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Variant Titles Again

Ok, this isn't to do with my Kuttner cock-up, but a more general moan on Collections. For editors, variants are a multi-step nuisance, and I'm now afraid to try some things that need doing. For instance: Robert Sheckley's "Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?", is an obvious variant of "The Same to You Doubled". Same with Varley's "The Persistence of Vision" and "In the Hall of the Martian Kings". "The Barbie Murders and Other Stories" is "Picnic on Nearside" but the publication is under the wrong title. There are (probably) inaccurate Novel versions of some collections. Cloning encourages people to leave misinformation in (e.g. how the author is credited in the actual publication, variant spellings are easier to leave uncorrected, etc). Before I mess anything more up - any suggestions on how to make this a more pleasurable experience? BLongley 15:06, 2 Feb 2007 (CST)

Moving a pub out from under a title it's tied to is the "unmerge" option that you have seen mentioned (and mourned) elsewhere on this page. We're all going to be glad when it comes back. Personally, I don't bother to do these, unless it's within the scope of something I'm working on in detail, such as Le Guin or Infinity Science Fiction. I keep notes on my user page of unmerges I need to do when the capability returns. The only way to do them without the tool is to reenter them as new publications, and then delete the old publications. For collections this means reentering and remerging each content item. Of course, once you have one successfully entered, the others can be cloned; but cloning assumes that the new pub is going to stay under the old title. That suggests a feature request, for "Clone this Pub to a New Title", if you think that's worth submitting. Mike Christie (talk) 22:32, 2 Feb 2007 (CST)
I added a note to "Feature:90097 Unmerge Facility" about a way to re-enable unmerge that should be safe.
Also, while a particular variant title relationship may be "obvious" it would be best if these could get documented in the title notes along with the source for your information. For example, with The Same to You Doubled is there a statement on the copyright page about Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? If so, then please add a note to the appropriate publication and/or title records that explain exactly where this statement was found and then quote the statement itself. Marc Kupper (talk) 02:57, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)
It's actually on the title page of The Same to You Doubled. I've added a note. BLongley 13:34, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)
I've checked Varley's "The Persistence of Vision" and "In the Hall of the Martian Kings" and there's no difference in content. However, neither refers to the other and both were originally published in 1978 so what's the guideline on choosing which is the variant? BLongley 10:23, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)
This area is somewhat subjective, but my general rule is that in the absence of any other reason to pick one title as canonical, the earlier title gets precedence. Per Nicholls that would be "The Persistence of Vision". Mike Christie (talk) 11:49, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)
One thing I HAVE done when there's only minor edits on a cloned collection is to mark the page-number as "NA" and add the corrected Author or Title as new under the correct page number. It's a great help to me when I revisit it to delete the incorrect attribution/title, but it would be far simpler to be able to edit the fields. What is/was the reason behind the edit rules? BLongley 15:06, 2 Feb 2007 (CST)
The problem it was intended to solve was twofold: duplicate data entry of content (where an existing version of the collection existed), and the requirement to merge each item after entry. The clone tool solves both of those problems perfectly: if you have an identical version of a collection already in the ISFDB (which is the most common case, though nowhere near universal), then cloning the pub and entering some page numbers and fixing the pub header can get you a twenty-story collection entered in under a minute, with no need to merge. However, having solved that problem, it revealed further requirements as you outline. So the answer really is that the requirements are still evolving as we understand our own process better. It is still in beta, after all. Mike Christie (talk) 22:32, 2 Feb 2007 (CST)
> What is/was the reason behind the edit rules?
A publication consists of a pub record and one or more pub_content records. The pub record contains the data you see in the upper part of the publication-edit page (from Title to Note) and each pub_content record contains a page-number field and a link to a title that you see in the contents. When you clone a publication, a copy of its pub and pub_content records is made and given to you to edit. You can safely make changes to the main publication data (Title to Note fields) as you are working with your own copy. You can also safely make changes to the page numbers as you are working with your own copy. The thing that is not safe to change is the title data that’s pointed to by the pub_content records.
Let’s say you have a publication that contains three stories. Story1, Story2, and Story3. You clone this and let’s assume the edit restrictions were not there and you change the title of Story2 to “The Story2.” You would discover that you would have also changed the story title in the original publication’s content and for that matter, in all publications that include that title in their contents. Basically, when you clone a publication the title records are already merged for you.
This is one of the biggest “gotchas” in ISFDB. For example, let’s say you see a collection that has Story1, Story2, and Story3. You look and realize that Story3 is entirely wrong and so you change its title and author. What someone may not realize is that now all of the collections/anthologies that used to list Story3 now instead list the new title/author you used.
Thus the rule is – if you need to change the title or author for something in the Contents section you first click on the title and see if it’s being used by any other publications. If not, then it’s safe to just edit the title. If there are any other publications listed you instead do an [Add Title] which gives you a dedicated (but blank) title record that you can fill in and would also do a remove-title to disconnect the original title you wanted to change from your publication. That original title will still be referenced by it’s other publications.
Note that a title’s Date, Type (novel, shortfiction, etc.) and Length fields are also shared between publications and when you change them the change will be visible in all publications that reference that title. Usually this is a non-issue as these fields are not as “mission critical” as the title and author fields.
There has been talk of allowing editors to make changes to the title/author fields (both in cloning and edit-pub). ISFDB would silently make a copy of the title record and apply your changes to that. Thus your change would do an automatic “unmerge” of that title. If you need to make a global change to the title that would be visible to all publications that reference it you’d just click on the title and do edit-title. Marc Kupper (talk) 02:32, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)

Collections problem

Another mystery: I want to add another publication to the already existing one for John Dickson Carr's The Burning Court. It was originally a 1937 hc novel. Right now in the DB there's a 1954 Bantam pb shown as the only entry. Putting in the 1937 hc is no problem. But my own personal copy of the book is in a 1959 hc collection called Three Detective Novels. I don't see how I can list this under the entry for The Burning Court -- right now, it looks as if the only info I can enter is for an entirely different title, ie, Three Detective Novels, which in turn will create a new book entry, not a new publication entry for an existing book. Hayford Peirce 17:49, 2 Feb 2007 (CST)

Add your book as a new-collection called "Three Detective Novels." In the contents you would add "The Burning Court" as one of the stories and once approved you merge "The Burning Court" with the record that's already in ISFDB. At that point the linkage from "The Burning Court" to your collection will work perfectly. Does the book bill itself as a "collection" or "omnibus?" I suspect either term would apply. I have a simliar issue coming up in that I have a book that's an omnibus of two previously published collections and includes 16 new stories. I have not decided yet if I want 18 items in the contents (the two original collections plus 16 new stories) or if I will list all of the short stories directly, or maybe even both, list all of the short stories with page numbers but also include the two collections without page numbers to show that the titles are related. The book clearly bills itself as containing the published collections. Marc Kupper (talk) 19:34, 2 Feb 2007 (CST)
Thanks for the above tips -- it appears to have worked perfectly. As to whether it's a "collection" or an "omnibus" I just don't know. I threw away the dustjacket 48 years ago, like a dope, and I don't know if there was any description there or not anyway. There's nothing inside the book. My own feeling is that if you republish 3 out of maybe 50 novels from a single author that is a "collection" of a small part of his work. I have a couple of Saint "Omnibus"s that, at the time they came out, tried to be more representative of his works, I would say, a mixture of novels, novellas, shorts. But, absent the publisher sticking one word or another on the book, I would say it's probably just a coin flip between the two words in most cases. Hayford Peirce 11:31, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)

Whose signature is this?

