probably not within the scope of this WikiProject.
Italics indicate a relationship that may be relevant to articles (e.g., History sections), but are not be represented in categoryspace.
Bold indicates the five main divisions of cue sports for Wikipedia article & category purposes (plus a bolded entry for the overarching topic itself).
[Non-cued indoor adaptations of non-team lawn games (bowling, shuffleboard, curling, etc.)]*1
Cue sports (i.e. cued indoor adaptations of non-team lawn games)
Ancestral early variants using a mace instead of a modern cue*2
Obstacle billiards
Bar billiards
Bumper pool
Bagatelle
(other variants)
Carom (carambole, pocketless) billiards*3
Pocket billiards*4
[Non-cue tabletop ball(s)-and-obstacles games (pachinko, pinball, etc.)]
Carom (carambole, pocketless) billiards*3
Straight rail
Balkline games
Three-cushion
English billiards*5
(other variants)
Pocket billiards*4
Pool*6
Nine-ball
Seven-ball
Ten-ball
Eight-ball
Blackball
One-pocket
Bank pool
Finger pool*1 (?? or is this actually a carom game ??)
(other variants)
English billiards*5
Snooker*7
(other variants)
Snooker*7
[Ancient board games]
[Non-cued disk-flicking games]
Table-top cue games
Carrom (cued variants)
Novuss
Crokinole (cued variants)
*1 Finger pool, though technically a non-cue game is a direct descendant of billiards, and uses otherwise identical equipment. *2 To be covered in Cue sports#History; not enough can be said (and cited) about this to warrant a separate article. On the slim chance that this does spawn enough articles for a category, that category should be at the same level as carom, obstacle, pocket and snooker under cue sports. *3 Carambole games evolved from pre-bagatelle, croquet-like tabletop obstacle games. Within categoryspace and for most purposes in articlespace it is treated as one of the four main divisions of cuesports. *4 Pocket billiards began as a variant of obstacle billiards. *5 English billiards is a hybrid carom/pocket game, and we treat it as a variant of both equally. Same goes for Cowboy (billiards) and Bottle pool. *6 Though not one of the four main subcategorizations of cue sports for our purposes, pool is obviously one of the top subjects and will likely represent the bulk of the articles in the cue sports articlespace. It is not ranked with snooker at the top level under cue sports, because it does not have the consistency and monolithic subculture that snooker does, it is a blanket term for a class of games played with pool equipment (eight-ball, nine-ball, etc.), and the terms "pocket billiards" and "pool" are used as synonyms in the industry. *7 Historically and technically, snooker is a variant of pocket billiards. However, as an organized sport and subculture it has a life of its own and does not significantly overlap with any other form of cuesports, even the closely-related pool and English billiards.
Avoid creating unnecessary articles
For instance, unless someone has a wealth of reliablysourced information about the composition, history, importance, differences between different kinds, alternatives to, etc., etc., of cue chalk, then we almost certainly do not need to create a Chalk (cue sports) article.
Do split articles that are getting unwieldy
The entire topic of cue sports aside from snooker was once represented mostly by a single long article at Billiards (now Cue sport). It was sensibly broken up into sub-articles and that work is still ongoing. So, for example if the eight-ball article becomes unwieldy and there is enough sourced material available about blackball, consider splitting the article into two. Note: This was actually done in March 2007, making the example particularly salient.
Don't unnecessarily duplicate lots of informaton
Articles about games or specific classes of games, for example, do not need to reiterate the entire history of cue sports, just the history of that particular variant. Likewise, we do not need wholesale reiterations of basic concepts, such as racking, lagging, etc. Use the {{Cuegloss}} template as much as possible (without creating redundant wikilinks in the same article; only the original introduction of a term needs such a wikilink in most cases.)
‡ = Principally the work of someone not connected with the project, usually someone from WikiProject Snooker more specifically.
Major articles
These are the largest of the cue sports "master" articles, from which many other articles descend. Not surprisingly, the list bears a strong resemblance to the organization of the cue sports categories.
Please feel free to list your new cue sports-related articles here (newer articles at the top, please). Listings will be removed as they age, unless they still need serious cleanup.
Any articles created (or existing and expanded at least five-fold) within the previous seven days that have an interesting or unusual fact in them, have a minimum of 1,500 characters of prose (ignoring infoboxes, categories, references, lists, tables etc.), don't have any dispute templates on them, and cite their sources, should be suggested for the Did you know? box on the Wikipedia Main Page. Note that articles developed in a subpage and later moved to the mainspace are considered new as of the date of the move.
This list was generated from these rules. Questions and feedback are always welcome! The search is being run daily with the most recent ~14 days of results. Note: Some articles may not be relevant to this project.
