Lack of involvement

This plan assumes that enough SABR members will be interested in becoming involved in maintaining and developing the Encyclopedia. There are many reasons why this might occur.

• Some members view SABR's efforts to produce previous Encyclopedias and other online resources as inadequate, and might be reluctant to participate in this initiative because they fear this will end up the same way. This may characterize the attitudes of some members who will take a wait-and-see approach. We have had discussions with 10-20 members who have been active in working on one or more of the datasets targeted for the initial launch, and have gotten positive responses on involvement from them.

• If the Encyclopedia is not sufficiently compelling as a useful resource, it will not be visited by most members, and therefore contributions will not occur. We propose to address this by holding off on a public rollout until we believe we have achieved a critical mass of information and navigational structure that will make the Encyclopedia worth visiting on a regular basis. This will minimize the chances of the chicken-and-egg problem where noone contributes because noone visits, and noone visits because noone contributes.

• Members will not undertake the private effort to contribute to a public good. It requires effort to make a contribution, but generally there is no direct benefit to contribution; therefore, people may choose to "free ride" by enjoying the contributions of others, but not contribute themselves. If enough people do this, the Encyclopedia will not develop. The general experience of community-developed projects on the Internet in the last decade is that people will contribute to projects, if the right conditions are met. The baseball-reference Bullpen shows that there are people willing to work on a wiki about baseball. Within SABR, the response to the Minor Leagues Database has been for several hundred people to contribute at least one correction or addition. The choice of the wiki software is motivated in part by the observation that contributing to the Minor Leagues Database is much more complicated than it needs to be. Based on the experience of the Minor Leagues Database, we anticipate several hundred SABR members would make at least one contribution to the Encyclopedia each year, with as many as 40-50 being willing to be active contributors or editors.

In all these scenarios, because of the incremental nature of building out the Encyclopedia, if low levels of interest and involvement do turn out to be constraints, we will be able to identify the problem early in the development process, prior to having laid out significant amounts of funds or development time.

Quality control failure and loss of reputation

This proposal would make the Encyclopedia the "front door" portal to SABR's knowledgebase and expertise. As such, the quality of the information and its presentation in the Encyclopedia will have a large impact on the goodwill and reputation enjoyed by SABR in the future. A risk in any community-developed project is the introduction of bad information, either maliciously or by accident.

Two features of the proposal address this risk. First, all edits will be approved by one of a core group of editors, who are responsible for maintaining consistency and accuracy across the Encyclopedia. We anticipate there would be around a dozen editors at the initial rollout, with that number increasing gradually as involvement with the Encyclopedia increases. We believe there will be members who will be interested and qualified to serve in this editorial role. The editor's role is similar in objective and in anticipated time requirements with being part of the SABR-L moderator team. SABR-L has been successfully moderated via the rotating moderatorship approach for almost a decade now.

The editor process is likely to prevent the most egregious errors from making it to the public eye. Errors which are more subtle are more likely to be posted, especially since even a diverse group of editors cannot be experts in every topic. The philosophy of community development of the resource is that the more people who see a page, the more likely errors on that page will be recognized by at least one person. This approach appears to work in practice; again we can turn to the Minor Leagues Database, which has been greatly improved by the visibility it has had over the last year.

Cannibalization of membership and existing SABR programs

Offering the Encyclopedia to the general public represents an outlay of funds and staff time which will not have a directly counterbalancing line item in terms of revenue. The Encyclopedia will offer a great store of information without requiring membership or subscription. Since SABR is a membership organization, an analysis of how the Encyclopedia may affect membership and existing SABR programs is in order.

The Encyclopedia proposed here does not supersede or replace any existing membership benefits. SABR does not currently have a meaningful online Encyclopedia application; the Online Encyclopedia currently available on members.sabr.org is very limited in content and usability, and is widely considered far inferior to the offerings at baseball-reference and Retrosheet. In terms of other SABR publications and activities, the Encyclopedia is not a replacement for the journals, books, and other activities. Encyclopedia articles do not cover topics in the same depth and breadth as these other publications. Additionally, the Encyclopedia articles will be a "living" document, subject to continual revision, updating, and improvement. This complements the relatively static and immutable nature of a journal article or book, which serve as reliable secondary sources supporting the Encyclopedia.

With the potential of the Encyclopedia being a valuable resource, an alternative to this proposal would make the Encyclopedia readable only by SABR members. A high-quality Encyclopedia would be a significant member benefit. In terms of the Encyclopedia attracting members as a private resource, there is a tradeoff. The Encyclopedia as a member benefit might be the deciding factor in a member choosing to renew. However, a private Encyclopedia would do little to attract members, since the quality of the Encyclopedia wouldn't be visible to non-members. A public Encyclopedia would serve as a recruitment tool, signaling the type of society SABR is; someone favorably impressed with the Encyclopedia may be more inclined to join SABR to be a part of the activities SABR members are involved in. A public Encyclopedia would also generate visibility and goodwill for SABR beyond the community of prospective members. SABR's reputation as the authority on baseball research will be in the long run the engine that drives member recruitment, retention, and donations.