(S29) Ultimus Week

[Troen]

Write 800 words or more on something about anything in the league that interests you. It could be related to statistics, a league issue that you take seriously, or a niche part of history that doesn’t fit neatly into either of the above categories. This must be directly related to the league, so don’t wax 800 words about your team’s participation on a Werewolf server or something.

For one of the PTs this year we were asked to pick someone on the team to get the first status outside the stadium. To research my answer for that, I naturally went to the wiki to look up the Copperheads' best QB, Easton Cole, where I was surprised to see he has no page. Searching for his name right now gives 29 results but they're all references from other pages. One of the places he's mentioned is on Austin's franchise records where he's still mentioned as active. Looking at the page history, it hasn't been updated since November 2020, around 8 months ago.

Thinking back to that for the UW prompt, I have two thoughts. First, I'm sad at the loss of TPE incentives to update your player's wiki page in the offseason. I've still done it in past years because I like being able to see the different season results in one place, but what I've seen makes it look like most players create their page as part of the new player process and then never go back to update it. To help that out, I think there should be a specific incentive to include a season writeup for players. If the TPE is too problematic to add, maybe a fixed monetary amount? PBE has a weekly task that's framed as a journal where the reward is always $300k - so maybe something like that for the wiki page where basically anything of 100 words or longer gets you a small amount. It's possible the actual issue was more about grading availability in the offseason for whoever is reviewing the wiki and this might not help with that, but I still like it as a concept. And beyond my personal interest in being able to read about the league history, I'm sure that the hall of fame voters would enjoy having the full stats and history for all the players they're evaluating.

That gets to my second thought - can there be an automated export of player and team stats from the sim files to the wiki? I've never looked into what data is available in the actual sim (and haven't bought it either), but I have seen that the index now tracks player lifetime totals since the sim engine migration. I'm guessing that the data prior to that was not ported over, but it seems possible that at least for newer players there could be a program to copy the per-season and lifetime totals over to a wiki page. I haven't ever tried to write an automatic wiki updater of any sort, but I'm assuming it wouldn't be impossible to get it set up so that the program would be able to update the lifetime stats and add new season totals without overwriting any summaries written by a person. I have no idea if it would be easy or hard, but I would like to see it at least investigated. I think that creating the stats part of the wiki automatically would help get better coverage of the progressive history of players and flesh out the wiki greatly, even if a lot of the player pages would be stats with no seasonal writeup (which again could be helped out by my first line of thinking).
Going back to my note about the franchise records page - looking at all teams, it seems like there are a bunch which were updated last in November 2020, though at least the expansion teams have been updated since then. I'm guessing that there was a person who was doing that who since left or got bored (and looking at the edit history suggests it was Swanty/124715 for the last few changes). Could those be automated? Were those automated but the program broke with the sim change or the people involved left? I have no idea (and haven't looked into it before), but getting that restarted or fixed seems like it would be great to me. Additionally, I think that tying the wiki and the index together more tightly would be interesting - could we customize the index so that the various team/player pages there have a link to the wiki? Having an automatic tie between the two could be a good way to get generated basic information in place while making it easy for players to find where to add more - eg having a page per game with the score/play information but then allowing people to come in and write summaries like we have for the Ultimus games. Having a full cross link between the wiki and the index would be another of those things which makes it easier to look into the history of the league for hall of fame or yearly voting. I also saw there was a post for award voters which posted a spreadsheet containing information that the sim files have but that the index doesn't show - that kind of information sounds like great things to get added to the wiki if we could, and then having links to the wiki from the index would help minimize the need for a spreadsheet connected to neither.

Now, some of these plans might be infeasible given the actual amount of time it would take to do them or the lack of people with the skills needed to do so. While sad, I think wqe should still keep in mind what we would like the wiki and index to be and continue thinking about ways we can try to get it there, regardless of if it's a technical measure or putting incentives in player for people to do it for you. For example, what if we paid cash out for creating/updating another player's wiki page? Easier said than done (plus there would need to be a way to prevent someone working on your when you were also working on it), but it's another thing we could think about adding to the league if we think it will help create the outcomes we like.