This is a bit of an off-the-wall request but I have a copy of of Klein's The Overlords of War (translated by John Brunner) that credits Karel Thole for the cover art but I think that's wrong as Thole did the first DAW printing and I have a 3rd printing with a different cover. TIA

theoverlordsofwar.jpg

Marc Kupper (talk) 19:42, 2 Feb 2007 (CST)

I pulled out the only Karel Thole cover I know I have, but it doesn't have this signature (or any other). Sorry, I don't recognize it. Mike Christie (talk) 08:18, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)
I wonder if perhaps it is Karel Thole as it does seem to have the letters T-h-o-l-e embedded within it. I know of one Thole cover that I have but like yours could not find a signature. Marc Kupper (talk) 03:46, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)

Subtitle rules

The help text said subtitles were optional, but I think various discussions have concluded that this is a bad idea. I've updated Template:TitleFields:Title and Template:PublicationFields:Title to assert that the subtitle should always be included; please revert those changes or edit them if there is more tweaking needed. Mike Christie (talk) 13:05, 27 Jan 2007 (CST)

I thought subtitles should not be included for titles and should be included for publications. I guess at this point this means that all publications should be matching their title record and we will be adding variant titles for every publisher permutation of the title? Marc Kupper 20:24, 27 Jan 2007 (CST)
I may have missed a recent discussion of this are, but how (and why) could we ensure that "that all publications should be matching their title record"? This is clearly impossible with omnibuses, anthologies and collections, so is the proposed rule only applicable to novels published as standalone novels? I can see that it could be a useful software-performed check that would display a warning when the two titles diverge, but why make it a hard rule? Ahasuerus 22:35, 27 Jan 2007 (CST)
Why is it impossible with omnibuses, anthologies and collections? They have titles, for example, The Faded Sun is the title of an omnibus and it's publications would be called The Faded Sun. Actually, if you look you will see both The Faded Sun and The Faded Sun Trilogy because the book has "Trilogy" on the cover but not the title page. Note that I'm writing about I'll call the "primary titles" which are the titles of publications and not the "content titles" where, yes, those title records will rarely match the names of their publications. Not impossible but rarely. :-)
I was wondering why it now seems to be a "hard rule" that subtitles are now to be part of the title record and also that minor differences in a title, such as adding a comma, also result us needing to add title record and variant titles (see Template:TitleFields:Title Novels). I'm getting concerned that the author bibliographies will have a bunch of variant titles simply because of minor variations in the titles from publisher to publisher (or as stories get exported across pond and people either add or remove the leading "The.") The old rule was we came up with a "canonical title" and did not pay all that much attention to minor variations in publication titles. In fact, the first line of both the title-title and pub-title templates support this. Marc Kupper 23:53, 27 Jan 2007 (CST)
Well, maybe I'm misremembering the discussion. I'm not asserting that the way it's currently worded is the way it has to be; I want to capture a consensus. But I do think what I put in is reasonable. Addressing specific points:
  • "impossible with omnibuses, anthologies and collections"; like Marc, I'm not clear why that would be. Can you explain?
Sorry, folks, that was confusing :( I was referring to the impossibility of making Novel titles match Omnibus titles or making individual stories match the title of the Anthologies/Collections that they are published in. It is certainly possible to make Anthology Title_titles match Publication_titles etc. I'll comment further once I have some time to digest the rest of the thread. Ahasuerus 09:18, 29 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • Marc, you comment that "the first line of both the title-title and pub-title templates support" the argument that minor variations in pub titles are unimportant; do you mean this sentence: "The title should appear exactly as published, even though this may be different from the canonical title"? If so, what I meant that to say was "If your title is different from the canonical one, don't change it to match -- different titles are recorded as different" which is in line with my changes to the help text.
  • trivial differences in titles and forms of author names -- should they always require a separate title record? I think they should. One good reason is that it makes the rule absolutely unambiguous. Another is it encourages title-titles to match pub-titles, which I think is likely to be a plus for unambiguous identification of the primary title record for a pub. The last reason, and to me the main one, is that it accurately represents the data. I don't think the variants are harmful; and who knows, maybe some day a bibliographic researcher will want to look at US vs. UK title habits. Finally, I gave one example in the last discussion of a seemingly trivial name change that was quite significant: Le Guin published "Nine Lives" (I think it was) in Playboy as by "U. K. Le Guin" instead of her usual by-line of "Ursula K. Le Guin". This was at the editor's request, and she later figured out that it was to hide her gender. I think we ought to capture data, and let our users worry about interpretation.
Having said that, I acknowledge that the data on what pub used what title doesn't disappear, so long as we keep the pub records strictly accurate. So there is no loss of completeness; just a different approach to what's represented.
Another thought: I now think I recollect that we agreed that subtitles were to be used in full on pub records; but perhaps we did not agree for titles? Maybe that's the source of the disconnect here -- I was assuming that it was sufficiently valuable to keep the titles matching that it made no sense to introduce the change for pub records and not title records. I know that the fact that we have two fields for title, one on title and one on pub, means we can have a difference.
So maybe it comes down to: "What does the title record represent?" Some possible answers:
  1. It represents the text, under any publication. Definitely not true, or we wouldn't use variant titles at all.
  2. It represents the text, under exactly one title and author combination. That's the way the help files now read, since my recent edit.
  3. It represents the text, under a set of titles that can be grouped as being "essentially the same" by human decision, where those titles are all by a single form of the given author(s) name(s). I think this is the interpretation if we drop subtitles from title records, but not from pubs.
But there are also title records put in as placeholders; for example, a title for a canonical name where the author never published that work under their canonical name. For example, I don't believe Moorcock ever published "Printer's Devil" under his own name, only as "Bill Barclay", but we will have to have a title record for "Moorcock/Printer's Devil" for that to show up correctly in his biblio. So the title field is a way to tie data together; interpretation is the job of display.
It occurred to me at one point that if the title and pub records really did always match, you wouldn't need both fields; just pick up the pub-title from the parent title record. That won't work for translations (under the current approach, anyway), or for magazines. Even if it did, that normalization brings risks with it; editing a pub title would then edit the titles of multiple other pubs. So the separation of the fields in the implemented database doesn't have to imply they have different functions.
That's enough for one post; I hope this is coherent -- I only had a couple of hours of sleep. (Got up at 01:30 to watch the Australian Open final.) Mike Christie (talk) 07:26, 28 Jan 2007 (CST)

One more specific scenario I thought of. If we have subtitles on pubs but not on title records, consider Le Guin's "Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea". There's an omnibus that contains it under the shortened title, "Tehanu". I don't have the pub to check if it's really listed this way in the omnibus, but let's assume it's actually "Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea" on the interior title page in that omnibus. (If it isn't, this same scenario could occur with other titles, so bear with me). That title is the same title record we use to record other pubs of Tehanu, so we either have a vt title record in this case, using the long form, or we use the shortened form of the title, thus losing the information that this pub does use the long form of the title. I think this is a good argument for using subtitles in both places. Mike Christie (talk) 09:09, 28 Jan 2007 (CST)

Author Bios

Bringing the discussion here as a central place; see Talk:ISFDB FAQ for Kathryn Cramer's original post on this topic.

Al posed some questions over there:

"We should discuss how the ISFDB should link to the author bio's (new link like the current wikipedia link? Replacement of the wikipedia link? Automated link generation as with the current author bibliographic discussion pages?), as well as what changes should be made to the Main Page such that it appears more... encyclopedic, and less as merely a wiki to support the bibliographic efforts."

