User talk:Bitdancer

Welcome!

Hello, Bitdancer, 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
• 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.

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! BLongley 09:55, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Discussions

Thanks. Looks like it is going to take me a while to learn my way around and figure out the community conventions. I don't suppose those are documented anywhere? :) I'm specifically wondering about how discussion flow works, and how to figure out where to discuss particular things. Bitdancer 15:42, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

For discussion on wiki pages, like this one, we tend to use a simplified version of the conventions in use at Wikipedia. See Help:Editing and the pages linked from it for lots more detail, but in general, we use a new section (such as this one "Discussions") for a new thread or subject, and responses are indented one level for each person responding. This is done by starting each paragraph with a colon -- one colon per indent level. If a thread is long and the indents seem excessive, or a person is changing tack and not directly responding to the previous comments, a comment may be posted with no indentation. Normally such a comment starts with "(unindent)" to indicate that this is intentional.

We like to keep conversations together, so, unlike Wikipedia, we normally respond on the page where a thread was started, rather than flip back and forth between two users' talk pages. This is feasible on a small site like this, while it doesn't work as well on a huge one like Wikipedia.

As for where to discuss things, there are some general guidelines:

• To raise an issue with a particular user, start a new section on that user's user talk page. For example, to raise one with me, edit User talk:DESiegel60. To raise one with the mythical user Joe Cool, edit User talk:Joe Cool
• To raise a general issue for the community, start a new section on the Community Portal.
• To ask how to do something, or to ask for help in some task, start a new section on the Help desk.
• To specifically call something to the attention of a moderator, or ask for help that requires a moderator or wiki-admin (all mods are automatically admins on the wiki), start a new section on the Moderator noticeboard
• To discuss the rules and standards for how we record bibliographic data, start a section on the Rules and standards discussions page.
• To ask people in general to check a published book or magazine (or other source) to settle an unclear point, start a section on the Verification requests page.

To discuss a policy issue, go to ISFDB talk:Policy.

There are specific pages for Publishers, Authors, and in a few cases Titles and Publications. These are linked to from the relevant DB records, but can be gotten to directly from the wiki. They are generally used for discussing issues on how to handle the entity in question, or for recording free-format info that can't be fit into any of the DB records (such as the source that justifies marking one author as a pseudonym of another).

If you want to discuss an issue on one of the above pages, check if there is already a discussion in progress on the same or a closely related issue. if so, feel free to just join in.

Many of the pages listed above have their own talk pages (use the tab labeled "discussion" to go to it) where what should be on the main page and/or how it should be arranged can be discussed.

The pages linked from Help:Contents document a good deal of how the ISFDB works. It is fairly complex -- feel free to ask at any time about anything that is unclear. Some of the help is out of date or not as complete as it should be -- this is a volunteer effort.

There are some useful Linking templates for making links to objects in the DB, See Template talk:A for authors, Template talk:T for titles, and Template talk:P for publications. Not everyone uses these, and they are never required. i find them helpful.

I hope this helps to answer your questions and get you started. -DES ^Talk 16:55, 2 June 2008 (UTC)