ISFDB:Community Portal/Archive/Archive03

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I unlinked a pub from a title and now I can't undo it.

I unlinked GRNHLLSFRT1985 from 174851, with the intent of deleting the title record, though now that I think about it, maybe it should have stayed linked? In any case, the publication display is now broken, and I can't attach it to 174851, or to any title for that matter. I had thought I could at least merge it back in, but publication merge is broken, so creating a dummy publication linked to the title and merging them didn't work. I think I may need someone to poke at the DB directly for this. grendel|khan 10:48, 21 Nov 2006 (CST)

Just a note to the effect that Publication merge is not available by design. Bogus Publication records should be deleted with extreme prejudice :) Ahasuerus 12:14, 21 Nov 2006 (CST)
Okay. I wasn't using it to merge publications anyway (I was trying to use it to affix a publication to a title.) Maybe the option shouldn't be there, then? grendel|khan 13:08, 21 Nov 2006 (CST)
Oops, I didn't realize it was still accessible via the Advanced Search option! Do we want to get rid of it, Al? Ahasuerus 13:30, 21 Nov 2006 (CST)
Ridded. Alvonruff 14:56, 21 Nov 2006 (CST)


I unlinked a title from an author and now I can't undo it

The help section “Editing:Making_a_Title_a_Variant#Relink_a_variant_title_to_the_correct_publication.” is empty and so I tried to wing it… Earlier I had made a couple of titles variants but that had the undesirable (to me) side affect of removing the titles from the pseudonymous author’s page and so I figured I would move the titles back. At the moment I have

  • Title record 17394 - Solar Kill – this is the original title record. This record “disappeared” from view when the variant was created.
  • Title record 199021 - Solar Kill - This was created when making the variant but is now “gone” as I tried to merged it with title 17394 to see if that would undo the variant links.

At the moment Title record 17394 is “invisible” or perhaps an orphan in that not showing up on the author’s page though I can locate it via advanced search. Ignore Solar Kill (30670) – that will be merged with 17394 once things get cleaned up.

  • Title record 17401 - Alien Salute – this is the original title record. This record “disappeared” from view when the variant was created though it’s still available from the advanced search.
  • Title record 199031 - Alien Salute – This was created when making the variant.

I edited 199031 to change the author name from "Rhondi_A._Vilott_Salsitz" (the real name) to "Charles Ingrid" (the pseudonym) and at the moment the title is showing on Charles Ingrid's page as "Alien Salute (1989) {as by Charles Ingrid}." Once I understand how to undo a variant I'll fix this record up too. Marc Kupper 02:25, 22 Nov 2006 (CST)

An update on this - Title record 17394 - Solar Kill is only missing from the author's Long Works page. The record is visible on the alphabetical and chronological pages. Marc Kupper 02:37, 22 Nov 2006 (CST)

I think I know how that "The Two Towers" had the doubled publication contents.

Consider THRLLNGSTP2005. I created it as follows:

  1. I created THRLLNGSTN2005 with the Add Publication to This Title tool.
  2. I cloned it and changed the ISBN, noting that it had 1284 listed as contents at that point.
  3. I accepted the edit in the moderation screen, and saw there that it had contents listed. (Specifically, one copy of the title it was created for.)
  4. The resultant new publication was listed twice in the title list, and appeared to contain four copies of itself when viewed, or two when edited.

Hope this helps track it down. grendel|khan 11:38, 21 Nov 2006 (CST)

Created bug 10051 to capture this. Mike Christie 09:42, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)

Legal name vs. Birth name

We have a field for the author's legal name, which works well for simple cases, e.g. pseudonyms or abbreviated names. However, what happens if an author's legal name changes over time? A number of genre writers -- off the top of my head, Andre Norton and Nicholas Yermakov/Simon Hawke -- have changed their legal name to their primary pseudonyms and, besides, people have been known to get married. Do we want more than one field to accommodate these cases? Ahasuerus 19:35, 21 Nov 2006 (CST)

I think we can give it a definition (e.g. most recent legal name) and leave anything else to be documented in the notes field on the author record. Mike Christie 20:55, 21 Nov 2006 (CST)
I know what I want here, I just don't think there's a convenient, all-encompassing label that neatly fits. This should be "the-name-which-would-show-up-in-an-encyclopedia-article" field. It's not exactly the legal name, as in the case of Simon Hawke it leads to loss of useful and interesting information. It's not exactly the birth name, because we get weird results for female authors who married and have a later married name (James Tiptree, Jr. vs Alice Sheldon vs Alice Bradley). I don't think I want three different fields for Tiptree, so I'm in agreement with Mike that we should find some definition that works and document the rest. Alvonruff 09:57, 22 Nov 2006 (CST)

Stray Publications?

As part of ISFDB:Community_Portal#What_it_looks_like_when_I_stick_to_the_rules_I_wrote I took a look at the author named “Not Available” and fixed all four outstanding publications as the author names are available. I then hit refresh on the author page – the four novels disappeared as expected but was replaced by a list of “Stray Publications.” Google finds ISFDB:Community_Portal/Archive#Editing_omnibuses that mentions this but does not address why these only show when there are no long works. Google also finds that there are 580 authors with “Stray Publications” (meaning no long works) – I think many of them are magazine stories. Marc Kupper 03:11, 22 Nov 2006 (CST)

"Stray Publications" are typically Publications whose Author(s) do not match the Author(s) of the Title that they contain. They are only displayed in Long Works if there are no legitimate Titles for the given Author. There is a fair amount of complexity behind the scenes due to pseudonyms messing things up, but whenever Stray Publications appear, I pull them up in Publication Edit and 90% of the time there is a discrepancy between the Pub and the Title that needs to be fixed.
In this case, half the Publications do not belong in the ISFDB, so we can zap them, and the other half (like that MZB anthology) need some TLC and cleanup. Ahasuerus 09:46, 22 Nov 2006 (CST)
(Ahasuerus beat me to the Save Page button). This probably needs to be titled something more straightforward, but the "Stray Publication" warning is intended to show that something needs fixing. In this case the title records have been changed such the author in the title records is now "unknown". But the old publication records still point to the author "Not Available". "Not Available" doesn't have a bibliography, since he doesn't have any title records.
In this case if we want to preserve the author "Not Available" on the publication records (which seems unlikely), then it would need to be made a pseudonym of "unknown". If we want to get rid of "Not Available" altogether (which seems more likely in this case), then the publication records need to be updated to use "unknown". The quickest way would be to do an advanced author search on "not available" OR "unknown", and then do an author merge selecting the "All records" option. Alvonruff 09:49, 22 Nov 2006 (CST)

