Difference between revisions of "User talk:Stewartcbaker"

From ISFDB
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Line 61: Line 61:
 
This gets especially bad when looking at tables of contents, such as the one for Shimmer which included that title: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?671037
 
This gets especially bad when looking at tables of contents, such as the one for Shimmer which included that title: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?671037
  
−
Although "as by alternate name" might be clearer to the ISFDB insider, someone checking through this from the outside is going to see that Faint Voices, Increasingly Desperate, is written by someone called Alan, and skim the rest of the link.  (This is the story that led me down this rabbit hole. It was cited on File770's review of Hugo-eligible short story editors for 2018, and listed Anya under her birth name instead of her actual name.
+
Although "as by alternate name" might be clearer to the ISFDB insider, someone checking through this from the outside is going to see that Faint Voices, Increasingly Desperate, is written by someone called Alan, and skim the rest of the link.  (This is the story that led me down this rabbit hole. It was cited on File770's review of Hugo-eligible short story editors for 2018, and listed Anya under her birth name instead of her actual name.)  The interview with Anya for that issue is even worse, since it doesn't even note that Anya is the name it was published under--despite the fact that the interview title is "Shimmer Interviews: Anya Johanna DeNiro" ISFDB describes it as an interview of Alan DeNiro.
  
 
[[User:Stewartcbaker|Stewartcbaker]] 12:31, 24 September 2018 (EDT)
 
[[User:Stewartcbaker|Stewartcbaker]] 12:31, 24 September 2018 (EDT)

Revision as of 12:32, 24 September 2018

Welcome!

Hello, Stewartcbaker, 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:

Note: Image uploading isn't entirely automated. You're uploading the files to the wiki which will then have to be linked to the database by editing the publication record.

Please be careful in editing publications that have been primary verified by other editors. See Help:How to verify data#Making changes to verified pubs. But if you have a copy of an unverified publication, verifying it can be quite helpful. See Help:How to verify data for detailed information.

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!.--Dirk P Broer 19:40, 22 September 2018 (EDT)

Anya Johanna DeNiro

Hi, I'm a bit at a loss for what you are trying to accomplish with the change in preferred name. Isfdb policy is to grant a most common name used in publications as the so-called canonical name, regardless whether that is the 'true' name of the author or not. And even when 'Anya Johanna DeNiro' were to be that canonical name, then would all pre name change publications still have the original name as 'as published by', as we do not falsify history. See e.g. R. L. Fanthorpe as an example what it means in our database to have multiple names under which your work came out. Any name change for Fanthorpe would not 'solve' anything either, all work would come under the new name just as it appeared under the old (minus one -the change- and with one added: Fanhorpe, the original name). I hope I've made myself clear, if not do not be afraid to ask questions.--Dirk P Broer 19:56, 22 September 2018 (EDT)

