User talk:CWesling

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 insert your name and the date. If you need help, check out the community portal, or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! Ahasuerus 22:53, 23 Apr 2007 (CDT)
 * Help pages
 * What the ISFDB Wiki is for
 * ISFDB FAQ
 * Help:Screen:EditPub - Warning and a note on how to update a publication's contents

ISFDB vs. Wikipedia and Modesitt
A few things to keep in mind:

1. The big difference between the ISFDB and Wikipedia is that the latter is mostly a collection of text pages that are interlinked in various interesting ways. You can put anything you want on Wikipedia, be it text, dates, tables or pictures, which is great for certain types of data, e.g. biographies or encyclopedic articles.

The ISFDB, on the other hand, is a software application wrapped around a database. It takes the data that you enter using well defined forms (screens), validates it using rather strict rules (dates have to be in the YYYY-MM-DD format, etc) and creates dozens of database tables and relationships behind the scenes. It then uses this data to dynamically generate the pages that you see when you click on various links. This works well for structured data like bibliographies: authors are responsible for multiple Titles (i.e. novels, stories, collections, etc), Titles have multiple Publications (i.e. editions, anthology and magazine appearances, etc), and they all point to each other in various complex ways that we model within the database. For anything that involves unstructured text, e.g. this discussion, we use the ISFDB Wiki, which runs an older version of the same software that Wikipedia uses (which means that some of the fancier features are not available here).

2. As a corollary of the above, you can't edit a Summary Bibliography page directly. Instead, you have to edit the data elements that contribute to it separately. The Author level data that is displayes at the top of the Summary page can be edited by selecting the "Author Data" option in the "navigation bar" on the left. The Titles that are displayed on the Summary page can be merged using the "Titles" option in the same area. If you want to edit individual Titles, you can select them, e.g. Bibliography: The Parafaith War, and then edit them via the "Edit Title Data" option on the left. If you want to edit edition-specific data, e.g. the number of pages or the ISBN, you can select that edition (e.g. the first edition of this novel) and use the "Edit This Pub" option on the left. If you want to edit Series data, you have to select that Series and then click on the "Series Data" link.

3. As far as Modesitt goes, you happened to run into a known bug that was documented on the Open Series Bugs page a while ago -- see the second paragraph under Bug 30006. We are still in beta, after all :) The problem couldn't be fixed via regular software means because of some obsure data issues behind the scenes, but, as you pointed out, it was potentially rather confusing, so I applied a bandaid by creating a dummy superseries, Ecolitan Universe, and assigning Ecolitan Envoy to it. The superseries has no other data, but at least it won't confuse our users into thinking that Ecolitan Envoy is related to some other, completely unrelated, Modesitt universe.

Come to think of it, "ISFDB vs. Wikipedia" is an interesting topic, perhaps we should convert this explanation into a static Help page. Thanks for bringing it up! I'll be happy to answer any other questions that you may have, but if you want a faster response to your questions, you probably want to post them over on the Help Desk, where we have something approaching 24x7 coverage :) Ahasuerus 01:31, 24 Apr 2007 (CDT)


 * You are entirely welcome! As far as r.a.sf.w goes, well, it was, in a way, the cradle of the ISFDB. It all began back in 1995 when Al von Ruff and I, two frequent r.a.sf.w posters, exchanged e-mails about various ways of better organizing genre-specific biblio data that was available on the net :) Ahasuerus 22:24, 24 Apr 2007 (CDT)