Talk:Magnus Carlsen

Article size

At over 12,000 words, WP:TOOBIG recommends that the prose be spun out or removed. After skimming the article, I think lots of the "Chess career" section can be reduced, so that each individual year is 2-4 paragraphs. I also think the "Notable games" section should be removed entirely, and if they are notable should be included in the "Chess career" section.

Is a subject-matter expert willing to go through the article to determine what can be removed and spun out? Z1720 (talk) 18:42, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

Since Carlsen is still alive and still active in his chess career, people are still appending things to the section about his career in almost journalistic fashion. This isn't good for an encyclopedia, but it's really impossible to control it until the dust has settled. I don't think we should lose any sleep over the size of this article until then.

I have argued elsewhere in favor of having a "notable games" section in a biographical article about a chess master. This is/was also the general practice in print encyclopedias, most recently Hooper and Whyld's Oxford Companion to Chess. I admit that it's not easy to choose notable games from the oeuvre of someone who is still active in his chess career, and the current selection in the article about Carlsen is far from ideal. But we are getting far afield from the issue of article size. Bruce leverett (talk) 05:03, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

@Bruce leverett: It could be several decades until Carlsen finishes his career, and readers are accessing his article now. While editors are constantly adding things to the article, I think it is also prudent for some to start trimming the information now so that it can be accessible to readers. I am happy to do this myself, but other editors have undone these undertakings in the past and I do not want to have hours of work undone. For the notable games, while other encyclopedias might do this I do not know if it should be done here, especially since this article is already so long. Also, since Wikipedia has its own definition for notability, my opinion is that only games that have their own article should be included in this section, if it remains. Z1720 (talk) 16:28, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

WP:N does not require that everything mentioned in an article must be notable enough for its own stand-alone article. For a game to be included as a "notable game" in someone's biography, there should be significant coverage of the game in reliable sources, i.e. one should find the game in many or most published biographies of the person, or in anthologies of historical games. For modern players, the published biographies and anthologies haven't come out yet, so it's more difficult to judge notability. A good example of a notable historical game is the last game between Lasker and Capablanca in the St. Petersburg tournament of 1914. I would never dream of writing an article about this game, but everyone who studies chess learns about it.

I do not have a solution to the problem of long biographical articles about modern players such as Carlsen. Most likely, I would not have any more success trimming the article than you would. Looking at articles about Grishchuk, Mamedyarov, and Vachier-Lagrave, I see different approaches; none of them are quite as long as the article about Carlsen, but they aren't under nearly as much scrutiny as the Carlsen article, so what works for them might not work for Carlsen. Bruce leverett (talk) 20:54, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

I did an example edit for 2010 of what cutting the prose might look like. Things that I cut include who Carlsen's opponents in every tournament were, results from preliminary rounds other than the finals, and information about other competitor's results. This cut about 300 words: doing similar edits in other sections might yield similar results. Since this was 14 years ago. these sections can be further trimmed to keep only the most important tournaments, and to emphasise career highlights and lowlights. Z1720 (talk) 21:48, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

I have no problem with what you have done for 2010. (I will make some minor corrections when I have time.)

For the World Blitz, since he didn't finish first, it was probably helpful to give the names of the people who finished ahead of him. Likewise for the Grand Slam final, it was better to give the name of the winner, Kramnik. This is sort of a tradition in chess literature (as far as I can tell). Readers tend to judge the strength of a tournament by who won it.

Even with what you have done, there is sometimes far more detail than one would expect in an encyclopedia biography article; but this is certainly a promising start. Bruce leverett (talk) 02:14, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

