User talk:Circeus

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Welcome!

Hello, Circeus, 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:

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! Ahasuerus 03:54, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Simak, Werber, etc

Just to let you know that I have approved a couple of your submissions and put the rest on hold. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with them, but they require a little bit of massaging before they can go in and I won't be able to work on them until some time on Saturday :-( I will try to leave a detailed explanation of what I had to change before I approve them tomorrow. Also, you may want to take a look at Help:How to enter foreign editions when you get a chance since it covers the areas that you are currently working on. Thanks! Ahasuerus 04:14, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

I am working my way through the submissions and here are the comments/questions that I have:
  • La Réserve des Lutins has been approved as a Publication under the main English language title, but is the cover artist's name spelled "Gerorges Raimondo" or "Georges Raimondo"? Also, OCLC has a record (No. 83554889) for the 1984 printing of this translation and the translator's name is given as "Barbara Kamir", so I added it to the Notes field.
  • The addition of La Réserve des Lutins as a variant title of The Goblin Reservation has been rejected. Unfortunately, we can't create variant titles for every translation since it would make the "summary bibliography" pages of popular authors unmanageable :(
  • Similarly, Los Tanatonautas was rejected as a variant title for Les Thanatonautes and El The Libro del Viaje was rejected as a variant title for Le Livre du voyage. I merged the Title records instead and the Spanish translations are now Publications under the French language Titles. Ditto L'empire des anges and Im Reich der Engel.
Thanks for that. How am I normally supposed to point that a separate book should be a publication elsewhere?
Let me take a step back first :) One fundamental distinction that the ISFDB makes is between "Titles" and "Publications". Think of "Publications" as physical books, magazines, audio cassettes, CDS, etc. Two different physical objects, e.g. two editions of the same book, are recorded as two separate Publications in the ISFDB.
"Titles", on the other hand, are basically texts. Two different editions of the same novel (e.g. a paperback edition and a hardcover edition), are separate Publications, but they represent the same text and, therefore, the same Title. You can have multiple Publications per Title, e.g. multiple editions of the same book, but you can also have multiple Titles per Publication, e.g. multiple stories/poems in a collection or an anthology. If two or more texts are identical, but have different titles or if they were published under different names (pseudonyms etc), we make one of them the "canonical" (i.e. "master") Title and all other ones become Variant Title under that canonical title.
Ideally, we would make every distinct text, including different foreign language editions (even different translations), a separate Title and then link them to the original Title using the Variant Title mechanism. Unfortunately, that would result in the Summary Bibliography pages of popular authors getting very crowded and hard to navigate. Eventually, we hope to have a separate page of user-specific preferences that would let users tell the application which languages to display on the Summary page for that user. Until then, we display all English language translations of foreign language originals as Variant Titles, but put all other foreign language translations under the canonical title as Publications. For example, the Title record for Wilson Tucker's The Long Loud Silence currently has 11 Publication records associated with it, including 3 foreign language translations. Stanislaw Lem's Katar has The Chain of Chance set up as a Variant Title since it's an English language title, but the German edition only appears as a Publication under the main Polish Title.
With that in mind, what we want to do if we find a Title record for a foreign language translation -- which should be a Publication under the master Title record as per the explanation above -- is to merge the two Title records. Any two Titles can be merged using the "OR" logic in the Advanced Search form. Alternatively, if two Titles belong to the same author, you can pull up the "Titles" page in the navigation bar on the left, which will let you merge any of that author's Titles. Ahasuerus 23:07, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
  • L'Arbre des possibles et autres histoires has been approved, but I changed the title type of "Avan-propos" from "NONGENRE", which is reserved for book length non-genre books, to "ESSAY". Also, when converting a Publication from Novel to Collection, we need to convert the associated Novel Title from Novel to Collection instead of overwriting it with the first story/essay in the collection. A Collection Publication without a Collection Title is no longer displayed on the Summary Bibliography page for the Author.
Next I'll go and set up series data for Werber's books. Thanks for all the submissions! Ahasuerus 02:20, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
I'm not too clear what you mean with this one, honestly...
I'll try to clarify later tonight, have to run at the moment :) Ahasuerus 23:07, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
Looking at your submissions, I see that you seem to have already grasped the concept. For example, when you changed one of Werber's Novel Publications to Non-Fiction, you changed the associated Title in the "Contents" section to Non-Fiction as well. Similarly, if you decided to change a Novel Publication to a Collection Publication (or "pub", as we often call publications), you would want to change both its Publication Type in the drop down box at the top (from Novel to Collection) and the Title Type in the Contents section (also from Novel to Collection.) Then and only then would you want to add the individual stories to the Contents section. Ditto for Anthologies and Omnibuses.
One caveat to keep in mind is that when you are editing a Collection/Anthology/Omnibus publication, only its stories/essays are displayed in the Contents section, but the associated Collection/Anthology/Omnibus Title is not displayed. The original idea was to make editing more user-friendly and less error-prone, but so far it seems to have caused even more confusion. Good intentions and all that :) Ahasuerus 05:43, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Le Souffle des dieux