Bug lists

I see Ahasuerus closing and moving bugs. I'd originally thought when I numbered them that they would stay there when fixed, with a status change, so that the "increment last bug" method of getting the next bug number would work. I realize now that that doesn't sit very well with the "Open . . . Bugs" title of the page. What's a good compromise? Maybe we could rename the "Open" pages to just say "Display Bugs", and "Editing Bugs", and mark the Fixed pages as historical? Mike Christie 14:45, 22 Nov 2006 (CST)

Ideally we would have software support for bug tracking like the previously mentioned Bugzilla, which would give us multiple views of the open/closed/NAB/etc bugs. As long as it doesn't go on a rampage and destroy Tokyo, that is. Barring that, I think it's more useful to have a list of currently open bugs that can be reviewed quickly when reporting a suspected new bug than to have a complete history (which admittedly has its uses, including the ability to more reliably assign bug numbers) in one place. Ahasuerus 01:12, 24 Nov 2006 (CST)

Non genre

What's the intended use of the NONGENRE entry type? I assume it's intended for non-sf fiction. Mike Christie 12:20, 23 Nov 2006 (CST)

That's right. There has been pressure from the writer community to list all books, SF/F or otherwise, for any SF/F writers that are cataloged by the ISFDB. This is certainly understandable from the authors' POV: "If they like my fantasies written as by Matthew Hughes and/or my Wolverine book written as by Hugh Matthews, maybe they will like my mysteries written as by Matt Hughes too?"
As an aside, the opposite can also be true. Writers can become unhappy (for various values of "unhappy") when we link undisclosed pseudonyms to their main biblios or, in some cases, list their legal/birth names. Some writers who have changed gender have been known to become quite upset about the latter practice.
Anyway, since we are not limited by mundane considerations like page counts, we can certainly go along with this expansion of the project scope as long as two conditions are satisfied. First, non-genre works need to be clearly labeled as such since otehrwise our users may order what they think are a bunch of spec fiction books and end up with a pile of mysteries or romances. Second, we don't want things to get out of hand. For example, if a writer like Poul Anderson or Andre Norton wrote 100+ books of genre interest and about a dozen non-genre books, we can easily list the latter. But if somebody like E. Phillips Oppenheim wrote only half a dozen borderline SF/F books and 150 non-genre books, do we really want to list all of them? Probably not. Ahasuerus 00:59, 24 Nov 2006 (CST)

However, there's no way to mark a new novel as non genre as it doesn't show up in the pulldown at the publication level. Mike Christie 12:20, 23 Nov 2006 (CST)

At this point the software only recognizes NONGENRE Titles, but not NONGENRE Publications. Which makes sense in a way since "NONGENRE" can be a subjective thing while "NOVEL" is much closer to the "immutable truth". Ahasuerus 00:59, 24 Nov 2006 (CST)

It does show up for the title; are you supposed to create the book as a novel, then use editpub to change the title entry type to nongenre? Mike Christie 12:20, 23 Nov 2006 (CST)

That's the workaround currently in place. At one point I suggested adding "NONGENRE" to the dropdown list so that the software could then create a NOVEL Publication linked to a NONGENRE Title. Al seemed to be reluctant to go along because, IIRCH, based on prior unfortunate experiences, he wanted submissions to stick as close to the "objective" stuff as possible. But I am sure he will chime in re: this issue as soon as he wrestles that turkey to the ground :) Ahasuerus 00:59, 24 Nov 2006 (CST)

It also appears we don't differentiate between nongenre short fiction and novels; is that correct? Mike Christie 12:20, 23 Nov 2006 (CST)

There are a few grey areas in the current categorization scheme and I believe that this is one of them. Ahasuerus 00:59, 24 Nov 2006 (CST)

Cloning question

The "Clone this Pub" tool displays the following note: "You may add titles, but you cannot delete or modify titles. Modification of a title requires knowing whether you intend to modify the canonical title or wish to create a variant title. If you need to change the canonical title, do so before cloning the publication. If you need to create a variant title, first clone the publication, and then go back and make repairs after integration." Can someone explain what the third sentence here means? Surely, either way, the simplest thing to do for a non-matching title is to clone, then delete the content entry and re-add it, finally manually merging it as either a variant or the canonical version. Is there a simpler way being referred to here? Mike Christie 06:05, 24 Nov 2006 (CST)

You're saying the same thing as the third sentence. The bottomline is that the cloning tool is for cloning, not performing significant (i.e. complicated) editing. Anything complicated requires, as you state, cloning then editing. Alvonruff 11:12, 24 Nov 2006 (CST)

Same-ISBN publication records.

I fetched a database dump and ran select pub_title,pub_tag,pub_isbn,count(*) as c from pubs where pub_isbn like '0%' group by pub_isbn having c > 3;. There appear to be many duplicate publications with same publisher, same ISBN, same pagecount, but different year. This likely refers to just a reprinting with no new ISBN, right? Should these duplicate publications be deleted? I wanted to be sure before I went in and started cutting away at data. (Examples are 5936 and 2803.) grendel|khan 10:32, 24 Nov 2006 (CST)

I'm sure there are occasions when two printings will have the same ISBN. I had a quick look on my shelves and can't find an example, but I don't think we can delete without having further evidence. In the case you cite, two of the publications are complete duplicates, so it seems pretty definite that one can be deleted. There are others with slightly different dates that are likely to be reprints.
I'm putting instructions in the help saying that the printing should be noted if it's not a first printing. That would help disambiguate some of these situations. Mike Christie 11:06, 24 Nov 2006 (CST)

Content Deletion

I just tried deleting content and I'm not sure I should approve the results. The pub http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?DSTNNOVDEC78 shows four duplicate entries for each of two titles. I tried "Remove Titles from the Pub" and saw only two duplicate entries (instead of the four duplicates) for each of those two titles. I selected the second of both duplicate entries and submitted the edit. When I saw the moderator's approval notes, it appeared that both entries for both titles were about to be deleted. Here I stopped, suspecting that something was strange with the database. The edit is in the queue. PortForlorn 23:58, 24 Nov 2006 (CST)

This is a recently identified issue with duplicate contents-Publication pointers sometimes appearing in the database. Al is aware of the issue, but I don't think he knows what is causing it yet. Whenever I run into this problem, I open a separate window to keep the data handy, then delete the problem contents item and re-add it. This is the only method that has worked for me so far, but I may well be mssing something. Ahasuerus 01:01, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
OK, I'll do it that way for now. PortForlorn 01:28, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)

Magazines, pb Anthology Series, Awards and James Baen

I looked at the title and pub listings for James Baen, James P. Baen, and Jim Baen (listed as an pseudonym of James Baen). There was a pb anthology series edited by James Baen called "Destinies" (and other, later series called "Far Frontiers" and "New Destinies"). Althought "Destinies" is not listed as one of the ISFDB magazines, that was how the editor/publisher described it. And "Magazine" is the category it won the Locus Poll Award over several years. The awards were listed in the name of James P. Baen - for four years - but only identified the magazine title, "Destinies", not the individual issues each year. I'm not sure how the awards data should be handled when James P. Baen is edited to show that it is a pseudonym of James Baen.