"I have no problem with what you have done for 2010." I have some problems with it. It is true that people judge strength of events by their participants, but that doesn't only apply to tournaments Carlsen didn't win. People judge the strength of tournaments Carlsen won by his opponents too. Although I would agree that it is more important to list the winner of a tournament when Carlsen finished second or third, it can also be important to list the second and third place finishers when Carlsen won. This is common in chess literature. The edits also removed many tournament scores and I expect those to be included. The edit "Carlsen won the Bazna Kings Tournament in Romania in June, finishing two points ahead of the second-place finishers." is simply worse than the barely longer original text "he finished with 7½/10 and a 2918 PR, winning the tournament by two points ahead of Radjabov and Gelfand." as it manages to both erase mention of the other strong players in the tournament and omit Carlsen's score. Some of the edits are definitely improvements, but the goal of making the article smaller is misguided and won't in itself make it better. The focus should be on quality, not length. Mentioning that some people thought Carlsen's performance at Bilboa 2010 was affected by distractions outside of chess but then cutting the text that explains that Carlsen did not agree with this view is odd. If the distraction theory is included then Carlsen's thoughts on it are clearly relevant and important and should be kept, or the entire thing could be struck. (I don't see how removing it would improve the article in any way other than to reduce hand-wringing over the article length.) On the whole, I don't like the changes. Quale (talk) 06:11, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

I emphatically agree with Quale that the emphasis should be on quality, not on word count. But if you can get a good handle on improving the quality, word count will take care of itself. Just tightening up the prose, as you have done in several places, is important. Regarding the discussion of why Carlsen had a bad result at Bilboa, this is the sort of thing that journalists have to talk about, but that is irrelevant to an encyclopedia entry, so the right approach was to remove all of it. Regarding the London Classic, I like that you removed a lot of detail, but I definitely agree with Quale that you have to mention the names of at least the other contenders. Another thing that was important to journalists in 2010, but has lost its luster for encyclopedia editors since then, is fluctuations in Carlsen's rating and whose rating was higher than his or lower. Bruce leverett (talk) 07:15, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

@Quale and Bruce leverett: Per WP:SIZE, a large article negatively affects "attention span, readability, organization, information saturation". If there is too much information, the reader will not be able to find the most important highlights from Carlsen's career. Also, large articles make it less likely for readers to read the article, which is the goal of Wikipedia articles. I think there is enough commentary about Carlson's career that much of this information can be spun out so that readers who want more specific information can go to those pages, while Calsen's main page remains an overview of his biography. I removed the opponents because, while chess enthusiasts will know who these people are, the average reader may not care who other tournament participants are. If the reader wants to know who competed in the tournament, they can go to the tournament's Wikipedia article. Z1720 (talk) 16:14, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

Both Quale and I referred to "Bilboa", but of course that should be "Bilbao".

We are trying to tell you that, in chess literature describing the result of a tournament, standard practice is to mention names of the contenders. You can verify this by reading some chess literature. In writing chess literature for Wikipedia, we should not be blazing new trails, but should follow standard practices, insofar as they are compatible with the encyclopedia milieu.

I don't want to get into a stalemate here arguing with you, and I don't want to leave unfixed the problems that Quale has pointed out, and I don't want to lose the valuable changes that you have made. When I have time, I will get in there and make some corrections, unless someboday gets in ahead of me. Bruce leverett (talk) 03:09, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

The fundamental concern I have is from the first comment: "lots of the "Chess career" section can be reduced," This could be a problem. Carlsen is a professional chess player. He is notable for his chess career so the article must cover his chess career in some detail. This was much easier for historical chess figures as there were many fewer top level tournaments and matches up to the 1970s and even 1980s than there are today. Modern chess GMs play in many more events today than they did in the past and I don't think we have yet found a good way to manage this in chess biographies. Most chess bios aren't greatly affected because only a handful of players play in the top tournaments and even fewer win them, but Carlsen is the extreme example. Carlsen has been the top-rated chess player for a long time and he plays a lot of the strongest chess tournaments and he wins a lot.

That said, I agree that the current organization of the article isn't good and we should try to improve it. Having a section for every year of Carlsen's chess career is not the best presentation. Small trims in the chess career section won't substantially improve the article and large removals will make it worse. Rather than eviscerating the description of Carlsen's chess career by removing all detail, I think it would be better to find a superior way to organize the article to make it read better. My opinion would be more helpful if I could offer some concrete suggestions how to improve the organization of the article, but I don't have any winning ideas yet. Quale (talk) 06:16, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

