Help talk:Getting Started

First thing to do

Shouldn't the "first thing to do" be "create a username and log on"? :) Ahasuerus 03:40, 21 Dec 2006 (CST)

Um, yeah. Done. Please feel free to make edits like these yourself, if you want to -- I don't have any "pride of ownership" in these help pages, and I know they'll improve if we all collaborate. Mike Christie (talk) 09:00, 21 Dec 2006 (CST)

It's been my experience with maintaining Wikipedia articles that the worst offenders are well meaning but clueless editors who try to improve "my" articles by dragging them down to their own level. I figure it's better to double check -- even if I am 95% sure that I am right -- rather than find myself in their shoes :) Ahasuerus 11:16, 21 Dec 2006 (CST)

I did not know that creating a wiki account would automatically create an ISFDB account. Testing this by following the offered link to create an account called isfdb test did create the wiki account got gets "Login failed: Bad user name" on the ISFDB side of things. Marc Kupper 21:21, 21 Dec 2006 (CST)

A follow-up on this – the ISFDB control panel has an option called “Public editing” though I don’t know exactly what it does. The page What's_New_from_2005 says it was planned to tie ISFDB logins to the wiki - maybe that gets enabled as part of public editing? The following comment is the only one I could find about user logins though. Marc Kupper 23:20, 21 Dec 2006 (CST)

1. In order to make the ISFDB self-sufficient in 2006, and to work through editing and moderator issues that might arise, I plan on having public editing capabilities no later than the end of March.
2. Items currently standing in the way of public editing capabilities:

• Database architecture - The current schema works mostly okay for both display and editing purposes - except in the area of pseudonyms. As such, some de-normalization needs to take place.
• User management - I don't currently have a system in place to manage user logins, although I may piggyback on the ISFDB Wiki capabilities.

I recall there was some glitch on first login, but that was a while back. I just tried to recreate it with a new user but couldn't. This is something we'll have to ask Al about in the morning. As for turning on the editing -- the control panel radio button is what we turn on -- at least, that's what I understand. I guess we'll find out in the morning. Mike Christie (talk) 23:37, 21 Dec 2006 (CST)

Hm, I guess we never formally described the ISFDB Control Panel in the Help files since it's not something that regular editors (i.e. editors without moderatorial privileges) will ever see. Oops! Briefly, the "ISFDB Status" radio buttons control whether the ISFDB is online or offline. The only time the ISFDB is offline is when Al is updating the software or running a database conversion.

"Editing Status" is the important data element here. "Editing Offline" means that nobody can add data to the online copy of the ISFDB (Al has another copy on his home machine) and that the publicly visible database is effectively in read-only mode. "Moderator Editing Only" is what we currenly have going -- only moderators can submit data. Finally, "Public Editing" is what we will have as of tomorrow. If Beta uncovers very serious problems, e.g. dataloss problems or if somebody has written a bot to set the Physical Verification flag for every record in the database, then changing these radio buttons back to "Moderator Editing Only" would be the safe thing to do. Ahasuerus 00:06, 22 Dec 2006 (CST)

Adding/editing materials other than books

Looking through the community portal, it looks like it's fairly recent that the changes were made to allow formats other than HC/TP/PB to be entered into the database. Which may explain why there isn't any mention of those formats within Getting Started. Um, like, might be a Good Idea™ for someone with a clear understanding of what the added formats are to create relevant pages, so that us newbies can gain a clue? Some of the options on the pulldown menu are clear to me, others, well, nope, no clue. And it's quite possible that my definitions of what falls into a specifice category don't match up with the definitions used here; I'd rather find that out prior to doing data entry, rather than after, so that other's time is not wasted correcting my entries; while I've been reading SF/F since ~1970 (A Life For The Stars, by James Blish, discovered on the school library shelves in 4th/5th grade?), my involvement in Fandom has been relatively small, and narrow in scope. I've been a professional Librarian, and know far too many horror stories of what catalogers can do with items where they aren't familier with the subject matter. Kd7mvs 20:12, 5 February 2018 (EST)

The question marks next to each field name display mouse-over help. When clicked, they take you to detailed Help pages. Was this not clear when creating submissions? If not, then we may want to update the Getting Started page -- it's easy to take things for granted once you become used to the editing system. Ahasuerus 22:50, 5 February 2018 (EST)