Site review - La Mecca Chess Encyclopedia

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A few months ago I received an email saying, 'You used to have a link
to a biography type of site. I can no longer find it... Could you
please tell me where it is?' I suggested a site featuring biographies
of the world champions and near champions. The response was, 'I was
looking for a site that had a very inclusive list of players. It
allowed you to look up virtually any player that has accomplished
anything at all in chess. There was quite a good number of photos
that could be perused on many players also.' I knew only one site
that fit the description, so I suggested...

La Mecca Chess Encyclopedia
http://maskeret.com/mecca/index.shtml

...and got it right the second time. The site, by Maurizio
Mascheroni, has a well maintained directory of chess sites plus a
number of features under 'Who, When and Where' -- Who is Who, When
and Where, Timeline, Today in history -- all relevant to chess
history.

Mascheroni, who also uses the nickname 'Maskeret', is from Milan,
Italy. In the last issue of Chess History on the Web, I reviewed an
Italian language site which had some great content, but failed to
meet the high standards associated with the term 'Italian design'.
Maskeret's 100% English language site shows that those standards can
also apply to Web sites.

Mecca's home page runs down two columns. Each section on the page is
set off in a different color, making it easy to spot particular
features. The 'Welcome' at the top of the right-hand column
says, 'Welcome to La Mecca, the first real Encyclopedia of Chess on
Internet. In this site you find a lot of information about chess,
chess players (images, biographies, etc.), chess events (tournament
tables), Elo lists and calculation, ECO codes and, of course,
thousands of links to best chess sites all over the world.' Of
course! -- the directory of links is what the Mecca Encyclopedia is
best known for.

The top of the left-hand column shows a random image related to
chess. This might be a picture of a well known grandmaster, an
Italian chess personality, artwork, or a stamp. I traced the images
to their source and counted 167 different images available for home
page refresh.

The rest of the left-hand column displays time sensitive information -
- 'Today in history', 'International Chess Events' (aka 'Jack - Just
Another Chess Calendar'), and 'Last news' (aka 'Blip'). Each of these
is also mentioned in the right-hand column, so I'll hold any remarks
until later in this article.

The first feature on the right is 'Who, When and Where', a collection
of database driven searches on chess personalities and chess events.
How many?...

'Players: 3296 - Images: 3538 - Update: May 7, 2002
Events: 1607 - Images: 411 - Update: Mar 10, 2002'

...That's how many! The main entry to the player data is under 'Who
is Who : A comprehensive guide to all major chess figures'. The entry
to the event data is 'When and Where : A complete guide to all major
chess events'. Both entries have an associated [Add] link, where you
can add or change information for a player or for an event.

'Who is Who' opens a search form to search for personalities by name,
title (GM, IM, etc.), and/or five other criteria. The search results
are displayed in a list with basic data like name, nationality, and
year of birth. The list also shows the number of images on file for
that person plus one randomly selected thumbnail from those images.
You can click on the person's name to get biographical details or on
the image count to get thumbnails of all images, if any.

I tried a search on 'Lasker' and received two entries -- one for
Edward and one for Emanuel. The entry for Em. Lasker showed no title
and gave his nationality as American. I would have preferred to
see 'world champion' as a title, and I don't believe that Lasker ever
took American nationality, but I couldn't verify this last point
elsewhere.

The page behind Emanuel's name has a 1500-word biography written by
Bill Wall, plus a fairly comprehensive overview of Lasker's
tournament and match career. The page behind Edward's name has a 75-
word biography, titled 'Trivia', by Bill Wall, plus a few career
details. Bill Wall's chess history work is well known elsewhere on
the Internet. A Google search on 'chess history "Bill Wall"'
returns 'about 232' pages, and I found the same Em.Lasker biography
on two other Web sites.

This reminds me of the major drawback with database searches on Web
sites : they don't fare well in the search engines. A Google search
on 'chess site:www.maskeret.com' returns 'about 2120' pages. A
similar search on '"Bill Wall" site:www.maskeret.com' returns exactly
one page, which is not even a Mecca page. A search on 'Lasker
site:www.maskeret.com' returns 'about 25' pages, none of which is the
Bill Wall biography. This means that the wealth of chess history
material in the Mecca databases can only be found by specific
searches on Mecca, which is unfortunate for budding chess historians
who are not familiar with the Mecca resource.

Bill Wall also has a Mecca entry (he's English) with photo, as does
Maurizio Mascheroni ('Italian player, organizer and arbiter'). I
found entries for a few other noted chess historians, although the
related information is sparse. Under 'Biographical data', the entry
for H.J.R.Murray says only 'British chess historian', while entries
for Ken Whyld and Edward Winter are missing completely.

One of the search form options under 'Title' is VIP. Here I found 71
entries, extracted them into my own database, and ran some simple
queries. The VIPs include film stars -- e.g. Dustin Hoffman and
Humprey (sic) Bogart (Google : 'about 1340; did you mean "Humphrey
Bogart"', which returns 'about 76500' pages); political figures --
e.g. Fidel Castro and Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (better known as
Che Guevara; 22 images (!) on the Mecca database); and artists --
e.g. Vladimir Nabokov and Luigi Mussini.

