Talk:Bishop's Opening

Too many variations?[edit]

I listed a lot of variations in this article -- maybe too many. I hadn't intended such a long list, but I found more in research than I had anticipated.

Maybe the list should be trimmed. Here are some of my thoughts on what variations to include and exclude:

Include the main variation(s), of course.
Include historically important variations, even if they are not currently popular.

Chess openings articles are useful for history as well as simply recording what is currently played. Many players enjoy examining old games (sometimes even those 200 years old), and the historical development of chess opening theory is an interesting subject in itself.

Include important transpositions.

Maybe these should be omitted. The Bishop's Opening actually provides a good illustration of transpositions in the opening, so keeping them might be helpful.

Mention refutations of common mistakes.

This information can be very useful to beginning players, and is hard to find from other sources.

Exclude variations that have never been played in serious games and have never been seriously analyzed.
Exclude overly long variations unless they have particular interest, like the Frankenstein-Dracula Variation.

Long variations are too subject to current fashion, and evaluations are frequently overturned. Unless the variation occurred frequently in serious play, it should be omitted. (For example, I think there's a variation of the Nimzo-Indian that was used frequently at the Zurich 1953 Candidates Tournament that might qualify for inclusion.)

If there are many reasonable continuations from a particular position, consider describing only one of them and mentioning that other moves are possible.
Avoid too much detail for irregular openings and other openings that have never been popular.
Avoid too much detail in general.

Too avoid too much detail, point readers to the standard chess opening books and opening specific monographs. Evaluations of openings change too rapidly and this area is too specialized for a general purpose encyclopedia like Wikipedia.

What do you think? I don't know how successfully I followed these principles with this article, or even if these are the best principles to use for chess opening articles. --Quale 22:41, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Diagram mistake in Classical Defense (2...Bc5)[edit]

I'm not sure how to change this myself, but under Classical Defense (2...Bc5), in the first diagram, there should not be a bishop on f1. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.10.112.4 (talk) 20:35, 7 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I fixed the typo in the diagram for the Wing Gambit. Quale 01:13, 8 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Tone[edit]

What do you think of the article's tone? Is it too technical for an encyclopaedic article? Is the present simple tense the correct tense for an encyclopaedic article? Finally, is Wiki an instruction manual, or an encyclopaedia? (e.g. should we discuss and treat the Bishop's Opening as a chess manual entry or comment and present the topic objectively and in a lay tone?) FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 17:25, 23 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it is too technical if you know how to play chess, and if you don't know how to play chess you would not be interested in reading it anyway. I don't know about the tense. I think it is not instructional and is objective. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 18:12, 23 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]