SABR Encyclopedia:Known issues

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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.

Contents

Issues

Search and Indexing

Search and indexing are not yet where they need to be. There are several technical reasons for this:

  1. The Encyclopedia makes fairly novel use of the underlying software (using "subpages" to keep certain data safe from editing and to provide a high level of structure).
  2. The software does not have excellent native support for "index" searches. A good search function should provide good "indexing" for players, teams, and parks. This is to say that searches should first be compared to a list of known terms before a full-text search is attempted. For example, "Smith" should be detected as a last name and should return a list of players named Smith.

The work on improving search will always be ongoing, but basic indexing should be in place by the end of November, 2009.

"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 (Linking to people) are not yet written.

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

  1. No career summary lines
  2. No differentiation between levels of play (independent, foreign, minor, major, college)
  3. Advanced stats not always calculated when numbers are available
  4. 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.

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