Help:Brief biographical outlines
From SABR Encyclopedia
For many people in the Encyclopedia, very little is known outside the fact they played for a particular team, and their basic statistics. Further information about these people may exist, scattered in brief mentions in newspaper articles or The Sporting News, or in team and league media guides, programs, and so forth. Usually, these bits of information are not enough on their own to write an encyclopedic summary in prose for the person, but they may be worth noting systematically to provide clues for future researchers. This article suggests some standards for organizing and formatting this information into an attractive summary.
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The Media Guide model
These guidelines are based on the format used by team and league Media Guides for many years. A good way to think of this exercise is that it is producing an expanded media guide entry for the person, without the space constraints of a printed guide.
Header formatting
It is recommended to start the "Media Guide" section with a second-level header
== Career highlights ==
Under this header, facts about the person are listed in a bullet-pointed list. The MediaWiki markup for this is to start each line with an asterisk. For a person for whom only one or a very few facts are known, this list can be a simple list, not broken up into subsections. This would be the typical case when noting a particular piece of information from an isolated news article, for instance.
Subsections for longer lists
In the case when enough facts are known about the person that a simple bullet-pointed list starts to become unwieldy, the list may be broken up into categories. These categories should be set off as third-level headers, such as
=== Personal ===
A suggested separation of content, based on practices used in Media Guides, is listed below. As always, these are guidelines; in specific cases, it may make sense to tailor these to suit the information known about a particular person.
Personal
The Personal section includes information about the person's origins and family ties. This may include:
- The person's hometown, as distinct from place of birth; if a person is known to be residing in a particular location, this can be useful information in identifying the person. Hometown is more appropriate for players in the 19th and first part of the 20th century, when players where routinely referred to as being "of" some city. For modern players where birth city is known, a hometown should only be noted if there is some significance to that information. Specific identifying information about a living person's residence or contact information should never under any circumstances be included.
- Family relationships. These, including marital status, should only be noted if the related person is themselves notable. A rule of thumb is the relation should be noted if the person has an entry in the SABR Encyclopedia, or in Wikipedia if the person is notable outside of baseball. For instance, see Ronnie Retton, who was the father of Olympic gymnast Wikipedia:Mary Lou Retton.
- Ancestry. Prior to about 1960, information about ethnicity was routinely collected and reported. While this practice is not common today, it is potentially of research interest, as the composition of the baseball player pool has changed over time. It is recommended to refer to this data as "self-reported," unless there is citation of formal genealogical evidence of a player's family origins, and it is preferred to use "ancestry" rather than "ethnicity." Modern terminology should be used; in particular, it was common to refer to players as "Negro," but this should be rendered by today's term "African-American."
Examples
The pages linked below have been prepared based on these guidelines.
Media Guides
The articles for these players have been updated based on information which appeared in team media guides circa 2000.
Older league player indices
These articles are for players, mostly circa 1950, who were profiled in league player guides, newspaper articles, or other resources.
