User talk:PortForlorn

Welcome!

Hello,, and welcome to the ISFDB Wiki! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~&#126;); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out the community portal, or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! Ahasuerus 01:13, 12 Oct 2006 (CDT)
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Mercedes Lackey et al
Sorry, I was reviewing the "Recent Changes" page and noticed that your Talk page was blank, so I added without thinking :)

As far as Lackey's biblio goes, I was about to add it to http://isfdb.tamu.edu/wiki/index.php/ISFDB:Authors_of_Recently_Published_Books_Cleanup as part of our regular "recently published books" cleanup, so any help would be welcome!

The software is reasonably stable at the moment, so if you promise not to try anything radical like mass-upload XML submissions without first checking the format :) we can make you a Moderator and you will be able to enter data into the database and then approve your own submissions. Deal? :) Ahasuerus 19:08, 15 Oct 2006 (CDT)


 * Sounds like a plan! I have made you a Wiki administrator and Al will make you an ISFDB moderator as soon as he can extricate himself from the black hole known as "work". Welcome to the club! :)


 * Here are some moderatorial guidelines that Al posted earlier this year when another moderator signed up:


 * The only real duty an editor has will be eventually to help moderate submissions by the general public. At present, only moderators are allowed to edit, as we bring more editing tools online, find bugs in the existing tools, and find the need for new tools. So the "official" obligations at present are:


 * Try entering data at your leisure. Most of us generally stumble into some area of focus: Grendelkhan is currently working on Heinlein, Ahasuerus is furiously *deleting* content, and I'm mostly testing new editing apps and webbots (which furiously adds content). We all fix errors as we come across them.
 * Document confusion you may have in the wiki, so that we can alter the tools or improve/create the online help.
 * Document ideas for improvements that will aid the editing process or make the bibliographies clearer.
 * Police the wiki for spam and delete mercilessly.
 * Create ideas on formalizing and documenting the bibliographic process, such that people can understand the relative maturity of a particular bibliography.
 * Other than that, there are no expectations, especially not on time. Any help you can provide will be appreciated.


 * Note that I typically zap spam within a few hours, so feel free to ignore spammers if pressed for time. Again, welcome! :) Ahasuerus 17:36, 17 Oct 2006 (CDT)

Moderator Status
The ISFDB moderator status comes from the wiki sysop bits, so now that Ahasuerus has promoted you, you should be able to perform edits. You will be asked to log in because the isfdb and the wiki are in different domains, so the server won't see your wiki cookies.

Happy editing. Alvonruff 05:08, 18 Oct 2006 (CDT)

Welcome
Howdy; just stopped by to say hello and welcome. Glad to have another moderator on board. I'm not very active on the Wiki or ISFDB right now, but hope to get more time on it when Al cranks up the verification code and we get into beta testing the moderation function. Meanwhile, good to have another recruit. Mike Christie 14:00, 18 Oct 2006 (CDT)

Deleting Publications
Well, I just tried my first edit (all of these will deal with Mercedes Lackey's biblio). Deleting an obviously duplicate pub entry (Publication:BKTG08642) for "The Lark & The Wren" is no sweat. And I even leave info in the Bibliographic Notes section about why I'm doing that. (Of course, if that pub is deleted what happens to it's Bib Notes?) Checking the moderator queue shows that I seem to have succeeded. So now I'm and experienced editor (sure you are ...). But I'll leave it in the queue and proceed.


 * There is usually no problem with deleting obvious duplicate publications of novels. However, Collections can be a little trickier depending on whether their contents is identical. If it's not, then it helps to pull up the two Publication records side by side, identify the differences and update the Publication record that will be kept with any data from the doomed record that will be shortly destroyed. Commonly missed items include introductions, forewords, minor essays, etc. But in this case everything looks clean, approve away! :) Ahasuerus 21:33, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)

Merging Titles
The second effort was to try to merge two titles. "Bedlam's Bard" is listed under the "Knight of Ghosts and Shadows" series and as a stand alone novel. OK says me, this should be another simple one. I list the titles and select the two; press a few buttons; and, magically the results get entered into the queue. Examining the queue, I see some strange notes about changing dates and something about novel vs omnibus and realize I may have made too quick a choice with those buttons. Let's reject this change and try again but be more careful. Noticing that the first instance is an omnibus and the second shows as a novel, I wander off to M.Lackey's web site which shows that she thinks that the omnibus is the correct choice. And so does Baen's web site. So it seems I should change the novel to an omnibus and add the correct contents before I merge the publications - but that's more than I wanted to tackle on my first night out.


