I had attempted to do reports here every month, but I think that is a bit too fine-grained for this venue. Of course, when I started the attempt, I had only been at SABR for 3 months, so a month was a significant portion of my time here. As I've moved on, most things worth noting have taken a longer time scale, and a longer period seems more appropriate. "Read more" for updates on the Encyclopedia, research sites, and other things from my "department".

The biggest development in the last three months has been work done on the new SABR Baseball Encyclopedia. Ted Turocy and I (mostly Ted) have been making a lot of progress on defining how the Encyclopedia will work, where data will be stored and how it will be displayed, and how members will interact with all of it. Some major points:

• The Encyclopedia currently has a page for every player known by SABR to have played baseball, probably up to date within a day or two (last night's debuts may not be online yet). Any SABR Member will be able to edit any page (except for certain sections) once the Encyclopedia is available to everyone.
• Ted has done a lot of exciting work with moving data into and out of the encyclopedia. The SABR Minor Leagues Database (which powers Baseball Reference's minor league section) is now being actively maintained using the Encyclopedia - new work is done in the Encyclopedia first, then extracted to build the database version.
• We recently established a system for including authoritative information about players on pages, which will allow us to have stats, Biographical Committee data, and other SABR datasets easily accessible.
• I am working on getting some other SABR Data into the encyclopedia - current work involves the Triple Plays Database and the Collegiate Database. The work on the Collegiate database has been done almost without exception by SABR's hardworking and professional summer intern, James Asimes.
• The system for allowing all changes to be approved by "moderators" is working properly now. This is more important for us than for Wikipedia for two reasons: our much smaller pool of editors means that changes will not be watched in real-time, and our different sourcing standards mean that we will have more judgment calls. Even Wikipedia is looking toward using this extension, though - we are just able to make the choice now, since we don't have any inertia against it.

Coming up in the next quarter, the encyclopedia will be made available to all SABR members to view and edit, formally replacing the current SABR Encyclopedia as a reference source. We will also see an important technical improvement from SABR's other very hardworking summer intern, Alex Zaddach (who resides near Detroit). Alex has been producing some truly excellent code for a novel mediawiki extension that should greatly improve our ability to search and index pages.

Things have also been coming along nicely with sites for chapters and committees. There are about 10 in progress now, with a few more online since the end of March (the Houston chapter, the Minors committee), and several more very close. I have managed to make some great improvements in user interface based on feedback from early adopters, and look forward to starting a number more (particularly with research committees) and some in-person meetings at the convention.

I have mostly dealt with a technical issue that popped up in my early days at SABR - signing on. We are moving from the monolithic single-database content management system to using a variety of tools to accomplish different jobs, and I have had to make all of these sites communicate effectively to know who is who, and whether they're allowed in. I've chosen a software package called CAS for this, which will allow members to sign in once with one username and access all of the sites. The software is configured and the committee / chapter sites and encyclopedia know how to communicate with it now.

Mostly for the benefit of the encyclopedia, I've also had to create a consistent username system for all members. I'll be announcing that widely in the next week.

I have made some progress in documenting the software we use, and have recently produced a few screencasts for the chapter and committee sites. By the end of next quarter I will have more of these, as well as a few screencasts for doing tasks on the encyclopedia. I've found this to be a great challenge, but I think it will be helpful.

One problem that has been around since the beginning of this quarter is the SABR website's new host. It's slow, problematic, and unstable. "Slow" is relative, of course - the SABR site is still better than average, but I'm not happy with it. I expect to have this resolved by the end of the third quarter, but moving a website of this scale is difficult. I am also almost done with a minor redesign of parts of the SABR website, which will make it a little more usable for its twilight year - it should be replaced some time during the next baseball season.