The problem seems complicated since each award was for that year's collection of issues - not for one of them. We could reclassify "Destines" as a magazine rather than an anthology series. But that would remove the list of 11 individual issues from his summary bibliography and substitute the summary magazine/year reference. This seems a bit misleading since each issue was published as a paperback book. We could leave them as an anthology series and edit the awards data so that all the issues for the award year were listed. But that isn't what Locus actually said.

The situation is simpler for "Far Frontiers" and "New Destinies" since the awards data isn't involved. They were published as pb anthology series. But "New Destinies" also has, on its cover, the announcement: "The Paperback Magazine of Science Fiction and Speculative Fact" (just as "Destinies" did). Is it a magazine or a pb anthology? "Far Frontiers" (edited by Pournelle and Baen) was not described as a magazine but it has a similar format: each pb issue has the same title and they are only distinguished by their Volume/date numbers.

As a minor aside, I noticed that http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?29820 shows as edited by Jim Baen AND James Baen rather than Jim Baen AS BY James Baen. And is there any way to get all the titles listed for the pseudonym shown under the canonical name? PortForlorn 01:28, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)

I struggled with this when writing help text recently; here's all I could come up with:
"It can be difficult in some cases to determine if something should be regarded as a magazine or a book. Some magazines were published in book format; some books were published as series with letter columns and regular dates of publication. Borderline cases should be discussed on the magazine or book wiki pages, but generally a magazine must have a common title from issue to issue, and an enumeration or dating system of some kind. This still leaves anthology series such as New Worlds Quarterly as judgement calls. In these cases, look for a consensus on the publication bibliographic wiki page. If no discussion exists, use your best judgement and document the decision on the wiki page."
In this case I think I'd go ahead and call Destinies, at least, a magazine, despite the drawbacks you note. Probably all three are best listed as magazines. Mike Christie 08:00, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
With regard to your question about pseudonym listing, doesn't it already work that way? See Megan Lindholm for example, which lists the Robin Hobb works. It appears to work correctly for short works too; see A. Bertram Chandler for example. Do you have an example where it doesn't do this? Mike Christie 08:46, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
Pseudonyms are generally displayed "as by", but sometimes Author data in the database is messed up. In this case, some Titles/Pubs point to two Author/Editor records, i.e. both "Jim Baen" and "James Baen". I have done some work on Baen's bibliography, but there are still quite a few issues. I'll try to clean things up at the end of December when I have access to my collection which includes all Destinies, New Destinies and Far Frontiers. BTW, what would you say the canonical name for Baen should be, "Jim" or "James"? Ahasuerus 12:50, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
Nicholls gives "Jim Baen" priority, so let's go with that. Mike Christie 12:58, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
I'd agree with Mike because he used Jim since the 80's on his books. As for the pseudonym titles not being included with the titles in the canonical name's bibliography, I noticed it with Jim Baen and James Baen. Jim is currently shown as the pseudonym for James but Jim's titles don't appear in James' biblio. I'm not sure I understand Ahasuerus's comment about two author records. PortForlorn 15:19, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
In Jim Baen's case some Titles list "Jim Baen" and "James Baen" as co-editors, e.g. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?29820 There are rare cases where it would be legitimate, e.g. John Wyndham once published a books "co-authored" with his own pseudonym, but in Jim Baen's case it's just a database error that needs to be cleaned up. Ahasuerus 18:52, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
I thought that the pseudonym author always had his own author record
That's right. Ahasuerus 18:52, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
but that it linked to the cannonical name record thus forcing the AS BY. PortForlorn 15:19, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
Well, sort of. Pseudonyms are currently handled on a Title by Title basis, not on an Author by Author basis. This is primarily due to the fact that there can be dozens of writers behind a "house name" as well as other bizarre combos like the John Wyndham book mentioned above. Full software support for pseudonyms is hard -- if it wasn't, then everybody would be doing it! Ahasuerus 18:52, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
If Jim is currently known as the pseudonym of James, shouldn't any title listed for Jim result in an AS BY James? PortForlorn 15:19, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
Ideally, it should. However, only half the "Jim Baen" Titles are currently marked as pseudonymous Titles by "James Baen", the rest haven't been touched yet. Of course, now that we have decided to go with "Jim Baen" as the canonical name, it will all have to be redone anyway. The fun never stops :) Ahasuerus 18:52, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
By the way, what kind of bribe would it take to get Al to recreate the old ISFDB1 capability that listed an author's pseudonyms on the summary biblio page? It would also be useful in the author search results to see any pseudonym annotated with the author's cannonical name. PortForlorn 15:19, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)

Outstanding Questions

I am close to completing a draft rewrite of the whole help system, and in the process I have discovered some areas I don't fully understand, which of course hampers my ability to write the help text. Here are three questions I'd appreciate some help with.

1. Awards. How is award data entered? I can see the tables in the ER diagram, but I haven't found any data entry screens for any of this information. Is it done behind the scenes? I'd like to know both how award nominees and winners are marked, and also how new awards are created.

Can't do it yet. I'm still mulling over the best UI paradigm to accomplish that. I'll probably put that in over the Christmas break. Alvonruff 10:35, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
OK, glad I didn't just miss a screen that was right in front of me. I'd say this is quite low priority, since it is not very volatile. There are lots of higher priority bugs and features -- the ISFDB watchlist would definitely be top of my list. Mike Christie 10:46, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
It's true that ISFDB award data is not very volatile, but keep in mind that there is a bug in the Title Merge code, which results in the Title-Award association being lost 50% of the time when you merge Titles. Until this bug is fixed and/or there is a way to edit Awards, we will be slowly corrupting our Award data as we review and fix Titles :( Ahasuerus 18:58, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
Good point. I think the bug is more important than the UI: we need the bug fix regardless -- dataloss bugs are top priority. Mike Christie 08:05, 26 Nov 2006 (CST)

2. Author Merge. The Advanced Search form, when used for authors, permits Author Merge. Here's the existing help text. The discussion refers to "Robert Heinlein", the canonical form is "Robert A. Heinlein". The way I've written the help text now, a story credited to "Robert Heinlein" (as several early stories were) would be listed that way in the publication, and "Robert Heinlein" would be a pseudonym. You would definitely not want to merge these. Alternatively, if the name were entered incorrectly, you would simply correct it. So what's the use for Author Merge? It occurred to me that if a significant number of titles were entered incorrectly in a way that led to a spurious split into two authors, this might be useful. E.g. "S.P. Somtow" (kerned) vs. "S. P. Somtow". If a big tree of titles were below each of those, it would be easier to merge them than to edit each publication. Is that the intent?

