User talk:Pkeets

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Please leave message here. Thanks.

Contents

Welcome and some suggestions

Welcome!

Hello, Pkeets, 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 (~~~~); 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!

To address the question that you just posted on Michael's page, do you happen to remember which authors you wanted to add information for? If so, you could search for their names and review their bibliographies in greater detail. If you still don't find the books/stories that you were looking for, you can use the "New Novel"/"New Collection"/etc choice in the navigation bar on the left and submit your additions. Or did I misread your question, by chance? Thanks! Ahasuerus 20:36, 4 May 2007 (CDT)

Adding new publications to an author's bibliography

I think the best place to start is Getting Started Guide. It should be reasonably self-explanatory, but if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them on the Help Desk page. I have to run right now, but we have about a dozen moderators who are usually lurking in the wings and should be able to help. If not, I will be back in an hour or so :) Ahasuerus 20:43, 4 May 2007 (CDT)

P.S. Ah, I see your response now, I guess we are playing some kind of delayed response tennis :) To answer your question, there should be absolutely no difference in database search capabilities between signed in and non-signed in users. Which author names were you trying to search for so that I could try to replicate the problem? Ahasuerus 20:46, 4 May 2007 (CDT)
P.P.S. We had the ability to add standalone stories/novels without publication information in a much earlier version of ISFDB (which we now refer to as ISFDB-1 as opposed to the current version, which we informally call ISFDB-2) back in the late 1990s. Unfortunately, that ability led to a lot of bad data making it into the database when people entered data from memory, so it was specifically excluded during the ISFDB-1 to ISFDB-2 transition. Better safe than sorry :) Ahasuerus 21:29, 4 May 2007 (CDT)
Well, now I've located another bug. These authors have other publications listed, but they don't show up when you search for a name. When I search for the publications, the stories are listed there, but then they don't show up on the author's page.Pkeets 20:50, 4 May 2007 (CDT)
Okay, I see what some of the problem is: the middle initial. Is there a way to set up a redirect page to get all these listed under the correct name? Pkeets 20:55, 4 May 2007 (CDT)
Well, if these are the same person, then first we need to decide which form of the name should be the canonical one (usually the most common form of the author's name) and then we can set up the other form as a pseudonym. We have a number of "How To" Help pages, including one on How to record a pseudonym. That page was a little out of date since we rolled out a new pseudonym editor a few weeks ago, so I went ahead and updated it. Let me know if it makes sense :)
As a general comment, one thing to keep in mind is that the ISFDB is a database and not a Wiki; we are just using this Wiki as a supporting tools. People who come from a Wikipedia background sometimes find the distinction confusing. Here is what I wrote in an exchange with another new editor recently:

(unindent)

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.

HTH :) Ahasuerus 21:29, 4 May 2007 (CDT)

Thirteenth Moon, March 1995

Pkeets - I approved your addition of publication # 186953 (Thirteenth Moon, March 1995). One minor issue with it is that you added an extra title record for a shortfiction called Thirteenth Moon, March 1995. I'm not sure what you were trying to do as it seems you used "New Magazine" to create the record and thus I'm not sure what motivated you to add a line in the contents section about the magazine itself. Removing the extra record is easy enough in that from 186953 you select "Remove Titles" but then after approval you'd need to go to Jacob_Weisman's page, drill down to Thirteenth Moon, March 1995 in the Shortfiction section, and delete that title record. The first "Remove Titles" just unlinks the title record from the publication and the second "Remove Title" removes the title record itself. Marc Kupper (talk) 23:44, 4 May 2007 (CDT)

It looks like we have the same issue with 186969 Thirteenth Moon, June 1995. Marc Kupper (talk) 23:48, 4 May 2007 (CDT)

And 186973 Thirteenth Moon, September 1995

I decided to check back on an earlier submission I had approved, Floating Worlds: Oriental Fantasies. I corrected this one myself as there's a bunch of extra steps involved to remove an extra contents line from anthology that references itself.