@Quale: It is very common to present someone's career in chronological order, so I am not sure if another arrangement of his career would be helpful. I typically recommend that sections be about four paragraphs per heading: if some years are merged now, the sections would be much too large. Some of the smaller paragraphs can be merged, but I think the fundamental problem is that the individual years contain too much information about every tournament Carlsen participated in that year. I think that information about the tournament can be moved to the tournament article, and the Carlsen article can focus on Carlsen's career milestones, highlights, and lowlights. After this is done, the smaller sections can be merged together to prevent MOS:OVERSECTION. Z1720 (talk) 16:08, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

As a reasoanbly good chessplayer (ELO 2200) who has followed Carlsen's career closely from start to finish/present I really like the memorable games section. I like it so much I even think it should be moved towards the top of the article. Playing chess games is after all what chess player Carlsen essentially is famous for. I also disagree a bit on the games included as memorable, but that's another discussion. The year by year sections on the other hand are too long for my taste and could very well be reduced into one section called "Career" or similar where only major wins like world championships and some 4-5 other outstanding tournament results are mentioned. In Carlsen's case this will be quite a long section even then. The sections on "Business endavours" also seem way too long to me or even totally redundant. Those could easily be reduced to a sentence or two in the main article. Ulvind (talk) 11:10, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

Many actors have a separate "filmography" article. How about farming off most of his chess career to a separate article, something like Match and tournament record of Magnus Carlsen? Adpete (talk) 12:58, 17 August 2025 (UTC)

That's not a bad idea @Adpete: I think a detailed career page could be warranted. I was also wondering if, as a temporary remedial step, we could make each year of his career section collapsible? Then the reader isn't forced to scroll through 20 years of history just to see when he got married etc.

In the long run, I think a good amount can be accomplished with basic copyediting. In addition, I think it might be prudent to group his career into consolidated "year groups" of 2 years/5 years, 2007-2008 or 2010-15 etc. --for no other reason than I think it will highlight any superfluous detail or repetition when we look at his career in longer chunks. Once edited, if these longer sections fail to make a sufficient impact on the word count, the broad strokes from each '"year group" can be removed as a summary, with the details collapsible or moved to a new "Carlson Career" wiki. That's my 2 pence, any thoughts welcome :) Duvenaag  talk 11:03, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

Hi all, rough draft of the above proposal here (not formatting correctly on mobile, please see on PC). Obviously each actual section still probably needs some trimming, or wholesale removal to a different Wiki, but I think this goes a long way to remedying the readability of the page in the meantime. I propose 5 year groupings after his 2004-2005 debut. Anyway, Z1720, Bruce leverett, Quale et al. have a look and let me know what you think Duvenaag  talk 19:17, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

Generally speaking, this article should summarize his career, whereas, the things that people are constantly adding to this article, every time Carlsen plays in a tournament, tend to give as many details as they can manage. While Carlsen is active, just about everything he does is notable, just because he's Carlsen. This is frustrating. It could be a number of years before you can really excise some event from the English-language summary because (you decide) it wasn't notable enough. But it's been done for the 20th-century world champions, so eventually it can be done for Carlsen. In the long run, the article about Carlsen should not be any longer or more detailed than the articles about Kasparov, Karpov, Lasker, Capablanca, Steinitz, etc. (However those last three could stand to be beefed up a little, I think.) So we shouldn't need a separate "Career" article.

Given that we mention some tournament, we can be selective about what we say about it. There was some discussion of this kind of thing above, when Z1720 tried his hand at one of the sections. Bruce leverett (talk) 23:44, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

@Duvenaag: I appreciate the attention editors are giving to improving this article and in generating ideas for improvements and I don't want to discourage that. Collapsible sections in article text aren't permitted (see MOS:COLLAPSE). I think there are improvements to be made, but collapsing article text is not one of them. I agree with Bruce that it may be difficult to write a truly good account of Carlsen's chess career until we can gain a few years perspective after he finishes playing. Quale (talk) 04:26, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

I don't particular like the idea of a prose article on Carlsen's playing career, because his playing career is so central to his biography. I had in mind a separate article which is a table of all his match and tournament results. (By analogy of many actors' filmography articles, e.g. John Wayne filmography, and I am slowly doing the same for Kasaprov, at User:Adpete/Playing record of Garry Kasparov). A Carlsen table actually already exists in this article, so a start is to simply move it to something like Playing record of Magnus Carlsen. Then we go through the article and removes all the parts which say little more than "in X, Carlsen played in Y and scored Z". It might help if the table included a "Comments" or "Notes" column (perhaps at the expense of some other columns - are separate wins/draws/losses columns really necessary?), so trivia which is currently in the article could be moved to the table. Adpete (talk) 08:17, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

