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 not helpful ===
There has been improvement in this area. Disambiguation carry career records for players, and this helps a lot in the short run (since we don't yet have real summaries). They still need a button for "Show all career records", which should be added in the next few weeks; for example, see [[Jose Reyes]].

In the long run, people will have real summaries, written by people.

=== "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.

Talk pages, formerly a known issue, are now documented: [[Help:Discussion pages]].

=== No process for uploading images ===
We have now worked out a metadata system for images, but this still needs to be formalized into a process and documented as of 2009-11-03.

=== Stats ===
# No career summary lines
# Advanced stats not always calculated when numbers are available
# Stats not viewable on browsers with javascript disabled
# Stats display on non-player pages

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.