Defecting Characters

In last week's post, Women's 1980-81 Candidates Matches, I finished with a couple of actions. The first action was:-

Lematchko tied for 1st in the 1979 Alicante Interzonal, but did not play in the 1980-81 Women's Candidates Matches. Why not? I'll look into that another time.

The second action was:-

At the same time, I'll standardize the spelling of her name across my pages. While preparing this post, I found Lemachko, Lematcho, Lematschko, and there might be others. I can do better than that.

The first action was answered on the appropriate Wikipedia page, Women's World Chess Championship 1981:-

In Alicante, Lematschko and Akhmilovskaya shared first place, well ahead of Gurieli and Litinskaya. However, Lematschko subsequently defected from socialist Bulgaria and was unable to take part in the Candidates Tournament, so her place was given to Fischdick as fourth-placed from the Rio Interzonal (on tie-breaks).

That's a detailed answer in just two sentences. It was followed by a note ('[2]') indicating its source:-

[2] -> "World Chess Championship (women) : 1979 Alicante Interzonal Tournament". Mark-weeks.com. Retrieved 2012-02-06

Thanks for the reference, Wikipedia! The problem is: my page doesn't say that (and I didn't know it). While much of the basic information on the Wikipedia page is indeed taken from my pages, the Wikipedia enhancements are considerable. Congratulations to the semi-anonymous Wikipedians who put the whole package together.

I was especially impressed to see that *all* of the participants in the 1980-81 women's WCC cycle have their own Wikipedia page. This might be expected for the corresponding men's WCC cycle, but is not trivial for women's events which received less press at the time than they do today. I know this from personal experience in my own library research. Are other Wikipedia pages for other women's WCC cycles so comprehensive?

As an aside, one of the participants in the 1980-81 women's WCC cycle was Miyoko Watai. If the name sounds familiar, the Wikipedia page explains,

After Bobby Fischer's detention on July 13, 2004 for trying to travel with a revoked U.S. passport, she campaigned for his release. They were reportedly married in August 2004.

As for the second action, 'standardize the spelling of [Lematchko] across my pages', my reference page Index of Women Players uses 'Lemachko'. Somewhat curiously, that spelling isn't found on any of my other pages where her name occurs:-

Lemachko T	1976 IZ-Roo	: Lematschko T
	1977 CM	: Lematchko, T
	1979 IZ-Ali	: Lematcho
	1982 IZ-Bad	: Lematcho
	1983 CM	: Lematschko T
	1990 IZ-Gen	: Lematschko T
	1995 IZ	: Lematschko T

I don't remember why I chose that spelling for the index, but it's probably not a coincidence that 'Chess Personalia' by Jeremy Gaige uses the same spelling. For the 1979 Alicante Interzonal, Informant 28 (1979-H2) gives the spelling as 'LEMAČKO'. This uses the same character 'Č' (lower case 'č') that you sometimes see for Korchnoi, i.e. 'KORČNOI'. That's another name with a similar set of variations found for Lemachko. In other words, the 'Č' is replaced by 'CH', or 'TCH', or 'TSCH'.

While I should be consistent and use 'Lemachko' on all of my own pages, I'll let it go for now. On top of the HTML pages, there are PGN files involved.