Other unsourced stubs and articles in danger of deletion
This has not been updated in several years.
Consider it a high priority to add at least one reliable source to each of these articles (properly – use <ref name="something-unique">{{Cite web| DETAILS HERE}}</ref> to provide source details and provide references for specific facts, inline in the article) and then remove it from the list. See "Newly discovered articles" list above for more.
John Roberts, Jr. (billiards player) – article is fine, but needs redirects from ", Jr.", "Jr", ", Jr", "Junior", ", Junior", "Jnr", ", Jnr", "Jnr." and ", Jnr."
These are the largest of the cue sports "master" categories, from which many other categories descend. Not surprisingly, it bears a strong resemblance to the organization of the hierarchy.
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (May 2010)
Talk page banners
The project banner, {{WikiProject Cue sports}}, should be placed above any less specific ones (e.g. for WikiProject Biography, WikiProject Japan, etc.). The best way to use it is to just copy-paste the appropriate code block below, and modify the parts in italics.
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Cue sports, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of pool, carom billiards and other cue sports on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Cue sportsWikipedia:WikiProject Cue sportsTemplate:WikiProject Cue sportscue sports articles
Internal pages: Something like: [8][9]). Such pages are not fluff, but can be good places to find recruits for the project, possibly including subject-matter experts, especially if cross-referenced to the project. Also, Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Cue sports (cf. [10][11][12]).
Create timelines, both textual and graphical. See link for various guidelines and examples. We need an overall one for cue sports generally, and more specific ones as we drill down into more specific topics (timeline of nine-ball, timeline of Willie Mosconi's career, etc.).
Form sections: Exhibition game needs section on cue sports; could later form a new article with "Main article..." xref to it. What other general articles need cue sports sections?
Images: improve articles with images from commons; create pics and add them to commons as GFDL/CC-by/PD.
Add: {{Sport overview}} to main articles of cue games that are real sports; medal table tags where they apply (see Ding Junhui for example).
Insert: Cue sports events (tournament results, etc.) into the "year in sports" categories (e.g. 1965 in sports), using {{subst:Cue sports heading}} if that year doesn't have one yet.
On talk pages of non-bio cue sports articles (other than snooker articles — for those, use {{WikiProject Snooker}} instead). The values shown are defaults for typical new articles. In some cases, another project's banner should be above ours. E.g., if it's a film, the {{WikiProject Films}} banner should be first. The DEFAULTSORT must come after all project banners and such (but before any cleanup categories) or it won't work. Please do include it, as it helps sort articles in our internal categories, instead of having them all under "T" for "Talk:..."
As above, but with additional features. A demo of it is on the project sandbox talk page; (It cannot be displayed here because some of the templates involved will not display properly on a non-talk page.)
Usage
On talk pages of biographical cue sports articles (other than snooker articles — use {{WikiProject Snooker}} for those instead). The values shown are defaults for typical new articles. Remove |blp=yes and change |living=yes to read no if deceased. The DEFAULTSORT must come after all project banners and such (but before any cleanup categories) or it won't work. Please do include it, as it helps sort articles in our internal categories, instead of having them all under "T" for "Talk:..." Please also use the DEFAULTSORT in the article too, immediately above the first category, and then you won't need to do any "|Familyname, Givenname" stuff after the category names. Note that |needs-photo-yes= is not added to our banner; the special {{Photo requested}} call will take care of this for us (but it is still used with {{WPBiography}}). The {{Find sources}} template works best with a singular keyword, such as "billiard" or "pool", and there can be more than one: {{Find sources|FirstName(s)LastName|billiard}}<br />{{Find sources|FirstNameLastName|pool}} Additional instances of {{Find sources}} can be used for alternative names.
Stubs
Put stub tags at very end of page, after categories and language transwikis, with two blank lines before them; this will prevent them running up against the nav box when the page renders.
On stub articles related to cue sports players and non-player personalities (except if snooker-related — use {{Snooker-bio-stub}} instead or pool-related — use {{Pool-bio-stub}} )
{{Cuegloss|Entry to link to|text to link from}} — Used for convenient wikilinking of a term in an article to the appropriate #-linkable entry in the Glossary of cue sports terms without having to type such a long wikilink name. Please do not "subst:" this template. Example usage: {{Cuegloss|Break|break shot}} is the equivalent of [[Glossary of cue sports terms#Break|break shot]].
=={{subst:Cue sports heading}}== — Used to quickly create section headings for cue sports in the "year in sports" articles (e.g. 1965 in sports). This template should be subst'd.
