Editing SABR Encyclopedia:Known issues

The issues listed on this page are technical and organizational problems or shortcomings with the Encyclopedia that are known to the Encyclopedia's technical team. 

== Issues ==
=== Search and Indexing ===
Search has made some progress lately, but is not yet where it needs to be. The indexing extension is in place, but not all pages in the Encyclopedia are using the proper semantic properties yet, so indexing will continue to work better gradually over the next few weeks.

A member recently pointed out that the results page for "Search" is very confusing. This is true, and it's also true that full-text search generally does not return excellent results to begin with, largely due to our use of subpages.

This issue highlights an interesting feature of the software used in the Encyclopedia - there are really two searches. The first is the "Go" search, which looks in an index for pages that might be an exact match to the name, and does its best to send a visitor straight to a page. If it fails, it drops back to "Search", which is a full-text search &ndash; it searches the text of pages and looks for a match.

In the long run, the solution to this is probably to use Google Search for full-text searches, but that option is not available until the Encyclopedia is public. However, the most important part of our plan is to ''not use full-text search often''.

We will continue working on improving Go searches and, as they advance, make the full-text search option less prominent, possibly moving it to a text link to a separate page, rather than allowing full-text searches from the front page.

=== Disambiguation pages are bad ===
Disambiguation pages (what you see when more than one person or ballpark shares a name), currently use a property called "summary" to differentiate between the records. However, for almost all persons, this summary is either "...is a professional player" or "...was a professional player, leaving these pages less helpful than they could be &ndash; for example, see [[Jose Reyes]].

In the long run, people will have real summaries, written by people. In the short run, we will try to implement a solution to make people findable, possibly including some career engagements or biological information on the page.
=== "Sources" separated from Infobox ===
Making biographical changes in a player's "infobox" - changes to birth/death information, high school, name corrections, etc. must be made in one subpage, while the source of the information must be entered in another ("pagetext"). This is a difficult usability problem.

This will likely be resolved by adding fields to the infobox for references, but the decision has not been finalized.

=== Documentation incomplete ===
Some of the more advanced topics and at least one basic topic ([[Help:Linking to people|Linking to people]]) are not yet written.

There also needs to be documentation on the concept of "Talk" pages, and when to use them. Some of this exists in current Help pages, but there should be a page specific to it.

=== No process for uploading images ===
There needs to be a documented process for uploading pictures that links them properly to their subjects. We should be making a final decision on what metadata will be stored with the images on 2009-10-22.

=== Stats ===
# No career summary lines
# No differentiation between levels of play (independent, foreign, minor, major, college)
# Advanced stats not always calculated when numbers are available
# Stats not viewable on browsers with javascript disabled

The presentation of stats in the Encyclopedia is in its early stages, and these problems are being resolved as the presentation is refined.

=== No simple procedure for editing careers ===
College play should eventually be included in careers, but the only way to have it there now is to edit the same subpage that includes major league career engagements and use a lot of complex notation. We hope to develop a way to capture this data without such an involved process.

=== Baseball Index entries are not keyed ===
Entries from the Baseball Index, included on the pages of major leaguers, are full-text searches and not related to a unique key. Therefore, players with the same name (related or not) will share the same search results. 

It may be possible to resolve this by having special, hand-crafted search terms in some places.