Mediawiki

Mediawiki is by far the most appropriate choice of software for this project. The wiki format is the most appropriate for data that will come in many forms, and mediawiki is by far the best wiki application, due in large part to its use on Wikipedia.

Useful features of mediawiki:

• Full, excellent revision history on all edits
• Standard interface for extensions and bots
• Easy transclusion of content from same and other wikis
• Scales extremely well
• The look and feel of mediawiki are well known and associated with research and encyclopedic knowledge via Wikipedia

Potential problems with mediawiki are largely related to things that mediawiki is just not designed to do.

• Fine-grained access control - this is just not in the wikipedia culture, and is not a priority for inclusion in the software. The SABR Encyclopedia will either work around this with flagged revisions or transclusion from separate wikis.
• Database-style content - if it would work well in a relational database, it will probably not work well in mediawiki. Much of this data should function nicely using the semantic mediawiki extension, since it will likely be "lighter" data, not huge tables of statistics. Still, there is a larger proportion of this data in the set of all baseball knowledge than in the set of all encyclopedic knowledge.

Semantic Mediawiki extension

The semantic mediawiki extension adds the ability to search and organize data inside articles. This example, from the semantic mediawiki homepage, explains what it does a lot better than words can:

http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Africa

That list is generated from this code:

{{#ask: [[Category:Country]] [[located in::Africa]]
 | ?Area#km²
 | ?Population
 | sort = population
 | order = ascending
}}

Flagged revisions extension

The flagged revisions extension allows wiki administrators to flag a particular version of an article for display. Users can edit the article, but their revisions won't be publicly visible until a new revision is flagged. This should allow for a degree of "authority" in the versions of articles that are displayed to the public. By only empowering a small group of editors to flag revisions. we can try to assure that displayed data is fairly well checked-out.