 * Right, "Bedlam's Bard" contained two previously published novels, "Knight of Ghosts and Shadows" and "Summoned to Tourney", both by Lackey and Guon (see http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?BDLMSBRD1992), and was a Science Fiction Book Club omnibus. Baen reprinted this omnibus in paperback in 1998, so the two books are just two separate Publications of the same Title.


 * There are two ways to merge these two title records. The first one is to use the "Titles" link on the Summary Bibliography page (Long Works only, the same link on the Short Works page has problems), check the boxes next to the two titles in question and then hit the "Merge Selected Records" button. Note that this method doesn't work if the titles that you are trying to merge are on two separate pages of the "Title Search" page, which can easily happen when trying to merge, say, "Axe" and "The Axe" by a prolific author, when the second title record is displayed on the second or even third page of "Title Search".


 * The second way is to use Advanced Search and search for the title, in this case "Bedlam's Bard". This method is a little more time consuming, but also much more powerful since you can use various AND/OR/NOT combinations. Well, assuming they work :) Either way, once you hit the "Merge Selected Records" button, you will find yourself on the "Title Merge Results" page, which displays any conflicts/discrepancies between the two records that you are trying to merge. In this case, there are three conflicts: title_series (i.e. no series vs. "Knight of Ghosts and Shadows"), title_year (i.e. the year when the title was first published) and title_ttype (i.e. "novel" vs. "omnibus"). Select the displayed series, the first year of publication (1992) and "omnibus" and hit "Complete Merge".


 * At this point the software merges the two title records and repoints the Publication records that used to point to the dropped Title record to the kept Title record. You can now review and edit these Publication records as appropriate, in this case converting the 1998 Baen publication from "novel" to "omnibus" and adding the two novels listed above in the Contents section.


 * Note that when you are adding new contents, the software automatically creates new Titles for every content line added. So in this case the software will create two new Titles, one for "Knight of Ghosts and Shadows" and one for "Summoned to Tourney". These two new title records will then need to be merged with the pre-existing title records for the same novels. Yes, this is a bit of a pain and may be changed in the future, but at this point there is no workaround :( Ahasuerus 22:00, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)

Series numbering
OK, we'll leave that 'till later and try the next change: moving a stand alone novel ("Four and Twenty Blackbirds") to the series it belongs in ("Bardic Voices"). Sounds like another simple task. Edit the title and add the correct series info. Except that M.Lackey identifies this as the first book in that series and also list another title as the first book while the ISFDB shows no numbering - guess I'll pass on the number thingee for a while. Otherwise it seems to go OK - the moderator queue looks good. But, having second thoughts about my level of expertise, I 'll leave this in the queue also for a while.


 * The submission looks fine, ready for approval. Unfortunately, you have run into one of the more intractable problems with genre bibliographies, namely series (and, even worse, subseries) order. There is publication order, internal chronological order, intended publication order, "author recommended" order, etc. Prequels muddy the waters even more and then there are intersecting subseries (e.g., Andre Norton's Dipple stuff), so there can be any number of arguably defensible ways to arrange a series list. Ahasuerus 22:16, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)

Series naming
Next up is "merging" two series in the DB, "Bedlam's Bard" and "Knight of Ghosts and Shadows". It seens that M.Lackey thinks they are all the same series, "Bedlam Bard". Baen calls it "Urban Elves". M.Lackey (on her own website) says this series name is “Bedlam Bard” (I suppose this is so that it doesn’t conflict with the omnibus titled Bedlam’s Bard). I’d change the series title so it doesn’t conflict with the omnibus. Oops, if I change the series name for the first series, will that screw up something else?


