Talk:Stabilizing Bibliographic Data

Introductory notes

Just a couple of quick points about this draft guideline.

• The author pages we are creating are starting to look alarmingly like a copy of the ISFDB, recoding edition data and what we verified. That can't be the right way to do it!
• I saw the feature request for "verified against Reginald" flags, etc., and it struck me that that, plus a Wiki page for notes, might be all we need.
• The "correct" flag is in the roadmap for 6/11/06. I suggest we leave it at just publications, since those are the clearest to verify and are 99% of our primary data. We can worry about the other records once we have the process working on publications.
• There is a feature request built in to the guideline: an automatic wiki link from a publication moderation (also perhaps from the edit page) to a wiki page. E.g. for JCKOEG1952, displaying the edit page or moderation page of an edit to that publication would show a link to a wiki page entitled "Publication:JCKOEG1952". I don't see how to avoid the permanent tag or primary key here, though clearly it would be nice to have a more English language text such as "Jack of Eagles, Avon, 1952". If we agree this is worth doing, I'll move it to the Open Features list.
• I have not here considered what happens to the Wiki pages on merging or deleting publications. I suspect for now that manual handling is going to suffice.
• A main impetus for putting this together is that there needs to be a flow towards stable data, so that the pool of stable data can be identified as such and grow. Otherwise there is no way to tell what's been done without the wiki author pages, which are themselves subject to editing and changing. I entered a few books and found myself realizing that I'd have no way to tell, afterwards, what was reliable, without retyping most of that information on the author page. Anyway, the guideline isn't important, but the goal is, so if the guideline doesn't work, let's rewrite it, rather than scrap it.

Mike Christie 21:03, 26 May 2006 (CDT)