User:Alvonruff/An Open Letter To The SF Community
This text is a draft, and not final.
Late last year, ISFDB moderators helped Lee Mandelo with a change to his canonical name. We thought that the matter was closed, but it was revived this summer with numerous, factually incorrect assertions being made on Wikipedia's article about the ISFDB. As such, I would like to highlight and correct those assertions.
Let’s start with some basics. The ISFDB is a website with a collection of bibliographic data and tools. It is not a company or organization. It is not a registered LLC, non-profit or otherwise, and has no CEO, President, Secretary, Treasurer, or Office of Public Relations. The ISFDB is an open-source, open-data project. We provide source code for people who want to host their own private versions of the ISFDB, and people do that. We provide the database contents for people who want to build their own search tools, and people do that. For people who are not savvy with software and databases we provide an editing platform that people can utilize at isfdb.org.
As an open-data project, the ISFDB is intended to be a self-service bibliographic platform. Because bibliographies can be complicated, and because databases are structured, we have bibliographic rules, and to ensure that the people who edit the data conform to those bibliographic rules, we have moderators. The moderators are there to ensure bibliographic correctness - they are not there to be your personal bibliographers. If you find a problem in your data on the ISFDB, you need to take ownership of that problem, roll up your sleeves, and fix it. That’s how open source works. If you are unfamiliar with the open source philosophy, the article at Wikipedia is a good starting point, which highlights the central tenet of a “decentralized development model that encourages open collaboration”. For the ISFDB, this tenet applies to both the software and the data.
There are a wide range of difficulties associated with editing data. For instance, changing or deleting your legal name is a trivial edit that only takes a few seconds to change. Others, like changing a canonical name that has at least one pseudonym is the most complicated kind of edit you can make. There can be a large number of steps to execute, and it’s unlikely you can successfully navigate the process without moderator help. But you need to directly ask the moderators for that help, and the best way to do that is by posting to the Moderator Noticeboard on the ISFDB Wiki.
The same self-service philosophy applies to offensive remarks found on the Wiki. The ISFDB is constantly bombarded by spam bots and vandals. If you find an inappropriate or offensive remark on a wiki page, you can select ‘View History’, find the offensive entry, and click ‘Undo’. You can determine if the offending remark was made by a moderator by going to the Moderator Noticeboard, and looking at the alphabetized list on the right-hand side of the page.
That said, I have some remarks on Jason Sanford’s blog post about Lee Mandelo and the ISFDB, titled: “ISFDB Fights Using Author’s Name”. Jason’s text is shown below as indented bold text:
'The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB), the SF/F genre’s main database of publication-related information, fought against changing Lee Mandelo’s name in the site’s author listing for over a year. Instead, ISFDB insisted on continuing to use Mandelo’s deadname.'
This is factually incorrect. There was a single submission made to the ISFDB on 25 July 2021, which attempted to erase Mandelo’s biographical information, and passively stated in a note that the canonical name should be changed. This submission was rejected due to the destructive data erasure and its attempt at an improper procedure for making a name change. A note was placed by the moderator on the submitter’s talk page describing the correct procedure that the submitter should take. The submitter never took that action. No follow up occurred from Mandelo or any intermediary until 28 November 2022 - 16 months later. The fundamental issue here is that the moderator presumed that Mandelo’s intermediary would follow the instructions and handle the change, and Mandelo’s intermediary presumed that the ISFDB would handle the change. It should be made clear that neither Mandelo, nor any intermediary, actually attempted to make any bibliographic changes; they simply passed notes along in empty or destructive data submissions. The ISFDB never refused a name change, and it is completely disingenuous to say that we “fought against changing Lee Mandelo’s name … for over a year”. That quote implies that the ISFDB repeatedly said no to attempted changes, but there were no attempted changes to say no to - no one made any additional requests over the subsequent 16 months. The reality is that we gave Mandelo’s intermediary the process steps for making the change, and they refused to make them.
On 14 December 2022, Mandelo posted a name change request to the Moderator Noticeboard. There was a lengthy four-day bibliographic discussion (which you can read at https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/ISFDB:Moderator_noticeboard/Archive_31#Records_Correction_-_Name_.26_Profile_Display) to collect all of the relevant information: which works were published exclusively under the old name, which were published exclusively under the new name, and which were published under both names. For those published under both names, some investigation was required to determine the publication date associated with the new name. 31 process steps were identified, and 40 individual edits were implemented on 19 December 2022. Once the problem was brought to the attention of moderators, it took a total of five days to rectify. Sanford’s accusations were posted on 31 December 2022, twelve days after all the changes were wrapped up. A detailed timeline of all data submissions and communications associated with Lee Mandelo's name change can be found at: https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/User:Alvonruff/A_Post-Mortem_on_the_Lee_Mandelo_Name_Change
'One ISFDB moderator eventually stated the bigoted reason behind their resistance: "So what happens if you decide to de-transition, as so many people in the news have said they're doing lately because they realized they shouldn't have transitioned in the first place?"'
This is also false, and lacks easily-obtained, fundamental fact checking . A user of the ISFDB posted the remark, but that user was not a moderator, and does not speak for the ISFDB, and certainly doesn’t speak for me, or the other moderators I work with. As stated previously, it’s your data - if you discover an offensive remark or vandalism on the ISFDB Wiki, you should remove it, not complain about it.
'Finally Mandelo went public with the fight, with Jordan Kurella, Jaymee Goh, and many others also criticizing ISFDB’s actions. The bad publicity appears to have convinced ISFDB to make the change. Mandelo’s entry and associated publications now lists his correct name.'
Actually we responded to Mandelo’s post on the Moderator Noticeboard from 14 December. I received an email from Gareth Jelley, editor of Interzone, on the same date, which is how it came to my attention. I posted the request on the Community Portal on the same day, and was told that the conversion had already begun. We can’t see Kurella’s Twitter post in the new world of X, but Goh’s complaint (posted on 17 December, while we were already implementing the name change) was about their legal name, which could have been easily rectified by simply getting on the database and fixing it.
There were some post-Jason tweets made by P. Nielsen Hayden (Tor), Jonathan Strahan, and Phoebe Barton (SFWA), that are disappointing, as they simply took Jason’s text as factual truth, when it was not. Barton’s post is somewhat awkward, as she is a member of the SFWA Board, and as of this writing SFWA is still deadnaming Mandelo at https://sfwa.org/bulletin-index/s22.htm
If Tor and SFWA really want to address the timeliness issue with trans author names then they should step up and support a simple fix: major genre publishers and SFWA should designate a member of their staff to become an ISFDB moderator. Their time commitment would be extremely limited, only focusing on high-priority author changes. An author could then simply call their editor (or SFWA rep), say they would like to change their canonical name on the ISFDB, and their rep could respond with: “I’ll take care of it”. Even if the rep doesn’t know precisely how to fix the issue, they would at least know to post a request on the Moderator Noticeboard. This not only solves the timeliness and procedural issues, but also provides immediate verification that the requestor is actually the author in question.
I am massively disappointed in the SF community. I really don’t understand why the first reaction to any issue is to pull out the pitchforks and torches, and start burning everything to the ground with outrage, without checking any facts, or attempting a civil discussion about the matter. It’s disheartening for the folks at the ISFDB who contribute money and time to give you a free platform for bibliographies, only to wake up to accusations of “transphobic bigotry” because no one bothered to get their facts straight.
Signed