Merge is for doing bulk conversions. As we move forward, this feature will become less useful as we'll have found most of the author names that need tweaking. It has been very useful up to now. Alvonruff 10:35, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
Makes sense; I also found a reference earlier on the portal discussions to using this to merge "Not available" and "Anonymous". This gives me enough to write the help text. Mike Christie 10:46, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)

3. Find Stray Titles. When looking at an author's bibliography, there's a link to "Find Stray Titles". What does it list? I tried it on Ted Chiang and it just listed everything he's written. Incidentally, after displaying stray titles, the other bibliography links cause bizarre errors; I'm about to go report that as a bug.

The stray title finder was a new tool invented a couple of days ago. Ahasuerus had deleted the titles and publications for an author, but the author didn't get deleted from the database. There were still book reviews that referred to the deleted book, but those author references were not detectable. Hence the stray title tool. It would be nice if it only showed up in the navbar whenever there are no works for an author, but that's a bit complicated. I'll look into the bibliographic links - it's probably not passing the author info to the navbar properly. Alvonruff 10:35, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
So the tool should only display titles that are referenced but do not exist? Right now it's displaying everything, as far as I can see. Mike Christie 10:46, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)

Apart from the above three points, I think everything else is documented. I've incorporated all of Al's help text, sometimes with a bit of rewriting to fit it into the new format. I plan to replace the link from Help:Contents that goes to Editing the ISFDB with a link to Help:ScreenList, with the same label. Let me know if you have a better idea.

I still have to go through the last couple of dozen community portal sections to find discussions of odds and ends that may need to be included. Please go ahead and edit the help wherever you can see a way to improve it. Mike Christie 08:00, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)

Excellent job! I will try to review the new Help pages over the next few days and comment on them. I am currently nursing my wrists after a 500 edit marathon session the other day -- fixing data is addictive :) Ahasuerus 18:58, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)
The Help screen now points to Help:ScreenList for the "Editing" link. I think the old help pages can all be deleted, once the new pages are reviewed. I'll leave them for a week or two in case anyone wants to refer to them for comparison; I think I got most of the useful text out of them and reused it, but no reason to delete them right away. I'm also going to delete the templates I put in them; I've reorganized the templates by source table -- there's a list on my user page.
I still need to add text for "Find Stray Titles", which I don't understand yet, and for "Publishers", which I haven't really looked at yet -- someone else can add that text if they wish. Mike Christie 08:04, 26 Nov 2006 (CST)
Since the Stray Title tool is confusing, I've removed it for now. I'll retool it to make it's meaning more intuitive. Alvonruff 09:39, 26 Nov 2006 (CST)

Using Wiki's Project pages

While reviewing various discussions over the last few days, it occurred to me that the table that Mark posted in this section is a good candidate for addition to ISFDB:Author Names Cleanup, one of our Project pages. We may want to start moving some of our other discussions (Help pages? Pseudonym support?) to Project pages as well if we want to keep them manageable. Wikis are great for some things, but sometimes you wish you had old-fashioned thread support a la Usenet or even Web forums... Ahasuerus 19:12, 25 Nov 2006 (CST)

This is an area that’s been bugging me a little but I don’t have a “great” solution in mind. My problem is that with wikitalk is that it’s rather painful to catch up as I do want to read all of the new comments for each thread/sub-thread plus an running into that “conversations” are starting to happen on multiple talk pages. Does the wiki system have a message board like interface that’ll organize posts into threads by date, etc? I’d suggest something like Google or Yahoo groups though that creates some pain in that we can’t just copy/paste good ideas, tables, etc. right into the wikitext of ISFDB help pages. Marc Kupper 17:05, 26 Nov 2006 (CST)

Wiki Site Map Generator

I just popped over to add a new question and Mike’s comment of “I am close to completing a draft rewrite of the whole help system” is relevant. The question is “Does the wiki system have a site map generator?” Lately I’ve been finding help pages by going to ISFDB, pulling up a random publication, clicking Edit, and then clicking on the link for the help page that I wanted. There must be a bunch of helpful stuff out on the wiki that I don’t know about as they are “orphan” pages that only get linked to from places like ISFDB. If a site map generator is available then setting up a page like Help or Help:Screen would be easy. Marc Kupper 17:12, 26 Nov 2006 (CST)

Related to this is that I did not understand what Ahasuerus meant by "Project pages" in #Using_Wiki's_Project_pages and so clicked on the link to discover that "oh yes, a long time ago I saw something about ISFDB projects - I wonder where?" The problem is the project page does not have a link back to ISFDB:Projects or similar page so that someone could see what the current projects are. Marc Kupper 17:23, 26 Nov 2006 (CST)

The master Project page is Bibliographic Projects in Progress, which is linked from the Main page, but I am all for adding more and better links :) Ahasuerus 18:28, 26 Nov 2006 (CST)
When browsing about I found the MediaWiki AllPages thing which does exactly what I was looking for. It did bring to my attention that we have been referring to the “Author” and “Magazine” namespaces but have not actually set up things. Here are a few relevant articles:
  • Manual:Using_custom_namespaces – Talks about how to define/add a namespace and some ramifications of this. Someone must have spotted this at one time because there is already a custom namespace called “ISFDB.”
  • Manual:Flat_namespace – Discusses pro/con of “flat” vs. “deep.”
  • Project_talk:Namespaces – It seems ISFDB used to be “flat” and “developer centric” which has lead to confusion on my part as a new person trying to figure things out. I think much of the structure is already in place for a three tier “users,” “system administrators,” and “developers” model but could be better defined/documented including in places such as the Main_Page (which I had to link to as “Main_Page” rather than “Main Page” because the main page is in the generic “all pages” namespace and this page (Community Portal) is in the ISFDB namespace…). It’s also not clear to me in that while we talk about the “Author” or “Magazine” namespaces if such things should be formally defined. It would certainly clean up the Special:Allpages view and perhaps would expose that some pages belong in the currently unused Category namespace. Marc Kupper 13:29, 8 Dec 2006 (CST)

Uncredited material

There's been some discussion about this already, but I want to suggest a resolution. How would people feel about a rule that said that publication attributions have to reflect only what is apparent from the publication itself? For example, an editorial by John Campbell, that's well-known to be by him, but which is signed only "The Editor", should be listed with author "The Editor" in the publication. Then a variant title is created to assign that work to him, and he gets a pseudonym of "The Editor".