There are a few historical personalities whose names I didn't
recognize. Among them are Atahualpa (1500-1533), '12th and last Inca
emperor of Peru'; John Lackland (ENG, 1167-1216), 'King of England
(1199-1216)'; and Timur (MGL, 1336-1405), 'Mongol emperor and
conqueror, known as Tamerlane [...] He named his son Shahrukh (chess
rook)'.

Not too surprisingly, the most frequent nationality for the VIPs --
13 entries -- is Italian. The English and French are runners-up with
10 each, while Americans and 'unknown' have 9. The entries for 63 of
the 71 VIPs were last updated 1999/05/16, while the most recent
update was for Frank Sinatra on 2001/08/10; the sole image looks like
Sinatra playing chess with former U.S champion Walter Browne.

Out of curiosity, I traced the images to a domain called
www.dreamchess.com. The home page says, 'Welcome to Dreamchess. This
site will be the future home for a comprehensive repository of
information about the world of chess. Please, stay tuned! For the
moment, please go to http://www.maskeret.com. Enjoy! Maurizio
Mascheroni, aka maskeret :-) [April 6, 2002]'. Watch this space.

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Getting back to the Mecca home page, the 'When and Where' link also
opens a search form. Here you can search on event date and type, plus
a few other criteria. The search results are structured like the
results of a 'Who is Who' search : an entry for each event provides
links to a crosstable and to images from the event.

The results for a search on 'Type = World Chess Championship' start
with '1886: Steinitz - Zukertort' and end with 'FIDE WCC 2000',
Teheran, Iran. The matches that Kasparov played with Short (1993),
Anand (1995), and Kramnik (2000), are all missing from the list.
Another search on 'Type = Matches' & 'Free words = Kasparov' returns
those matches interspersed with entries for London (1987; the Speed
Chess Challenge vs. Short) and Deep Blue - Kasparov (1997; the 1996
match is missing). The five Kasparov - Karpov FIDE matches are
missing from this second list. There's no need to ask where
Maskeret's loyalties lie in the FIDE - Kasparov dispute.

Another search on 'Free words = Linares' returns a list of ten
events, eight of which document the annual supertournament. The first
event in the list is the 1988 category 15 tournament won by Timman.
The First Saturday tournaments in Budapest are heavily represented.

The first event in the database is London 1851, won by Anderssen. The
last is the Anand - Shirov FIDE final, played in December, 2000. The
world championship qualifying events are represented only
haphazardly. A search on 'interzonal' returns no events; a search
on 'candidate' returns seven, all tournaments, one of which is the
1997 women's event held in Groningen; a search on 'zonal' returns 18
events.

The next home page function, 'Timeline : A guide to all major chess
events, ordered by date', opens a search form on date and type. The
results are ordered chronologically in a format similar to the other
searches. A search on 'Year = 1963' & 'Type = (All)' returns a list
of births and deaths in 1963, mixed with the start dates for a few
tournaments. A similar search on 'Year = 1902-1903' gives a quick
look at upcoming centenary events.

The first event in the list is the birth of Said Bin Jubair in 665;
the second event is his death in 714. Who was Said Bin Jubair?
Clicking on the name tells us only that he was born in 665 and died
in 714. The 'Oxford Companion to Chess' (OCC) is more helpful : 'a
Black African who allegedly took up chess to make himself ineligible
for an appointment as a judge', and goes on to give the reasons.

The next link in the right-hand column -- 'Today in the history :
What's happened today in the chess history?' -- is given more space
in the left-hand column. It opens a list combining births, deaths,
and tournament starts on today's date. A simple search box returns
the same for any given day. Has anything happened on 29 February?
Yes : Hermann Hirschbach ('German player', no further information)
was born on that day in 1812, while Giorgio Bombig ('Italian player')
was born in 1892. The OCC gives a little more information about
Hirschbach, but nothing about Bombig.

The next link on the home page -- 'Jack : Just Another Chess
Calendar' -- is also found in both the left- and right-hand columns.
A list of upcoming chess events, it's outside the scope of chess
history. I'll say only that the oldest event in the Jack database
is 'Winterthur Open, 05-Oct-2001, Switzerland'.

A few other right-hand column links are also time
sensitive. 'Companion' offers tools for the 'Encyclopedia of Chess
Openings' (ECO), for Elo ratings, and for press releases. 'Wap Chess'
displays the address you need to access a few Maskeret.com features
via a WAP enabled mobile phone.

Faced with this gold mine of free information on chess history, what
can one say? The biographical information for less well-known players
is largely incomplete, but that's not Maskeret's fault. He's provided
the resource and the tools to work with the resource. It's up to the
rest of us to provide the data.

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The only remaining Mecca function to discuss -- 'Clink! Click the
link!' -- is the biggest. It's a directory of chess sites which I
discussed briefly in...

