Talk:McLaren

Wiki Education assignment: Research Process and Methodology - FA22 - Sect 200 - Thu

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 22 September 2022 and 8 December 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Rt2510 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Rt2510 (talk) 23:01, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

Formula E dispute

@CrashmasterSOAD: Could you please use the talk page to "reply" to another editor? That is what it is for, and making pointless edits to the article to do so is disruptive (see also WP:POINT). If the other editors involved wish to reply to your "reply" edit, they should also do so here. ― "Ghost of Dan Gurney" (talk)  13:44, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

You are absolutely correct. I often forget about this feature or rather about how to use it properly (as I don't edit stuff of Wikipedia nearly as often as I used to be). I was actually looking for ways to message that given user directly (as I know talk pages exist for users), but then opted to "reply" via an edit to be more specific about that given page which I understand wasn't an ideal solution. Consider this my apology. CrashmasterSOAD (talk) 17:34, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Is this article too unwieldy?

For a long time, if you looked up "McLaren," you almost certainly meant the F1 team. Thus it made sense for the McLaren article to focus specifically on the F1 team, not the McLaren Group or McLaren Automotive. Today, not only is McLaren Automotive much more notable than it once was, but McLaren Racing itself does much more than just F1. There's now an IndyCar team, an Formula E team, and an Extreme E team. This article has grown very large and very complex as it tries to cover all those topics in depth. I would propose using this article to cover only McLaren Racing as a company, then breaking out separate articles for McLaren F1 Team, McLaren Formula E Team, and McLaren Extreme E. Or perhaps this article could just be the F1 team, as that remains the most notable part, and we create a separate article for McLaren Racing. Any thoughts? Lazer-kitty (talk) 12:56, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

@Lazer-kitty: I think the article is getting unwieldy (the total article size is currently 217kb), but I'm not sure about the best way to split it. One option is as you have described above. Another option would be to split out just the "Formula One" bits (the "Racing history: Formula One", "Sponsorship, naming, and livery" and "Formula One results" sections) into a separate article (McLaren in Formula One?), which would reduce the size of this article by about 50%(?). Another option would be to "go the whole hog" and move this article to McLaren Racing (with optional splitting as described above), allowing McLaren to become a disambiguation page. One factor to consider is the existing links. Most F1-related instances of "McLaren" link to McLaren, although there are about 500 which link to McLaren (racing), following a page move back in 2009. And there are 57 existing links to McLaren Racing. I'm not saying that existing links should stop us adopting the most sensible arrangement; it's just a factor to consider. DH85868993 (talk) 02:52, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

@DH85868993: Well we both seem to be somewhat indecisive folks regarding how to split this article, so I'll just write down an idea and see how it sounds:

• Keep this page for the F1 team specifically, both because it's the most notable "McLaren," and because of your point about all the existing links. I agree that it's not something that should dictate what we do, but I still think we should consider it, especially since it's also another example of how most people think McLaren = McLaren F1 Team.
• Create a separate article for McLaren Racing as a company, and use that for all the corporate details and ownership stuff.
• Create a separate article for the Formula E team
• Create a separate article for the Extreme E team
• And obviously we already have an article for the IndyCar team

Lazer-kitty (talk) 14:40, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

@Lazer-kitty: That sounds good to me. I've advertised this discussion at WP:F1, in the hopes of attracting input from others. DH85868993 (talk) 22:06, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

>"...we already have an article for the IndyCar team".

Not that simple. The article currently named Arrow McLaren has its scope purely on the entity formerly known as Schmidt Peterson Motorsports. It does not have any coverage of McLaren's AOWR exploits prior to 2020 and at present should not be considered a child article to this one.

Also, where do the Can-Am history and current sports car programs fit in? McLaren is a large organization; I'm not sure a split is needed here. ― "Ghost of Dan Gurney" (talk)  01:43, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

McLaren has almost always had more than one racing team. They built cars for lower Formula and became famous originally for their monster Can-Am sportscars. Bruce McLaren was always keen to have a larger presence in America as well as his home country and nearest neighbour for stuff like the Tasman series. It was only during Teddy Mayer's tenure as McLaren boss that they streamlined. It's important to describe, where appropriate, that Formula One teams have pursued many strands of motorsport. Brabham was a major constructor of racing cars. Ferrari (and Alfa Romeo and Sauber and Audi and Ligier) have long history with sports car racing. Toyota F1 was created from the Toyota Team Europe World Rally team. Zakspeed came from Touring Cars. Scuderia Italia went to GT racing when they could no longer race in F1. Most F1 teams start in lower Formula. Red Bull's history began as Paul Stewart's Formula 3000 team.

Maybe the exhaustive stats and tables should be broken into seperate articles rather than telling the story of racing teams in chunks of seperate articles. You can't accurately tell the story of motor racing teams by concentrating on only one of their categories. --Falcadore (talk) 07:34, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

One of the reasons the article is so unwieldy is the ever-increasing amount of detail. Compare the detail for the 2023 season, which is barely half-way through, with the earlier years. Halmyre (talk) 11:38, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

WP:RECENTISM and WP:TOOMUCH are hallmarks of the whole wikiproject, to be honest. We're not very centralized and attract a lot of single-interest editors who don't realize that we're trying to write to a broader audience and end up with a lot of WP:CRUFTy detail. I've long felt that some sort of merging of the various subprojects that cover F1, NASCAR, and other forms of auto racing should be done. I agree that we should be splitting the results tables out, ala Career results of Juan Pablo Montoya, Career results of Jimmie Johnson, etc., before anything else and would not oppose this split at all. ― "Ghost of Dan Gurney" (talk)  15:52, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

I already regret bringing this up. Splitting out all the stats into separate articles is something I could not oppose more strongly, it just makes the process of finding information more complex and convoluted. I don't believe it aligns with how people read wiki and how they expect wiki to work. I proposed splitting the articles in the way I outlined above because I believe it would align with readers' expectations: if they want to read about F1, they go to the F1 team article, or the IndyCar team article for that, or the McLaren Racing article if they want to know about the company specifically, etc. Somebody who wants only to read about McLaren F1 Team is not going to have a great experience if we persist with a massive, all-encompassing article, but with certain F1 stats split off elsewhere. That doesn't make any sense to me.