Does this seem reasonable? I have been assigning editorial material in Fantastic Universe on a few occasions, where I felt fairly safe doing so. However, I find I'm uncomfortable with creating publication records that don't accurately reflect the publication. I've been adding notes to the publication, saying what deductions I've made, so technically I think it's OK, but I think it might be better if the rule for author and artist attribution was "if it's not in the publication, it doesn't go in the publication record". That rule might not apply to publisher, or price, since there's no equivalent to the "variant" mechanism for recording alternative sources of information. In those cases we'd just enter the data and make a note. But given that we do have a pseudonym mechanism that works on the title level, should we use it to this extent? Mike Christie 20:34, 26 Nov 2006 (CST)

In the spirit of sticking to "objective information", I would be inclined to agree. Genre history suggests that just because an essay is signed by "The Editor" and page 1 proclaims that John Smith is the current editor of this fine magazine doesn't necessarily mean that the article was written by John Smith. There has been so much ghosting (and plain delegation) over the years that the assumption "The Editor = John Smith" strays too far away from the "objective information" standard for comfort. It's more work for us, but I think the extra effort can be justified. Ahasuerus 21:21, 26 Nov 2006 (CST)
I would agree on sticking to "objective information" information but am nervous about how when you make the variant titles that works will disappear from the pseudonym’s author page. See #Pseudonyms. For example, I just added the cover artist name for a publication. The publication stated the cover as “Romas” and that’s what I entered. I’ll assume this is Romas Kukalis who routinely did covers for DAW at the time but decided to not make the title record a variant title to link it to Romas Kukalis as it’ll yank that title away from the “author” page for “Romas.” The main downside is there are now two author records for the same person. Marc Kupper 02:32, 27 Nov 2006 (CST)
I agree this is not ideal, but it's a display issue and I think should be fixed as such. I don't want to compromise the source data for that reason -- I think we can get the display improved and in the meantime enter the information correctly, as you did for Romas.
I'm going to change the help files to correspond to this approach, and will also go back through the Fantastic Universe issues to make them conform. Mike Christie 19:33, 27 Nov 2006 (CST)

Publications: cloning and splitting

The Publication cloning tool is very nice, but there are two related scenarios that we currently have no way of handling aside from re-entering and merging all Contents data manually.

The first scenario occurs when you find a Publication that shouldn't be under its current Title. This happens fairly frequently with collections when you discover that a later reprint edition contained more (or fewer) fiction Titles. You would then want to create a new Title and make it a variant Title of the original Title plus "(expanded)" or "(abridged)" added, but the only way to do it would be to delete the existing Publication and re-enter/merge all of its Contents titles, which is a pain. The obvious solution would be to add a "Make this Publication into a New Title" option on the navbar, which I think Al briefly mentioned some months ago.

I don't see this on the feature list; it probably should be added. Do we need feature numbers, like the bug numbers? Mike Christie 10:18, 27 Nov 2006 (CST)

The second scenario happens when you find a Title with numerous Publications associated with it, e.g. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?13556 , where only the first Publication (edition) (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?THWLKLNG311900 in this case) has Contents data. The only currently supported way to propagate Contents data from the first edition to the rest of them is to clone the first edition, then update the newly created Publication with Publication-specific data from the existing Publication, and then delete the current Publication. Doable, but somewhat time consuming. One possible solution would be to add an "Existing Publication ID" field to the Cloning tool. When this field is populated, the cloning process, instead of creating a new Publication, would copy the contents of the current Publication to the one that was identified by the specified Publication ID. If the destination Publication already has Contents data, the cloning process would presumably fail since merging the Contents data of two Publications is potentially too messy (?).

Does this sounds reasonable/desirable? Ahasuerus 21:40, 26 Nov 2006 (CST)

Sounds worthwhile to me. I don't think either of these is needed for go-live, but they should be in the roadmap. Mike Christie 10:18, 27 Nov 2006 (CST)

Adding contents to an omnibus

I decided to take a spin with adding contents to an omnibus. The process itself seemed to go well but now when I look on the author’s page I see the two novels (The Spell Sword & The Forbidden Tower) contained in this omnibus floating down in the novels. Does this mean that each time I add the contents to an omnibus that I’ll need to then merge the new title record with the existing one? Marc Kupper 02:00, 27 Nov 2006 (CST)

Unfortunately, that's the way it currently works. There have been various discussions about improving the process (ultimately going to AJAX, etc), but nothing definite so far. It does raise the bar for current and especially potential editors, but in absence of a better data validation process, enabling auto-merging of newly created records is asking for trouble :( Ahasuerus 09:32, 27 Nov 2006 (CST)

One minor complication, and maybe this is why I got a new title record, is that the title (and the omnibus) are part of a series.

A thought that came to mind is that when I was adding the contents for this I was wondering why I could not just enter the title-ids for the existing novels as I was entering data I knew was redundant (title, author, copyright, etc.) and also needing to look up the dates on the copyright page. Marc Kupper 02:00, 27 Nov 2006 (CST)

That would be one way to do it and may well be the easiest one for now. Ahasuerus 09:32, 27 Nov 2006 (CST)

Watchlisting Requirements

We need to start accumulating requirements for the watchlisting feature, as there is a general belief we need to have it prior to going live. Requirements should be of two forms:

  • What changes trigger an event? Adding a book to a watchlisted author is a no-brainer. Modifying a title of which the watchlisted person is an author is a no-brainer. What about changes to titles in an anthology or magazine, which was edited by the watchlisted author? Are we only watchlisting authors, or are we watching other datatypes as well?
  • What happens when a watchlist event occurs?

Alvonruff 06:47, 28 Nov 2006 (CST)

Of course I support the watchlist, but I don't know that everyone does -- Ahasuerus is unconvinced, I think, for example. I've started a separate topic below about what should be done by beta, but here are my answers to the questions above.
  • I think we need to be able to watchlist titles; I think authors are lower priority, and publications may not be needed at all. Watchlisting awards isn't necessary because we can't edit them; series can be handled via titles; and publishers are free text so that would be very hard to do well, and shouldn't be in the beta.
  • For a watchlisted title, the triggers are:
    • changes to the title record
    • adding or deleting it as a parent of a variant title record
    • changes (add, modify, delete) to any of the content records for that title
    • title merges that involve it
  • For a watchlisted author, the triggers are
    • changes to the author record
    • changes to any of the author's title records
    • author merges that involve it
    • addition or deletion of title records that refer to the author
So the answer to your question is yes, if you watchlist Campbell, you're notified of any changes such as an edit to the title record that is part of the contents of an Astounding he edited. Future enhancements could include the ability to fine tune watchlists to exclude magazines or anthologies, for example, but I don't think we need that now -- and as I said, I don't think we even need author watchlists first time out. An author project could manage with just titles.
When a watchlist event occurs, nothing happens. When you click "My watchlist" in the ISFDB, a list of approved submission records is displayed, sorted by title, that meet your watchlist criteria. Clicking on the submission record displays the same screen as moderator approval, but without the approve/reject button.
The other change needed would be an "Watch this Title" and "Unwatch this Title" link in the navbar, and similarly for authors if we implement that. Mike Christie 07:45, 28 Nov 2006 (CST)
The reason I am not convinced is that I am not sure what the scope of this task will be and how long it will take to implement, although Mike's requirements are a good start and I am currently in the process of trying to digest them. I wonder if we could start with the low hanging fruit and update the Recent Edits section by linking the Subject field to the updated Publication/Title/Author record as well as adding a new field -- call it Edit # -- that would be hyperlinked to the same "Before and After" form that moderators see when they approve submissions? Ahasuerus 13:13, 28 Nov 2006 (CST)
I'd personally can the project for now. It's a good abd useful idea but having coded several watchlist style systems in the past I can say it's a big messy thing. Marc Kupper 21:33, 30 Nov 2006 (CST)

