All the News That's Fit to Post, Part 2: The Super Bowl and The Boat Race

The serene presentation of Wikipedia's front-page "In the news" section belies the messy truth behind the headlines: a never-ending newsroom argument about matters both serious and silly

Today’s post is the second installment of a series on Wikipedia’s “In the news” feature, exploring how the news headlines posted to Wikipedia’s main page are decided upon. To fully understand today’s installment, I recommend first reading “All the News That’s Fit to Post, Part 1: What is “In the News”?

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Recurring items and the Big Game

Notwithstanding the directive that “each event should be discussed on its own merits”, over time ITN participants have created a list of news stories that come up on a regular or semi-regular basis in hopes of avoiding having the same damn argument every time. The list is called “Recurring items”, or ITNR for short.

Events granted “recurring item” status are divided into several categories, including awards, discoveries, celestial events, and sports. 

Within the sports category, more than two dozen sports are guaranteed a front-page slot when championship time comes around. 

“Football (American)”—one of five listed sports called “football”—has just one allocated annual event. 

Of course it is the Super Bowl, and wouldn’t you know it, whether to include the Super Bowl is one of the earliest such items ITN had to figure out. The most frequent arguments on ITN often center on whether its content is too Western and especially U.S.-centric, or too defensive about its Western biases. And few things are as identifiably American as the Super Bowl.

ITN archives begin February 6, 2005, the same day as Super Bowl XXXIX. At this time ITN, still called “Current events”, already showed signs of it being an old argument. One participant begged: “Please just add this when the time comes”. But the next went the other way: “I don’t think American sporting events are sufficiently relevant to appear here. Just my opinion.” Nevertheless, it was posted with a compromise: listed below an item about the 2005 Thai general election:

But the matter was not settled. Two years later, on February 4, 2007, an editor asked why the Super Bowl wasn’t listed on the main page: “Since this is one of the largest sporting events around the world (at least TV wise), shouldn’t it be mentioned on the front page today? I think it should.” The first response: “I say no. The NFL is a national championship, in a sport that only has a following in one country … This is an event of local, rather than international significance.” The decision was still to post it.

Objections continued to be raised. In May 2013 an effort was made by ITN regulars to develop an “extremely conservative” list of “low controversy” recurring items, the Super Bowl among them. It was soon ratified and is in use to this day.

Only four years later, in the wake of Super Bowl LI—the one where the Patriots rallied for the biggest comeback in Super Bowl history—it still took 3,100 words of discussion to decide. “Oppose as a sports event of very little interest outside the country in which it is played”, went the first objection. “Trivial. The only interesting bit was the half-time show”, went another. Some of these opposes were surely deadpan humor, but certainly not all. It was posted anyway.

Fed up with the naysayers, pro-Super Bowl editors took the unusual step of proposing to remove the Super Bowl from ITNR. The idea was to settle this once and for all, and put as many editors on the record as possible supporting it. Not everyone got the point, and responded as if it was in fact genuine: “This is one of the biggest sporting events in the world. We’re not removing it. The fact that this is even being considered by anybody is a problem.” Which is exactly the response the nominating editor was going for; less than 4 hours later, precedent for posting the Super Bowl annually was re-established. And so it was never debated again. 

Until the following year: “This may be news in the States but it sure isn’t news anywhere else.”

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The Boat Race vs. March Madness

High-profile though it is, the Super Bowl is far from ITN’s most controversial sports-related topic. That honor goes to The Boat Race, a rowing competition between Cambridge and Oxford dating to the early 19th century. And its story at ITN is inextricable from another university-level sporting event: the NCAA Division I men’s (and women’s) basketball tournament.

The earliest recorded effort to post The Boat Race to ITN is found in April 2006. The proposed blurb was to be “Oxford won The Boat Race decisevely [sic] beating Cambridge in choppy Thames waters.” However, it was denied with the simple, uncontested argument that sports topics are “not ITN material”.

Two years passed without it being brought up again. Then in March 2009, it snuck through: “Oxford Boat Club defeats Cambridge Boat Club to win the 155th University Boat Race in London, England. (BBC)”. (Note, at this time ITN was featuring outbound links to news articles hosted outside Wikipedia, something it no longer does.) A month later, someone raised the idea of linking to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament (only the men’s). In a show of personality that would never fly at ITN today, this discussion was given a rather David Foster Wallace-like headline: “Another one of those really, really long and tiring debates on sports; this one features a healthy mixture of basketball, baseball, association football, its American counterpart, rugby union, Gaelic football, horse racing, Aussie Rules, rowing, ice hockey... and The Da Vinci Code”.