Flag templates (with and without country names/abbreviations) for tournament results tables, champions lists, etc., are available from WikiProject Flag Template, and are much easier to use than [[image:Filename.svg|size|etc.]] [[Country Name]] manual coding. Please review WP:FLAGCRUFT about avoiding overuse and abuse of these templates (it is not an official guideline yet, but it probably will be).
Reference citation shortcuts
{{Shamos 1999}} - used inside <ref name="Shamos 1999"></ref> to cite Mike Shamos's The New Illustrated Billiards Encyclopedia without having to manually fill in {{Cite book}}; takes page numbers (with "p." or "pp.") as semi-optional parameter. Example: Blah blah blah.<ref name="Shamos1999">{{Shamos1999|accessdate=2024-09-22|pp. 123-125}}</ref>
{{World Snooker Championship bracket}} - For showing results for tournaments with 32 competitors in knock out format in a tree diagram; may need minor adjustment for non-snooker games; similar to {{32TeamBracket}}, but prettier and without position numbering
These warn readers that article may be updated frequently as results come in:
{{Current sport|sport=cue sports|event=three-cushion tournament}} - a hatnote for the article on an ongoing tournaments or the like, using "three-cushion tournament" as an example:
{{Current sport-related|sport=cue sports|2024 WPA World Nine-ball Championship}} – a message box for other articles (e.g. competitor bios) that may be affected by what happens at the ongoing event; second parameter is the name of the event article, using 2024 WPA World Nine-ball Championship as an example:
{{Category redirect}} - put at top of categories slated for rename, deletion or merging (subst and edit as needed, if target category does not exist yet).
Participants
To sign on as a project member, simply add your name to the list below, and feel free to tell us about your relevant interests, focus, editing so far, etc. You can see who's been active lately at this auto-generated report.
Getting started
As a member of WikiProject Cue sports, it is requested that you watchlist at least the following pages:
Wikipedia:WikiProject Cue sports - if the project members do not pay attention to changes at the project page, especially its talk page, effective collaboration will be nearly impossible and the project would eventually fail.
Cue sport - our main article, frequently subject to vandalism and nonsense edits that (historically) have sometimes taken hours or even an entire day to be fixed
One or more player articles of your choice that you'd like to "adopt" as a guardian against vandalism, PoV-pushing, etc.
Keeping in touch with the rest of the team via the project pages, and keeping an occasional eye on core articles will go a long way to strengthening the project and protecting the articles. Thank you for your collaboration!
You may place {{User WikiProject Cue sports}} on your user page to display the following userbox:
Armbrust (talk·contribs) I create and try to improve many snooker tournament, rankings and season articles. I'm also interested in the Mosconi Cup, Cue sports at the World Games, the World Professional Billiards Championship and the Artistic Billiards World Championship.
Alexfromm44 (talk·contribs) - Avid Billiards Player and looking to help out in any way I can as a college student. 13:48, 8 February 2012
eengner (talk·contribs) - Billiards player who competes in pro-am leagues and who's wife is also an avid billiards player (and recent Amateur National Championship Finalist). I was a Division Representative for APA and an official referee at the 2013 APA National Team Championships in Las Vegas, NV. I am an engineer in the U.S. who uses a physics based approach to billiards and life. Created the page American rotation and am looking forward to contributing and advancing the sport. (Eengner (talk) 18:07, 30 September 2014 (UTC))[reply]
Countakeshi (talk·contribs) - A member of the board and table games project with interest in cue sports, especially its history. I've recently sorted out the Wikimedia Commons categories on billiards.
RebSkii (talk • contribs) 13:56, 11 December 2006 (UTC) i'm currently working on the Asian Games pages and i'm a member of the Wikiproject:Sports Olympics. so i'll be contributing on Asiad and Olympiad related articles. i might as well make a cue sports templates for the Asian Games.[reply]
MichaelJHuman (talk·contribs) Contributor of the first substantial content to the initial billiards stub. Pool enthusiast (strictly average player), and long time student of the history of the game and it's players.
Psdubow (talk·contribs) I have a family member who is a pool and billiards promoter/event marketer/enthusiast/salesman, and also I find cue sports fun and interesting
RailbirdJAM (talk·contribs) Transcriptionist and American pool enthusiast, familiarity with the evolution of pocket billiards in the United States and its players, past and present.
Last updated by Lee Vilenski 2 years ago [Refresh]
This list is automatically generated based on those making at least two edits to WikiProject-area pages and discussions within a 90-day period, excluding bots. This is distinct from a membership list that the WikiProject may maintain.
Last updated by Lee Vilenski 2 years ago [Refresh]
This list is automatically generated based on those making at least five edits to an article in the WikiProject's subject area within a 30-day period, excluding bots.