THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Registration is recommended (will be easier for you to track your edits) but not required.  Unless some yahoos derail the project, at which point it will be required.

Might as well make registration required now. A cursory examination of wikipedia shows what happens when the inmates run the asylum.

The wiki is a welcome addition for those of us trying to figger things out. Muchas gracias.

I’m delaying registration, to make it easier for people to do their edits. One less barrier for entry.

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A useful tip when adding content, this will automatically create a link for you:
[[xxxx]]

Say for example that you are using a keyword on your page, like “David Smyth” or “DIPS”.  What you do is wrap it with those two square brackets.  This way, it makes that keyword linkable.  If there’s no page created, no problem, as that’ll let whoever clicks it the option to add content.

Also:
[[xxxx|yyyy]]
Say that “xxxx” = “DIPS”.  But, you want to show “Defense Independent Pitching Statistics”.  That’s your yyyy.

So, xxxx refers to the page you are linking to, while yyyy refers to the name of the link, in more english like terms.  Most of the time, you’ll just be coding it as [[xxxx]]

Here’s a good page for some of you to update:
http://www.tangotiger.net/wiki/index.php?title=Websites

Click on EDIT, and you will see a couple of codes. 
- The asterisk (*) represents a bullet point. 
- Each equals sign (=) represents one level of heading.  So === is a level 3 heading. 
- Three tick marks ( ‘ ‘ ‘ ) represents bold.

Ok, main page has been updated with a better index page.

Great idea!

You beat me to it by about a month or so. 

I’ll see what I can do to fill out some pages.

Dan, as noted in a recent thread, I changed your new page from “Evaluating Defense” to “Evaluating Fielding”.

Defense=Pitching+Fielding
Offense=Hitting+Baserunning

Some suggestions:

- Include tons of links to outside articles, with brief descriptions of each.

- Include a paragraph or two of the “basics” for each stat or concept, even if it’s not up to “our” standards of completeness or correctness.  Nothing turns off newbies faster than jumping straight into techno-speak.

- Leave notes or outlines of how each page could/should be expanded for others to build on.

It’s really up to the contributors.  Right now, Patriot is doing most of the heavy lifting. Nothing is stopping anyone from doing anything, really.

I agree it’s all up to the contributors.

I encourage everyone to remember that there’s a big difference between writing an article summarizing what you already know and writing an article that helps someone learn about a concept.

I see three ways I would use a wiki like this:
- point others to it as an introduction to a concept
- a collection of helpful links on a subject/find new information around the web
- read it myself to learn more about a concept I don’t know much about

Sky, check down on Tango’s blog here (or click on my name) and you can see my attempt to compile a bunch of sabermetric type links. It’s very much a work in progress, but it seems kind of along the lines of what you’re talking about. The wiki will probably blow it away in no time (if it hasn’t already), but if you’re looking for links to explain the stuff in more detail, it may be another option.

I would encourage MB and others to include all their work into the wiki.

Tango, is there any way that categories could be added to the wiki? As this thing grows, it could be helpful to be able to organize the articles.

Yes, we should be adding categories.  I’m not sure yet how to do it, but it should be a snap.

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All: please go to the home page of the wiki:
http://www.tangotiger.net/wiki/

There is a section called “Empty Pages”.  This would be a good starting point for anyone wanting to do a fresh contribution.  Just select one of the Most Wanted, and start editing.

There’s about four pages that need to be deleted over there.

Great, thanks.  Taken care of now.

http://www.tangotiger.net/wiki/index.php?title=The_Book

You’ll note that I added the following text:
[[Category:Books]]

What that will do, automatically, is create a category page called Books:
http://www.tangotiger.net/wiki/index.php?title=Category:Books

And so, any other page that has
[[Category:Books]]
on its page will automatically appear in the category page called Books.

So, when you edit a page with a book in it, add the Category link as above.

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Feel free to create whatever Categories you want. 

The following categories have already been created by one or more people:
http://www.tangotiger.net/wiki/index.php?title=Special:Categories

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If I look at the list of pages here:
http://www.tangotiger.net/wiki/index.php?title=Special:Allpages

I can think of the following categories:
Metrics (or Statistics)
Books
Fielding
Pitching
Offense
Bill James
Pete Palmer
Run Distributions
Win Probability
Sabermetricians
Finance

Other ideas for Categories can be found here:
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/categorylinks/
http://tangotiger.net/archives/studies.html

We don’t have to come to any consensus.  That’s the great thing about wiki.  It just evolves into something.  Very Wisdom of Crowds approach.

Bumping, for those who want to contribute to the wiki.

The wiki received contributions from a very small group of people, which is not at all the intent of a wiki.  I’m thankful to Patriot and DavidRF and the rest of the gang to putting something good out there.  Now, it’s time for the rest of you to pick up the pieces.

Here’s my suggestion.  Go here:
http://www.tangotiger.net/wiki/index.php?title=Websites#Wikis

And go to one of those wikis.  Find out what page they’ve got that doesn’t yet appear on our wiki.  Then, create a page on our wiki with the barest of details.  Someone else will pick it up from there.

Creating a page is supereasy: do a search.  If the page doesn’t exist, you get to do an EDIT immediately.  Done.

Tango, the wiki has been spammed.

I check it M-F, and am at their mercy on the weekend.  Monday mornings are the worst for me.

If anyone can help with the technical aspects of user management on wiki, I’d appreciate it.

Otherwise, I’m going to have to block all new users from registering.

I made some changes based on what I read here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:User_rights

I put in a one-month lag to creating pages for new users.  To edit pages, any user must have a valid email address.

Hopefully, this won’t affect any of the current users. 

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Among “white-collar crime” and those who don’t actually take anything tangible from you, are spammers the worst people in the world?