Some suggestions and more questions:

  • A new link for the bio; "Author Bio" instead of "Bibliographic Comments". We need the biblio page for organizing information about given authors.
  • Automatic link generation is good -- no reason it can't be linked from the author display. Doesn't need a field in the table; it's going to be a standard name.
  • The main page is easy to change; just wait till you've made the relevant changes elsewhere and then it will be easier to see what changes to do there.
  • The FAQ will have to change, along with Help:Contents/Purpose.
  • What do we do about verifiability, sources, and conflicts? One of the benefits of having people like Kathryn contributing information about authors they've known is that they know stuff that is unverifiable. I'm not concerned about what Kathryn posts, but what if someone else posts negative information about someone -- do we require some kind of verification for that? I seem to recall this happened some time last year, and would presumably recur if we open up to bios. I don't quite know what the right answer is here. Maybe we should just open for business, and hope that interested editors will help manage the articles. Is there any liability for TAMU on libel, if incorrect information is posted, Al? Mike Christie (talk) 16:28, 27 Jan 2007 (CST)
I am sure we can handle technical questions, but I suspect that first we want to make sure we fully understand what we are trying to accomplish and why the current solution is inadequate. It sounds like there is a number of different, although perhaps overlapping, concerns with farming biographical data out to Wikipedia. Let me see if I understand them correctly.
First, we have Kathryn Cramer's original post re: finding a home for original articles, personal accounts, anecdotes, etc -- which Wikipedia can not and will not take -- in the ISFDB. As Mike pointed out in his response, many of us "would like to have a place to read that material". However, there are already Web sites that cover this ground, e.g. http://www.fanac.org/ . We may want to investigate what kind of information they have, what their plans and resources are, etc and then either determine whether we want to do more than they are already doing or whether we want to partner with them.
If we do decide to provide an ISFBD (or perhaps an ISFDB-affiliated) place for original articles, then we will next need to consider whether a Wiki is the best way to make them available. Wikis are great when many people are collaborating on the same project and are constantly interacting with each other and supplementing each other's information. 5 different users may edit the DAW list or the Le Guin Project page in any given month, and there will likely be few problems with that.
On the other hand, if somebody like Teresa Nielsen Hayden were to provide us with a memoir of Roger Elwood, would we really want to make the resulting article editable by any ISFDB user? Or would we want to make it only editable by the original author and the ISFDB administrators so that any other original articles (by other hands) about Elwood would be separate documents/pages, all of them linked from a master "Biography:Roger Elwood" page? I think we would want to go with the latter approach, which should help minimize revert wars and contributor frustration.
Regardless of which approach we choose, publishing original articles/anecdoted would necessitate another departure from Wikipedia standards, namely contributor anonymity. Anonymous contributors work fine as long as the data that they supply is independently verifiable, e.g. the fact that the third edition of book X has N pages. It doesn't work nearly as well for original articles for obvious reasons. (Have I ever mentioned that I once saw science fiction writers N and P sacrifice a small animal to Cthulhu?) And once we do away with anonymity, we will also need to have a way to confirm contributor identity, which is to say a way to prove that User:Hayford_Peirce is the same person as Hayford Peirce the science fiction/mystery writer. I think this would be a fairly strong argument in favor of moving the Bio project to its own subspace with its own user registration scheme. It may still leave the ISFDB open to lawsuits from various corners, from vanity publishers to Scientologists, though. More research would be presumably called for.
Next we have the two possible issues that Marc raised: data duplication vis a vis Wikipedia and diluting genre boundaries. We may be able to find a reasonable compromise in this area, though. For example, Wikipedia's article on Robert Conquest concentrates on his government career and his subsequent work as a historian. A similar ISFDB article, on the other hand, would concentrate on his sf novels/poems and his work as an SF editor in the 1960s. We could cover his views of the New Wave (see Reginald-2) and other SFnal areas that may not be considered worth covering according to Wikipedia standards, but would be of interest to genre readers, fans, and historians.
Which brings us to Al's comment about Wikipedia's standards for inclusion being too restrictive for our purposes. This is certainly a good point and the primary reason why there are detailed Wikis outside of Wikipedia for everything from World of Warcraft to Star Wars.
Finally, Al's other comments about adding "critical evaluations of a work's impact on the field" to the proposed Bio project and covering non-biographical tpics like Terraforming open a whole different can of worms and I'll need to think more about them before I can comment in a meaningful way. One thing that immediately comes to mind, though, is that it would be likely very difficult to support "critical evaluations" in a Wiki. No critic worth his salt will agree with any other critic 100% of the time, so we would probably have to treat "critical evaluations" as I suggested we treat "original articles" above. Ahasuerus 01:18, 28 Jan 2007 (CST)
Some good points in that. I think issues about standards of inclusion and genre boundaries can be addressed via policy. I think the issue of whether a Wiki is the right technical mechanism is also a good one, but is secondary to the question of contributor anonymity, which had occurred to me as an issue too. I hadn't thought through the implications as thoroughly as you have done; I think now that this is the key point. If Kathryn Cramer contributes an article, the main thing to verify is that the author is Kathryn Cramer, not that the article can be verified from independent sources, because the value of the information is derived from whatever authority the writer has on the topic. That in turn implies that the appropriate editing is not Wikipedia-like open editing, but the editorship of a single central editor (or perhaps a small group) -- the editing work would more closely resemble what is done with text in a publishing house than what happens in an open collaborative project.
Open collaboration could still work for information verifiable from third party sources, and our standard for notability would be more inclusive than Wikipedia's. But that's not what Kathryn is asking for, it seems to me.
I'd like to hear from Kathryn, or others who might supply text for bios, how they feel the editing/verification issues mentioned above should be handled. Mike Christie (talk) 07:38, 28 Jan 2007 (CST)

One last remark on this topic: while I don't have a problem with putting biographic material here, we should not bring existing Wikipedia articles here. The Wikipedia material is licensed by the GNU Free Documentation License, while the ISFDB content is licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution License. These licenses are not compatible, and the ISFDB will not move to the GFDL. The GFDL is more restrictive than the Creative Commons license, in that the GFDL does not allow Wikipedia material to be brought into the ISFDB without changing the ISFDB license to the GFDL, while the Creative Commons license allows Wikipedia to use our material without changing their license. The original authors of Wikipedia articles are naturally allowed to bring their material here, as they have licensed the material to Wikipedia, and still retain copyright.

Yeah, but how much material of any Wikipedia article actually *belongs* to any one contributor? For instance, I did all of the original work on fairly long articles about Bill Tilden and Pancho Gonzales. Over the years many edits and changes have been made by various editors, and some new material has been added by others. But let's say that at least 80% of the articles as they exist today is *my* material in its original form. Do I actually have copyright on that? Suppose Mike Christie goes into it and adds a single comma? Then what? Does he have copyright to the comma? A better example might be the John W. Campbell, Jr. article. Both Mike and I have contributed to that and so have a bunch of other people.... This looks like a real can of worms to me. And, of course, as someone notes above, how do you even know that I, Hayford Peirce, am the s.f.-writing Hayford Peirce? I might be an escaped character from a John Barth story.... Hayford Peirce 12:10, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)
You're right, but practically speaking I don't think it'll be a problem. If I wanted to lift the Campbell stuff, I'd just find a diff that showed a version that was essentially all yours and my text, and use that. I don't think Wikipedia is going to get sniffy about that. I think Al was more saying "Don't go and grab all the bios from WP regardless of authorship". For the Campbell case I think we wrote pretty much the whole thing, so it would probably be OK, but for most others we shouldn't take stuff we didn't write. As for you not being Hayford Peirce . . . if we never rely on your identity as an authority for our data, does it matter? If we do need to rely on it, we need some verification, of course. That's one of the points raised above. Mike Christie (talk) 12:25, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)
Ah. This whole Wikipedia thing is very confusing in some ways.... But, oh well, as you say, almost all of this is entirely moot, as is the necessity of verifying my identity. How would that be done, by the way? Is there a PayPal equivalent of verifying identities? Hayford Peirce 13:07, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)
I don't think there's a simple, foolproof solution. Practically speaking, the easiest thing would be if a writer has a website that is clearly maintained by them, we could accept a correspondence with that website (e.g via email, or a note posted on the website) as evidence of identity of an ISFDB editor. Other than that, I don't quite know what we'd do. If people start editing the bios, no doubt the question will come up. Mike Christie (talk) 13:33, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)

I think the key is that the SF field has its own sources of infield expertise and regardless of the process arrived at, I think anyone who is going to edit a bio at ISFDB has more basic common sense about what is and is not important in th SF field than the random officious wikipedia editor.