Where to talk about the beta

Where are we going to talk about what's needed for the beta? I'm mindful of Ahasuerus's comment that we need to stop having every single conversation on this one page. Some thoughts:

  • A feature list roadmap showing what's in and what's out for the beta seems necessary. Personally I don't think we need the pseudonym editor, for example; I'd rather have, e.g., a resubmit capability for rejected edits. I think the feature list talk page seems the right page for that discussion.
  • How to recruit beta editors, how many to recruit, and what the goals and exit criteria for the beta are. Maybe this should be a new page; perhaps Project:Beta.
  • What bugs need to be fixed before beta. Possibly a section on Project:Beta, or perhaps on the talk pages of the buglist pages?
  • What further page editing and organization is needed to the Wiki itself before beta. E.g. cleaning out the old help files; improving the project page links and organization, adding new help pages for any new functionality, and anything else we think we might need. Parts of this could go on Project:Beta, but perhaps some of it could go on the relevant talk pages -- perhaps Talk:Bibliographic Projects in Progress would be a good page to organize projects from, for example.
  • Do we want to assign tasks amongst ourselves? E.g one of us takes on project organization, another works on beta planning? I know Al is going to have to do all the ISFDB work, unless someone else here knows Python and the task is farmable.

-- Mike Christie 07:45, 28 Nov 2006 (CST)

Good questions, Mike. I am trying to think this through, but at the moment I am a little groggy and overmedicated due to some pebbles stuck in the system , so I am not making much progress. I'll post something on the new Project page once I am borderline coherent. (No sympathy posts, please: It's all my fault - I should have gotten an extended warranty for this hardware!)Ahasuerus 20:41, 29 Nov 2006 (CST)

Unmerge?

I see comments on "unmerge" in the notes on 10006; what's an unmerge? Is this a feature I missed writing help for? Mike Christie 19:12, 28 Nov 2006 (CST)

There used to be two unmerges: publication and title. The publication unmerge was a horrible mistake and support was revoked. This lead to the widespread purge of all things unmerge, which unadvertently removed the title unmerge function, which I just found while looking at the bug Ahasuerus filed.
Let's say that someone mistakenly merged two titles together and the submission somehow got through our top-notch moderation process and was integrated. Rather than deleting publications from the existing title, and re-entering them into a new version of the old title that was lost after the merge, an unmerge will take all of the publications under a title, and break each one out into it's own title. Example: let's say there is a title that looks like this:
 Title: Darwin's Blade
 Author: Dan Simmons
 Year: 2000
 Publications:
   * Darwin's Blade (2000 , William Morrow, 0380973693, $25.00, 368pp, hc)
   * Darwin's Blade: A Novel of Suspense (Oct 2001 , HarperTorch, 0380789183, $7.50, tp)
   * Das Schlangenhaupt. (Mar 2002 , Goldmann, 3442451051, tp)
   * Bisturi de Darwin (Jul 2002 , Diagonal -Grupo 62, 8495808072, $60.90, tp)
Performing an unmerge on this title (not that you would, but as an exanmple) would bust up these publications and create titles, such that the following titles would now exist:
   * Darwin's Blade (2000)
   * Darwin's Blade: A Novel of Suspense (2001)
   * Das Schlangenhaupt. (2002)
   * Bisturi de Darwin (2002)
Any duplicates would have to be remerged by hand. Alvonruff 19:32, 28 Nov 2006 (CST)
(This time Al beat me to the Save button). At this point, the option gives you no choice but to convert all Publications for a given Title into separate Titles, but that Submit button makes me wonder if Al may be planning to convert it into a form with checkboxes that will let you select which Publications you want to Unmerge from the Title. That would save a lot of re-merging time when there are only half a dozen erroneously merged Publications out of a few dozen (see the Bramah example above). Ahasuerus 19:39, 28 Nov 2006 (CST)
That's a good idea. For later. Alvonruff 20:27, 28 Nov 2006 (CST)

Reviving Bibliographic Rules

FYI, in the spirit of moving different discussions to different pages, I just tried to revive Bibliographic Rules with a post on Multiple Authors with Identical Names. Ahasuerus 23:54, 29 Nov 2006 (CST)

A related FYI: I'm going to go through Bibliographic Rules and update help with any conclusions. I'll add a note to each Bibliographic Rules section about what impact it will have on help text.
I also think there's a discussion to have about the relationship between help and bibliographic rules; I'll start that at Talk:Bibliographic Rules. Mike Christie 19:04, 30 Nov 2006 (CST)

Anonymous, uncredited, etc.

(Salvaged from an archived section as it may be useful for ongoing cleanup. Feel free to move it to an appropriate project page if there is one. Mike Christie 08:37, 2 Dec 2006 (CST))

Isfdb seems to have the following: Marc Kupper 14:10, 16 Nov 2006 (CST)

Author Long Short Awards Comments
Anonymous ~150 ~250 6
Anonyous 0 3 0 Should get merged with Anonymous [Fixed Marc Kupper 02:47, 22 Nov 2006 (CST)]
Not Available 4 0 0 This sounds like our "not stated" [Fixed - I checked each of the four titles and for each was able to dig up the author name. Marc Kupper 03:01, 22 Nov 2006 (CST)]
uncredit 0 1 0 Should get merged with uncredited. [Fixed Marc Kupper 02:47, 22 Nov 2006 (CST)]
uncredited 0 ~1,000 0
Unknown ~1,050 ~550 172 Used for many cover/interior art instead of "unsigned"
unknown ~1,050 ~550 172 Both "unknown" and "Unknown" get used but search returned same list
unknownAfghan 0 1 0 No explanation in the story notes about this
unsigned 45 0 0 All 45 long works are for Interior Art
Unknown Unknown Listed on http://www.isfdb.org/DIR_U.html but not found
Various 69 0 0
Various Authors 2 0 0 Should get merged into Various [both were bad entries and have been deleted. Ahasuerus]


Reorganization of Bibliographic Rules and Help

I was going to start this at Talk:Bibliographic Rules, but I think it's more general than that. I think that BR has a lot of overlap with the help files, and we need to regularize this. For instance, the detailed help file templates contain a lot of information about what should be entered in every field. Any relevant information about the data entry has to end up in the help files, either explicitly or by reference. I've opted for putting it in there explicitly, so I think that reduces the utility of the BR page.