You mention examples like Career results of Jimmie Johnson - one of my absolute least favorite things about reading wiki is when I go to an actor's article to look through their filmography and then find it's been offloaded to a second article. I do not see how this improves the reader's experience in the least. Lazer-kitty (talk) 18:31, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

It improves the readers experience because wikipedia's approach has always been to prioritise prose over raw data. People don't speak in tables, they speak in sentences. From MOS:TABLES;

Tables are a way of presenting information in rows and columns. They can be useful for a variety of content presentations on Wikipedia, but should be used only when appropriate; sometimes the information in a table may be better presented as prose paragraphs or as an embedded list.

Wikipedia is first and foremost a general purpose encyclopedia, it's audience is not people who are looking at tables of race results. It's audience is people looking to read the story of a motor racing team, not in infodump of what they have done in only one championship.

If you find this a cause for regret than you should be remind of some of the basics of wikipedia. If you can write something in a sentence, then do that. Never present a table as an alternative to text. Data is an addendum to the article, not the article itself. -- Falcadore (talk) 07:57, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

It improves the readers experience because wikipedia's approach has always been to prioritise prose over raw data.

"This is how we've always done it" is in no way an explanation of how it improves the reader's experience. I was asking how it improves the reader's experience by making them go to multiple pages for the information they want, and I gave an explicit example of how it makes my experience worse as a reader.

People don't speak in tables, they speak in sentences.

We're not talking about speaking, we're talking about reading, and people absolutely do read data from tables just as easily as they read prose. In some cases more easily. This is why you can look up just about any match summary from any sport and find both a story of what happened in the match and a table filled with data about the match. They go hand in hand.

Wikipedia is first and foremost a general purpose encyclopedia, it's audience is not people who are looking at tables of race results.

General purpose encyclopedias absolutely do include tables of data, and our audience absolutely is people who want to see (among other things) tables of race results. Otherwise...we wouldn't have tables of race results, and they wouldn't get a lot of traffic. But they do! The claim that people are only here to read written prose is completely baseless.

It's audience is people looking to read the story of a motor racing team, not in infodump of what they have done in only one championship.

I'm not proposing the latter so I have no clue what this in response to.

Data is an addendum to the article, not the article itself.

I'm literally opposing the suggestion of creating new articles based solely on data tables. I'm saying the articles should be aligned with specific topics. If you want to read about McLaren's F1 team, you should be able to go to an article specifically for that and have all/most of the relevant information in one place. The counterpoint is that the solution to this article being too large is to change nothing about it but cut out a bunch of data and make new articles to contain that. That solves none of the problems I see and creates new ones in terms of people now having to go to multiple articles in order to get information that previously would've been in one place.

The claim that most of our readers are here to sit down and read the full history of McLaren Racing and all its entities, without caring about any data or any recent news, or without intending to research only one of those teams specifically, is 100% completely detached from how I see people use wiki in real life. I see people ask "How many races did Verstappen win last year?" and open up Wikipedia. I see people ask "Who is that actress? Was she in Columbo?" and open up Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and encyclopedias are reference works too. That means that designing wiki to allow people to quickly and easily find the information they're looking for is critically important, and we've completely lost sight of that. Lazer-kitty (talk) 21:01, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

You've gone out of your way to twist my words and/or take them the wrong way, so I'm going to give you moment to reframe rather than to pointlessly restate that same things in simpler language. -- Falcadore (talk) 12:46, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

This is a blatantly false and absolutely unacceptable accusation that I would not expect from a long-time editor. I responded to exactly what you said. Lazer-kitty (talk) 22:42, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

I didn't want to waste everyone's time by firing back on every detail raised. Because arguing the point makes no difference. You know absolutely what I was saying and some of your responses don't hold water. But is there any point in pointing it out? It's not going to change your mind is it? -- Falcadore (talk) 12:54, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

• I think the article is clearly a mess. It's confusing to try and navigate and does a poor job of describing any of the possible scopes for this article. McLaren Racing or McLaren in motorsport ought to be created to cover the company itself. McLaren ought to be about the F1 team. Can-Am and American series can be covered in the McLaren Racing/McLaren in motorsport article, with Arrow McLaren covering the present-day team. Further, McLaren in Formula E and McLaren in Extreme E (or McLaren in electric racing]) should be created to cover those two series. Sportscar racing also needs to be covered, I would suggest in the McLaren Racing/McLaren in motorsport article. This, to me, is a fairly intuitive way to enable better coverage of McLaren on Wikipedia. It separates the different series in what I believe is a sensible way, while keeping the McLaren article about the primary topic - the historic and well-known F1 team. 5225_C (talk • contributions) 10:52, 22 July 2023 (UTC)