Sorry about the delays with approval, I have been sick this weekend and our multilingual support is still somewhat weak on the moderator side. Another moderator and I have approved most of your submissions, but I have Le Souffle des dieux on hold since the linked cover says Nous les dieux. Is that intentional or is the URL wrong?

Also, do we know what Albin Michel thinks of other Web sites linking to their image library? Some sites, e.g. Wikipedia, consider it bandwidth theft and reserve the right to block anybody who links to their images directly. We have a list of sites that we have received an explicit permission to link to, including Amazon and Visco, and we list them in the "URL" section of the Help:Screen:NewNovel. Would you happen to know of a way to ask Albin Michel whether they would mind if we linked to their images directly?

P.S. I may not be able to answer until late tonight or tomorrow since I will be traveling most of the day. I'll try to answer the rest of the questions that you had on Monday. Ahasuerus 16:41, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Los Tanatonautas

Your submission had no change to the existing data did you hit the "enter" key by mistake?Kraang 00:54, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Is the cover price on L'Ultime Secret actually EUR 21.19? This is an odd amount or did they use this when they converted from Francs to Euro's?Kraang 01:08, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
For some reason the hyphens don't show up on some ISBN numbers and ones starting with "8"(Spanish I think) are a prime example, Marc knows more about ISBN's than I do so he may have an answer to this puzzle. As for the Albin book it would be best to leave a note about were the source of the price is from if it's not taken direct from the book. I'll add the note. You can generally leave any response on your own talk page, this way it avoids going back and forth between pages, I'll see any response in "Recent changes". This way it keeps the conversation in one place. Thanks.Kraang 02:47, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
We've only done ISBN hyphenation support for ISBNs start with 0 through 5. Haven't done 6, 7, 8, or 9. Alvonruff 22:01, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
Is that because hyphenation is strictly automatic? (I wish we could get that in MediaWiki...) Circeus 22:17, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Use of talk pages here

I too am a Wikipedia editor, and i found the use of talk pages here a bit confusing at first. But a number of people here strongly dislike fragmented conversational threads (as some Wikipedia editors do, as you no doubt know). So a standard has arisen for this wiki that messages are always responded to in the place where they started, and that if you leave a msg on someone else's talk page, you are responsible for watch-listing that page, or checking recent changes, to see the msg. On Wikipedia where watch lists are huge (mine is over 1000 pages) and recent changes scrolls away in minutes, this would not work as a general plan, but this wiki is small enough for this method to work fairly well. -DES Talk

Noted. Thanks. Circeus 03:10, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Exit, tome 2 : Le deuxième cercle

According to OCLC, Exit, tome 2 : Le deuxième cercle is 44 pages long (very similar to what you submitted) and is classified as a "comic strip". Does that match your copy? If it does, we probably want to exclude it as a comic. Ahasuerus 05:09, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

All three Exit volumes are comic book, I was adding this one for completeness. However, I'd be in favor of deleting them entirely as, unlike the other publications, it's definitely more of a mere thriller series anyway. Werber has written a definitely SF Comic book series (Les Enfants d'Ève), but I don't intend to add it. 05:19, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, zapped! Ahasuerus 05:22, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

L'Ultime Secret

I see that you would like to make L'Ultime Secret: Roman into a subtitle of L'Ultime Secret. We generally don't create separate variant Titles for minor subtitles like "novel", "roman", etc, although we preserve these idiosyncrasies at the Publication level. We do record meaningful subtitles like "A Romance of the Far Future" in Title records, though. Ahasuerus 05:09, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