 * You can change series names to anything you want, but keep in mind that if you change the name to the name of a pre-existing series, it may merge two series' data when you don't expect it. To move titles from one series to another, just pull up all titles in the first series and change their series' names to the name of the second series. There are a couple of bugs in series name display, typically having to do with apostrophes. Apostrophes are generally evil since there is more than one Unicode code for them and they always trip you when you least expect it. In extreme case, you may have to change series names to something without an apostrophe first, then move the titles that need to be moved to it and then rename the series. Ahasuerus 22:35, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)

Also, she think that "Bedlam Bard" is part of "Elves on the Road universe" along with the "Diana Tregarde" and "Serrated Edge" series. So I'd have to create a new parent series and then try to add those other ones - not on my first night, I won't!


 * Ah yes, the wonderful world of superseries! :-) Thankfully, the new ISFDB database scheme supports any depth of series nesting, so you can make it as convoluted as you want. One thing that is not supported is having the same title belong to more than one series. This can (and does) cause problems in certain cases, but there is not much we can do about it without a major software rewrite. Also, a series can have only one name, so if two or more names are equally popular (e.g. one name is preferred by the author, another one by the publisher who thinks that it will sell more books, and a third one is the one that is commonly used in SF encyclopedias), the only option that we have is to list them all in a slash delimited format, e.g. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?1455


 * All you need to do to create a superseries is to pull up one of the constituent series and select "Series Data" on the left. Then you can enter the name of your choice, in this case "Elves on the Road Universe", in the "Parent" field and submit/approve the change. Note that once you have created a superseries, you can't get rid of it even if you dissociate all of its constituent series from it. It's not a huge problem, but the superseries name will stick around and appear in all kinds of places where it doesn't belong. This is a known bug and will be hopefully addressed at some point. Also, there is currently no way to make constituent series appear in some semblance of intelligent order within their superseries :( Ahasuerus 22:35, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)

Prequels
Next on my list is the "Heralds of Valdemar" series. Seems that titles numbered 4 and 5 are actually prequels for numbers 1, 2, and 3 but where published later. Hmmm, how am I gonna fix that one?


 * See above. There is no single "correct" way to handle this, I am afraid. We have a special Wiki page to discuss this kind of Bibliographic Rules. Ahasuerus 22:35, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)

Duplicate series names
OK, let's try something else. According to M.Lackey, the stand alone novel "Firebird" is supposed to be the second novel of a series called "Fairy Tale" - but there are already two series whose names include the words "Fairy Tale" and it's an awfully common expression. I wonder if I should search the Wiki for guidance in naming series?


 * As long as there is no other series with that (exact) name, you should be OK. I suspect that there will be a collision with another series name at some point, but we will burn that bridge when we get to it :) Ahasuerus 23:00, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)

Variant Titles
Maybe I'll try another change. "The Wild Swan" is listed as a stand alone novel. This is listed by M. Lackey as her preferred title for "The River's Gift" although it was not published as such. This could be listed as a VT but since it was never published that way it doesn’t seem necessary.


 * Quite so. If there is a reason to think that this unpublished title is well known, e.g. the book may have been advertised under that title at some point prior to publication, then we can make a note of it in the "Note" field. Ghost titles are generally a (if not the) bane of bibliographers' existence :( Ahasuerus 23:00, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)

Also, this entry has no data other than the date of publication and may have derived from a forthcoming books list. It probably should be deleted entirely. But I think I should check with the powers that be first.