GA concerns still present

After looking at the history section, it seems like this article is getting larger, and I do not think the prose is concise anymore, a requirement of WP:GA? 1a. I also see that there is uncited information. Is anyone willing to address these, or should this go to WP:GAR for further discussion and requests for help? Z1720 (talk) 19:18, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

I fully support going to WP:GAR. Your assertions have merit. Marcus Markup (talk) 20:45, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

I entirely agree that there are legitimate GA concerns. However, it would be Sysiphean to go through GAR at this time. In fact I think it was crazy to pursue GA back in 2013, when Carlsen won his first world championship. (Though I admit, I myself was not in Wikipedia at the time.) It's not crazy to try to improve the article, but to expect it to hold still for you while Carlsen pursues his very active career, what are you thinking? Bruce leverett (talk) 22:07, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

• @Bruce leverett: I was not involved in the original GAN, so I can't judge on whether this should have been promoted. There are many articles on BLPs with an active career that can maintain a GA or FA status, but that happens when editors put in substantial effort to keep the articles updated. This article needs more than updating Carlsen's career: it needs someone willing to trim the article of too much detail and ensure all important aspects are represented in the article. Z1720 (talk) 22:28, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

GA Reassessment

Magnus Carlsen

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: Uncited material and bloating remains. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 08:27, 17 May 2025 (UTC)

The article has become bloated, with many minor events added to the article and too much detail of games and events. This causes the article to be WP:TOOBIG and efforts to spin out text or remove unnecessary prose have stalled. The article also has some uncited text. Z1720 (talk) 17:06, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Bloat and article size are not among the GA criteria. An article can be WP:TOOBIG and still be a good article, and quite a number of articles meet this description. Bloat and article size are entirely irrelevant to GAR.

That leaves uncited text. I would be happy to work on this. As a courtesy, can you give us an idea of where you have found this, so that we don't overlook something? Bruce leverett (talk) 20:41, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

• I have added citation needed templates, per requested above. In regards to article size, good article criteria 1a states that "the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct". I do not think the prose can be concise if the article is this large and bloated. I suggest as a starting point that "Notable games" be removed as, unless a source has declared these games to be notable, this section is original research as Wikipedia cannot make this declaration on its own. Z1720 (talk) 21:12, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  Nothing I have read in Wikipedia policy would lead me to your conclusion that the article must be smaller to conform to criterion 1a.

  Regarding Notable games, there was a lengthy discussion about that in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chess/Archive 34#'Notable games' inclusion criteria. I would ask you to read that discussion. I am not satisfied with the present Notable Games section of Magnus Carlsen, but again, this is separate from the GA criteria, and should be sddressed as a separate subproject.

  Thanks for adding the CN templates, I and perhaps other chess regulars can tackle those. Bruce leverett (talk) 01:32, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

• @Bruce leverett: The guideline WP:AS state "While expert readers of such articles may accept complexity and length provided the article is well written, the general reader requires clarity and conciseness." Earth, one of Wikipdia's featured articles, is a great example of summarising a large topic and spinning out notable prose. I also invite other editors to comment on if the Carlsen article, with the prose currently in the article, adheres to GA? 1a. Z1720 (talk) 13:06, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  I think the issue is more the WP:PROSELINE feel of the year by year sections. There we have a clear violation not so much of 1a, but of 3b, which tells us to use summary style and to avoid too much detail. For an example from a different type of competition, the Roger Federer article is much better at explaining what was important in a given year and relegates the excessive detail to appropriate subarticles. (I personally think it should be more concise, but it is a lot better than the Carlsen article). —Kusma (talk) 15:25, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  Is splitting the year by year sections of Carlsen's career to separate articles like "2025 Magnus Carlsen chess season" what's being suggested here? As far as I can tell, the durations of the annual ATP Tours are used to define an official "season" in tennis. I suppose the chess equivalent to this would be the FIDE Circuit, but that has only existed since 2023, so it might not be clear how exactly to define chess seasons. 9ninety (talk) 15:32, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

