Editing SABR Encyclopedia:Projects

This page details a number of '''projects''' which require attention.  As distinct from the [[SABR Encyclopedia:Job Jar|Job Jar]], these are tasks which will require anywhere from dozens to hundreds of hours to complete. They may be helped along by automated processing, but will require significant human attention as well.

== Professional leagues and teams ==

Kevin Johnson maintains a master list of professional leagues and teams, which is one of the foundations of the Minor Leagues Database.  Soon, a bot will be run to stub out pages for each league-season and team-season in the list.  At that point, two types of tasks will be in order:
# Topic pages should be created to organize league-seasons by entity. For example, there should be a page that covers the disambiguation among the four separate entities that have gone by the name "American Association." Also, "franchise" pages for clubs should be created. For major leagues, this will be straightforward (except possibly in some 19th century cases); for minor leagues, this will be much trickier. The person or people working on this should also consider designing appropriate navboxes and other navigational tools to link the league-season and team-season pages directly.
# Fleshing out of details about league seasons. In the fullness of time, we will want to have a nice summary written about every league's every campaign. In the short run, however, there are some sources of information worth capturing, even if in simple bullet-point note format. For example, Reed Howard has notes on many 19th century leagues, some of which have been wikified in the minor league database project wiki. These include nuggets like league executives, notable events like no-hitters, movements of clubs in and out of leagues through disbandment and other manouvers, and so forth.

Population of these pages with standings and statistics will largely be done through bots from the Minor Leagues Database and the Palmer database for the majors. The initial stubbing will leave stub template placeholders to facilitate this down the line.

== Collegiate ==

Rick Benner has a significant amount of information on collegiate baseball, stored largely in Word documents. These will need to be wikified. Part of the process of doing this will be to establish standards for collegiate data, including notability, linking the college entry in the infoboxes on person pages to college pages, addressing recent seasons for which statistical data is available, and so forth.  Development of a category structure, as well as identifying what semantic properties collegiate-related pages should have, will also be part of the task.

A potential offshoot of this project would address wood-bat collegiate summer leagues.

== Minor league and Negro Leagues ballparks ==

Stub articles for Major League ballparks have been created, tagged by their Retrosheet IDs. Gord Brown has an extensive register of minor league ballparks.  These consist primarily of "infobox"-type information, along with a list of minor league tenants, although some also have links to external websites and other notes.  These files are organized by state, alphabetical by city within the state.  Two main steps are needed here:
# Wikify Gord's files. A few states have been completed, and are being transplanted from the Minor Leagues Database wiki.  This is a tedious but straightforward task. Gord's files are not quite formatted neatly enough to permit automatic conversion.
# Consult ''Green Cathedrals.''  This book also lists parks used for Negro League games, which is a gap left open by the Retrosheet list plus Gord Brown's list. It will also be a good resource for filling out infobox-level information on parks such as dimensions, capacity, and so forth, which has not been done for the Major League parks.  The task here is not to scrape every bit of information out of ''Green Cathedrals,'' but simply to get solid coverage of the basic data on parks to support future development of articles.

== Managers and Coaches ==

Minor league managers have been merged based on Jerry Jackson's register. This has proven to be less than an ideal resource, but is generally a good start.  Major league managerial and coaching service has not been added to careers  Major League managers who did not play in the Major Leagues do not have Retrosheet IDs on their pages, and there are generally no pages at all for Major League managers who did not play at all professionally.

== Umpires ==

No significant effort has yet been undertaken to create pages for umpires. Some umpires will already have pages because they had a playing and/or managing career. The tasks here are
# Use the [http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/index.html#Umpires umpires register on retrosheet.org] to create pages for umpires who do not have one, and to tag the pages of people who also umpired in the majors with their Retrosheet ID, if not present.  (Retrosheet umpire IDs are generally numbered 901 and higher, unless they played in the majors as well.)  Umpiring stints in the majors should also be added to the career table on these pages.
# Retrosheet has also posted [http://retrosheet.org/TSNUmpireCards/MLU.htm scans of umpire cards] obtained from The Sporting News. The bulk of these are of umpires who umpired only in the minor leagues. These need to be reviewed and the information imported as appropriate. There are around 5000 of these cards, so this will take a while, but will be a great boon to research as they have not been formally catalogued.

== Localization of names ==

High-level baseball internationally is within the scope of the Encyclopedia. We will require volunteers fluent in Spanish to provide spellings of names correct with acute accents and tildes, and volunteers fluent in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese to provide names in local character sets.

==Statistics==

Definitions, history, and other information about statistical measures of performance.