 * Unfortunately, we have many legitimate as well as some semi-legitimate and a bunch of illegitimate titles with no publication data associated with them. Just because there is no Publication record, it doesn't automatically mean that it's a bad title. More likely, it was found in an encyclopedia, an award list, library catalog, etc. Most of these are real, although their quality (especially the "year of first publication" field) tends to be lower. Others, unfortunately, are either completely non-existent, e.g. advertised and ISBN'd titles that were never published but linger on amazon.com etc, or badly garbled. There is no silver bullet, I am afraid, and every case is special. Typically, you will want to check Sources of Bibliographic Information and determine what the scoop is in this particular case. Ahasuerus 23:00, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)

I see on my list there are a couple of new prequels shown as stand alone novels to be added to various series but since I'm not sure what to do with prequels, I'll skip them for now also.


 * See above. Also, sometimes prequels form a separate subseries, in which case they can be segregated that way. Ahasuerus 23:00, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)

Anthology Series
And there are three titles that belong in an anthology series as part of the Valdemar parent series but one shows as a novel with no content ("Crossroads and Other Tales of Valdemar") while the other two ("Sword of Ice and Other Tales of Valdemar" and "Sun In Glory and Other Tales of Valdemar") are already listed as anthologies and I'd have to figure out how to create an anthology series, add it to a parent series


 * Anthology series are created the same way that regular series are created. You just pull up an anthology record and add the name of the series that it belongs to. If the series doesn't exist, the software will create it automatically. The same goes for associating anthology series with superseries -- see my response about regular superseries above. Note that there is no distinction between regular series, anthology series and non-fiction series made internally. All title records of all types belonging to the same series point to the same series record. The only difference is in the way they are displayed, which is a function of the Python script that Al maintains. Ahasuerus 23:00, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)

change a novel to an anthology


 * There are two ways to do this. The first one is to go to Title Editor and Publication Editor separately and change the type from "novel" to "anthology" in each record. The other way is to pull up the Publication Editor and change the Pub Type and the Entry Type field at the same time. This is a common task since Dissembler, the webbot that populates the ISFDB, will default the type field in new Publication and Title records to "novel" if it is not sure what kind of book it is dealing with. Ahasuerus 23:00, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)

and still get some sleep tonight.


 * Sleep is strictly optional! ;-) Ahasuerus 23:00, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)

Perhaps it is time to quit tonight and seek some advice tomorrow. PortForlorn 01:42, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)


 * Boy, you sure picked a convoluted case for your first foray! :) I'll try to answer the questions later today when I am done chasing some pesky humans. Ahasuerus 09:28, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)

confounded novice editor who can't read
I tried to fix a title whose author was misspelled. Obviously when David Weber has written "The War God's Own" and there is another author "Weber" who has also written the same title, the second author is erroneous. After reviewing the wiki on editing authors, I somehow conclude that this isn't an author merge because we dondn't want "Weber" hanging around as a pseudonym for David Weber. Easy says I, edit the author data for the second title and spell the name correctly. The moderator queue looks OK, so approve it. Oops, this obviously must have been a instance where author merge is required. I now find two David Weber entries in the Name search for "Weber" both linked to the same biblio. And the second publication of "The War God's Own" is missing from the biblio even though it appears in a title search.

So to fix my mistake, I think I should use title search to find the second record; edit the title record to change the name back to "Weber"; then use author merge to combine the "Weber" and "David Weber". Is this correct? PortForlorn 20:34, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)


 * Hold on, hold on, not so fast! :) There is more to this known problem than meets the eye, which I will explain in a second. For now, I have merged the two author records and you can now see the two versions of the "The War God's Own" in David Weber's Long Works display. Ahasuerus 21:17, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)


 * Here is the problem from the Open Editing Bugs list:
 * Sometimes there are two+ Author records for the same author. Typically, one+ of them will be misspelled. If you try to change the spelling of the Author's name to the correct spelling using "Author Data", the system will let you do it, but then you will end up with two Author records with the exact same name. This will cause various problems since you will only be able to find the data associated with the first record that the system finds. We may want to add a check to make sure that we are not creating duplicate Author names. Ahasuerus 19:55, 13 Sep 2006 (CDT)


