Editing Help:Editing People Pages

This page is a step-by-step guide to editing pages describing the careers of people. It covers most of the common scenarios that arise while doing biographical research.

== What do to if you're not sure ==

Pages in the Encyclopedia should contain information which is factually accurate and, to the extent possible, sourced by reliable primary and secondary citations.  Even without a citation handy, you will encounter pages on which there appears to be some sort of factual conflict, for instance, a person listed as playing in a season after he is listed as dying, or a World War I veteran listed as killed in action with a date of death in the 1950s.  When you see such a situation, but you don't have a source which allows you to determine which information is correct and which is erroneous to resolve a conflict, do not simply guess and delete the information you believe is inaccurate. Instead, tag the page (at the top) with an appropriate template. (A list of templates, and details on using them, is available at [[Help:Disagreement]]). Doing this will place a box at the top of the page indicating a factual conflict has been identified. Then, use the '''discussion page''' for that person (click the box labeled "discussion" at the top of the page) to describe the conflict, and give any partial information you might know about its potential resolution. 

In editing a person's career, do not delete records from his list of engagements unless that engagement is entirely in error. If you simply suspect that the engagement has been attached to the wrong person, again, flag the page with the appropriate template from the list at [[Help:Disagreement]]. Deleting the record does not fix the underlying problem; in fact, makes the error more obscure. If you find, for instance, a playing record listed with a John Smith after he died, and simply delete it, we lose the information that there was a player, probably named Smith, possibly named John, who played on that team. While keeping that playing record on John Smith's page for now creates a logical absurdity, it also flags that for others to identify the correct solution.  On the other hand, if the record is simply deleted, it increases the likelihood the error will perpetuate itself unnoticed.

== Guidelines for pages on Major Leaguers ==

With a small number of exceptions, the identification of playing, managing, and umpiring records for Major Leaguers are well-established. For this set of people, the infobox on the person's page includes their Retrosheet ID.  Major League engagement records are synchronized against the authoritative sources for this information.  Therefore, Major League engagement records should not be transferred from one page to another. If a minor league or other record is incorrectly assigned to a Major League person, move the other, non-Major League records from the person's page, creating a new person page if necessary or appropriate.  Moving Major League engagement records without also moving the Retrosheet ID will lead to a conflict, and the change will get undone at the next synchronization, so the changes you intended to make will be overwritten.

== Identifying a new person not in the Encyclopedia ==

Each person who is notable should have, at a minimum, a main page describing their career.  If you identify someone meeting the notability criteria, first make sure the person is not in the Encyclopedia under a different name or a variation of the name. If he (or she) has no page, then you should create a new one. See [[Help:Adding a page for a person|Adding a page for a person]] for the procedure for creating a new person page with the standard structure.

== Identifying a new person currently listed only by last name ==

In the case of a person known only by his last name, the Encyclopedia uses the name "Unknown" (see for example [[Unknown Williams]]). If you identify the first name of a person, there are three possibilities:
# The person already exists in the Encyclopedia.  In that case, follow the rules below for transferring engagement records between people. If all the records assigned on the unknown's page belong to the person you've identified, you should delete the unknown's page completely after transferring the records.
# The person does not exist in the Encyclopedia, but only some of the records on the unknown's page belong to the newly identified person. In this case, [[Help:Adding a page for a person|create a new page for the new person]], and add in the engagement records belonging to him [[Help:Career timelines|in his career section]]. Edit the unknown's page to delete those engagement records.
# The person does not exist in the Encyclopedia, and all of the records on the unknown's page belong to the newly identified person. In this case, treat it as a name change, and follow the instructions below.

== Changing a person's encyclopedia name ==

When you update a person's encyclopedia page and change the <tt>nameFirst</tt> entry in his infobox, you should make several related changes. Check the narrative text to make sure any references to the previous name are revised to the new name, where appropriate. Check the list of categories at the bottom of the page, and update the first name in the category entries as appropriate.  Finally -- and importantly -- you will need to move the person's page to reflect the name update. After saving your edits, click the "Move" tab at the top of the page, and give the person's new name as the new page name. Make a note to the effect that you're updating the page title based on new information about the person.

Before you move, check to see what other pages link to this page. Some links, such as links in rosters and statistical tables, are automatically generated, and will be updated in a few days automatically to reflect your page move. Some other links may be in human-edited narrative text or other parts of the page. Consider editing those pages to point to the new page name. The software automatically creates "redirects" whenever you move a page, so the page is still accessible from the old name. However, it is a good habit to make sure pages don't unnecessarily link through redirects, as this can have some unintended consequences down the line.  To take the example above, suppose we find out Joe Shlabotnik actually went by "Tad" instead of "Joe." We would then edit his page accordingly, then move his page to "Tad Shlabotnik." When we do this, an automatic redirect from "Joe Shlabotnik" to "Tad Shlabotnik" would be created, so any page pointing to "Joe Shlabotnik" would actually take the reader automatically to "Tad Shlabotnik."  Now suppose further that someone else, perhaps his son, also warrants a page, and this person is known as "Joe." An editor might then create a new page for the new person at "Joe Shlabotnik."  Now, if there are any pages referring to Tad that were still linking to "Joe Shlabotnik" they would now be pointing at the wrong Joe Shlabotnik.

The move operation will issue a warning if you attempt to move the page to a name that already exists. If this happens, you'll need to do some disambiguation work; see the [[SABR Encyclopedia:Naming conventions (people)|naming conventions]] page for guidelines. 


== Transferring engagement records between people ==

We often find out that playing or other service records are assigned to the wrong person. Fixing this is easy, especially compared to some of the more complicated situations on this page. Simply edit the career segment of the person who's incorrectly credited with the records and remove those records, and then edit the career segment of the correct person to add those records in, and save both pages. That's all there is to it.  If this change affects minor league playing or managing records, the change will automatically be propagated to the Minor Leagues Database, and statistics will be transferred; there's an automated program to harvest this information, so you don't need to take any further action to flag the change.

When you do this, this might affect the first and last active dates for the person, so check whether any of the body text of the article needs to be revised to reflect this.