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".

One of the challenges we face in the Encyclopedia project is that we have a universe of what will be over 200,000 "notable" people. That universe grows every day as players make their professional debuts, and our knowledge about past players, managers, executives, umpires, and so forth continues to evolve. We chose a wiki-based Encyclopedia in part because it gives us the flexibility to deal with these ever-changing data, and allows for collaboration in improving the data.

This is the first in a series of occasional updates on the development of the SABR Encyclopedia wiki.

It's been about six weeks since the Board approved the concept of the Encyclopedia and authorized us to begin work. After a month of planning, on April 1, the first automated "bot" went into action, creating a page for each person listed in the Minor Leagues Database, which is the single largest dataset anywhere of people involved with professional baseball. About five days later, the upload process was completed, and a few intrepid souls, Jack Morris, Cliff Blau, Joel Dinda, and John Zajc among them, have begun the task of organizing and expanding biographical knowledge about this set of people. In the meanwhile, pages have automatically been built out for (most) professional leagues and teams. Pages for each ballpark to host at least one Major League game have also been created.

This report is coming awfully late, about two weeks into April. This is largely beacuse right around the turn of the month I was moving the main sabr.org website to a new server, which started a few days before the end of March and trickled into April. Around the same time, I heard back from several (4, I think) chapters and committees about putting up sites, so I have been working as hard as possible on those, and I'm almost caught up now. The server moved dominated the month, pushed back the sabr.org redesign, and also makes this list rather short:

• Developed and implemented a delivery system for the Emerald Guide to Baseball
• Improved our website analytics with some combining of sites and a funnel to track new member signups
• Moved the main sabr.org site and about a dozen others, and eliminated about 6 dead sites
• Scanned the first issue of the National Pastime, found an OCR program that should actually function well
• Set up a testing/development Linux server; its first use is for the aforementioned OCR
• Modified an online text editor to create a tool to speed posting Bioproject bios
• Created one chapter draft site, and one research committee draft site (the committee site turned out very well, and I look forward to announcing it here in a month or two when it goes public)