Discussions of the help rules should, I think, be conducted on the talk pages of those templates. For example, if you want to debate whether a ToC entry for an author should be higher or lower priority for spelling than the entry on the heading for the story itself, then Template talk:TitleFields:Author is where you should start, since Template:TitleFields:Author is where that rule is given.

There are some things that could legitimately be included by reference. For example, there's a section on scope that is probably better left as a separate policy statement. It's already been duplicated in ISFDB:Policy, in fact, and that's a better home for it.

I suggest I archive each of the current BR discussions once I've gone through and made sure that their conclusions are reflected in the help file, and then post a heading to the BR page saying that it is for debates on bibliographic rules, but only where they do not fit on the talk page for an appropriate help file or help template. If we find no debates occur there, we can close the page down. Mike Christie 09:11, 2 Dec 2006 (CST)

Well, back when I first created Bibliographic Rules, we had no other place to discuss these issue aside from the Community Portal and we had no Help pages. Now that we have more formal and more detailed Help pages that describe how data should be entered intho the systen, we can certainly move low level discussions to individual Help/Talk pages. We just need to make sure that everybody can find these discussions easily :) Also, there will probably always be a need for high level discussions re: policy issues that are too generic to be handled on individual Talk pages within the Help namespace. Ahasuerus 18:19, 2 Dec 2006 (CST)
Agreed on both counts. I'll go ahead and archive the page some time today, and put up a draft notice about where to go for certain kinds of discussion. Mike Christie 08:02, 3 Dec 2006 (CST)

Using the Storylen / Length field to note series/volume numbers

On Tanya Huff’s page I saw

I was curious as to how the “/1,2” etc. was added to the omnibus indicator and on editing the title record learned it's was done by setting the “Storylen” field to “/1,2”. This use of the “Length” (aka “Storylen”) field is not documented and I'm wondering if it's in error or should be documented as a standard ISFDB practice. I certainly found the indicator helpful though it does mean a little double entry of data. Marc Kupper 15:45, 2 Dec 2006 (CST)

The field has been doing double duty for a long time. The notation itself comes from John Wenn's biblio lists back in the early 1990s. "Storylen" is also used for things like "jvn" (YA novels), so it's currently heavily overloaded. I think that Al's main reason for not splitting it into multiple fields is the desire to keep the number of fields per form manageable. And yes, we should certainly document the current usage. Ahasuerus 17:33, 2 Dec 2006 (CST)
I've added a description of this to the help page. I didn't cover the "jvn"; where does that get displayed? Mike Christie 08:10, 3 Dec 2006 (CST)
To quote an ancient Database Schema document:
title_storylen - This column has been overloaded to mean numerous things. For shortfiction, nv=novella, nt=novelette, ss=shortstory, sf=shortfiction (unknown length). For novels jvn=juvenile, nvz=novelization. This is totally messed up and needs a new mechanism.
Emphasis added :) Ahasuerus 12:58, 3 Dec 2006 (CST)

Determining the source(s) of ISFDB data

Copied from Author:Franklin_W._Dixon: Something I wondered about a long time ago is when I’m looking at an ISFDB record (author, title, publication, etc.) is how can I determine the source of the information and its update history? Sometimes knowing the source, a dope smoking penguin for example, will help me decide if something is just garbage data and safe to change or if the data is from a typically reliable source (Locus Magazine for example) then I’m better off creating a new or variant record rather than overwriting the existing data. Marc Kupper 03:13, 3 Dec 2006 (CST)

This is a known problem and the driving force behind the Verification system which has taken shape over the last few months. In absence of Verification flags, you can check the usual suspects listed in our Sources of Bibliographic Information, although it can be quite time consuming. Ahasuerus 14:09, 3 Dec 2006 (CST)
My question was aimed more at that when I'm verifying today I will look and may see 20 publications and I see one that's close to my copy but not perfect. I'm still unsure if it's safe to edit that publication to make it a perfect match with my publication or if I should clone it and edit the copy. If the record is from an “unreliable” source then everyone is better off with the publication record getting edited. With a DAW Books publication I'm familiar enough with what should or should not be out there that I can make this judgment call without knowing the source but for something like a Macmillan reprint from the 1960s I'll have no idea if a record is one that a person has carefully edited or if it got scraped together by the dissembler. Marc Kupper 00:29, 7 Dec 2006 (CST)
That's precisely the "known problem" that I was referring to above :) Prior to the implementation of the Verification flag, there was no way of telling where the data had come from. Hence it was impossible to determine by looking at the data whether the difference between your edition and the edition(s) listed in the ISFDB was due to a real difference between two real printings or whether it was due to bad data in the ISFDB.
The good news is that once most Publications cataloged by the ISFDB have been Verified, we will have a high(er) degree of confidence that any differences are real. The bad news is that it doesn't help much while the percentage of Verified Publications is still very low, but things should improve over time. For now, the only recourse that I am aware of is to consult the "usual suspects" mentioned above and see if the ISFDB data is obviously in error. Not a great solution, but at least there is light at the end of the tunnel... Ahasuerus 10:36, 7 Dec 2006 (CST)
My recommendation would definitely be to edit the copy you see to match the copy you have in hand, and mark it as verified. I don't think unverified records will have much value to the ISFDB, eventually, and a verified record from you is far more valuable than an unverified one of indeterminate origin with no verification and no promise there will ever be verification. If the data is close enough to your copy that you think it's reasonable to believe it's your copy, edit it. Mike Christie 18:42, 7 Dec 2006 (CST)

Order of authors in a collaboration

The help text currently says to make the order of authors alphabetical. I did these because I'd seen some problem caused by having different publications of a title entered with the authors in different orders. I now can't think of what the problem was; perhaps just that reviews don't connect correctly if the order differs? If anyone has seen this issue, can you tell me what it is? Mike Christie 21:44, 6 Dec 2006 (CST)

The only issue that I am aware of is that the Title Merge screen will ask you to select the preferred order if you are merging "A+B" with "B+A", but AFAIK it's harmless. Ahasuerus 23:03, 6 Dec 2006 (CST)

The related question (which could be posted at Template:PublicationFields:Author, but I'm here so I might as well ask it) is whether we should make the order reflect what's on the title page or not? The "alphabetical" instructions will lead to reversing some well known pairings, in some cases making the "with" author come first -- e.g. "Donald A. Wollheim with Arthur W. Saha", who edited some of the DAW anthologies. Any preferences? Mike Christie 21:44, 6 Dec 2006 (CST)

