Proposal
Sports shall be recognized on Sports SE as they are recognized on SportAccord. SportAccord organizes all international sports federations. All sports included in each federation shall be considered on-topic for Sports SE.
Pros
- This would provide an objective answer to "What is a sport?" on Sports SE.
- "Self-identification" would be objective through membership with SportAccord.
- Member federations on SportAccord are recognized internationally, not only in specific countries.
Cons
Some sports, such as MMA or competitive eating, are not members of SportAccord.
MMA and competitive eating do have international federations. In fact, the MMA international federation (IMMAF)'s vision is to be recognized as a sport through membership with SportAccord with the goal of becoming an Olympic sport.
Other Thoughts
Although competitive aspects will still be on-topic for Sports SE, shall we defer activities to where (potentially) more expertise lies (Chess SE for chess, The Great Outdoors SE for climbing, etc.) or keep the question here? A subset of said activity's expertise would include competitive aspects.
The dichotomy between running seem to be clear enough to categorize running for fitness and running for competition. However, other activities (chess, for example) do not possess the same distinction.
SportAccord categorizes federations into five categories: physical, mind, motorized, coordination, and animal-supported. This statement goes further than to corroborate "physical activity" as sports. Moreover, we have had motorized (NASCAR, formula 1, etc) and coordination (billiards/pool) questions.
This is only a proposal. The purpose of this proposal is to objectively define Sports SE's scope of sports.
Sports SE has been in public beta for 2+ years, and to be able to determine what the scope should objectively be and to document it seems to become more and more appropriate with recent meta discussions.