User talk:Gandalf

Mhhutchins 14:23, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Publication submissions
Hi. I have a few of your submissions on hold. In all four cases (two for Atlantis Rising, one for Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, and one for Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt), it looks to me like you're trying to create a publication entry for a single work contained in a magazine or book. Is that true? You can answer here by editing this section: Indent your response by adding a colon (":") to the beginning of the line -- one colon per level of indentation -- and "sign" your response by adding four tildes ( ~ ).

Assuming that is the case, what you have submitted will at least need to be reworked. It's also possible some of the submissions may be outside of the scope of what the ISFDB wants to track (see below), I can't quite tell.


 * The general comment about all of the submissions is that the ISFDB "publication" is for a physical (or electronic) entity, such as a book or magazine. A publication always contains one or more works, which we represent by "title".  We represent the relationship between publications and works as publication "contents".  For example, a retail paperback release of a novel might contain just the novel, while an anthology or magazine issue might contain many different pieces.  So if "Indians and Aliens" appeared in an issue of Atlantis Rising magazine, we would record the magazine issue at the publication and make one of its content entries be "Indians and Aliens".  More on magazines below.


 * Also see bullet #4 in ISFDB:Policy, which deals with the inclusion of short non-fiction works (essays, forewords, etc). If the work itself is not about speculative fiction and does not appear in a publication that otherwise qualifies for inclusion, we would not record it, no matter who wrote it.  I suspect this might apply to the foreword to the Dunn book, although you are in a better position to judge than I.

Magazines fall into one of two categories: "genre" or "general interest" (a.k.a. "non-genre"). The former is something like Analog, primarily dedicated to things speculative fiction. The latter is something like Atlantic Monthly, dedicated to something non-speculative or to broader literature. We record both types of publications. The major difference is that for genre magazines, we record the entire contents, while for general interest magazines, we record only the speculative fiction content. See Help:Entering non-genre magazines for instructions about the handling of the latter. (We use a similar speculative-fiction-content-only approach to anthologies.) It is ok to enter a genre magazine but to include only the portion of its contents that is known -- a complete set of contents is not required to get a magazine entry going.

Take a look at the above and see what you think. If you tell me more about what those submitted pieces are, I can make some suggestions. Also, you can ask for help anytime at ISFDB:Help_desk, which might get you a faster response than waiting for me and gaps in my holiday schedule. Thanks, and thank you for contributing. --MartyD 12:22, 25 December 2013 (UTC)