I am easy about a number of the specifics, but the ISFDB is just a much more sensible forum for bios. One doesn't really want or need for an author bio associated with a bibliographic database to be The Unauthorized Biography (ala the Harlan Ellison Wikipedia bio). What I'm looking for is not perfection, just a larger helping of common sense. --Kathryn Cramer 17:51, 9 Feb 2007 (CST)

If there exist copies of what bios were in the ISFDB before bios were moved to Wikipedia, then that could be used. The current problem I have there is that I did some work on editor bios, which brought the attention of some of WIkipedia's more authoritarian editors who note that editorial bios (which probably came from the ISFDB or a similar source) are "inadequately sourced". Now, material on authors is much more readily available in general than material on editors. While our house technically does contain most of the print materials to do that, we don't, for example, have our issues of Locus all together and in order. The editor bios may get radically cut or dropped from Wikipedia now that they have attracted the attention of the "deletionist" types.

Kathryn

Now we have the bio links in place from the ISFDB, I think bio material will eventually come back. Up to Al if he wants to retrieve old bio information and use that. At the moment, though, I think we have a group of editors who are more bibliographers than biographers, so it may be a while till we see activity in that area. Mike Christie (talk) 14:32, 23 Feb 2007 (CST)
Last I checked, the original author bios were still in the database, just dormant. It should be easy to export them to the Wiki if that's what we want to do.
As far as Mike's comment that "we have a group of editors who are more bibliographers than biographers" goes, well, it depends. At one point I wrote quite a few biographies of various European Social Democrats and Communists for Wikipedia, from relatively short pieces about obscure folks like Vladimir Posse to longer articles about major figures like Arvo Tuominen to a 100Kb biography of Leon Trotsky. I also updated numerous SF articles on Wikipedia (Simak, Laumer, etc).
However, the ISFDB has a long history of concentrating on bibliographies and that's what I have been working on here for years, on and off. One of these days, once the biblios are more or less stable and self-sustained, I may concentrate on biographies, but I suspect it will be a while. On the other hand, we see new editors join all the time and who knows what their priorities may be? Ahasuerus 18:44, 23 Feb 2007 (CST)

Title Unmerge Returns From the Dead

A redesigned title unmerge tool is now online. This time you select which publications you want to unmerge from the merged title. Normally the name of the new title will be the same as the publication that was split off; if the title in question is a work of shortfiction, the name of the new title will be the same as the original title (if we need more exceptions like essays, interior art, etc let me know). The moderator screen will show what the new title will be for each selected work, so there shouldn't be any surprises. Any awards associated with the title stays with the original title. Alvonruff 05:34, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)

Great news; I'm sure everyone will be happy to hear about this. It's going to get stress-tested pretty quickly! Mike Christie (talk) 08:27, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)
Seems to be working fine right now. <and there was much rejoicing!> Ahasuerus 22:56, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)
I've been really happy with being able to unmerge. Thank you! There is one type of unmerge I have not tried yet in that I was on a parent title and the unmerge offers me the publications listed in both that title and in it's the variant titles. Presumably unmerge will still be safe should I choose a publication that's the only one listed for a variant title or to unmerge a publication that does not have a title reference (title-type does not match). Marc Kupper (talk) 18:33, 6 Feb 2007 (CST)

Moderator Help

I've created Help:Screen:Moderator to help moderator consistency. Please edit as necessary to make this more accurate -- both editors and moderators, please, since editors will probably have opinions on how moderators should interact with them over possible errors. I know there are some submission types missing; please add at will, or I will as I get time. Mike Christie (talk) 13:08, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)

Nominating Unapersson for moderatorship

I'd like to nominate Unapersson for moderatorship. We have no defined process for this, but rather than define one up front, I thought it would be best to learn by doing. Below is a short nomination paragraph, with links to contribs, and Unapersson's edit count. After that I've put some notes about consensus.

Nomination statement for Unapersson

I nominate Unapersson (talk • contribs) for moderatorship; he has accepted the nomination. With 911 edits, Unapersson has been the most active of the new editors since the beta went live, but has been so accurate that there have been few issues for review on the talk page. He is based in the UK (see this diff, and his website), and that is an additional advantage as it will give the UK-based editors a better chance of having a moderator awake when they are submitting edits. The backlog of unapproved edits is occasionally getting quite sizeable, and with Al focused on the code, and work needed on the Wiki as well, the other moderators could use more assistance. Mike Christie (talk) 14:10, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)

Process

Some initial thoughts:

  • A nominee has to be asked (on their talk page), and accept the nomination, before the nomination can be made.
  • Editors and moderators alike, please comment if you have an opinion.
  • Start your comment with either Support, Oppose, or Comment. Unless anyone objects, I will regularize comments to this format to make them easier to read.
  • To avoid a lot of indentation, please put your comments in consecutive bullets, rather than indenting replies. If you want to reply to a comment, then indent below that bullet.
  • The model I am using (just for format) is the Wikipedia Request for Adminship; take a look at this page. We don't want a big hairy process like that; I just mean look at the bullet format of the comments.
  • Moderator comments and editor comments carry equal weight.
  • This isn't a vote; the bureaucrat who closes the nomination uses their judgement based on the comments, and can go against the consensus if they have a strong enough reason. They must give their reasons. (For those who don't know, a "bureaucrat" is a user who has the ability to make an editor into a moderator. Currently we have four bureaucrats: Al, Ahasuerus, Grendelkhan, and myself.)
  • Any bureaucrat can close a nomination.
  • The nomination should be closed after five days at most. A bureaucrat can close a nomination early if they feel the outcome is unlikely to change -- either for or against.

All this is straw man, of course, so please suggest changes too; but in order to avoid getting tied up in process discussions I am being bold and assuming this is close enough to a good process to be able to start now.

Discussion

Support

  • Support, as nominator. Mike Christie (talk) 14:10, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Support, as nominator. Marc Kupper (talk) 14:50, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Support looks a good choice to me. BLongley 16:26, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Support. I was going to nominate as well, since roughly 1000 contributions seems like more than enough to show both commitment and knowledge of most of the editing types. Alvonruff 18:10, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Support as per the reasons given by the nominators. I am sure new moderators will make their share of technical mistakes -- as we all have and still do -- so one thing I would suggest is being extra careful the first few weeks. You will be likely running into various types of submissions that you have not had a chance to submit as an editor, so if you see anything new or unusual, just put it on hold and ask around :-) Ahasuerus 01:32, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Support Excellent. think it would be v. useful to have someone actively moderating on this side of the pond - as noted above, the time difference can be a problem for you all , I imagine. Seems a knowledgeable individual , with good website.Thomas conneely 17:44, 5 Feb 2007 (CST)

