Help:Formatting collegiate baseball articles

From SABR Encyclopedia

This page outlines the changes needed to convert a college page that looks like Stanford University into one that is fully part of the Encyclopedia, like Auburn University. This includes moving some data and splitting the article into the proper sections.

This process is somewhat technical, since it involves wikitext, but that part is mostly cut and paste. It would be a good project if you want to learn more about how wikitext works, but if you're not interested in that, consider writing about people instead, which you can do without learning any special codes or syntax.

The finished article will contain links to individual pages for people who played or coached at the college, where those pages exist, and will look consistent with the rest of the encyclopedia.

Contents 1 Introductory information 2 College Infobox 3 Data Tables 3.1 Conference Affiliations 3.2 Year-by-year records 3.3 Major League players 3.4 First-team All-America selections 4 Remaining Data 4.1 Bulleted Lists 4.2 External Links 4.3 Headings 5 After saving 5.1 Verifying players 5.2 Table of Contents

Introductory information

There should be a brief introduction at the top of the article, for example:

The '''Clemson Tigers''' have represented Clemson University since 1896. 
They have played in the [[Atlantic Coast Conference]] since 1954.

The introduction does not need to be restricted to this information. For example, if a college is defunct or a current conference champion, that is worth noting in the introduction.

College Infobox

Every collegiate article should have a green infobox in the top right corner that provides basic information about the college or university in the article. There is a form to help input the information for the infobox. The information that should go in each field is as follows, with an example value (for the example of Clemson).

Field	Description	Sample value
Name	The official name of the college or University - the form you would see on letterhead or a degree.	Clemson University
Nickname	The nickname used for the baseball team, if it exists.	Tigers
City	The city used in the institution's official address. For	Clemson
State	The two letter code for the state or province for North American schools, or the full name of the sub-national region elsewhere.	SC
Country	The two letter ISO 3166-1 code for the country.	US
Other names	If the college has been known by different names, they should be listed here, separated by semicolons.	Clemson Agricultural College

Data Tables

The data tables for Conference affiliations, Year-by-year records, Major League players, and First-team All-America selections should have column headings. These are formed by using an exclamation mark to start the row instead of a vertical bar.

Conference Affiliations

The correct format for the column headings for Conference affiliations:

! Conference
! Years

Year-by-year records

The correct format for the column headings for Year-by-year records:

 
! Year
! Record
! Coach

Major League players

The correct format for the column headings for Major League players:

! Name
! Birthplace
! Dates Played
! Major League Debut 

Each major league player must have his name linked to his professional player page. Players in unedited collegiate pages are generally listed by their first name, middle initial, and last name. In general, this should be modified to refer to players by their professional use name. For example, Ryan Garko is listed as "Ryan F. Garko" on Stanford University's page, but should be linked as Ryan Garko. However, if there is evidence that a player was primarily known by another name while in college, that should be preserved.

To preserve these, you can link to a player page, and have the link display a different name than the name of the article. For example Kevin Brown (brown-008jam) is referred to on the Georgia Tech page as James K. (Kevin) Brown. If he had been known as James in college, you could, edit the name as such:

[[Kevin Brown (brown-008jam)|James K. (Kevin) Brown]]

You can use the same technique just to make links look nicer, like so:

[[Kevin Brown (brown-008jam)|Kevin Brown]]

Which will create the link "Kevin Brown" instead of "Kevin Brown (brown-008jam)".

First-team All-America selections

The correct format for the column headings for First-team All-America selections:

! Year
! Player (awarding organization)

Remaining Data

Bulleted Lists

The data for other notable alumni as well as highlights of conference and national champions is formatted as bulleted lists. To create bullets for a list of people or highlights, simply use asterisks corresponding to the level the data corresponds with. For example, on the Auburn University article, conference championships and college world series appearances are first level lines, where as the conference and championship year are second level lines. The correct way to format these lists:

* Conference Championships
** Cleveland Athletic Conference: 1970, 1999
* College World Series participant: 1999
* College World Series runner-up: 1999

For notable alumni who played baseball but achieved notoriety outside of professional baseball and did not play professional baseball, attach a hyperlink to his Wikipedia page. The correct way to format a non-SABR Encyclopedia hyperlink to the fictitious Wikipedia:John Doe:

[[Wikipedia:John Doe]]

External Links

Links to websites for the college program should be included at the end of the article. To format a link with the web address shown:

* http://clemsontigers.cstv.com/sports/m-basebl/clem-m-basebl-body.html

If other sources have been used in editing the data or adding to the information on the page, the source should be formatted as described in the Help:Citing Sources page.

Headings

Major headings, for example Conference affiliations, will appear with larger font than the body text and will have a line underneath. They should be formatted as such:

== Conference affiliations ==

Minor headings (subheadings), for example Major League players, will appear in boldface font and should be formatted as such:

=== Major League players ===

After saving

Verifying players

Once you have created links to all the players, it is a good practice to click through to their person pages to make sure the links go to the correct players. This can usually be confirmed by the presence of a college record in their career box. If that is not present, confirm that their professional debut is consistent with the dates they played at the college and add the entry to the career box if you wish.

Table of Contents

Be sure to double check the headings used in the college article. The table is generated automatically from your headings. It should look something like this:

1 Conference affiliations
2 Year-by-year records
3 Notable players and alumni
    3.1 Major League players
    3.2 Other alumni
4 Highlights
    4.1 Championships
    4.2 First-team All-America selections
5 External Links

When you are happy with the page, remove the line {{Undone-college-box}} or {{Cleanup-college}} from the top of the article, if it's there.

This will remove the box at the top of the page, and take the college out of the College articles requiring cleanup category.