The 2024 World Chess Championship is barely over and already people are finding ways to argue about it. The most prominent one is the number of 'Official Champions' although a few silly arguments have also popped up.
The cause of the argument about who is an 'Official" champion started with the claim the Gukesh is the youngest World Champion in history. A number of people pointed out that Ruslan Ponomariov won the 2002 FIDE World Championship at a slightly younger age, meaning that Gukesh was not actually the youngest. This of course then devolved into a debate whether these events could be considered proper World Championships.
Normally it would be assumed that FIDE itself would have the final say in this, but it appears this is not the case. While they recognise their own version of the World Championship, they also seem to omit the winners of these events (Khalifman, Ponomariov, Kasimdzhanov and Topolov) in their numbering of world champions. This does make sense if the criteria is "Undisputed or lineal" World Champions, although at the time of the split between Championships, FIDE certainly never made that argument.
BTW if you think that finding the answer at place like Wikipedia might help, I would suggest you wait a few weeks. There seems to be an edit war going on on the World Championship page, which as a result has restrictions on who can actually now edit the page.
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