Comments

  • I hope candidates are asked first if they were ok with the role and given a chance to look over the moderator help pages, etc. before finding out via the public forum that they are being nominated. Marc Kupper (talk) 14:50, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)
You're right, that's a necessary step. I did ask: see User talk:Unapersson#Nomination for moderatorship, but it needs to be part of the process statement. I've made the change, above. Mike Christie (talk) 15:36, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • I see that on the Wikipedia discussion page for Admins. there is also a Neutral vote allowed. Should there be one here also? I suppose that anyone who really is neutral about a proposed moderatorship would probably have a Comment as to why he/she was neutral but I don't really know.... Am I just being a Completist about this? Hayford Peirce 17:10, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)
I made it "Comment" thinking it was a more general category than "Neutral". We can change it to Neutral if there's a need for it, or add a "Neutral" list; I think that might be overkill this early on, though. Mike Christie (talk) 07:35, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)
How about both Neutral and Comments sections? Had there been just a Neutral section I would not have commented and I assume there are people who did not have an opinion one way or another that could have felt invited to partipate had there been a Neutral section. Marc Kupper (talk) 18:28, 6 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • I see that Unapersson is not on Special:Listadmins yet. Is there a specific time-frame and/or conclusion for these nominations? Marc Kupper (talk) 18:28, 6 Feb 2007 (CST)
Well, it's pretty clear that Unapersson is going to be a sysadmin, but I was going to wait the five days just for form's sake. However, now you mention it, it does seem unnecessary to wait. -*ZAP*- Unapersson is now a moderator. I'll leave a note for him in a bit; right now I have to run. Mike Christie (talk) 18:59, 6 Feb 2007 (CST)
I have left Unapersson a note informing him. I'll create a process page based on this to define moderator nomination process when I next get time. Mike Christie (talk) 22:06, 6 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • This is just a comment on the process, not on Unapersson: but I see that "number of edits" has been mentioned as a positive point more than once. I seem to have overtaken Unapersson on that score, and do NOT feel in any way more qualified than him, so can we reduce the importance of that? Or make it clearer what type of edits are being done - someone that can edit collections, omnibuses, magazines and translations, decipher foreign languages, find cover-art images, et cetera, seems to be more rounded overall and in better shape to moderate than others (like me) that just pick up their books and go for "Add Pub" and "Verify"? (OK, I'm trying to learn all the other skills, but the number of questions and "Help!" posts here show I'm several months away from even considering such a role, unless we get specialist Moderator levels that can 1: approve the obvious things and 2: deal with the unobvious things. BLongley 17:44, 16 Feb 2007 (CST)

Link problem in database?

A search on title for Artemis, brings up among 

Artemis, Spring 2002 	EDITOR 	2002 	Ian Randal Strock
Artemis, Summer 2001 	EDITOR 	2001 	Ian Randal Strock
Artemis, Summer 2002 	EDITOR 	2002 	Ian Randal Strock
Cover: Artemis, Autumn 2000 	COVERART 	2000 	Bob Eggleton
Cover: Artemis, Spring 2000 	COVERART 	2000 	Alan Bean
Cover: Artemis, Spring 2002 	COVERART 	2002 	David Menehan
Cover: Artemis, Summer 2000 	COVERART 	2000 	Randy Asplund-Faith
Cover: Artemis, Summer 2000 	COVERART 	2000 	Randy Asplund
Cover: Artemis, Summer 2001 	COVERART 	2001 	Bob Eggleton
Cover: Artemis, Summer 2002 	COVERART 	2002 	H. Ed Cox

Clicking on Cover: Artemis, Summer 2000 brings up the entry that cover, clicking on the Publications entry for that magazine brings it up. Clicking on Editors: Ian Randal Strock in that entry brings up his Summary Bibliography, which doesn't list Artemis Summer 2000.

This may be related to the other problem just above but in case it isn't.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dcarson (talk • contribs)}.

I fixed it from the publication by doing an edit-pub and adding an EDITOR title entry. Did you by chance initially create this publication as something other than a New-Magazine and then convert it to type magazine? Marc Kupper (talk) 04:02, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)
In ISFDB1 there was a separate table (file) for EDITOR data. This means that it was often forgotten (which is why it is now autogenerated). When ISFDB1 was converted to ISFDB2, the entries that existed were translated into titles of type EDITOR. There are then numerous magazines without EDITOR titles. Alvonruff 04:33, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)

That one and a couple of others were already in ISFDB. I'm entering the rest and adding things like page numbers to the existing ones. The others seem to have the same problem. How do I add an EDITOR title entry? When I look at the content type menu I don't see that as a choice. Dana Carson 06:24, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)

When you enter a magazine, the EDITOR record is created behind the scenes from the name you put into the "Editor" field. You shouldn't need to enter it yourself. Mike Christie (talk) 08:56, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)

Rfom what Alvonruff these are probably from the first ISFDB and are missing those records. The ones I entered are fine. I'd like to fix the messed up ones. Dana Carson 14:54, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)

You fix the messed up ones by doing edit-publication on the magazine, click [Add Title], and adding a new title record to the contents where
  • Page: Leave it blank
  • Title: Match the name of the publication/magazine
  • Date: Leave it blank (the date will be copied from the magazine's date)
  • Type: EDITOR
  • Storylen: Leave it blank
  • Editor: Credit the magazine's editor
I was in a hurry to get out the door when I wrote my first response but another way the linkage can break break is if you change the tag field value. I just ran a test with this though and it did not break my test magazine but recall doing this with a novel and things broke. In that case the novel had been entered with a completely wrong title (it was one of those books where the series name was displayed in a larger font than the title and someone assumed the series name was the title). I tried to correct the tag to match the corrected title but discovered that broke things and so I cloned the novel to generate a record with a new-correct tag and deleted the original publication. Marc Kupper (talk) 15:27, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)

OK, that looks like it should do it. Problem was that on existing titles there is no choice of EDITOR so I didn't know where to make an EDITOR record. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dcarson (talk • contribs).

You are right - there's already a feature-request/discussion about that for existing titles EDITOR is not an option while it is available if you click [Add Title]. I believe the plan is that EDITOR will be available as a choice for both when it's a magazine and will be removed as a choice when the publication is not a magazine. It does mean that if you change the type to/from magazine that you would first need to get that change submitted/approved before the EDITOR choice became available or was removed. Marc Kupper (talk) 13:58, 5 Feb 2007 (CST)

Pagination question

An editor just submitted a NewPub for this pub. Take a look at the note and the pagination; he entered the page range. Do we want to do this for omnibuses? I think probably not, but information about length certainly disappears if we don't. I think perhaps it would be better to have the Pages field at the pub level say "xi+361+398+281+xxvi" and then give page 1 for each content item, but I thought I'd post the question here before editing it. I'll update the help text with the answer, too. Mike Christie (talk) 11:58, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)

"xi+361+398+281+xxvi" is fairly standard in the biblio world, so I think we can adopt it as well. As far as the data that we want entered in the "Page Number" field, I guess the first question is whether Al can think of anything that this would break? Ahasuerus 22:46, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)
Agreed - I would have used "xi+361+398+281+xxvi" rather than "xi+1040+xxvi" as it more clearly documents how the book was paginated. The "1-" in the pagination in the contents confused me as the source of the "1-" was not explained nor apparent until I thought about it for a moment and realized the editor was trying to convey "page 1 to 361." I suspect that as our standard usage of the content-page field is the starting page # that the record should have "1" for each of the titles and with "xi+361+398+281+xxvi" someone should understand that the first story goes from page 1 to 361 though that then creates the problem of that ISFDB will not know about what order to sort the titles in. As it is, the pub's note probably should explain in detail the exact content order and pagination rather than trying to tweak field values so that the contents are reliably listed in the correct order. FWIW, This morning I entered this publication to deal with two collections in a dos-a-dos double. Marc Kupper (talk) 13:45, 5 Feb 2007 (CST)

Do you want me to add in more detailed information about each individual element in the omnibus? I confess it was one of the few pb omnibus editions I've seen where each volume retained individual pagination, as well as adding new content ( the appendix ) not originally in either of the original hc publications Thomas conneely 17:38, 5 Feb 2007 (CST)

I've updated it here; the field length is three characters too short for all the pagination so I left of the last page number ("xxvi") and put it in the notes. I'll add a feature request for the extra length, if there isn't one already. Thomas, I don't think more detail is needed; the pagination makes it clear what's going on. Mike Christie (talk) 07:08, 6 Feb 2007 (CST)

Witchworld: The Turning

OK, I've just looked at my copies of the "Witchworld: The Turning" series and based on the contents I think these are all anthologies rather than novels, as they each seem to contain two novels by different authors set in Andre Norton's world. (Sort of like "Merovingen Nights" series.) The linking text is uncredited, but presumably belongs to one or more of the stated authors. However, there's questions about some of those too: I think we can do an author merge on "P. M. Griffin", "Pauline Griffin", "Pauline M. Griffin" and on "Mary H. Schaub", "Mary Schaub". However, I DON'T think we want an author merge on "Patricia Mathews", "Patricia Matthews", "Patricia Shaw Matthews", "Patricia Shaw Mathews", "Patricia Shaw-Mathews" as there's a Patricia Anne out there and I think some titles are currently mis-credited. Can I ask for comments before I do anything drastic? BLongley 15:51, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)

Another possibility would be OMNIBUS -- novels by different authors under one cover seems like an omnibus to me. However, I think anthology works OK too.
For the Griffin author merge, I'd say it's pretty safe to merge "Pauline Griffin" with "Pauline M. Griffin"; there's only one title under the former, and it's listed as by "Pauline M. Griffin" in at least one source. Without a verified source saying otherwise, I think you're good to go on that one. You could also just change the title record on Oath-Bound, and that would also get rid of "Pauline Griffin"; authors disappear when their last record vanishes. However, I think "P. M. Griffin" should stay; this page of Locus1 certainly quotes that form of her name for the last entry, "Firehand", and the "P(auline) M(argaret)" format generally means she used her initials.
Mary Schaub seems to have generally used her middle initial everywhere; there are only two titles using just "Mary Schaub". I don't think it's impossible that she didn't use it on a couple of stories, though; this Amazon page, for example, includes a review listing all the authors, including middle initials, but she doesn't give Schaub a middle initial. Since we don't have a verified publication under either of the "Mary Schaub" titles, it's not that big a deal to change it, but in a situation like this I tend to leave the records as they are until I can come up with evidence they're wrong.
Haven't looked at the Patricia Mathews ones, since you say you're not going to merge them. Mike Christie (talk) 19:52, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)

New Worlds Quarterly

I've checked my copies and based on the three editions I have it seems clear that it was certainly a magazine by issue 3. Issue 2 was arguable as it had content from "New Worlds" and one from a "Sword and Sorcery" magazine that never appeared, but issues 3 and 4 are all new content. All three editions are labelled as magazine in some way (2 as "Britain's foremost", 3 as "Britain's finest", 4 as "Britain's best"). I'd like to make them "Magazine" and leave the "Anthology" to the "Best... New Worlds" books with proper SBNs and such. I know this is the definitive example of how to categorise something as Magazine in the Help Text, so that'd need updating too if you allow this change. (Oh, and can anyone can verify "Weihnachtsabend" as opposed to the "Weihnachtabend" (no "s") I can see? I have no German skills.) BLongley 18:16, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)

I think it's OK to make these all magazines. I have certainly seen them treated that way by bibliographers in the past, so it's not a departure to do so. Re "Weihnacht(s)abend": Contento gives both spellings, so that's a genuine variant title. Mike Christie (talk) 20:02, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)
There are a few anthology series that can be legitimately called magazines. Some were advertised as magazines and some were not, but I don't think it's that big a deal either way. Magazines are a little more painful to maintain in the ISFDB, but on the other hand they get their own Wiki pages, which may help some users. There will always be borderline cases and we'll just have to toss a virtual coin. One word of caution, though. Original content vs. reprint content is not always determinative when deciding whether something is an anthology or a magazine. There have been many reprint magazines and many original anthologies. Ahasuerus 22:38, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)

Times Without Number

Here's one that came up in a discussion with BLongley; we're debating whether John Brunner's "Times Without Number" is a novel or a collection. It was originally three short stories. You can see all three listed here, in the Ace Double version. These had "numerous minor alterations" from the original stories, per Brunner's notes in the Ace 1969 edition. That edition, according to the same notes, says "Shorter and substantially different versions of the three sections of this novel were . . ." and it gives publication details of the Ace and the earlier magazine printings.

The Ace Double says "Turn this book over for a second complete novel"; they would say "second complete book" when they regarded it as a collection or anthology, so that's (rather circumstantial) evidence for it being a novel.

However, it is not a stretch to regard this as a collection, either. The three story titles are retained; they're prefixed with "Part One", and so on, but the novel is in three section that correspond to those stories, with no additional linking material. I would say the later version is definitely a novel, and there is already a Ballantine pub of that version that records it as a novel. The Ace Double is recorded as a collection, though.

Any opinions about which it is? Currently we have a confusing situation as there are two Brunner "Times Without Number" titles in his biblio; one under Collections and one under Novels. Comments? Mike Christie (talk) 20:16, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)

For what it's worth, Contento lists it as a collection, but then Contento tends to take an inclusionist view since collections and anthologies is what he concentrates on.
I have run into this problem with numerous fixups and was never able to come up with a cut and dry rule. At one point I almost filed a feature request to have "FIXUP" added as a new title type, but then decided that it would be too silly. But then again, maybe not? Ahasuerus 22:43, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)
I would go with "collection" for Times Without Number and to make the Ace double an omnibus of the collection and Destiny's Orbit. My thinking is that when someone views the title in either a bibliography or the Ace double's contents list they will see "coll" in the title list and know that they should drill deeper to see the stories contained. If Times Without Number is filed as a novel it's not apparent that it contains three short stories. You can always add a note explaining the thing is sometimes packaged as though it's a novel and that the stories did not seem to get published outside of this collection. Marc Kupper (talk) 15:26, 6 Feb 2007 (CST)
OK, I've read it now, and have to say that they still read like three short stories to me. 1 is set in York (or Jorque), 2 in London (or Londres), 3 in California. They share a common protagonist, Don Miguel Navarro, and there's enough references back in the two later stories to put them in order - but that doesn't make it a novel to me, each episode tied up perfectly neatly. I'll add some notes and submit my opinion again. BLongley 14:41, 14 Feb 2007 (CST)

Amazon Look Inside as a Source

I was sure that Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy was wrong. Looked at Amazon, the copyright page and table of content are readable online. Different edition, reprint of the paperback. Is is legit to use that to get the data closer to correct?

What the cover says is by the Editors of Analog and Asimov's Science Fiction. The copyright page just has the LOC catalog info, Gardner Dozois . . . et. al. The TOC lists all the articles and that includes many people who aren't editior anywhere. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dcarson (talk • contribs) .

The Locus Index and Worldcat.org both list Dozois as the only editor, which is probably what we want to do for now. I have a copy somewhere in my collection, which I may be able to check in late February when I am briefly reunited with it. Ahasuerus 06:07, 5 Feb 2007 (CST)
I have a project in my personal queue to verify the DAW book's using Amazon's "Look Inside" as for many of them I'll be able to verify nearly all of the information we collect about a publication other than the page count. Instead of flagging these as "p" (physical or primary verification) I would use "q" (I'm lazy (aka, efficient) and just used the letter after "p") for these. I've also been wondering just how Amazon generates the Look Inside scans as they are nearly always well clean and well registered. I assume they use an industrial paper cutter to strip off the spine and then feed the loose pages through a scanner.
There are specialized flatbed scanners that will create high quality scans of book pages. Low end products, e.g. Plustek's Bookreader are relatively inexpensive. Ahasuerus 14:13, 5 Feb 2007 (CST)
Back to the magazine issue - Look Inside may be less than reliable as you really want the physical magazine to check what the interior says rather than going by the cover, table of contents, or copyright page and also to check that none of these conflict (and to document if and where they do conflict). When I made additions/changes to ISFDB based on partial data such as a Look Inside or a cover scan I try to always state the source and to indicate that I'm not able to double check the data against other places in the publication. Marc Kupper (talk) 13:17, 5 Feb 2007 (CST)

Backwards Variant Titles

Look at who's back! Variant Titles!  :-) I was documenting a Terry_Carr collection which included the following statement about the story The Chaser on the copyright page “‘The Chaser,’ copyright © 1959 by Terry Carr. Originally published under the name of Carl Brandon.”

I see that a title record does not exist for The Chaser by Carl Brandon though the pseudonym had already been set up. From the Terry Carr version of The Chaser I did “Make this a variant title” and had it be a new record by Carl Brandon.

I believe this is accurate in that the story first appeared as-by Carl Brandon in 1959 and was reprinted as-by Terry Carr in 1986. The problem is that ISFDB does not show variant titles in the main part of bibliographies meaning that while this story is visible on Carl Brandon (the pseudonym)’s page it’s not showing on Terry Carr’s page as the Terry Carr version is the “variant.”