• @9ninety: Splitting the prose out into new articles might be a solution, but the new articles have to meet Wikipedia's general notability requirements on their own. Another solution is to remove non-notable prose from the biography, as Carlsen's appearance at every tournament and his actions in each round of the tournament does not need to be described in the article. Z1720 (talk) 15:50, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

  Some of the sections (like 2017 which contains no less than 11 paragraphs) are quite long and go in depth into the details of each tournament he played. This could easily be trimmed down to 2 or 3 paragraphs going over the main results and other events or controversies he's involved in, and then the rest of the detail can be covered in a dedicated article.

  Another reason I'll be supportive of splitting is the results tables, which aren't very easy to navigate due to their length; it requires a decent amount of scrolling just to get to his most recent results in 2025. This table could benefit from being split into the respective sub articles. Splitting might also help avoid some proseline issues. 9ninety (talk) 17:09, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

I do not care whether the detailed results appear elsewhere, but they should not be in this article. So I do not have an opinion on "splitting" as such, but certainly cutting 80% of the year by year sections from this article would help. —Kusma (talk) 08:17, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

• Delist. Work seems to have stalled, uncited statements remain, and the article remains too detailed. Z1720 (talk) 22:06, 9 May 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

2900 rating

Carlson hit 2900 rating; somebody update it in the infobox? --2406:7400:107:F26F:0:0:0:1 (talk) 08:42, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

Infobox ratings are updated automatically for some players, including Carlsen.

The rating that hit 2900 was not an "official" rating, see WP:CHESSRATING. Also, it was for chess960, which is a different game from chess; comparing ratings between the two games is sort of like apples vs. oranges. Bruce leverett (talk) 15:12, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

best chess player

i think the start of the article should mention that he is widely or generally considered to be the best chess player alive Warpfrz (talk) 09:04, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

Similar proposals have been discussed, in this talk page and those of Garry Kasparov and Bobby Fischer, several times. See for example Talk:Magnus Carlsen/Archive 2#GOAT again. There has been a general lack of enthusiasm for including statements like this in the article, let alone in the lead paragraph. No matter how carefully you hedge such a statement ("widely considered" or "generally considered", "alive" or "of all time"), readers will want to argue with you as if you had tried to provoke an argument.

We are already saying that Carlsen is the #1 ranked, and was the World Champion until he declined to defend his title. For readers who are unfamiliar with whole topic of Carlsen, which we assume that most Wikipedia readers are, that information should be plenty. Bruce leverett (talk) 13:53, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

Picture

Is that seriously the best picture possible? ~2025-33042-94 (talk) 23:11, 12 January 2026 (UTC)

Yes. It is, objectively, the best picture of Magnus. Marcus Markup (talk) 00:40, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

I agree that the current infobox photo (File:Magnus Carlsen in 2025.jpg) is pretty bad; it's very grainy, shot from great distance, and is generally not a flattering photo. I changed it to File:MagnusCarlsen24.jpg, but I was reverted by User:Bruce leverett who said to see the consensus on the talk page. As far as I can find, there has not been a talk page discussion about the photo in several years. Further, it was only added in November so there doesn't seem to be a long-standing implicit consensus.

Bruce, could you please give your thoughts on why you prefer the 2025 photo to the 2024 one? Thanks, IagoQnsi (talk) 04:35, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

I am more or less neutral, believe it or not. But in Wikipedia, anyone can revert your change to anything. So if you want to make a change and you want it to stick, you have to get other editors on your side.

In general, with a young and still-active guy like Carlsen, this year's photos are more helpful than last year's. But if a photo from this year is pretty bad, then sure, another photo might be more suitable, even if it's older. Or, you might just wait until a 2026 photo is available, probably something will come along soon enough.

I didn't think the 2025 photo was so bad. But what do the rest of you think? Bruce leverett (talk) 04:44, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

He looks a bit feral in the 2025 photo. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 05:55, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

Rapid and Blitz ratings

@Gaga2222: Regarding this edit:

You suggest that people should be motivated to play rapid and blitz too. It's not the job of Wikipedia to motivate people to play chess, in whatever format. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not to be used for promotion.

