Baseball Musings: A Baseball Wiki

March 06, 2006

A Baseball Wiki

Dan Lewis is launching a new site today, and asked for some space to make the announcement:

About a month ago, the guys at Baseball Analysts brought DeadSpin's Will Leitch over to discuss, as the title so perfectly notes, "a new way to look at baseball journalism." Will took great care in demonstrating how sports bloggers have effectively respun the journalistic twine into a product more appropriate for the Internet generation. And, as Will points out, newspapers and similar dead-tree media have an opportunity to follow suit.

I agreed then, and I agree now. But nevertheless, I objected in the comments to that article.

My objection to Will's stance is simply that newspapers, blogs, and most every medium this far developed is hierarchical in nature. A newspaper column only hits the printing press due to the thumbs-up of an editor or publisher. Same thing with big internet media such as ESPN.com. Writing for a site on All-Baseball, Baseball Toaster, MVN, or Sports Nation requires an invitation.

Clearly, the masses have more access to publish their work than before. There are many sites open to guest columns. Or we can start our own blogs. And we can comment on the blog posts of others.

But only blogs address the root problem I brought up. Even this guest column required the okay of the hierarchy -- David had to grant me the space. Commenting requires the blogger -- the hierarchical power -- to frame the argument.

Why is the hierachy such a problem? Simply, because we want the marketplace of ideas to have few barriers to entry. Small, discreet groups of people -- typically, editors and publishers -- operate as an enormous barrier to entry. We need no other proof than to note that Bill James had to self-publish his Baseball Abstracts, an endeavor few of us would undertake.

The solution de rigeur is, of course, the blog. Any one of us can create a blog in a matter of minutes and, by the end of the day, we are publishing our thoughts in a medium available to the masses. 'Tis much easier than running off your own photocopies and mailing out Baseball Abstracts to random SABR members.

Blogging mitigates the hierarchy problem, but there are still costs involved. Having one or two excellent pieces of analysis is not enough. You need constantly fresh content. You need to promote your materials. The time involved is exceptional, and the reward is fleeting. By some estimations, a new blog is created every second -- but only 30% of those survive the first three months. And that includes everything from an TypePad-driven academic symposium to your 11-year-old cousin's "OMG HE IS SOOO CUTE" livejournal.

Perhaps ironically, the costs incurred by blogging are exactly the costs avoided by reporters and commentors for newspapers, radio, magazines, and the major websites. Peter Gammons, before he became a pseudo-blogger, published a story once or twice a week. That's death for a blogger. And I guarantee you that Gammons is not his own PR department.

In any event, one thing is clear: blogging is only a step in the right direction. The next step needs to recoup the advantages of traditional media, and apply it to the new.

It is this next step that brings me here.

Today, my friends and I unveiled ArmchairGM.com, the world's first world-writable sports blog and encyclopedia. What that means that anyone, right now, can surf over to that site and write an opinion article, report sports news, or contribute to the site. There's no registration required. No fees. You do not even have to ask us for permission. Just go to ArmchairGM.com and start writing. That's it. The only cost involved is your time and, yes, the learning curve to understand how ArmchairGM.com works.

That's why we built the site on the MediaWiki platform. It's the same engine that powers Wikipedia, giving at least some sub-set of users an easy transition. (We have added some technological improvements to allow for easy publishing of opinion and news articles, but that should not affect the learning curve negatively.)

In the end, ArmchairGM.com aims to blend tradtional media advantages back into the awesome power of new media advances. As Will said, online sports fans have no problem with everyone else joining the party. Let's making participating as easy as possible.

To read more about the site, visit http://www.armchairgm.com/mwiki/index.php?title=ArmchairGM:About

I tried it out last night, authoring my bio.

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Posted by David Pinto at 08:51 AM | Blogs | TrackBack (0)

Comments

One of the big questions we are getting is how the site filters the wheat from the chaff. After all, our whole schtick is to limit, if not outright eliminated, the control of a select few. But when anyone can write an article, what prevents something totally absurd from being published?

The answer: You do.

Every news and opinion article on the site has a ballot box. Readers -- registered or unregistered, regular or occassional, Mets fans or Yankee fans -- can vote to approve the article. Those votes, combined with comments from readers, add to the "score" of the article. Once the article's score reaches a certain level, the article appears as a link from the relevant player's page. Go even higher, and it'll appear as a link off the relevant team's page. Even higher, and it appears on the relevant league page. (We're not only baseball.) And if the article hits some ultimate score, a link to it appears on the front page of the site.

Posted by: DNL at March 6, 2006 09:08 AM

looks pretty cool

Posted by: anon at March 6, 2006 09:09 AM

I like the idea--doesn't sound perfect, but certainly a step towards moving in the right direction.

Posted by: stat man at March 6, 2006 09:14 AM

I love the idea....too bad you couldn't have come up with a better name. Something that sounds good and makes you want to read a site full of text. (Like Baseball Musings!!!)

Posted by: Steve at March 6, 2006 09:39 AM

It's about all sports, and we figured most people wished they could be General Managers, but only do so from the sofa.

Posted by: DNL at March 6, 2006 09:46 AM

I love the idea. Good luck. I know I'll be posting a thought or two in the future.

Posted by: Nate at March 6, 2006 11:32 AM

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