There have not been any major changes in the Encyclopedia in the last few weeks, but we have made some incremental improvements, both for editors and for researchers in general. Read on to find out what's new with the Encyclopedia!

Faster viewing

You may notice that the Encyclopedia is a bit faster than it was when we first announced it to the members. This is a result of a few invisible technical changes in the way the software manages background tasks. We hope to improve speed even more in the coming months.

Search Improvements

Searching the Encyclopedia is steadily becoming easier. We face a lot of challenges in this area of the project, because search in a project like ours is not just about finding matches - it's about taking a small input and figuring out what someone meant by it.

We are responding to that task more or less by building a "dictionary" of small inputs and what they might mean. For example, "a-rod" is likely to mean Alex Rodriguez, and we have a system for adding that meaning to the dictionary. In a future post, I will explain more about how the system works and how to add new entries.

In this post, however, I'm happy to announce that search is now fully case insensitive, meaning that entering the terms "mcdaniel", "Mcdaniel", "MCDaniel", or any other form will work perfectly well, whereas in the past you would have needed to enter "McDaniel" for it to work correctly.

Another improvement is that you can now search for teams by their location. This is not quite the same as the city they're in - a familiar example is that you'll find the 1995 California Angels if you search for "California", but not if you search for "Los Angeles" or "Anaheim".

Citation templates

This is an improvement for editors: it is now easier and faster to cite sources, especially in footnotes. Citing sources will always be a somewhat technical process, but the current technique is much improved.

There are still few active editors in the Encyclopedia, this should make things easier for those who are contributing. You can see the changes on the help page on citing sources.

Improvements in Documentation

In another improvement for editors, there are two help articles that have been added recently to help in editing player pages:

• Editing demographic information
• Brief biographical outlines

The first is a detailed guide to when and how to edit demographic information for players and other people, including some helpful information on the value (and limits) of the Social Security Death Index.

The second is a format for organizing information on a person that comes in the form of "loose facts" rather than a full narrative. Sometimes loose facts are all we have, and this article will help you organize them and make them useful.