You also suggest that There should be mention of other formats too. You didn't say why.

The guidelines for writing the lead paragraphs of an article can be found at this link: MOS:LEAD. Among other things these guidelines say that Significant information should not appear in the lead, apart from basic facts, if it is not covered in the remainder of the article. Thus, you should not add information in the lead unless it is already in the rest of the article.

The lead is expected to be concise. We should not write a list of all the records that Carlsen ever set and all the chess milestones he ever achieved. We are not the Guinness Book of Records. Instead, the lead should be a summary of what is most notable about Carlsen. The guidelines about what is considered "notable" in writing Wikipedia articles can be found at this link: WP:N.

Is it notable that Carlsen has the highest ratings in Rapid and Blitz chess? His high ratings in these formats are almost never mentioned in the chess media or in other reliable sources. Therefore, they aren't notable. In general, the Rapid and Blitz ratings are not considered newsworthy, although they are used for other purposes, such as seeding and pairing in tournaments.

You have, indeed, found a source, 2700chess.com, that mentions Carlsen's high rapid and blitz ratings. This website is dedicated to tracking the ratings and rankings of the world's leading players. But the regular news websites and magazines do not follow the lead of 2700chess.com.

I should add that Wikipedia has another guideline, WP:CHESSRATING, that discourages editors from citing "Unofficial live chess ratings, such as those published by the site 2700chess.com". However, if Carlsen's Rapid and Blitz rating records were notable, I am sure you could find his "official" ratings mentioned in places other than 2700chess.com. Bruce leverett (talk) 04:23, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

Some of these do require better sourcing, and FIDE has not issued any standardized rankings for freestyle. There have been mentions of Carlsen's rapid record a couple times in media from The Guardian, and then Chess.com mentions both his rapid and blitz ratings. There is some coverage outside dedicated rating sites, which could support including these facts in the article, as long as they are presented neutrally and with proper sourcing, but as you said, not as widely mentioned as his other achievements. Reaper1945 (talk) 07:41, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

I agree with your assessment of the mention of Carlsen's rapid record in the Guardian. I am accustomed to thinking of the Guardian as a citable source. Bruce leverett (talk) 16:48, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

"All four formats"

I think we have a consensus that this is not a satisfactory wording. Fischerrandom or Chess960 is not a "chess format", it's a chess variant with different rules. Seriously Gaga2222 stop edit warring. It's a serious breech of Wikipedia etiquette and usually leads to you getting blocked (I should know). Also, the chesspuzzle website explicitly says that it gets its content from Wikipedia. This means we can't cite it as a source. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 06:53, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

sure I agree everything with you but except one thing as it is mentioned on chess.com that Chess960 is a different variant or format yes different rules but still you can search "Is chess 960 different format?"

Thank you.

Regards:Devgaga2222 Gaga2222 (talk) 12:15, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

You can search for it all you want. But on Wikipedia, we have to avoid the "I saw it on the internet, so it must be true" philosophy. We are supposed to figure out which are "reliable sources", and mostly rely on those.

An article in chess.com might be a "reliable source", or it might not. Chess.com is pretty reliable for tournament crosstables, game scores, spelling of players' names, and other basic facts about chess events. But for questions like whether or not something is newsworthy, they are sloppy. For instance, they report breathlessly about their own online tournaments, but we sort of have to rely on other sources as to whether or not one of those tournaments is really notable.

What about ratings records, such as Carlsen breaking 2900 in Freestyle Chess ratings? Well, for one thing, Freestyle Chess ratings aren't FIDE ratings, they are published solely by the Freestyle Chess organization. When we publish their rating records, we are doing their marketing for them. That is not what Wikipedia is for. Bruce leverett (talk) 14:51, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

This article also carries an "excessive-detail" tag. Hence, rather than more material being added, it needs to be slimmed down. User Gaga2222 seems fixated on finding material to show Carlsen's achievements and excellence, none of which is in doubt but which scarcely needs further reinforcement Billsmith60 (talk) 09:36, 7 March 2026 (UTC)

Maybe not the entire article, but the lead certainly needs to be slimmed down. Just summarise the article, and his achievements should speak for themselves. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 11:37, 7 March 2026 (UTC)