ISFDB talk:Stray Essays

Stray Essays

It appears that most of these were orphaned when they were removed and/or replaced by another record, and the editor failed to delete the original record. You can check the author's summary page and find another title very similar to the orphaned one. There's no reason why those can't be deleted. Mhhutchins 21:03, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

If we're lucky, most of these were created by editors being over-cautious about changing contents that might appear in multiple publications, before we built in the protection that means you can no longer accidentally edit such via a pub-edit. The Add/Remove step is boring enough that people often skip the "Delete Strays" third step(s). BLongley 21:24, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

There are others that are stub records. These look like they were created because they appeared in nongenre or small press publications. IMHO, these should not be deleted until we determine their suitability in the db. Many are by obscure writers who wanted to fill out their bibliography using the ISFDB as a platform. A non-spec-fic essay in a nongenre publication by a writer who doesn't meant the threshold for entry is a debatable case for deletion. If we want to keep this list to a manageable length and have the script added to the clean-up links on the moderator page, we have to find a way to distinguish orphaned titles from stub record. Mhhutchins 21:03, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure if these need to be retained. To be here in the first place, they must have been in a publication that once existed (unless they're carry-overs from ISFDB1?) but has now been deleted. But I'll see what people think after these have been worked on a bit, it's too early to pronounce mass-deletion. I'm not optimistic that we'll find an automated way to distinguish "stubs", I think we're going to have to rely on humans for that. BLongley 21:24, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Here's a example of what I meant as a stub record: A Cavern Full of Moths. I don't think this should be deleted as it appears to be an article in what may be a spec-fic pub. The author (Gary Bowen) has populated his ISFDB bibliography with several such records (look at the essays on his summary page). Don't you feel we should make exceptions for these kind of records? Mhhutchins 21:51, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

How do you know Gary populated them himself? Those look old enough to be ISFDB1 leftovers. If, and I stress the IF, we want to do some mass cleanups then we could make an exception for entries pre-dating ISFDB2. Or we can just leave the project open long enough for all stubs to be dealt with by humans. I still suspect that we will end up with either automatic deletion of stray titles, or at least a warning about such being created. But I'll leave such arguments for much later, I think these projects will keep people occupied a while yet! BLongley 23:28, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

There's no way for me to know who actually created these records, but it's obvious they're not orphans. I've created stub records myself, and don't consider them stray or orphan. Again, should exceptions be made or should there be an automatic deletion of titles without pubs? I'd rather have a human doing the deleting than a software design feature, but an automatic warning would be nice. When a title record is deleted from the last pub, the moderator would get a warning and deal with it there. He could decide to delete it or flag it to warn others not to delete it. Once we've worked on these lists (both stray essays and shortfiction) it shouldn't be too overwhelming for a human to make the decisions. Mhhutchins 19:33, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Working on T-Z, I found the following authors have stub records: Arlan Andrews, Gary Bowen, Michael Bracken, Atk. Butterfly, Richard Gilliam, Kurt Lancaster, Thomas M. Sipos, Joy V. Smith, Ian Randal Strock, Chris Tannlund, and James Van Pelt. Most of these will have other records on the list. Mhhutchins 22:22, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Sipos at least looks like someone I've just fixed for a stray award, for "Vampire Nation". Are the other stubs because of awards? I've noticed several "Best Fact Article" awards led to stray NONFICTION titles. I'm actually having more fun with the "Award Titles with No Pubs" project than most of the others I've posted - there's no telling where they'll take me. I'll have a go at "LC-39" and "Sackcloth & Ashes" at some point, if nobody else does - I hadn't even known they'd existed before. BLongley 00:38, 3 May 2011 (UTC)