Help:How to update cover artist data

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This page is a help or manual page for the ISFDB database. It describes standards or methods for entering or maintaining data in the ISFDB database, or otherwise working with the database. Other help pages may be found via the category below. To discuss what should go on this page, use the talk page.

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Cover artists are sometimes added later to a publication record for several reasons, for example if they were not known when the publication was entered initially. Changing or adding cover artists can require multiple steps.

  1. Change or add the artist(s). For detailed help on the individual fields on the screen, and what should be entered in them, please refer to Template:PublicationFields:CoverArt.
  2. Create pseudonyms and variants if necessary in the same way you'd do it for authors.
  3. Check if a cover image had been uploaded into the wiki already. That's the case if there is a cover image, of course, and if the Cover art supplied by link goes to the ISFDB wiki. In this case, you have to change the cover art's wiki page as well:
  • If the number of cover artists has not changed, just replace the old with the new artist for the Artist= value (or Artist1=, Artist2= etc. values for multiple artists).
  • If the number of cover artists has changed, you will need to add or remove additional artist parameters. So if there was two artists (Artist= and Artist2=) and you wish to add a third, add a new Artist3= line with the artist's canonical name. If you need to remove one, delete the applicable line. However, the artist numbers need to be in sequential order (Artist=, Artist2=, Artist3=, Artist4=, Artist5=) so if you any but the last, you will need to renumber the remainder.

The templates support up to 5 cover artists.

The standard cover art templates are: