ISFDB talk:Variant Title Type Mismatches

Some interesting questions here. Like 813237 - should we cope with SERIAL ESSAYs? BLongley 23:38, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

OK, ignore all the "ESSAY / REVIEW" entries. Does nobody want to work on the rest? BLongley 00:51, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

I'll work on the NOVEL / NONGENRE entries (and vice versa). Mhhutchins 01:21, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Conclusions

Most of the NOVEL / NONGENRE mismatches were easily fixed. They happened when someone made a variant because of author credit and the type didn't get transferred to the new record. This problem seems to have been fixed, because testing shows that the type remains the same unless you make a choice during the variant process to change it.

A few other mismatch types that I've not chosen to tackle are going to be more contentious: ESSAY / SHORTFICTION mismatches are based on one editor's opinion that an "in-universe" essay should be considered fiction. I'll not stray into that fray.

An even more troublesome area is the SHORTFICTION / NOVEL mismatches. This happens when a novella first published in a periodical is reprinted as half of an Ace Double as a novel. I don't have either the magazine versions nor the Ace Double versions, so I won't mess with them. It would be nice if the verifiers of the original pubs could figure something out.

I'm also trying to figure out how to handle a serialization of a nonfiction work. Would changing the individual parts into SERIAL type prevent the script from putting them on this list? I'm afraid changing them from ESSAY to SERIAL would lead a casual user of the db to believe it's fiction. Are they any other serializations of nonfiction in the db? Or are they hidden as essays and not linked to the original title record? That makes me think it's better to unlink the individual essay records from this work's title record and leave them as essays. Mhhutchins 19:36, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

You don't seem to have left any for other people to work on, so maybe we'll be short on experienced commenters. ;-) I think we've only got the one ESSAY / NONFICTION problem so we can leave that out in future. ESSAY / SHORTFICTION and SHORTFICTION / NOVEL - yes, they're cans of worms. I can report them separately and let Verifiers argue over each one? BLongley 20:22, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

I've rerun with last Saturday's Backup, and at 7 minutes on my PC this is NOT going to be a Moderator Clean-Up script anytime soon, unless we can cut it down to particular type mismatches - and maybe not even then. Is it worth working on, or are we fairly confident these are going to be rare? BLongley 20:22, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

I think they're rare enough that running the script quarterly and posting the results on the wiki should keep them under control. As for the SHORTFICTION / NOVEL and SHORTFICTION / ESSAY mismatches, perhaps a separate script for each mismatch and then the verifiers can hash out the differences without being overwhelmed. There are only 34 of the first and 25 of the second, so it shouldn't be too hard to see which pubs should be discussed. The quarterly script shouldn't have to differentiate the mismatches once those lists have been worked (fingers crossed). Mhhutchins 20:42, 3 May 2011 (UTC)