Template talk:PubSeriesHeader

The template of which this is the talk page is considered a high-risk template. this means that it is used on many pages, and could cause widespread problems if it were changed accidentally or maliciously. Accordingly it has been protected. If you need to edit it, ask a moderator or post on the Moderator noticeboard.

Possible Change

Please discuss the merits of the change before making it, particularly as the same change was objected to on {{SeriesHeader}}. -DES ^Talk 05:21, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

It is my view that "Discussions about how to organize and/or record the works in the series, or what should be recorded" form the major part of what the main series page ought to be used for, unless we intend only finished articles such as Series:Winston Science Fiction, which is really almost more of a Wikipedia article. -DES ^Talk 05:24, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

[after edit conflict] When you created this heading you pointed out that you basically copied a previous template. You may recall that I pointed out the apparent (to me) ambiguous and even conflicting statements. I reprint the original template here:

"This page may be used for a list of the titles in the series, bibliographic comments or extended notes about the series, or discussion on how to organize and/or record the works in the series. To discuss what should go on this page, use the talk page."

How can there be "discussion on how to organize..." on this page, but if you want "to discuss what should go on this page" you should use talk page? My change was made to resolve these conflicting statements. Nothing more. MHHutchins 05:30, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Maybe someone (even I) am missing the point of what the purpose of these Wiki pages are for. These are projects and do attempt to be complete, finished, even possibly helpful, lists of publication series. Would Kevin want people making comments about what should be on the page he personally created (after hours of research, coding, etc.) directly on that page? I wouldn't. MHHutchins 05:41, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps I was missing the point. For pub series, unlike regular series, a finished list is the eventual goal. I was thinking that one would "discuss how to organize" what went into the database. That language was borrowed from the headers for regular Author and Series pages, where the main data does eventually appear in the database. Let me start with your wording and maybe tweek a bit. For {{SeriesHeader}} things are a bit different, IMO. -DES ^Talk 14:50, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

My 2 cents. 99.9% of the pages in the Wiki here are 'working pages' that should be treated much as we treat the major pages (Noticeboard, Rules & Standards, etc) and we should write all over them. About .1% of the pages here are 'finished' product and should be treated as Wikipedia pages. (I.e. Edit them to correct them or update them, but discuss the page somewhere else). I think the SFBC Pages, Gutter code page, Magazine links page, as well as the Winston page fall into this category. Some of the other publisher pages might fall into this category as well. For these 'finished' pages, the template generic headers just aren't appropriate. There is no 'need' to instruct the reader what the page is for... it should be obvious that the page is a storehouse of information, that is already organized , etc. Perhaps you folks could create 'Finished/Complete page Footer' templates if you feel that there must be a template applied to the page. Otherwise, couldn't we just put them in the correct category and be satisfied? Kevin 03:29, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

I disagree, i think those pages could really use the header if anything more than the "unfinished" pages. I thought the move of the header to a footer on the Winston series page was a mistake. That said, there is no decree from on high that requires a header, or even a template. You can put the page in a category manually. When/if we have database support for pub series, we might want an automated link to the proper db page, and a template may well be a good way to do that, depending on how the URLs for such pages are constructed, but we can worry about that when such support is implemented. I'll be glad to construct a footer template such as you describe if you want one, but I have no desire to force one on you or anyone. -DES ^Talk 15:00, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

A solution that comes to mind is to add Bibliographic comments and in the project header pages we would boilerplate "See bibliographic comments for notes on how to use this page." The Bibliographic comments page itself would have something like

Frequently we want to add bibliographic notes, comments, or other details about an individual author, series, publication, or publisher. The ISFDB database supports this with a titled Bibliographic Comments on each record in the database. These links lead to individual pages within the ISFDB wiki. At present ISFDB does not support bibliographic comment pages for titles. A convention has developed to add notes about titles as a section under the author or editor's bibliographic comments page.

== Content and structure ==

The only rule concerning bibliographic comment pages is that they should contain bibliographic comments or notes about that title, series, publication, etc. They should not be used used for biographies, synopsis or reviews, etc.

Some bibliographic comment pages are structured like talk pages and others may contain the final results of someone's research. The goal is information and the exact structure used to share that information is less important. It is left to the editor's judgment on if they should add notes or questions to the main page or the article's talk page.