By April 2010, the presumption against including sports stories had given way to a presumption in favor of only listing results from the “highest level of the sport”. On this basis the NCAA failed to make the cut this year, and spotty archives only confirm that the outcome of The Boat Race was up in the air for a while. Evidence against its posting, this comment: “I was tempted to nominate [The Boat Race], but if someone else had, I would have opposed because I think it’s of comparable significance to [the NCAA tournament].” Evidence for, a blurb exists in the archives: “Cambridge Boat Club defeats Oxford Boat Club to win the 156th University Boat Race in London, England. (BBC)”.

By the following April, The Boat Race had become a recurring joke. Its nomination went down again, and editors danced on its grave with a little light Anglophobia: “Toffs having a day out on the river isn’t newsworthy.” And: “What’s that you say, chap? A game of croquet before luncheon. Splendid, old chap, splendid!” Adding insult to injury, the NCAA tournament (still just the men’s) was posted, although it took 5,300 words of debate to get there.

For the next two years, thousands upon thousands of words of debate were necessary to deny both events. In 2013, The Boat Race wasn’t even nominated.

Then in April 2014, the tide began to turn, as it were. This time one editor nominated both The Boat Race and the NCAA championship and argued forcefully for each, using similar arguments: “This is not the ‘highest level’ of rowing, but is a race of high cultural significance.” This time, both succeeded.

In 2015, both made it through again, and so too did the NCAA women’s tournament, finally. Both were fully accepted as mainstays in the ITNR list, although The Boat Race remained an object of some mockery. From the comments prior to its posting in April 2021: “Oh no, not this again. Hooray, at last the Fens hit the front page!”

As recently as 2022 neither the NCAA tournament nor The Boat Race faced any opposition to their inclusion.

But in early 2023, something happened: a newly active ITN regular decided to nominate The Boat Race for removal from ITNR—the accepted list of recurring events—and The Boat Race haters came out in full force. The motion passed. Subsequent to the decision, the Boat Race could still be nominated for inclusion, but would no longer enjoy official sanction all but guaranteeing its listing. 

This time, the very persistence of the rowing competition’s supporters became a liability. That is to say, a perception had developed that ITN (and all of Wikipedia, really) had become immodestly influenced by British editors who had been too successful getting British topics in general and pub sports considered obscure by the rest of the world specifically—darts, snooker, hurling—all the way through the process. One editor summed it up: “All the focus tends to go to the project’s American bias, so it’s good that the British bias is getting some attention.”

A couple months later the NCAA tournament was posted with limited opposition, while The Boat Race sank like a stone. One cranky British editor particularly associated with The Boat Race’s cause snapped: “[I]t’s the relentless hatred that’s stopped me bothering. Fuck it, why bother? The ex-colonials win and the encyclopedia loses.”

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Even as the NCAA basketball tournament’s ITNR spot seems secure, and the Super Bowl’s opposition never amounted to much more than eye rolls, a similar competition appears to be no closer to acceptance at the beginning of 2024: the College Football Playoff National Championship.

No one is ever satisfied with American college football’s postseason, so the current game only replaced the hated BCS’s championship game in January 2015. The CFP championship game was nominated for ITN, but produced no consensus after more than 10,000 words of debate. 

Nor was it accepted in 2016. Also in 2017, no. In fact, The Boat Race’s chief proponent posted 17 comments in opposition, arguing that Americans having to “fight so hard to get this apparently so notable and so significant event onto ITN must demonstrate to them that at the very least that it’s utterly insigificant [sic] outside their own universe?” 

In 2018 it was a “weak consensus against”, then no in 2019, a no in 2020… wait, wait, a yes in 2020! Yes in 2020!! The editor responsible for deciding wrote: “Consensus has established posting for this year, and it won’t be pulled. Discussion as to whether to include in ITNR can take place there, now that it has been posted this once. That’s how ITNR works, not the other way around.” Although it was secondary to a meteorite:

In 2021: no. 2022: no. 2023: no.

The 2024 game was held last night. As of publication time, it looks like this one is also going to be: no.

We’ll get ‘em next year, guys.

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All screenshots via Wikipedia, CC-BY-SA 4.0; Patrick Mahomes photo by All-Pro Reels, CC-BY-SA 2.0; The Boat Race logo via The Boat Race, all rights reserved; The Boat Race photo by Chris McKenna, CC-BY-SA 4.0; Murchison meteorite photo by Art Bromage / Basilicofresco, CC-BY-SA 3.0