User talk:ApeMind

Welcome!

Hello, ApeMind, and welcome to the ISFDB Wiki! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• Help pages
• Help:Getting Started
• What the ISFDB Wiki is for
• ISFDB FAQ
• Help:Screen:EditPub#General contents - Warning and a note on how to update a publication's contents
• Wiki editing help - Tips on how to use the wiki-specific features when editing wiki pages.

Please be careful in editing publications that have been primary verified by other editors. See Help:How to verify data#Making changes to verified pubs. But if you have a copy of an unverified publication, verifying it can be quite helpful. See Help:How to verify data for detailed information.

I hope you enjoy editing here! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will insert your name and the date. If you need help, check out the community portal, or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! -DES ^Talk 21:32, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

13 Great Stories of Science Fiction

Thank you for adding page numbers to 13 Great Stories of Science Fiction. I have approved the edit.

If the publication record is now correct and complete, and you have the actual book at hand, you might want to verify the record.

Again, welcome to the ISFDB. -DES ^Talk 21:36, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for adding the introduction to 13 Great Stories of Science Fiction. However, we have a convention that you would not have known of. When a title, usually an essay, has a "generic" name such as "Introduction", "Preface", "Afterword", "Author's note", "Editorial", or the like, we qualify it by putting the title of the book or other publication in which it appears in (parentheses). In this case, I have approved your edit, but changed "Introduction" to "Introduction (13 Great Stories of Science Fiction)".

This is because we don't want many entries on an author's page all with titles like "Introduction", with no easy way to tell them apart or know which introduction is associates with which book. Consider what the essay section of Issac Asimov would look like otherwise.

You can see more about our data entry conventions at Help:Screen:EditPub. But don't worry about them too much at this stage. If you get the data in, a moderator will check formatting conventions and either make the changes or guide you in doing so.

Again, welcome. -DES ^Talk 21:48, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks DES! (I wondered for a second where that suffix to the Introduction came from! :-) I'll be sure to add it myself in future.) And I've now verified the publication too. Am now trying to figure out how to upload a cover image.. ApeMind 21:56, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

See Help:How to upload images to the ISFDB wiki. Also useful, Help:Wiki Conventions, although you are following them pretty well so far.

I hope this is just the first of many publications you will enter and verify. Once more, welcome. The links in the "welcome" section above may be useful. -DES ^Talk 22:38, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Impulse, June 1966

I've rejected your submission to add a record for the June 1966 issue of SF Impulse, as it's already in the database as Impulse, June 1966. Please check this record to see if it matches your copy and make a submission if any changes are necessary. Thanks. MHHutchins 22:39, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, that is the same pub - what confused me was that the magazine changed its name from Impulse to SF Impulse between the July and August issues... so the copy I've got wasn't in the series I expected it to be in. Thanks for the due dilligence though! (This is more complex than I thought - I'm learning a lot though.) ApeMind 22:49, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

I figured the confusion came from the name change. Magazines records are not currently easy to search for using database search (which is based on editor records, not issue records.) But there is an alternative. The best place to look for magazine issues is the list of links here. Most magazine Wiki pages have a list of issues which link to that issue's database record. And if a magazine changes names, it should be made clear on its Wiki page. Unfortunately, the current page for Impulse isn't as clear as it should be about the name change. When I get a chance I'll try to work on it. In the meantime you can still use the list of issues to get to the database record.

And yes, it can be quite complex. But you should be able to get the hang of it before long. Thanks for contributing. MHHutchins 23:05, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Oh yes, you found a particularly nasty mess there - look at Kyril Bonfiglioli's page. Science Fantasy, Impulse, SF Impulse, then SF Reprise - all sorted in the wrong order, some are magazines but others are magazines rebound into books, editor is miscredited in some otherwise impeccable references... we'll get there, but it's not a starting point I'd recommend! BLongley 20:12, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

A few questions

I'd like to get an impression of how the ISFDB looks to people new to editing it. To that end, here are a few questions. Feel free not to answer if you don't feel like it.

