Topic on User talk:Mad melone

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Hey Mad melone, you seem to be more of a tennis expert than I am. Can you please help me with some tennis-specific details?

• There is always a “player 1” and a “player 2” in tennis (or “doubles team 1” and “doubles team 2”). What’s the official term for those two players/teams? I assume that it does have a different meaning than in other ball games, where the first team is the home team and the other one the away team.
• Does the order of the players in the match have any significance for the match itself (e.g. “player 1” always starts with the first service, or may choose the side on the court, or so…)
• How do they determine the order of players in tennis? Just coincidence/draw (and then tournament progression), or by something like the world ranking list?

Thanks!

Hey,

Thanks for reaching out, hopefully my answers will help you (Sidenote: I am keeping this conversation in English for the purpose of transparence in the widely English-speaking WD-community, but if there are any specifics, feel free to write in German):

• There is no clear definition of player 1 and 2. Generally, the order the players are listed depends on the actual draw. However, results are always noted in a way where the winner is mentioned first and the loser second (as there is no classic "home" or "away" team.
• Still, this is a valid point as we should probably have some kind of order to be able to produce draws in Wikipedia automatically from Wikidata sources. However, I would refrain from simple calling this team 1 or 2, but rather go through all the teams in the draw for a specific round. As an example, there would be 4 players in a semifinal and we would have one item (with player 1 and 2) for the upper bracket semi final and one item (with player 3 and 4) for the lower bracket semi final. The different Wikipedia draw templates already work this way, so there wouldn't be that much change necessary.
• The order therefore does not have any significance for the match itself, e.g. the first service is determined by a coin-toss)
• Additionally, I would suggest to use the participant property with the qualifiers "winner" or "loser"/"runner-up". Especially for doubles, we would not need to define a doubles team, but could list all four players and derive the winning and losing teams that way.
• The order of play is pre-determined by a tournament draw and then tournament progression. However, this raises another good point: while the world ranking has no direct impact on the potential next match-ups, the best players are usually seeded so that they don't play each other in the first rounds of the tournament. This seeding is (apart from Wimbledon) always derived from the world rankings as per a certain time (most of the times two weeks prior to the event). Apart from the actual seeding, there are additonal information that we normally show in a tournament draw, i.e.. wildcards, qualifiers, lucky losers, protected rankings. We would probably need another property for that, but let's take it one step at a time.

All of what I said is basically also true for the sports I mentioned in the property request, e.g. squash, table-tennis, beachvolleyball, volleyball, badminton,....

Please don't hesitate to ask additional questions if I haven't been clear enough. I appreciate your support, melone