All right. I'll drop that subtitle from any future Albin Michel pub. I think they put in on every single cover as part of a house style, but I've noticed they don't even keep it in their own database. Circeus 05:21, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
Subtitles are a bit of a pain at the moment since we still have a couple of relationships, specifically all links between Reviews and Serials on the one hand and Titles on the other hand, which depend on an exact match between the master Title and the way it's spelled in the Review/Serial record. We hope to have this part of the application rewritten in the next couple of months, but until then we have to worry about this "lexical match" issue :-( Ahasuerus 05:27, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
I'm not too clear what that means for my case. Do you mean the haphazard inclusion/noninclusion of them causes problems in matching reviews to titles? Circeus 06:05, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
That's right, inconsistent inclusion/exclusion of subtitles will result in the associated Reviews not appearing on the Title page. For example, the page for Equal Rites currently shows two reviews, but if you change the title from Equal Rites to Equal Rites: A Novel of Discworld, the reviews will no longer be displayed because the title won't match. Ahasuerus 06:15, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

The Last Continent

I have approved the addition of L'Atalante's version of Terry Pratchett' The Last Continent, but shouldn't the title be Le dernier continent rather than The Last Continent? And shouldn't the Note say "French translation by Patrick Couton" rather than "Translated from French by Patrick Couton"? Thanks!Ahasuerus 01:27, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Big brainfart. I figured I could easily fix it afterward, though (unlike the mess I made with some pubs for King's The Shining) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Circeus (talk • contribs) .
No worries, this is very common when working on bibliographies. Having more than one person involved usually helps, but sometimes it works the other way. For example, multiple layers of editing resulted in Dave Langford's Saberhagen article in Clute/Grant's Encyclopedia of Fantasy becoming corrupted. No such thing as perfection, but the internet certainly makes it easier to find and correct errors :) Ahasuerus 16:14, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
With King, I wasn't sure if I would remember which pub was supposed to be which. Unlike Pratchett or Asimov, who are (usually) more straightforward, King's books often have a complicated edition history. Circeus 20:33, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Parlez-moi d’horreur...

One thing that I forgot to mention when we discussed translations is that we don't have real support for foreign language translations of short stories at this time :( We enter novel translations as Publications under the main English language title, but stories don't have dedicated Publications, so there is no place to put their translations. This is admittedly a major flaw in our current design and the main reason why we would like to implement translations differently, i.e. as separate Titles that will be only be displayed for the users who have enabled that language in their User Preferences.

For now, unfortunately, we have to refrain from entering foreign language translations of individual English language stories. We can still enter foreign language stories and their English language translations, though, since English language translations get their own Title record. Sorry about the confusion! Ahasuerus 19:16, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

And here I thought the problem was simply in how that volume was a mix of stuff from an English anthology and magazine material. Well, this eliminates the possibility of publishing about half my Asimov books... Wait, does that also applies to translated omnibuses? Circeus 20:04, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
We can enter foreign language translations of Collections and Omnibuses as Publications under their respective English language Titles as long as we don't enter their contents. On the other hand, we generally don't enter translated collections and omnibuses that do not have English language counterparts for fear of cluttering the Summary page. We have been trying to stay away from this messy area until "such time as the software is upgraded", which may happen sooner rather than later now that we have more volunteer developers on board. Hopefully :-) Ahasuerus 05:29, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Slaves of Sleep

I had to change the magazine appearance publication type to "Serial" and added "(Complete Novel)" after the title this way the database recognizes the the story(serial titles are automatically linked to main publication titles if it exists) as being from a magazine and displays it as such. This way it shows the first book appearance(1948 Shasta) and also indicates that it appeared as a complete novel in magazine form(1939 Unknown). In this case a merge was not the best way to link the two titles. This is one of the more complicated aspects of the database for a new editor. I hope this explanation helps. Thanks for editing. :-)Kraang 03:07, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

I highly doubt I'll be called on to create more of those in the future. It was almost an accidental find while I did some minor Wikipedia→ISFD interlinking. Circeus 16:17, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

La Communauté de L'Anneaux

You made an edit to this pub which i have approved. But I have a couple of questions. You changed it from trade-paper to mass-market paper, and ISBNDB.COM agrees that this ISBN is for a MMPB edition. But the price seems quite high for a MM ed, can you confirm it? (By the way, ISBNDB.COM list the date as 2001-10-00, for what that is worth.)