1. How did you find the ISFDB?

   I'm into science fiction short stories and like to rummage in second hand book shops for old paperback collections. Trouble is, I've read so many I often can't remember whether I've already read one or not from the title, so I was looking for a science fiction short story database that I could use as an aide-memoir. Of course ISFDB doesn't do enough with its synopsis field to help me remember what I've read, but it was by far the most comprehensive db on science fiction I found and I got excited about the depth of the data in it and by the possibility that I could use it to keep information about my short stories. (Actually I was really geekily excited by it :-) In my day job I'm Business Innovation Director for a technology company that specialises in designing and building large web apps - http://www.technophobia.com, so it piqued my professional interest as well).

2. What made you want to start entering data?

   Well partly I wanted to see how it all works, partly I wanted to see if I had anything that no one else has logged yet and partly I wanted to see if I could use the tagging and synopsis features to get it to do some things that I'd like.

3. How did you find the ISFDB wiki? (In the past, some editors have had trouble finding it.)

   Actually, I don't remember - I think the system left me there when I registered. I do find switching between the two sites a bit confusing though - I expect the links to be in the main nav (i.e. a link to the db front end in the wiki nav and vice versa).

4. What is your impression of the ISFDB as a whole? What confused you, and what was helpful? What can we improve?

   Well, there were some minor things that confused me when I started adding data such as working out what the differences are between a short story, novelette and a novella, and how to count the number of pages in a paperback that has advertisements in the back (the help seems a bit ambiguous on this one); but then there were a whole heap of impressions about what the ISFDB could be and how it could be improved and developed. I spend a large part of my job working with clients to develop their web strategies and to be honest my impression of the site is that its a complete diamond in the rough - it has some fantastic assets, especially the wealth of data, the processes defined to properly collect and approve it and the evident community of data suppliers and fantastically helpful and responsive moderators (that really impressed me, btw), but there are also some gaps I think. I hope you don't take this as any sort of criticism, because the site is clearly a success, but were the site in my portfolio to develop, off the top of my head (and given that I have 50-odd designers and developers to do the work :-) I would do the following:

   • Strategically: Make the site as friendly to people who like reading speculative fiction as those who like collecting and cataloguing speculative fiction publications.
   • Redesign the visual look and branding.
   • Overhaul the search and make it central to the user experience.
   • Improve the user experience for data entry, such as providing in line help.
   • Look to add value to key object pages, such as author, publication, publisher and story by making them aggregation points for conversation and debate.
   • Add value to the tagging system - especially look to implement a standard taxonomy to enable use cases such as 'I want to see all stories that involve time travel'.
   • Add synopses (preferably both from some authoritative source and user generated) including a spoiler toggle.
   • Look to add user reviews with ratings and comments.
   • Define a linking strategy, e.g. with wikipedia and other resources (inbound and outbound).
   • Define a search engine optimisation strategy.
   • Define a commerical strategy either advertising based or based on affiliate linking or donations or some other model or any combination, and reinvest the revenues.
   • Look for ways to punch the data out to other networks, for instance a facebook app for user reviews and recommendations.
   • Look for other data points to make the experience richer such as trivia, biographical information, character names, locations, etc.
   • Longer term look at the feasibility of providing (or hosting) short story downloads to mobile.

Obviously that's a heck of programme of work, but it's just my thoughts of the direction I would head in if I had the time and resources to do it. Anyway, hope I haven't offended you and I'm more than happy to talk about any of those points or anything else for that matter while I work through my paperback collection to see what more data I can add :-)

Warm regards, Chris D. ApeMind 23:18, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

No, none of that is in the least offensive -- it is quite helpful.

• Some of those we may not do at all -- I am dubious about "trivia" myself, and we are firmly committed to being a non-profit, non-commercial organization -- I suspect many of our contributors would leave in a heartbeat if we "defined a commercial strategy" -- I know I would.
• Many of your suggestions sound like good ideas. We are limited by the fact that most of the application was created by a single, volunteer programmer. We now have several volunteer programmers, but probably they don't add up to one full-time-equivalent.
• Some of those we are actually already doing -- we have thousands of inbound links from Wikipedia, which has three special templates to create such links. We have a field for outbound links for every entity that has a Wikipedia article (authors, titles, publishers, and series). We also link to library (worldcat) records for every publichstion with a valid ISBN, and to several book vendors. We have discussed linking to LibraryThing, but they would charge our users for any significant use, and would require significant development effort to link with.
• Currently the tagging and rating/voting are very rudimentary -- we clearly need to improve these, although they are not central to our goals.
• We fully support synopses entered by a user, the problem is getting users to write and enter them. Synopses from other sources have copyright issues, particularly since all our content is released under a creative commons license.

