THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I use the wiki every once in a while and also link to it.  Archiving means it will be “read” only?  How about fan mail, do you guys still read and respond to it?
vr, Xei

I’d recommend turning off new registrations but leaving it open otherwise, so folks now registered can edit if they choose.

Yes, archive means read-only, but I would make an exception for myself, MGL and Andy, so we can respond to mail.

Yes, if I can stop new registrations and let the existing users edit, I’d be happy with that.  Frankly, it would be whatever is easier to do.

I had forgotten all about it.  I suggest putting a link to it on the sidebar of the main page.

I don’t have any wiki-tech solutions, but if you need an editor/grunt to help keep it alive, I would be happy to help.

Rally: good idea.  I didn’t put it on the main page (I never go there), but at the top of this blog, I added it to the “red section”.

RFK: send me an email at tom~tangotiger~net.  The job would be to monitor new registrations, delete spam ones, and generally do something to promote the pages to spur on the creation of new ones, or update existing ones.

Something like this:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Main_Page

If you are up for it, great.  If not, that’s ok.

Like RFK, I would be willing to offer editorial and grunt-work assistance.

Anyone interested can send me an email, and we’ll see who’s up for it.

It’s a shame that people (no one in particular) are always calling for an accessible introduction to sabermetric concepts, but very few are interested in doing any work on it themselves.  There were, what, about 10 people who contributed substantially to the wiki? 

I would be happy to help out, but I’ll wait until there is a sufficient number of people working on it.

I had seen the mailbag part before, but I never really saw that there was more to it than that.

This might be a bad time to ask about this now that it has entered limbo, but it seems I can edit pages now but not create new ones.

There’s a 30-day wait period that I put in, because I go through the new registrations every 30 days to delete the spammers.

Once an editor is in place, then that window can shrink down to 1 day or even less.

If you are interested, just shoot me an email.  In a day or two, I’ll contact all those who expressed interest and we’ll see what we can do.

Tango,

You have a couple of options.  The sledgehammer approach is to close registration, but tick the box that allows admins to add accounts and add people upon request.  For a small userbase this works.

The newer versions of MediaWiki also have a much better CAPTCHA than older ones like I suspect you’re using.  If it’s after 1.5.4? upgrading is easy, otherwise you have to reinstall.

Tango,
try HCO at BTF (he’s in the Lounge).

Excalabur beat me to it.  I’ve installed a few MediaWikis at work and I’m sure there are extensions you can use to prevent Spam.

You have a captcha here...I assume it works, so why not use it in the wiki?

MediaWiki is pre-installed by the web host.  I’m not really keen on doing much configuration with it.

This blog is from ExpressionEngine, and captcha is included as part of the software.

Fair enough.  There are a fair amount of extensions that need little configuration, just a matter of copying the file into the extensions directory and adding an include to LocalSettings.php. 

Here’s one for example:  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit

That’s the best “Wiki-tech” solution I know, but as mentioned by Excalabur, it depends on which version you are running.

Tom, if you should ever want to mess around, let me know. I’ve installed Media Wiki several times and it’s really easy to configure.

I see that the wiki’s been updated by a few people.  I’ll write back to everyone who emailed me (if you made a post in this thread, and didn’t email me, then email me… makes life easier for me), and then transition the keys to one or a few of you.

Ideally, someone who wants to be editor, who can be proactive in certain situations, would be the ideal candidate.

I’m glad to read that the wiki may be back in some form. I don’t feel like I’m really qualified to write anything for it, but I linked to it frequently.

Did I understand correctly above that the “mailbag” will continue? I really loved that. Although I’m a bit bashful about asking too many questions, I still have plenty in the hopper and its getting more full all the time.

Feel free to keep sending questions to the mailbag.  What I do is when I get 6 or 7 questions, then I update the wiki, and I ask MGL and Andy to reply, as well as myself.  The more questions asked, the faster we will get to them.  (Basically, when I’m sick of seeing the questions still in my inbox, then I get to it.)

That’s another thing for the wiki: it keeps revisions history.  I don’t need revisions history for the mailbag (certainly not more than say 5 versions, or more than 1 month).

I’m glad to read that the wiki may be back in some form. I don’t feel like I’m really qualified to write anything for it, but I linked to it frequently.

Matt K-

I’m sure you’re capable of contributing.  The nice thing about wikis is that you don’t have to write an extensive article to contribute; even adding one line helps, especially at this point when there’s still a lot to be written. 

I outlined a handful of pages but there’s still plenty to fill in.  For example, the Baseball Prospectus entry.  At the very least, you can go to the regular wikipedia page on the topic and paraphrase some of that content for the SABRwiki (referencing Wikipedia as the source, of course).