Excluding the feature request that variant titles do get displayed on the pseudonym’s page I decided to deal with this by redoing the variant title linkage so that it was “backwards” and made the original Carl Brandon version the variant. The story disappeared from Carl Brandon’s page and now displays on Terry’s Carr’s page with an “as by Carl Brandon.”

Interesting. To me that is the "forward" case, and precisely how I've been entering them. No matter what, Terry Carr wrote the work, so his version should be the invariant one, and the Carl Brandon version is the variant title. (The fact that Brandon is a pseudonym makes it a variant title). For authors, "variantness" is whether the authorship varies, not how the title originally appeared. Maybe this is why we have confusion on the topic. Alvonruff 19:17, 5 Feb 2007 (CST)

My question is – should these “backwards variants” be an ISFDB standard or is there a better way to deal with this situation? Maybe instead of “variant title” these could be documented as being used to set up “as by” relationships where the canonical name is always the parent and you “as by” variant titles. Of course, with ISFDB you do these backwards in that you go to the variant and give the record # or name of the parent version though I’ve been thinking if a feature request to allow VTs to be set up from the parent would add or remove confusion about this subject. Marc Kupper (talk) 13:52, 5 Feb 2007 (CST)

I have been making the "usual name" the parent of the variant tree for the ones I've been doing. For example, I'd say that any story by Murray Leinster as "Will F. Jenkins" has a canonical form as by "Murray Leinster", even if it was never actually published that way, and even though that's actually a pseudonym. I had thought this was the standard, but maybe it's not documented. I agree that when there is doubt, the earlier version should be the parent, but this usually applies to titles as I assume that the canonical form would be whatever the canonical form of the author was. Mike Christie (talk) 19:29, 5 Feb 2007 (CST)
In thinking about what Al and Mike wrote I suspect what’s happening is that the two types of situations where the VT mechanism are used are not separated out well in my mind and I suspect in the minds of others.
  • When a story is released under one title and later under another title then the first title is the parent and the second is the variant.
  • When a story is released under a pseudonym then it’s reversed in that the initial story is the variant and the title record under author's canonical name is the parent.
Today I had a pseudonym but mentally dealt with it like a title variant. It was a case of tunnel vision in that I saw that The Chaser by Carl Brandon was the first title and therefore anything after that would be a “variant.”
I believe we tend to think in terms of “this title is the variant” and “that name is the pseudonym” meaning there’s some shifting of gears (and a little dizzy in the head) in with ISFDB you go to the pseudonym (author or title record) and say “make This the pseudonym/variant.”
At the author level it may work to have a “manage pseudonyms” link that would show the list of pseudonyms for the canonical name and allow people to add/remove them. If someone did it from an author that’s already flagged as a pseudonyms then you’d switch to the canonical name and to it from there or if there is more than one canonical name, as with house names, you could have a page that says “this name is used by a pseudonym by … and allow people to add/remove from the list of canonical names.
The variant/pseudonymous title version is more complicated and I need do some screen layouts to see if I can come up with something seems to make sense. Marc Kupper (talk) 23:18, 5 Feb 2007 (CST)
I think I see where you're going. If you do work on screen layouts, don't forget to look at the odd cases like Leinster, who has a usual name that's a pseudonym; John Wyndham is another. The house names are going to be particularly nasty; where the authorship is unknown, I think the house name becomes the canonical name. Mike Christie (talk) 23:24, 5 Feb 2007 (CST)
How about this as alternative wording for mkvariant.cgi - I did not change any of the functionality. < is the existing wording and > is the replacement.
< Making the following title a variant title of the specified parent:
> Use this screen to mark this title record as a variant of another
> title or to mark this title record as a pseudonymous title.
Title: Test Novel
Author: Marc Testing
Year: 0000-00-00
Type: NOVEL
-------------
< If the parent title already exists, enter the record number of the title below.
> If the parent (canonical) title record already exists, enter the record number of the title below.
< Parent #:
> Parent/canonical record #:
--------------
< If the parent title does not exist, enter the title information below to create it.
> If the parent or canonical title does not exist then enter the title information below to create it.
> Note that if you are changing the story title (variant title) then you will be creating a record for the original (canonical) story name below and Test Novel will be a variant title of the new title record you are creating.
> If you are changing the author name (pseudonym or a variant spelling of the name) then you should enter the canonical author name below and Marc Testing will become a pseudonym or alternate name for the canonical name. The canonical author name is the name under which a particular person's bibliography is organized by and is usually the name the author is most commonly known by.
> If neither of these seems to fit what you want to do then please check Help:Screen:MakeVariant. (I suspect the most likely reason for clicking the help at this point is someone who wants to make that name or record the variant/pseudonym rather than this name/record being the variant/pseudonym and so the help should address this. Another common reason is what do to if someone wants to change both the name and title and they are unsure of the this-n-that.)
Marc Kupper (talk) 01:17, 6 Feb 2007 (CST)
Your text seems reasonable; you might turn this into a feature request. I am hesitant to add too much text directly to the screens; we did have a feature request a while back for rollover help, though, and that might be a compromise. But your changes are not extensive so would probably be OK. Mike Christie (talk) 06:58, 6 Feb 2007 (CST)
I'll wait to see if there is any other feedback here and then copy/paste this thread to feature requests. In the mean time I'll be doing some editing of Help:Screen:MakeVariant. Marc Kupper (talk) 12:05, 6 Feb 2007 (CST)

Other Days, Other Eyes by Bob Shaw

Contendo, and as a result ISFDB, list this publication as a collection containing

  • Light of Other Days • Bob Shaw • ss Analog Aug ’66
  • Burden of Proof • Bob Shaw • ss Analog May ’67
  • A Dome of Many-Colored Glass • Bob Shaw • ss Fantastic Apr ’72
  • Other Days, Other Eyes • Bob Shaw • na Amazing May ’72 (+1)

I'm assuming the novel is a fixup of magazine stories but could not find any evidence of this in the book nor on the Internet. Does someone know of a source that I could cite for this being a fixup or should I convert the publication into a novel and remove the short story links?

As the note for "Other Days, Other Eyes" shortfiction says it's an Expansion of "Light of Other Days", it wouldn't make sense to list both as parts of the same collection, IMO. I think that's a fix-up novel. BLongley 14:50, 9 Feb 2007 (CST)
And his Wikipedia entry agrees, see paragraph 3. BLongley 13:55, 15 Feb 2007 (CST)
Other Days, Other Eyes was serialized (Amazing, May and July 1972) and so assuming it's a fixup that's why Contendo lists all of these as part of the "collection" Other Days, Other Eyes. I think I'll need to chase down copies of Burden of Proof and A Dome of Many-Colored Glass to see if this is a fixup. It's not something that seems to be mentioned in any edition of Other Days, Other Eyes. Marc Kupper (talk) 21:51, 22 Feb 2007 (CST)
I've got a copy of Other Days, Other Eyes on order, I think that goes top of my re-reading list when it arrives. (Sadly, I don't yet possess a copy of every good book I ever read, although my house is becoming a replica of the Colchester Public Library's SF section circa 1975...) BillLongley 16:00, 26 Feb 2007 (CST)
It's arrived. I think I will go enjoy reading rather than editing for a bit. BLongley 16:41, 1 Mar 2007 (CST)

Also, here's the signature. Does anyone recognize this as H. J. Bruck?

otherdaysothereyessignaturex.jpg

Here's a 300-dpi scan of the entire cover if that'll help. Marc Kupper (talk) 02:53, 8 Feb 2007 (CST)

Links to other sf related databases

I was chasing down an attribution and found that someone has built what looks like a complete index for the British Science Fiction Association (B.S.F.A.) magazines. I’m thinking that we should have a page that’s right off the ISFDB main page that could list other fan databases that overlap with ISFDB. Potential sites for inclusion are

Science Fiction indexes/databases

Publisher indexes/databases

What I have not thought up yet, and why I’m not making the big bucks as an editor :-), is a good title for the page.