but none of your ideas are at all out of line, and what we have done in the past may not be what we do in the future. Any editor is free to propose ideas -- the Community Portal is the main place for most such ideas to be proposed. Feel free to make suggestions. And thanks a load for your answers so far. -DES ^Talk 00:17, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Oh and you might take a look at Development and at the feature list linked there to see what changes are currently planned, and how more can be suggested. -DES ^Talk 00:21, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for the feedback ApeMind. You have some good points. One comment is that Wikipedia editors have been supportive of linking to ISFDB because the license terms are similar. ISFDB is not a commercial enterprise and its data is freely available under Creative Commons. See isfdb name for one of the link templates. I have thought about cross links with other sites. Part of the problem is that ISFDB's focus is speculative fiction meaning a site is not likely to spend a great deal of effort pulling data from, or linking to, ISFDB unless they too have a speculative fiction emphasis. --Marc Kupper|talk 09:48, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

I agree, but perhaps we might do more with SfSite and FantasticFiction.com and similar genre-specific sites, at least. -DES ^Talk 15:25, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Our data is partially incorporated by Freebase.com and probably by other sites which haven't notified us yet. At one point Freebase.com offered to send us Author level data for "our" authors, but nothing has come out of it so far. In addition, there have been a few "clone" sites which replicate our data, e.g. authors.wizards.pro (they seem to be off-line at the moment), which even says that some of their data "may have been adapted from the [author's] bibliography at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database."

There is nothing terribly wrong with that except that Google ranks authors.wizards.pro higher than us, so people searching for, say, "Nancy Carrigan bibliography" will find their (often obsolete) version of the data instead of ours. That's a bad thing since we probably lose potential contributors that way. Ahasuerus 20:23, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

I am hoping that we can do better on some things, but it is often too easy to become used to things and not realize how they look to someone new to the site. -DES ^Talk 23:17, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Image names

I just approved the edit adding Image:0-586-05781-1.jpg to WSTFDNCXQC1985. One thing to note: publishers often reuse the same ISBN for multiple printings, including printings with different covers. So a bare ISBN is not always a safe name for an image, since there may be multiple publication records and images that share the ISBN. Many editors use the publication tag ("WSTFDNCXQC1985" in this case) as the software forces this to be unique. Others use Title-Artist on the assumption that a given artist will not do two different titles for the same book. In any case, thank you for uploading the cover art and linking it to the pub record. There is no problem in this particular case, this is just advice for the future. -DES ^Talk 00:32, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama

I accepted your submission updating this pub but copied it first. The record originally stated "First Pan printing" and it's possible (and likely) that Pan's first printing had the same ISBN and year as the second (this was a popular title!) In cases where there's a printing statement that doesn't match your copy, it's best to clone that record and change the non-matching data or create a new record instead of overwriting the original one. Unlike American pbs at the time (which changed catalog numbers or ISBNs with almost every printing), the ISBNs of UK pbs were often re-used for reprints. Thanks. MHHutchins 19:43, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, my 5th Pan printing states that that edition was first published in 1974, as apparently does Phileas's 10th printing - mine doesn't mention the dates of the 2nd to 4th, but some publishers will list all prior printings in excruciating detail. ;-) Unfortunately those can't all be trusted, so I personally don't usually create stub entries for the missing printings unless I've really learned the publisher's habits. Maybe the first, those tend to be accurate. But in this case, the 6th Orbit printing mentions that this title was first published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz in 1975, whereas the Pan book says it was first published by Victor Gollancz in 1973. A surprising discrepancy, considering that both publishers seem to have formatted every page of content identically. But it does demonstrate how a British publisher will retain the same ISBN for years, whereas a new publisher (not new imprint though) will assign a new one even when the typesetting is the same. (Apologies if you knew this already or it's too much detail!) BLongley 20:01, 2 September 2009 (UTC)