If we decide to capture the stated order of author names in a collaboration, then I assume that we would have to record any reversals in subsequent reprints, making them, mm, variant titles, I guess? I am not sure it's worth the effort. Ahasuerus 23:03, 6 Dec 2006 (CST)
I personally am picky about the author order which is why I engaged in a battle with ISFDB (Open_Editing_Bugs # 10054) to get the order to show the way it's stated. But, I also care more about the order at the publication level than at the title level as I see the title records as a "merged consensus" of the publications. Hopefully if someone researches just what the consensus seems to be then ISFDB will reliably preserve whatever the person enters and not change the order of things. Related to this are the collections or anthologies where page numbers have not been entered yet – the order ISFDB uses by default seems baffling and it leads to a rather long hunt-n-peck session just to get the page numbers entered so that I can say “yes, this record now matches my publication.” Marc Kupper 00:50, 7 Dec 2006 (CST)
There is NO author order in the ISFDB. There is only the set of authors associated with a book. The author order as returned by the SQL query will depend upon the order of records in the author/title mapping table, and can subsequently be shuffled by the Python scripts as they collect/translate the data into HTML. The same is true of title order in a collection - there is no way for the ISFDB to know what order the titles appeared in unless you tell it - with page numbers. You can't depend on the order that they appear in the database - because that is EXACTLY what the ISFDB is doing now. If you first have collection A, with stories in order 1, 2, 3, and 4; and then have anthology B with stories in order 5, 3, 2, 6 - then the order in the title table will be: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Displaying the anthology without page numbers would then give an order of 2, 3, 5, 6. There's simply no way to preserve the title order without specifically stating that order, and we're using page numbers to do that.
The only way to implement title ordering without page numbers would be to put a hidden ordinal that isn't displayed. That would lead to other problems. For instance when I enter a magazine I first enter the data in the table of contents and submit, and then I carefully thumb through the magazine page by page to find errors in the TOC, enter interior artwork, and enter book reviews. Without page numbers, but using ordinals, this would result in the wrong order unless I could do title INSERTS instead of APPENDS, which greatly complicates an HTML form (maybe in AJAX that could work). The author order could theoretically be done with ordinals in the author/title mapping table. The bottomline, however, is that there is currently no order preservation in the ISFDB. Alvonruff 07:14, 7 Dec 2006 (CST)
Isn't it a temporary problem, though? As ISFDB data improves, we will have more and more Publications with page numbers, so eventually the issue will fade away. The only scenario where the problem is likely to persist is when Publication data comes from a secondary source that doesn't list page numbers, e.g. a Mongolian library catalog, and it may be hard to Verified physically. Granted, it may take a while to get to the point where a vast majority of Publications have been physically Verified, but eventually the problem should be alleviated, shouldn't it? Ahasuerus 10:45, 7 Dec 2006 (CST)
I agree that the hidden ordinal for titles will be a pain and so let’s not try that path. A simpler idea for the edit-publication (and probably the display-publication) page(s) would be to sort unpaginated titles in some sort of order. By author or title will do, by date is probably less useful. That way when someone is looking at a list of 30+ titles in an anthology trying to assign page numbers or look for a story the visual search process will be a tad more efficient. Or, you could duplicate the title and/or author in the display HTML along with what’s in the edit field and someone can use the Ctrl-F find to search the page for the field that needs the page #.
Something that could be done as a 1-time pass would be to search for publications that have unpaginated titles, sort the list, and to assign page numbers starting at 10,000. Then the main display code would not need to change (assuming it’s ok with five digit page numbers).
A visible ordinal for the contributor names does seem needed. People care about whose name goes first and secondary contributors are nearly always at the end of the list. The ordinal would be visible on the edit page so that if there’s a need to change the order you can just change the numbers. Marc Kupper 14:12, 7 Dec 2006 (CST)
Some version of a sort order would be handy, but I don't think we need it for Beta. This would be a good feature suggestion. Mike Christie 18:44, 7 Dec 2006 (CST)

Prioritizing Data Entry/Verification

I will have access to my collection in late December - early January as well as a fair amount of free time to enter/verify data. What would you say the most efficient way of spending this time will be? I am thinking that I could start with entering the stuff from my "special" boxes which contain rare pulps, obscure 1940s/1950s British digests, early self-published pamphlets by people who eventually became professional writers (e.g. Lin Carter), etc. Alternatively, I could do physical verification of a bunch of pulps, which would go faster but wouldn't yield any new data for the database. Ahasuerus 12:33, 8 Dec 2006 (CST)

That's a really good question. Last week I found the boxes with my Analog collection (1965 to some relatively recent date), and have started systematically going through them 1 by 1. It's fairly tedious, and I find the need to mix it up with other work (like implementing reject reason support). I think that there is a ton of validation that can first be done against Contento - it's the first step I take with the magazines I do have. When I'm off I can manage to verfiy about a decade per day against Contento, which means something like F&SF will take the better part of a week to validate. So there's easily a few years worth of work to do against the stuff we already have entered.
I think I'm leaning toward the more obscure stuff as a priority, as it may not have been indexed anywhere else to date, and it's obscure - meaning fewer people will have that data on hand. Alvonruff 12:48, 8 Dec 2006 (CST)
Well, trying to think like a resource optimizer, I'd say that as moderators we'll be doing just fine if we never enter a single thing and spend time making things easier for editors. I'm working on Fantastic Universe right now, kind of as fill-in, while waiting for us to go live. I hope that there'll be enough data entry going on by editors that I'll be busy reviewing it and won't have time to enter much. Of course it's fun to enter data, so I won't give it up completely, but I think my best value to the project is going to be validating old sf data entry, particularly magazines; and perhaps also communication and new user training.
Al, for you the highest value has got to be bug fixing and enhancements. I bet you feel the same way about having fun entering data, but I don't think there's a lot of point in any of us doing much data entry right now -- it doesn't bring editing closer, and we don't (yet) have the tools to ensure the data doesn't get corrupted. Marc's data entry is different -- his data source is outside the ISFDB, so he has an audit trail for his data.
Ahasuerus's access to rare pulps etc. is special enough that I do think there's a lot of value in entering that data, more so than the pulps. There should be a fair number of people with decent magazine collections; I'm not going to bother doing verification on the digests, for example, until I see where the gaps are after some other editors have got involved.
So I'd say if Al didn't want to have fun, he should do nothing but code till we go live. That's the way to maximize value for time, I think. Al, do you want to have fun? :o) Mike Christie 13:08, 8 Dec 2006 (CST)
I have personally flip-flopped at times on this with the conflict being generated because I see value in both having good data to act as a model/guide for new people but that attention also needs to be spent on making sure the overall system works well. Mike Christie recently verified a bunch of DAW books and that has been helpful to me as it exposed holes in my personal verification methods and how/what the DAW List and ISFDB should be showing (or not showing). It’s also triggered additional questions about ISFDB which I’ll mull over and post. Marc Kupper
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