Stabilizing Bibliographic Data

This page is a proposed guideline for how the data in the ISFDB database progresses towards a stable state. For a discussion of these guidelines, see the talk pages; updates to this page should be restricted to modifications and improvements to the guidelines.

Definition of terms. The following terms are used in these guidelines.

• Editor. Any user who submits a modification to the ISFDB data.
• Moderator. Any user with privilege to choose to accept or reject data submissions.

Overview

The data in the ISFDB is of two types. First, there are individual ‘’’publications’’’. “Publication” is the ISFDB term for a physical, published entity. It can be a book, a magazine, or an eBook; a chapbook, or perhaps even a fanzine. However, it is an object that can be obtained and examined, and the information verified.

Second, there are relations between publications. There are authors, who may have written many books; sometimes authors use different names on different works, while there may also be two authors with the same name. Works have titles, which can vary; they can be revised, or completely rewritten. Stories can be parts of series. Stories, novels, magazines and authors can win awards. All of this data is verifiable, but in a weaker sense than for publications, which can after all be physically examined. There are degrees of certainty for this data. Is “Masters of the Vortex” really part of the Lensman series? Is “Sunken Universe” the same story as “Surface Tension”?

These two types of data are what the ISFDB wants to record. The ISFDB is now open to editing by users, which means that all of the data can be modified. All modified data must be validated first by moderators, of whom there are currently four. However, it is clear that the goal of the ISFDB is not endless modification of the records, which is likely to be the case for Wikipedia, for example; instead the goal is that when a record is “correct”, it should be stable and should never change again, unless perhaps new attributes are added to the database. “Correct” here is clearly defined for “publications”, and will generally be clear for authors, titles, pseudonyms and so on; it may be a subject for debate on occasion. It is still true, however, that once a consensus is reached that data is correct, it should not change again.

This guideline defines how this is achieved.

Verifying, discussing and recording correct data

The discussion here is provided in terms of publications, since that is the data for which correctness is easiest to ascertain. A short note after this section comments on the differences from these notes for other data, such as authors, pseudonyms, titles and variant titles.

Ideally one always has a publication in hand when the data is entered. In practice this is not always done; and sometimes it is very difficult, e.g. for rare editions. Hence the data is entered from bibliographic sources such as Tuck, Reginald, Nicholls or Currey. This is secondhand attribution and is occasionally incorrect in itself.

It is also worth noting that occasionally there are printing variations within a given edition.

When a publication is updated by any editor, by default the only validation a moderator will provide is a sanity check. If the change looks reasonable the moderator will let it pass. If the moderator has a copy to check they may, but the volume will probably not permit this in general.

If the change is definitely wrong, it will be rejected. More often the correctness cannot be determined and the moderator will have to make a judgement as to whether the data update is to be permitted. Each publication has a wiki page (the title of which is taken from the publication id, since that’s the most stable data), which is available from the moderator screen, and which records any notes on history of changes to the record. A change can be accepted and a note made; or rejected and a note made. Editors with rejected changes can read the notes to determine why a change was rejected, and the issue can be debated and settled on that page. This will guide moderators in accepting changes.

A moderator can also choose to mark a publication as correct. This is a flag on the publication record itself. A publication flagged as correct should generally not be updated, though this will be at the discretion of the moderator. The flag is settable only by moderators. Any change to a correct publication should always include a note on the publication’s wiki page explaining the change.

It may be desirable at some stage to use the correctness flag in displaying ISFDB data, to help readers to assess reliability. Such uses are outside the scope of this guideline.

Other record types

The same principles apply to other record types. However, correctness flags cannot be set for these other record types. They may be introduced at some future stage, but the publication data, being both easy to verify and clearly primary data, is the only data which has this verification at present.