Anyway - thank you for the submissions to ISFDB - they look great other than that detail. Also, I'm not sure if you are aware of Help:Screen:EditPub#General_contents. You had submitted a publication update where you changed the author for one of the items in the contents. I checked as the publication involved was the only one connected to that title record it was a safe edit and so I approved it. If there had been more than one publication connected to the title then you'd need to do the add-title / remove-titles thing mentioned on Help:Screen:EditPub#General_contents. Marc Kupper (talk) 00:05, 5 May 2007 (CDT)

Thanks for the help, Marc. I still don't understand the process of fixing this, but I will fool with it a bit. That first entry looked like it was a heading for some reason, and I thought the title and editory went in there again. I'll stop doing that right away. There's more coming--I'm copying these out of the Locus Index.Pkeets 00:19, 5 May 2007 (CDT)

No problem - It's always interesting to see how new people to a system perceive things. If you are entering things from Locus could you also add the page numbers? Thank you again for the submissions. I'll go ahead with the fixes to the existing three magazines. Marc Kupper (talk) 00:25, 5 May 2007 (CDT)

Hah. I didn't realize those numbers in Locus were page numbers. My bad, or I would have filled them in at the time.Pkeets 01:07, 5 May 2007 (CDT)

I wonder how common that misunderstanding is. Both ISFDB and Locus put the page numbers on the left where in a book's table of contents they are usually on the right. I just looked at a typical ISFDB contents listing and realized that there is a lot there that could cause confusion for a newcomer. Marc Kupper (talk) 02:30, 6 May 2007 (CDT)

The wonderful world of ISFDB pseudonyms and variant titles

Pkeets - I'm catching up on recently updated pages and saw that on User_talk:Ahasuerus you left the following comments.

Well, now I've located another bug. These authors have other publications listed, but they don't show up when you search for a name. When I search for the publications, the stories are listed there, but then they don't show up on the author's page. (also posted at my discussion page) Pkeets 20:52, 4 May 2007 (CDT)
Okay, I see what some of the problem is: the middle initial. Is there a way to set up a redirect page to get all these listed under the correct name? Pkeets 20:54, 4 May 2007 (CDT)

When I saw your comments I realized that a couple of days ago I had approved a publication update where in the contents you changed Lela Buis to Lela E. Buis. I now realized that we need to undo that change. The publication was Midnight Zoo, v3n12 1993 and you had changed the author for the story The Virgin Goddess Maria. In ISFDB we want the publication record, including the contents section, to reflect exactly what's stated in the publication. For a magazine or anthology we'd use the title and author's name as credited in the body of the book. Usually that's the same as the table of contents but I just wanted you to be aware that while we usually enter the data from the table of contents we then double check or verify it against the body of the book or magazine.

In the case of this magazine looks like the contents are only listed at Locus [1] and ISFDB [2] (before you changed it) though in both case Lela Buis is credited and not Lela E. Buis.

With that in mind I updated title 78933 (The Virgin Goddess Maria) so that the author is Lela Buis again. From the same title record I linked it to the author's real name by clicking "Make This Title a Variant Title or Pseudonymous Work" and in the lower part of the page linked the title to Lela E. Buis.

I then went to Lela_Buis's bibliography page, clicked "Make This Author a Pseudonym", and entered the parent name as Lela E. Buis.

Lela_Buis's page now says she's a pseudonym for Lela_E._Buis and Lela_E._Buis's page shows among her shortfiction works

Thus Lela_E._Buis's shows that she wrote the story using the name "Lela Buis".

If you look at the magazine Midnight Zoo, v3n12 1993 you will see in the contents section

The formatting takes getting used to but in this case you can see that the author's real name is Lela_E.Buis and that she was credited as Lela_Buis for the story in this magazine. Marc Kupper (talk) 03:07, 6 May 2007 (CDT)

Help in locating

Hello, you asked

I..located a couple of author entries in this database that I'd like to add to. However, I signed up for a user account and now I can't find the entries. Help! Pkeets 20:25, 4 May 2007 (CDT)

The only thing that could have happened is that the entries were edited or deleted, though not likely. Let me know which authors you were looking at and I'll try to find out what's up. Mhhutchins 18:33, 9 May 2007 (CDT)

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