Chess History on the Web (2001 no.23) : Chess Directories
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Chess_History/message/13

...The introduction informs us that there were a mind-boggling 5666
links as of 2002-5-8, 'probably the greatest collection of chess
links on the net'. There are multiple ways to access the links. The
most straightforward is via 'Clink! Home', where 18 main categories
are further subdivided into approximately 100
subcategories. 'History' is the only category which is not
subdivided. I looked at the list of 32 sites assigned to history and
found two candidates...

Greatest chess games
http://www.geocities.com/faros8/vote.htm

Segerschach
http://www.segerschach.de/index.htm

...to add to my own page of Recommended sites (address at the end of
this article). This means that I'll be reviewing these sites in the
future.

Maskeret's list gives a date for each site, but it's not clear if
this is the date that a site was added to the Mecca Encyclopedia, the
date that it was last updated, or something else. The earliest date
in the History category is 2001-04-19, which is assigned to 12 sites.
The last date is 2001-11-29; no, I should say, 'the last date is 2002-
05-15'; a 33rd site, on Swedish chess history, was added as I was
finishing this review.

To the right of each site are functions to rate and review the
associated site. In the history category, only three sites have been
reviewed, all one-liners by the same reviewer. The ratings are also
few and far between; most sites have no ratings. 'The Chess History
Center' at www.chesshistory.com is the leader with seven. These
consolidated ratings have to be taken with a grain of salt. The small
number of ratings means that the scores are easily skewed by a
zealous individual eager to promote a personal favorite or to demote
a rival. One site has managed to achieve the maximum rating 10 out of
10, although 0 votes have been cast.

A second method to find relevant links is 'Quick Search : A speedy
method to search in our links database'. Here I get the chance to
correct a blunder. In the review of Chess Directories (2001 no.23) I
wrote, 'I searched [Mecca] on 'chess history' and received a list of
1924 matches, far too many to handle in this review.' Ahem! I should
have realized that multiple words in a search are automatically ORed
together. Here are the counts from a new search exercise:-
'Searching For 'chess history' : Found 2449 Matches'
'Searching For 'chess' : Found 2440 Matches'
'Searching For 'history' : Found 54 Matches'
This means that a search for 'chess history' is really a search for
items referencing 'chess' OR 'history'. This last result makes me
wonder how there can be 5666 links, of which 3226 don't mention chess
(5666 - 2440), but life is too short to tackle all minor mysteries
which confront us.

Some sites are counted more than once. The 54 matches returned
for 'history' represent 47 different sites. I found one site
(IceChess) counted three times, by being listed in three different
categories. Of the 47 distinct sites, 32 are in the History category.
I looked at the remaining 15 sites to uncover more candidates for my
own list. Two addresses covering computer chess history looked
interesting, but one of them failed to respond and the
other, 'Computer Chess History' by Bill Wall, is a single page; I
tend to exclude single page 'sites', hoping to find something more
comprehensive. Since I have no other references for computer chess
history, I may yet decide to add the Bill Wall page.

Next I searched on 'weeks' and found 40 matches. Although my own
pages generally have my name in the address, it's not easy to say
quickly how many of these 40 are mine. For some reason, the Quick
Search doesn't display the real address of the target page. The first
item listed on a search for 'weeks' is...

The World Chess Championship
http://www.maskeret.com/cgi-bin/seek/tseek.cgi?id=6583&ct=Events-
World_Championship

...Only by clicking on that long maskeret.com address do I see that
the real address for 'The World Chess Championship' is...

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Mark_Weeks/WCC-INDX.HTM

...the domain I used when I created the site in 1997. I've since
moved the pages to another domain and have quit Compuserve, but the
automatic redirect from compuserve.com to the new domain continues.

Looking at the list of 40 matches, I found that they covered 10
different pages. In addition to the index page for the world
championship site, Mecca lists the title matches held in 1886, 1894,
1921, 1927, 1948, 1960, and 1978; the 1992 Fischer - Spassky rematch;
and Kramnik's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record. The 1948 FIDE
Title Tournament is listed in seven different subcategories:-
- Events/
*- Timeline/1948
*- Events/World_Championship/1948
- People/Players/
*- Botvinnik_Mikhail_Moiseyevich
*- Euwe_Machgielis
*- Keres_Paul_Petrovic
*- Reshevsky__Samuel
*- Smyslov_Vasily_Vasiliyevich
Now I am certain that the 5666 links include many sites and pages
counted more than once.

On top of the category index and the Quick Search, Mecca provides a
list of the newest sites ('What's new') and the most popular ('Top
hits'). Mecca's highest rated site is...

Encyclopedia of Chess Openings
http://www.homestead.com/Observer/Openings.html

...with 1202 hits. An Extremetracking.com counter at the bottom of
the ECO page confirms this total with 1159 hits over a period of 387
days. The same tracker shows another 1100 hits from Mecca's 'Great
Sites', a banner exchange page.

The Mecca home page winds down ('About this site') with a personal
message. 'My name is Maurizio Mascheroni (nickname maskeret) and I'm
an Italian chess player and tournaments director. I have made this
site to help chess players all over the world. I hope you enjoy my
work.' Thank you, Maurizio! I do indeed.

Bye for now,
Mark Weeks

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