How to Help

The Effectively Wild Wiki serves as a reference aid cataloging nearly 2000 podcast episodes, the wider community, and their respective chronicling of Major League Baseball. Because of this, keeping the wiki up to date, organized, and useful is a big job that requires a lot of assistance from listeners.

This guide is evolving!

As the wiki grows, the hope is to automate multiple aspects of page management, but there will always be a need for human editors. Keep an eye on this page to learn about updates to the editing process!

Adding New Episodes

Effectively Wild generally uploads 3 new episodes a week, and the goal is to have new pages up as soon as possible. If one hasn't been added yet, follow these steps:

1. Create a new page titled Episode XXXX: Name of Episode
   • Do not add "Effectively Wild" at the start.
   • Replace "smart quotes" with their plain equivalents: For example, change ’ to '. (The EW-Scrape extension does this automatically.)
2. To add the episode content to its page, you have two options:
   1. Copy the source code of the Episode Template into the page and fill out the page manually.
   2. Use the EW-Scrape chrome extension on the episode's Fangraphs page to generate a fully populate template in your clipboard.
3. For Email Episodes, gather questions from the Email Question database to add to the page. Whenever possible, use this method rather than attempting to transcribe!
4. Follow the remaining template instructions inside the pasted text to finish the page and save it.
5. Create a new page with a title consisting of just the episode number with no extra text, and redirect it to the corresponding episode page. Example: 1745
6. Enjoy the warm feeling of satisfaction you've earned from helping keep the wiki up to date!

Note: If you're going to spend a lot of time on an episode, you may want to start by creating a "stub" page with a comment like

<-- your-userid hopes to to finish this episode by yyyy/mm/dd -->

so that others won't duplicate your work.

Adding Episode Timecodes

We recently added a new feature to Episode pages that can directly link to an episode's mp3 with a timecode pre-queued, allowing for users to immediately listen to a section of the podcast they're looking for without having to try and manually search through the episode. While we've gone through and added these links to existing timecodes present in episode descriptions, most topic lists or other sections still don't have any entries to update.

(To see this feature in action, see Episode 1745: The State of the Starting Pitcher.)

To add timecodes, follow these steps:

1. Open an episode page that needs timecodes added, and click edit.
2. Listen to the episode, and flesh out any topics as needed on the page.
3. For each topic, add a timecode at the end of the entry noting when the relevant conversation begins using our custom template. For example, if you wish to link an episode at 1:02:59, enter ({{tcl|tc=1:02:59}}). (The parentheses are not required for the template to function, but are used for cleaner formatting.)

Linking Players and Teams

In older episodes, many mentions of players or baseball teams are not linked. Having these items linked is extremely helpful for research, even if no page exists for them. Some guidelines to follow:

• You don't need to link a player or team more than once per episode, though extra links don't hurt either, especially if the player or team is mentioned in unrelated topics. Use your best judgement.
• Use a player's full name, even if the player is only referred to by their last name or similar. For consistency, use the player name as given on FanGraphs. For example, [[Jesús Aguilar|Aguilar]]
• Team links should use a team's full name, such as [[Seattle Mariners]].
• For Cleveland, link to [[Cleveland Guardians]]. If the name "Cleveland Indians" is included in the original episode description, please keep there, as these are intended to archive the actual episode text that was included in the RSS feed.
• For linking to a current franchise's previous incarnation, link to their current team. For example, if you were referring to the original Washington Senators, you'd input [[Minnesota Twins|Washington Senators]].

The EW-Scrape tool does a lot of the player hyperlinking automatically.

Linking Guests

Guests on the show should have their names linked for better research functionality. It's okay if the guest does not have a page on the wiki. The "What links here" feature works for missing pages.

After being introduced, identify guests in the same way they are addressed by the hosts. This is typically the first name only. Exception: If multiple guests (or a guest and a host) have the same first name, use the first and last name throughout. For example, when Ben Clemens is a guest while Ben Lindbergh is hosting, the notes identify them as "Ben Clemens" and "Ben Lindbergh".