A talk page convention is that editors should not modify another editor's comments and should not modify their own comments well after the fact. The goal is preserving the discussion. This convention does not apply to bibliographic comment main pages. An editor can restructure a talk conversation, deleting ~~~~ references, for example, so that the page, or that section, summarizes research/findings, etc. If an editor feels the conversation thread should be preserved then the thread can be copy/pasted to the talk page before editing the copy on the main page.

== Sources ==

Ideally, though it's not required, any information added should also cite the exact source for that information. An ISFDB editor is free to add their own opinion, beliefs, or speculation but ideally they make it clear that they are the source and that the information provided is not fait accompli.

== Headers ==

A convention has developed that bibliographic comment pages have a header which contains a link back to the ISFDB database record that this page would be commenting on plus instructions on how to use that page. The available headers are {{AuthorHeader}}, {{SeriesHeader}}, {{PubHeader}}, and {{PublisherHeader}}. Please note that you are not required to use a header on a bibliographic comments page. These exist for convenience. To use one of these headers, for example on an author page, you would add {{AuthorHeader}} at the top of the bibliographic comments page. Note that some headers require additional parameters to help construct the link back to the ISFDB database record. Please see the help for the individual headers to learn about these parameters.

I omitted mention {{PubSeriesHeader}} from the final paragraph as I have a minor headache and could not think of a clean way to include it as while the PubSeries pages would be bibliographic comment pages at present there is no mechanism to link to them from the ISFDB database. I have not looked to see if the existing pages are orphans or if someone's come up with a way to reference them. Anyway guys, just below this edit box is "If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then don't submit it here." and so feel free to either edit when I wrote above or if you like the Bibliographic comments page concept to start the page and to copy/paste/edit as needed. --Marc Kupper|talk 00:42, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

I started the Bibliographic comments page as it'll make it easier to edit or move the thing rather than modifying the copy within this talk thread. --Marc Kupper|talk 01:07, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Broken!

Um--is it me of is this just wrong!? First, the summary is wrong as it says it is an author header. Next, the link is wrong and broken as this uses the Template:Series and not the Template:PubSeries. Finally I have to ask why is this protected? There are not that many pages affected by this template and further those pages are not used often. Perhaps it would be alright to make them semiprotected so only logged in wiki users could edit it (along with most of the other similar templates; I would fix these problems otherwise--that is unless someone wants to make me a wiki admin)? Uzume 23:15, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Also shouldn't we have another wiki namespace for for PubSeries like we have for Series!?. And while I am on the subject of biliographic groupings, wouldn't it make more sense to have a generalized mechanism for such instead of making each work/title be in only a single series and single pubseries? I noticed Googlebooks has something called "bibliogroup" (though it seems to be poorly organized/used). Uzume 23:34, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

I have very limited knowledge about Wiki templates and headers, but I'm unable to find where the summary states this is an author header. I can't say why it's protected other than the statement that's given above: it's "...a high-risk template...used on many pages." I see about thirty pages are linked to it. About the broken link, perhaps the page was cloned from the Title Series template and the writer failed to change the link? If you can tell me how to fix it, I'll do so. The person who wrote it (DESiegel60) has not been around for a number of months.

There's not been much progress on this particular header, because shortly after the template was created, we finally got the ability to create Publication Series in the database proper. Once that happened those of us who worked on creating the Publication Series pages on the Wiki moved all of our efforts to the database.

There's also been little progress on creating the ability for title records to become part of more than one Title Series, because it's quite uncommon, and I understand the software changes that would allow it would be rather extensive. Again, I don't write software so I'm not sure if there have been further efforts to bring this about. And because publications can only be in one Publication Series, there's no reason to change the software to allow it. (I've only once in many years come across a publication that was part of two series. It was an academic publication from a university press which indicated that the book was part of two different series.) Mhhutchins 00:06, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

I just changed the link in the document page. Did that correct the problem? Mhhutchins 00:12, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

No, that did not fix the linkages. Yes, I know how to fix it. I mentioned that above but it was more for a programmer type of person. For the layman, to fix the linkage (though the summary really ought to be fixed as well) change the {{Series template instanciation to {{PubSeries. I hope this helps. Uzume 00:34, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

(unindent) OK, Mhhutchins unprotected the page and I fixed the issue and the links now work but the other issues (general title and pub series DB issues) remain. (Over)protection issues also remain. Already one cannot edit wiki pages without an account so protecting pages is highly overkill unless they really affect many pages. Uzume 00:59, 4 January 2011 (UTC)