Hi Dirk,
A policy that treats somebody's gender identity as a pseudonym implies that their gender identity is fake. That has the potential to be incredibly harmful to transgender people, who already face significant bullying and attacks online.
I would encourage you to consider changing your policy to whatever that person has most recently self-identified as, similar to Wikipedia's policy on gender identity: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Gender_identity
If you're not familiar with transgender issues, I know this can seem confusing and unnecessary. But although it might require a little bit more work for ISFDB it's really a small change, and it can really have a big impact on transgender authors. Here's an article that talks about the negative effects being referred to by birth name can have on transgender people: https://www.healthline.com/health/transgender/deadnaming#media
I don't think you would need to worry about retroactive changes, but marking a person's transgender name as a pseudonym is something else altogether, at least to me. If you take a look at Charlie Jane Anders page, her previous publications don't display her current name, so I'm not sure why this should be different from a programming perspective.
I would be happy to talk with you more about this if that would be helpful. You can feel free to email me at stewart.c.baker@gmail.com if that's easier than a talk page discussion. Stewartcbaker 14:44, 23 September 2018 (EDT)
Let me make sure that I understand the proposal correctly. The current policy says "The canonical name is the name under which a particular author's bibliography is organized. For authors who publish under multiple names, the canonical name is the most recognized name for that author within the genre." For example, see James Tiptree, Jr.'s and Murray Leinster's bibliographies, which are organized under what was the author's best known in-genre pseudonym.
Your proposal is to change the policy so that bibliographies would be organized under "whatever that person has most recently self-identified as", right? If so, then I suggest you post it on the Rules and standards discussions page. Ahasuerus 15:03, 23 September 2018 (EDT)
The issue is the word pseudonym. In Tiptree's case, it makes sense for that to be her base name. However, Tiptree was not to my knowledge transgender. She published under what was actually a pseudonym.
In Anya and Charlie Jane's case, the name change is not due to a pseudonym, but due to a gender identity that no longer matches that of their birth name. Conflating this with a pseudonym has the potential to cause actual harm to these authors. Stewartcbaker 16:16, 23 September 2018 (EDT)
I see. It sounds like it's a terminological issue then.
The term "Pseudonym" as used by the ISFDB covers a variety of scenarios, some of them unusual. For example, consider Murray Leinster's bibliography. His legal name was "William Fitzgerald Jenkins". He published a huge amount of fiction (hundreds of stories) under his full legal name as well as by "Murray Leinster", "William Fitzgerald", "Will F. Jenkins", "Will Jenkins". Since the majority of his SF output was as by "Murray Leinster", that's what we use as his canonical name. The rest of his bylines, including his legal name, are listed as pseudonyms. Similarly, "Мюррей Лейнстер" and "マレー・ラインスター" are listed as pseudonyms even though they are just transliterations of "Murray Leinster" in Russian and Japanese respectively.
There are hundreds and thousands of other cases where the term "pseudonym" is used to describe spelling variations that are normally not thought of as pseudonyms. For example, "Stanislaw Lem" is set up as a pseudonym of "Stanisław Lem".
We are aware that it can be a bit confusing to people who are not familiar with the way the ISFDB data is organized. There is an ISFDB feature request (FR 348) to "differentiate pseudonym types". It reads:
We haven't had a thorough discussion of the proposed functionality, so we don't have a solid design yet. Ahasuerus 18:05, 23 September 2018 (EDT)
That said, I recognize that this is not intentional but sure to what is still a rapidly changing set of norms in the real world. Also, I'm obviously an outsider to this organisation and have a limited understanding of how this change would be made it what it would affect. I am not by any means an expert on transgender issues either, although I do know a fair bit about the topic.
If you all would be open to suggestions for a policy change (and it's great that you seem to be!) Stewartcbaker 16:16, 23 September 2018 (EDT)
Oh sure, we have changed our policies over the years. Our goal is to create accurate and comprehensive SF bibliographies, which are essentially reflections of certain (mostly publishing-related) activities in the real world. When the world changes, we try to reflect the changes in our system. For example, back when the ISFDB project started in 1995, we didn't list self-published and vanity-published books; the policy was changed in the early 2000s with the rise of print-on-demand books. Similarly, we changed our policy in 2006 to include certain types of e-books and audio books. Later on we changed the policy yet again to include even more types of e-books, then webzines. And so on and so forth -- see Rules and standards changelog for a list of recent changes. Ahasuerus 18:21, 23 September 2018 (EDT)
I will get in touch with some people who are and see if we can put together something more useful and comprehensive, and then I'll propose that in the policy page. It may be that delinking a transgender author from their birth name would be the simplest and least harmful option--although that may be less than ideal, too.
The reason I suggested this change, by the way, is because people use ISFDB to compile lists of publications elsewhere on the web. I saw a page at file770 which listed a 2018 story of Anya's under her birth name, despite the fact that the publication itself used the correct name for her. So this is definitely a policy at present that can cause problems for transgender authors Stewartcbaker 16:16, 23 September 2018 (EDT)
We always credit authors the way they are credited in publications, give or take some stylistic differences like "r a heinlein" vs. "R. A. Heinlein". For pseudonyms we then set up a "variant title relationship" using the author's canonical name. If one of our bibliographic entries doesn't credit the name as it appears in the publication, please let us know and we'll correct it. Ahasuerus 18:28, 23 September 2018 (EDT)
Thank you again for your consideration on this important issue!
Stewartcbaker 16:16, 23 September 2018 (EDT)

Example of title with incorrect name listed

Putting this in its own section since the nested quotes are getting confusing.

Although for ISFDB's purposes listing a title as by a person's "pseudonym" (really, an alternate name) and linking that to their canonical name may be sufficient to show the relationship between titles and alternate names, the problem has to do with how these appear to the casual browser.

For example, for Anya, Faint Voices, Increasingly Desperate, shows up under her (incorrect) birth name as well as under her current (correct) name: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?2386942 VS http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?2386424

This gets especially bad when looking at tables of contents, such as the one for Shimmer which included that title: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?671037

Although "as by alternate name" might be clearer to the ISFDB insider, someone checking through this from the outside is going to see that Faint Voices, Increasingly Desperate, is written by someone called Alan, and skim the rest of the link. (This is the story that led me down this rabbit hole. It was cited on File770's review of Hugo-eligible short story editors for 2018, and listed Anya under her birth name instead of her actual name.) The interview with Anya for that issue is even worse, since it doesn't even note that Anya is the name it was published under--despite the fact that the interview title is "Shimmer Interviews: Anya Johanna DeNiro" ISFDB describes it as an interview of Alan DeNiro.

Stewartcbaker 12:31, 24 September 2018 (EDT)

Retrieved from "https://isfdb.org/wiki/index.php?title=User_talk:Stewartcbaker&oldid=530075"