Play ball

The hoohah over Durova and her goofball mailing lists continues. My guess is that everything will be smoothed over and the clownish lists will continue their high-larious sockpuppet hunts. Maybe they'll find one under the Queen of England's bed. On my user page I've made my final statement on the matter, a quote of the last paragraph in yesterday's blog post.

So let's talk baseball. Durova and wpinvestigations-l have now proved with unimpeachable sooper-sekrit evidence that Alex Rodriguez is a sockpuppet of George Steinbrenner. Oops, got to get my mind off that drivel.

In fact, I've written a few articles on baseball for Wikipedia, including several on league championship series. Here's my account of the melodramatic 1980 NLCS between the Phillies and the Astros. These articles are fun to write because I can slip a little excitement into the prose. Usually, Wikipedia demands a style that's dull as reused dishwater. Try anything remotely colorful, and you get ominous notes about an "unencyclopedic style." I've handed out a few of those ominous notes myself.

But sports articles allow a little more latitude. The people who read them tend to be, surprise, sports fans. So they accept a little oomph in the prose.

I stole the markup for the box scores from other articles on championship series. It's amazing what you can do with those arcane symbols. Batter-by-batter records of the games were easy to find on the web, and I fleshed out the dry details with a few flourishes. Other editors have provided some nice touches, and the article is now more than respectable.

For once Wikipedia worked pretty well. Meanwhile, wpinvestigations-l is checking the umpires for nefarious connections to Wikipedia Review.