Help:Writing about a person

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This article covers how to add facts about a person, and helps describe which types of information are appropriate for the encyclopedia.

Adding information

The SABR Encyclopedia is designed to be a central place to find information on baseball topics. This includes people, and for a person who is involved in baseball the Encyclopedia will ideally contain links to online sources about the person and notes about offline sources.

In general, it is appropriate to add any individual fact that is notable about a person, that person's life, or that person's career in baseball, as long as you note the source of the information. You can add it as part of a sentence, or a point on a bulleted list. If you can't find a way to work it into the page at all, add it to the discussion page instead.

It is not appropriate to try to import all of the information from an article published elsewhere (offline or online), especially if much of the information is widely available. The best practice in this case is to add a link or reference to the article.

There is no need to worry about getting the style exactly correct when you add information, since the format of the encyclopedia makes it easy for someone else to reshape the information and make it fit with the article. This is a natural part of the editing process and allows you to focus on what you do best. If you like to find facts, find facts and add them. If you'd rather edit grammar and style, do that instead.

Any information you add about a player that is not either a part of the statistical record or common knowledge should include a citation referring to the source where you found the information - see the help article on citing sources to learn how to cite various source types. That page also details how to include an explanation in a footnote.

Building a narrative

Ideally, each person in the Encyclopedia will have a short narrative describing their career and any interesting facts about their career and life. This section should (but does not currently) give advice on how to create such a narrative.

Scope of the Encyclopedia and the Bioproject

SABR's existing project to write biographies of players is a well-run effort that is working hard to create quality single-author biographies of baseball players. If you are interested in creating a long-form biography of a player that is your work alone, the Bioproject is the right place to pursue that. In the Encyclopedia, you will receive credit for your edits, but you will never "own" an article, and it will always be open to revision by others.

However, the SABR Encyclopedia has a very broad scope, and has been built to accommodate articles on everyone every involved in professional baseball. This makes it the perfect place to document players about whom there is not enough information to create a full-length biography, and to create informative summaries for the rest.

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