Feature:90145 Add Author tags

• Feature:90145 Add Author tags OPEN This was originally posted to Al's talk page as "Adding author gender information to authors table (and web)". I'm copying it here as remembered seeing this request and just had a merry hunt trying to find which page it was on. See the 90145 details page for more info. Marc Kupper (talk) 20:02, 2 May 2007 (CDT)

As far as I know there is no gender (male/female) informations about authors in isfdb which I think is a little annoying. I would propose to change that my adding a nullable gender column to isfdb's author table.

I have noticed public lists like this one [1] and I also think I saw somewhere more general public lists of commen male and female names. With these kind of background data, I think I could make a good computerized estimater that could be used initially to fill out the blanks... I am willing to do a first stap at calculating the estimated genender codes along with a change script for the database

if someone else will do the GUI and apply it to the isfsdb install (i.e. I can do the data gathering + database stuff but not the python web stuff). Interested? mortench 12:46, 19 Apr 2007 (CDT)

I think it's a good idea but would like to generalize it by extending the tagging system to authors. Author tags would be separate from title tags but would have the same function. In recent web search I've recently landed on a fantasy authors page, women SF writers, Australian writers, Canadian SF writers, lesbian SF writers, author pseudonym database, etc. All of those could be implemented by author-tags. Marc Kupper (talk) 20:02, 2 May 2007 (CDT)

I kind of like the idea of author tags. We're currently printing out an accumulation of the author's title tags, but author tags could cover more ground. The database changes are trivial; it would require a few hours work to put together the forms to handle data entry.

I have some major changes I'll work on in a few months dealing with author names, as we need a dynamic replacement for the aging static author directory. As such, I probably won't be too keen to make name-related mods until after that rework. Alvonruff 12:09, 4 May 2007 (CDT)