 * Once there are two author records in the database with the (exact) same name, the "ISFDB Name search" will put the URL of the first record that it finds in the displayed links to both records, so the second record becomes effectively inaccessible. The (relatively easy) way to fix this is by going into Advanced Search and searching on the Author's full name. Both records will come up, this time with correct URLs, at which point you can merge them. Hopefully, Al will zap this bug when he has more time to work on the code. Ahasuerus 21:27, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)


 * Thanks for the explanation - but I surely wasn't about to try "fixing" anything without advice. What would have happened if I'd found the second copy of that title with title search and edited the author name back to the misseplled version? PortForlorn 21:35, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)


 * That would depend on how badly the software is broken :) which only Al knows (or at least suspects) at this time. You are absolutely right, once something is clearly out of whack, it is best to leave it alone and have Al take a look at it. Unless it's a known problem with a known workaround, in which case another editor (in this case me) may be familiar with it. Safety first! :) Ahasuerus 22:09, 19 Oct 2006 (CDT)

Changes to user rights
Just to let you know that we have been talking about the best way to handle inactive moderators over on ISFDB talk:Policy. The executive summary of the discussion is that a moderator who hasn't been active for a over a year will have a hard time keeping up with all the policy and software changes that we have been going through.

Since you haven't been active in a year and a half when you were helping with testing the software, I have turned your "moderator" flag off, so when you come back, you won't be able to approve submissions. No need to panic, though :) as we have a list of Moderator Qualifications and you can reclaim the ability to approve submissions once you go through the process. Hope to see you again when you have time for the ISFDB and thanks again for the help with testing during the alpha phase! Ahasuerus 05:07, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm baaack :-)
Considering the length of time I've been absent, Ahasuerus's comments about inactive moderators is certainly on the mark. After an unscheduled visit to my cardiologist in Jan '07, I found a whole new set priorities and deliberately neglected the ISFDB. I see that much has changed and grown since I last visited this plane. There seems much wisdom in spending time learning the system all over again so I'll be quite content to submit new and/or verification data (as I reconcile my library with this one) while an experienced moderator reviews the info.

I am also starting to build (actually I'm starting to fiddle with a design of) a cataloging tool to track my holdings against the ISFDB's. Something that would remind me what I own while also capitalizing on all the good work here. I'd love to carry that subset around on my iPhone. If and when it progresses past the design and talking stage, I'll let folks know more. PortForlorn 03:43, 31 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Welcome back! and submit away! :-)Kraang 04:20, 31 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Indeed, welcome back! I had no idea about the unscheduled visit to the cardiologist -- glad everything worked out! Ahasuerus 04:43, 31 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, thanks indeed for the welcome! PortForlorn


 * Welcome back from me too. A lot of us track our holdings by making sure we've verified everything we own - that's why there's room for five Primary Verifications now. BLongley 10:54, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

The Last Continent
You verified this pub, and I think we have the same edition. Only, mine states it's the first HarperPrism international edition: March 1999. Your notes only mention it's the First printing as indicated by the numberline. Are they really the same, or is yours the February 2000 edition, the first US mass market edition? I added my note & verification to the March 1999 edition. Thanks, --Willem H. 19:14, 12 June 2010 (UTC)
 * My copy reads exactly as yours. It says nothing about the first US mass market edition, only that it is the first HarperPrism international edition: March 1999 so I must suppose they are the same edition.  Sorry about the omission of that remark.  I should be more explicit.  PortForlorn 04:14, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Info from book vs. info from other sources
Hi. This is not a big deal, just something for you to be aware of. I handled your submission of the additional note to, and I adjusted it a little. If a book itself states the information, there's no longer a need to record the fact that secondary sources state the same thing. Many ISFDB records are constructed entirely based on information from secondary sources. If you have a book in hand and are updating an entry whose notes indicate information came from secondary sources, you can clean up the notes, deleting anything citing secondary sources where the book provides the same information. So I removed the Locus1 part of the note, leaving your statement that the copyright page says March 1993. Thanks. --MartyD 01:01, 26 August 2013 (UTC)


 * I posted some answers to your follow-up questions here. I didn't want you to miss them.  --MartyD 10:57, 26 August 2013 (UTC)