Maybe what I'm thinking of is an expansion and/or renaming of Reference:General_Overview.

Marc Kupper (talk) 14:04, 8 Feb 2007 (CST)

Would it be any different than the Sources of Bibliographic Information page, which is linked from the Main Wiki page? Ahasuerus 14:21, 8 Feb 2007 (CST)

Perfect - I had igored the page as it's under "Current Projects" and also I had thought "Sources of Bibliographic Information" meant projects related to importing data into ISFDB. Would it work for you if I moved "Sources of Bibliographic Information" to the Resources section on the left and gave it a byline of "Lists on-line and print resources that can be used to verify publication and title data?" I suspect then we could combine "Current Projects" and "ISFDB Operations" - probably under the banner "Current Projects." Marc Kupper (talk) 21:45, 8 Feb 2007 (CST)

Moving it out of the Project area certainly sounds reasonable as I have occasionally wondered if our users could easily find the "Sources" link in that section. It would appear that the answer is a resounding "No" :) The proposed byline, however, sounds rather long for the Main Page. Something a bit more compact, perhaps? Ahasuerus 00:06, 9 Feb 2007 (CST)

I went ahead wth the move and also trimmed down the wording. The other Resources bylines averaged 13.1 words and 81 characters. Here are various editions of the wording followed by the (word count, character count).

  • Sources of Bibliographic Information – Lists on-line and print resources that can be used to verify publication and title data. (15, 88)
  • Sources of Bibliographic Information – Lists resources that can be used to verify publication and title data. (12, 70)
  • Sources of Bibliographic Information – Resources that can be used to verify publication and title data. (11, 64)
  • Sources of Bibliographic Information – Resources used to verify publication and title data. (8, 52)
  • Sources of Bibliographic Information – Resources used to verify data. (5, 32)
  • Sources of Bibliographic Information – Resources used to verify bibliographic data. (6, 44)

Marc Kupper (talk) 11:55, 9 Feb 2007 (CST)

Strange Seas and Shores

I just added a pub to Avram Davidson's collection Strange Seas and Shores and noticed something slightly fishy about the contents of the first listed edition. The Doubleday ed. lists both a preface and introduction by Avram Davidson, which would be a bit odd, but is possible. My copy (Ace) has a preface by Davidson, but an introduction by Bradbury, and I wonder if the introduction in the Doubleday ed. should have been credited to Bradbury as well. Contento only lists the Doubleday edition, and doesn't credit anybody with either the intro or preface, implying that both are by Davidson. Can anybody check this from their collection or other refs?Jefe 23:20, 8 Feb 2007 (CST)

I have the hardcover edition in my collection and should be able to check it ca. 2007-02-17 when I get back to it. Ahasuerus 12:22, 9 Feb 2007 (CST)
P.S. If you run into any errors or omissions in Contento's biblios, keep in mind that Bill welcomes corrections (contento[at]best.com). Ahasuerus 12:26, 9 Feb 2007 (CST)
Take a look at the copyright page in your edition and see if there is a later copyright for the "new" or "Bradbury" introduction. Ace tends to be bad about including details on their copyright pages but you might get lucky and find a statement such as "New introduction copyright (c) 19xx by Ray Bradbury." Marc Kupper (talk) 12:34, 9 Feb 2007 (CST)

I checked, and my edition has copyright info for all the stories, but nothing whatsoever about either the preface or intro. The cover says "Introduction by Ray Bradbury" but doesn't suggest whether it's a *NEW! EXCITING!* introduction, or just the old one.Jefe 15:40, 9 Feb 2007 (CST)

The lack of attribution may be a clue that the introduction was added but for now we'll wait for someone that has the hardcover in hand. Marc Kupper (talk) 02:14, 12 Feb 2007 (CST)

Stardance and Stardance II

I've finally dug out the Analog magazine containing the conclusion of Stardance II and verified that it's part of the novel Stardance, not a separate novel. I don't see how to represent this clearly though: I believe the Serials only appear under a Novel if they have the same title? So I could make the Novella Stardance appear under the Novel Stardance in the Stardance Series by making it a serial (Part 1 of 1), but I can't see how to add Stardance II (already nicely serialised but under a Novel that doesn't exist) as well. Any suggestions on two serials in one novel? BLongley 06:42, 9 Feb 2007 (CST)

Play with a variant title called "Stardance (Part 2 of 2)". I'm not sure if it'll work with "Stardance (Part 2 of 2)" being the variant or if that has to be the canonical title and "Stardance II" would be the "variant." Marc Kupper (talk) 12:22, 9 Feb 2007 (CST)
I can't see that that would remove the non-existent novel... Anyone got any definite advice rather than suggestions of what to "play with"? (My mistakes will get noticed longer than a Mod's will. :-( ) BLongley 16:48, 9 Feb 2007 (CST)
What I did was
  1. Renamed Stardance (Part 1 of 3) to Stardance (Part 1 of 4).
  2. From Stardance II (Part 1 of 3) I did a "make this a variant title" and created a new parent title Stardance (Part 2 of 4).
  3. From Stardance II (Part 2 of 3) I did a "make this a variant title" and created a new parent title Stardance (Part 3 of 4).
  4. From Stardance II (Part 3 of 3) I did a "make this a variant title" and created a new parent title Stardance (Part 4 of 4).
I left your old placeholder, Stardance II in there for now as one problem with doing it this way is that the shortfiction titles Stardance II (Part 1 of 3) to 3 of 3 are no longer displayed in the bibliography as they are variant titles and ISFDB does not have logic to check for and display these when showing the serials. I'll see if anyone else has a better idea and/or if a feature request to show the variant titles is needed. Marc Kupper (talk) 03:05, 10 Feb 2007 (CST)
ps: Brian, is the Stardance shortfiction at the bottom of the page is the same as Stardance (Part 1 of 4)?
Yes, that's the one I wanted as the first "serial". (And I'm "Bill", Not "Brian".) BLongley 14:50, 11 Feb 2007 (CST)
I remember I had a situation that was very similar this and I dealt with it the way you did where there was a dummy title/ But, I was able to then snug this title right up against the real title by adding a dummy series. Unfortunately, that trick won't work in this case as the Stardance novel itself is a numbered item in a series. While it would look a little messy you could do it by creating three dummy series
  • 1 Stardance
  • 2 Starseed
  • 3 Starmind
The parent for all of these is the main Stardance series and under "1 Stardance" you would put the Stardance and Stardance II titles. This will cluster things right but looks a little messy. Marc Kupper (talk) 03:26, 10 Feb 2007 (CST)
Thanks for trying - I don't think I want to mess with it anymore till we sort out presentation over accuracy. BLongley 14:50, 11 Feb 2007 (CST)

Getting to isfdb from the wiki

I'm not sure where the mediawiki skins are stored but believe it would be useful if the "isfdb" folder linked to http://www.isfdb.org/ rather than Main_Page. There have been numerous occasions when I wanted to get to www.isfdb.org from the wiki and it seems my only option is "main page" and then to click on the word "ISFDB" in the greeting. Another option would be to add an ISFDB link to the "navigation" box in the skin. Marc Kupper (talk) 12:40, 9 Feb 2007 (CST)

I second this. I'm forever clicking the "isfdb" image in the wiki and being surprised that I'm not on the other site.Jefe 15:43, 9 Feb 2007 (CST)
Sounds like a good plan! Ahasuerus 15:56, 9 Feb 2007 (CST)
Thirded. I have resorted to having 3 "Favourites" entries to get me from place to place. BLongley 16:33, 9 Feb 2007 (CST)
Three favorites? Which pages are they as we might as well combine the requests to update the navbar. Apparently the skin that contains the navbar is in a CSS file that may or may not be called monobook.