Template talk:PublicationFields:Author

To start this off: I don't like the "Accented characters" rule. The software doesn't support most of such, and I as a Developer have no intention of fixing such. In the long term I appreciate we'll need to cope with multiple alphabets, but that will be after I've gone well past my abilities. BLongley 00:08, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

The wording of the "Accented characters" rule seems to be in disagreement with Ahaseurus' discussion in Rules & Standards, Jan. 2009. According to that post, it doesn't matter whether you enter "Andre" or "André", they will both get linked to the same author automatically. Hence we should be able to enter the name as it appears on a title page in either format. I think, though, that if we had two editions of a book with these two slightly different spellings and we merged them, then we would have to select which spelling to use for the merger. I'd go with the more formal one, but someone can still find "André Maurois" if they search for "Andre Maurois", so I don't see a problem here. This is more of an issue with book titles, where "Maelstrom" brings up 47 fiction publications, while "Maelström" brings up 2 different publications. But that's an issue that doesn't apply to author names.

     You bring up the issue of different alphabets down the road somewhere. But if we followed Ahaseurus' approach to the diacritical issue, we would: (1) Select a standard transliteration scheme for each supported alphabet; (2) Store each author's name using that transliteration (with no diacriticals and no capitalization); (3) When doing a search, automatically transliterate the search request and search for that name. That way, it wouldn't matter if you searched for "Алексе́й Толсто́й" or "Alexei Tolstoy", you would get the same bibliography. (I'm assuming your browser can handle the Russian characters in that last sentence.) And a Russian publication could be listed under the former, while a European publication was under the latter, and we would impose just enough language chauvinism to require that the title record be under "Tolstoy". Chavey 19:45, 8 July 2011 (UTC)