User talk:Beatsandskies

References

Hey, thanks for adding in the Player's Guide decklists. Just a couple of things in regards to the referencing. We try to avoid naked URLs across the Wiki. I recommend using the {{WebRef}} template. You can read the documentation here: Template:WebRef/doc.

If you are referencing one source multiple times you can do one full reference and the a ref call each subsequent time. This is done by adding the name variable to the <ref> tag.

• The first time will be <ref name="[unique name]">{{WebRef|url=|title=|author=|publisher=|date=}}</ref>.
• Subesquent times are just <ref name="[unique name]"/>.

-- RivalRowan (talk) 08:51, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, cool as. Bit of a learning curve here and there’s still a bit to add to that page so will be easy enough to pop in and improve that.

Beatsandskies (talk) 09:57, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Hey Beatsandskies, I've just seen that the Cathy Nicoloff has all references using naked URLs. These should be WebRefs. If you're using the Internet Archive snapshot, you can add two parameters to cover the snapshot (<ref>{{WebRef|url=|title=|author=|publisher=|date=|archiveurl=|archivedate=}}</ref>). "date" will be the original publication date and "archivedate" is the date of the snapshot you're using. -- RivalRowan (talk) 04:42, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

It's an older page so the references were like that already. Definitely something which would be good and check through and update though: I'd mentally added it to my to do list.Beatsandskies (talk) 04:45, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, unfortunately it's just an extra step on your edits but because you're going through a bunch of old articles we may not have a chance to fix these up otherwise. If noone's editing these articles, nobody's checking them is the problem. There should be a lot less now we've fixed up the majority of broken references. Fingers crossed! -- RivalRowan (talk) 07:54, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

Product names — MTGO and MTGA

Hey Beatsandskies, as you've started uploading the Magic: The Gathering Arena decklists now I just noticed a couple of minor things.

1. Magic product names, including software, should be italicized per the MTG Wiki:Manual of Style.
2. To save yourself some pain, the first time an article refers to MTGO or MTGA it needs to be the complete product name (i.e. Magic Online or Magic: The Gathering Arena). Thereafter feel free to abbreviate it.

Us admins haven't been super consistent with this, so I apologize for the many times you'll see it not italicized, but we're trying to fix those up when we encounter them. -- RivalRowan (talk) 04:11, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

Midweek Magic event dates

Hi Beatsandskies, I've just been reviewing the updates you've made to the Into the Future Midweek Magic series. Nice work on bringing those together. I did notice that you've been listing the event dates as the Friday of that week (e.g. "October 13, 2023" for Into the Future (Eldraine)). Midweek Magic events aren't usually one day affairs and should run for three days. Both the schedule announcement and the MTG Arena Event Calendar for October 2023 show the event running October 10-12, 2023. Please double check those because we want readers to have an accurate timeline when WotC inevitably deletes the MTGA calendar. Otherwise, it's looking good. -- RivalRowan (talk) 00:37, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Cool as, I'll go back through and check all the dates (and other copy/paste errors). I did want to expand them to give the range rather than just the start point. It just means going back and finding all the updates (to cite them too).Beatsandskies (talk) 00:45, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Also I wasn’t aware of that calendar — or at least I never thought to see how far it went back. That’s actually incredible: would be amazing if it could be scraped somehow since we certainly can’t trust WoTC not to break it, and I don’t think that it’d be very useable through internet archives with how it is structured. Beatsandskies (talk) 04:54, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Thoughts on National Champs pages

This started off as something which I planned to post to the Irish National Championships talk page but I think I've managed to expand things way past my seed issue/question so maybe here is a better place for it.

I'm wondering if it'd make sense to copy over the Northern Irish tables from the British page over to this one so that information is easily viewed on both? It's what I've done with the UK and Eire section already. While I think doubling up the 95/96 info does make sense, especially given there's similar situations with the NZ/Aus and Czecho/Slovakia, it's a little bit less so with NI splitting off in 2012. Especially as it'd then open the idea of adding the 1997-2011 joint Irish competition to the British page, which definitely doesn't feel right. The two pages are linked together in a few different places where it made sense to do, so I think it should be fairly easy and grokable to navigate between them.

However: what prompted this talk-note is Alan Warnock. He was joint Irish Champion in 2011, and then Northern Irish pro-points champion in 2012 to 2014. But it may be easy to miss this information as it is split between the two pages.

So, some options for both the Northern Ireland situation and in general:

• Double up on tables - which I don't really like as above.
• Make a note somewhere on both pages about Alan's achievements - a bit clunky but probably the easiest option. There might be other players too in a similar situation, I'll mention them too if so.
• Make a player profile page for Alan. Which, no offense to the dude (since he's still a better player than I ever will be), I don't think his other results really warrant it. I've been working on a "two National titles, a good PT/worlds finish and ideally a GP win or two" as a rough guideline with the pages I've been creating recently.
• Add flag symbols next to player names. Could look a bit busy, and opens a can of wurms with me then needing to probably needing to do it for all the other nats pages too. It might be ok to use a flag here and there: eg a Belgian flag next to Dominic Symens when he placed in the French nats, with the implication that everyone without a flag is French. But then that would likely also be a nightmare with the British page. (Is everyone there English unless proven otherwise? I wouldn't want to risk angering a proud Scotsman!)

This is the point where I moved to my personal talk page.

• Completely reformat how I've set up these pages, potentially using the format that GP results have on the Pro Tour season overview pages. (for example). Would this be clearer than what I've been using? It was originally something I threw together for the Americans to act as a bit of an index/summary of the individual US nats pages I was/am doing. (And will get back to once I'm finished being distracted by documenting this other stuff). Maybe I'll trial something with the Slovak page I just created.
• If I do adopt that GP style formatting then it'd allow me to include the Top 8 of each competition: something I'm in two minds about, but certainly wouldn't work with my current set up. Finding full Top 8s is going to be harder than just the top 4s, but then also the national teams at Worlds aren't always the Top 3 or 4 players. Invitations could be declined, which meant they got offered to the next higher finisher.
• That set up would also make it easier to indicate when there's not a specified 3rd and 4th place for the semifinalists, or 5-8th for quarter finalists. Hmm. Even though this is supposed to be a request for ideas I think I'm convincing myself now. But hey: I'd still welcome thoughts!

I will leave things there I think. I could go on, but I probably shouldn't.