This user feels that out of processdeletions subject to an administrator's whims rather than consensus damage Wikipedia more than any userbox ever could.
For expanding the Stan Lopata article, which deserved a good expansion, and for the rest of your baseball related expansions I give you the writer's barnstar.Orsoni (talk) 09:54, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
The Sporting News (1886-) No longer free. Costs like $12/month or you can become a member of SABR for $45/year. I know, I'm an idiot to pay money to expand baseball articles, but The Sporting News has helped me make articles at least 4 times longer than they would've been had I not had access to them. I recommend this to any serious baseball article writer.
Baseball Digest used to offer most of their back-issues for free on Google Books, but one of their lawyers told them to remove it in September 2012. Absolutely no update has been given since as of June 5, 2013. At the very least they should offer their PDF database to SABR, but to dangle the archives out there only to take them away on the advice of one person was a dubious, ill-advised move. The only thing BD has to say is that they're 'negotiating with google', in other words, they want Google to pay them. Idiocy. They don't even have the right mind to offer their own pay service on their site or make it open to SABR like The Sporting News. A magazine I once read vividly as a child has become clouded with immense greed, making it all the more difficult to expand articles of players from 1942 to as far up as even the 1990s. TSN monetized their archive access, but at least they made it available and for FREE to legitimate baseball researchers. Baseball Digest doesn't give a damn about that. I hope I saved PDFs of players I was researching, else write-ups about catchers from the 1950s that had less than 30 home runs in their entire career will have much shorter articles. It irritates me to no end how disrespectful of a move Baseball Digest made. Whenever they get their head out of the sand or stop listening to something that hisses garbage words into their ear, please let me know.
Template article I tried to model my baseball article contributions after
My main goal on Wikipedia is expanding articles of Major League Baseball players from the 1950s and 60s, whether they be hall of famers or third string catchers. Most of the articles on my task list are from former players that were kind enough to autograph baseball cards I sent to them through the mail. I want to thank them for their continued dedication to the fans by giving them a definitive article on Wikipedia, an encyclopedia that I feel will be the top archive for information as the decades and centuries go by. The least I can do is give them a large article that chronologically details their achievements in professional baseball.
I do not have the ability to write what Wikipedia considers "Good Articles" but my goal is to expand as many target baseball player articles as possible to B-Class or C-Class so that these players will be more than just a footnote in history. I have not nominated any of my articles for Good Article class as I don't have the time nor skill to take an article to the next level at the present time, but any other seasoned article writer more experienced than I that wishes to do so at Wikipedia:Good article nominations and is willing to make the necessary changes to improve the nominated article is free to try. Otherwise, I really don't care whether or not an article gets a little green plus-mark. I'm here to write baseball articles, not break my back to accrue plus marks and tons of barnstars, especially the barnstars that are awarded to people that click the "undo" button a couple hundred times or spend seconds deleting what others took hours to create multiple times. It is far easier to destroy than it is to create.
Projects and articles with significant contributions
"And as long as some people like to pretend that our carrying out of policies against posting private emails on the wiki is an attempt 'to suppress discussion' then we will continue to allow drama mongers to control the discussion of things on the site." [1]