Baseball Reference Bullpen
sean-...@baseball-reference.com
site. The Baseball Reference Bullpen is an on-line, collaborative
baseball encyclopedia,
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Main_Page
On this site, users write and edit entries for a collaborative
encyclopedia. There are and will be entries for players, teams,
dates, strategies, news items, groundskeepers, mascots, high school
coaches, owners, collective bargaining agreements, definitions,
quotes, trades, pitches, bat materials or any other tidbit of baseball
history (For example, do you know something about the history of the
spitball?). Literally, any baseball topic is welcome. I would
encourage you to lend your vast baseball knowledge to this on-line
resource. Even a short tidbit like whether a player wore glasses, how
to pronounce his name, or a famous boyhood friend is a lasting
contribution. Information beside the stats.
Here are some links describing the project and how to contribute:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/What%27s_the_BR_Bullpen%3F
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/How_to_contribute
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Guidelines
Some sample entries:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Hilton_Smith
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Negro_Leagues
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Mike_Schmidt
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Pitches
These entries do not become the property of Baseball Reference,
instead their use is governed by a ShareAlike license similar to that
used by RetroSheet and their files. Your contributions will always be
freely available.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/BR_Bullpen:Copyrights
Each player, team, and league will have a link to their Bullpen page,
so this expanded information is just a click away from the BR
statistics pages. These pages are not meant to compete with the SABR
BioProject in any way and the pages can easily be linked to those bios
if desired.
Please don't hesitate to e-mail me if you have any questions.
RLM, here is a link to Joe Carter (no stats allowed),
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Joe_Carter
Sincerely,
Sean Forman
http://www.Baseball-Reference.com/
Keith Willoughby
> Baseball-Reference.com is pleased to announce a new addition to the
> site. The Baseball Reference Bullpen is an on-line, collaborative
> baseball encyclopedia,
>
> http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Main_Page
You're obviously familiar with Wikipedia, given you're using their
WikiMedia software. There's going to be massive duplication of effort,
given the thousands of baseball related articles already on Wikipedia,
and AFAIK the CC Sharealike license you've chosen means that content
can't be shared by the two projects (Wikipedia uses the GFDL)
Obviously, it's your prerogative, but it's a shame to see effort
divided.
(The link to the CC license at the bottom of your pages is broken, btw)
--
Keith Willoughby http://flat222.org/keith/
"Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free
people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough."
-- FDR
sean-...@baseball-reference.com
Thanks for the feedback.
Have there been any examples where a wikipedia area ported to another
site or does the wikipedia essentially subsume those efforts?
I think what people have done on wikipedia with baseball entries is
great, but I think there could be a good deal more depth on a baseball
only wiki. Perhaps I'm being overconfident, we'll see.
I went back and forth on the license. I thought about using the same
license as wikipedia and encouraging the use of the existing entries,
but I didn't really want to be seen as piggybacking on other people's
effort. Are there examples of sites that have taken the wiki data and
run with it in another direction?
sean
Keith Willoughby
> Keith,
>
> Thanks for the feedback.
>
> Have there been any examples where a wikipedia area ported to another
> site or does the wikipedia essentially subsume those efforts?
I'm not sure. I'm not aware of any site that has taken on a more niche
role than Wikipedia in a similar style, but that doesn't mean they don't
exist.
> I think what people have done on wikipedia with baseball entries is
> great, but I think there could be a good deal more depth on a baseball
> only wiki. Perhaps I'm being overconfident, we'll see.
I'm sure that you're right. It's quite likely that the quality coming
from a b-r wiki will in fact be higher than that of the more general
Wikipedia - it's just the duplication of effort that is a shame.
> I went back and forth on the license. I thought about using the same
> license as wikipedia and encouraging the use of the existing entries,
> but I didn't really want to be seen as piggybacking on other people's
> effort.
Wikipedia actually encourages it. As long as you abide by the terms of
the license, the content is there to be piggy-backed on. It's not like
Wikipedia hasn't piggybacked on your content - it's where most authors
get their stats from for writing the baseball articles.
It just seems to me like the best thing for the baseball community would
be if you started with the Wikipedia content, and then amended it to
more fit the baseball-reference way of doing things - the Wikipedia
obviously has to be targetted at someone who may know little about
baseball, whereas a baseball-reference style could assume much more
knowledge. It's *hard* to start this sort of thing from scratch - you
really need a critical mass of contributions pretty early, and starting
with a lot of content could have aided with that.
Of course, it would have been a two-way-street - content from the b-r
site could have been taken back into Wikipedia, suitable edited for the
different aim of the site.
I guess it depends on what you're looking to do. It's understandable if
you were worried that using Wikipedia content wouldn't help you stand
out from the crowd. On the other hand, as a Wikipedia contributer, I
would just find it a little frustrating to see stuff in Wikipedia that
could fill in gaps on your site, and potential stuff on your site that
could fill in the gaps in Wikipedia - when taken together, we could have
a really good baseball encyclopaedia :)
> Are there examples of sites that have taken the wiki data and
> run with it in another direction?
answers.com combines Wikipedia content with other free content in a
pretty good way.
Incidentally, you could probably learn from experience with wikipedia's
baseball articles, and set up a standard template for current/ex/Hall of
Fame players as soon as possible. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curt_Schilling for an example. It'll do
wonders for the look-and-feel of your site, and it'll be a lot easier to
do it now, rather than retrofit it later.
Do you have plans for coding stuff into MediaWiki to interface with your
stats database, btw? It would be neat as hell if the templaces could be
kept up to date programatically.
--
Keith Willoughby http://flat222.org/keith/
"For every problem there is a solution which is simple, clean and wrong."
- HL Mencken