Also, in the title phrase "Le seigneur des Anneaux" why is "seigneur" lower-case? is this some convention for French-language titles that i don't know? -DES Talk 17:09, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

The price is accurate (in 2001 Canadian $ anyway), but should probably be in Francs or Euros. I just did a quick fix rather than look the details, as the trilogy was published at least twice by this editor, and it's not clear which edition that's supposed to be in any sources I looked up. The uncapitalized "Seigneur" is definitely a typo. Circeus 21:55, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
If it was sold priced in C$ then that is what we should record, i think -- note that canadian dollars are recorded as C$10.99, to indicate the difference. If the source of the price data is not the actual book, it might be a good idea to mention the source in the notes. -DES Talk 22:55, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
Can't have been the book. I know of no major French pb publisher that currently use prices rather than "price categories". And if they would, well obviously they would not give it in dollars. Circeus 23:31, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
I wasn't sure if the book had perhsps been printed for sale in French Canada. I admit I don't know much about French publishing, how do "price categories" work? -DES Talk 23:52, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
I honestly have no idea. I figure it's easier to say "these books have this basic price, which we may change at any time" (since the basic format doesn't change) rather than print a price that might have to be adjusted between printing to account for inflation and whatnot, but I can't tell. All pb publishers I own stuff of use that system (I have no idea if it's standardized between them; I doubt it) except for Librairie Générale Française, who does print a price on the books.
As far as I can tell, printing a price on pbs is a rather marginal practice in general fro French publishers in all formats. Although my older published pbs do not use the category system (or not visibly, anyway), they still don't give the price on them. Circeus 05:11, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Le Seigneur Des Anneaux'

I had your proposed deletion of the 2002 Pocket edition of Le Seigneur Des Anneaux on hold for a few hours while I was researching this ISBN. Our version was indeed seriously screwed up, but I have found what appears to be the right data for this publication in OCLC's catalog. When you get a chance, could you please take a look at the result and see if it looks OK? Thanks! Ahasuerus 09:00, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

That seems mostly accurate, except for the publisher, which is Pocket. Christian Bourgois is the original publisher; it's traditional to show it on the title page of the paperback editions. Circeus 13:59, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, fixed! Would you happen to know if "Pocket" and "Pocket Books" are related? I know that Pocket Books have published books in Canada and the UK, but I am not sure if they have published books in French. Ahasuerus 19:08, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
Very much doubt it. If Pocket's published outside the French-language market I don't know about it. Circeus 19:48, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Les Visiteurs

Changed artist from Lehr to Macédo for your verified here. Hauck 16:31, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

2001: L'Odyssée de l'espace

For your verified here, I deleted artist (1974 is too early a printing to have the Grant illustration, it's probably the Csernus one) and ISBN (none for J'ai Lu in 1974); put in J'ai Lu SF series and vted it as per new ways for handling translations. Note that your number of pages is probably wrong (it's probably 310). Hauck 15:06, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

Au-delà de l'infini

I approved your submission for this pub, but I took the liberty to change the pub series to "Fleuve Noir - Anticipation" in order to avoid possible future confusions with the short-lived magazine "Anticipations". I also see that you've provided a link to the cover hosted by noosfère. Do you have the authorization of the site to do so ? Thanks. Hauck 18:40, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Entering french publications (Fforde)

Please note that there is a new 'standard' way to enter translations of titles. Here, instead of adding a publication to the english title, a new title (here in french) must be created with french as language and then made a variant of the english one. The result looks like this. Note that I also changed the artist to Viktor Koen (instead of Victor) as per this site and added an space before the exclamation as per the french usage. Hauck 18:50, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Le puits des histoires perdues

Done the same thing for this title (approved then unmerged then vted), corrected artist's mane and french title from 'The puit ...' to 'Le puits ...'. Idem for the two others Fforde Hauck 18:56, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Sorry about the processes

The new Language support is not really stress-tested yet, and we're happy to take feedback on the processes involved - please DO carry on entering data, it's all good, even if we haven't got the methods right yet. I suspect from what you've said that "Add Translation to This title" rather than "Add Publication to This Title" would be helpful? BLongley 01:33, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Carrie

Hi. I did a couple of things with your Carrie submissions. Instead of using the disambiguated title with "(French)", I left the title "Carrie" and made the French title a variant of the English title. I believe that is the way we want to be doing it now. It looks ok to me when I go here, and then following the "[French]" one shows the French publications as I'd expect. See what you think. For this pub, I moved the information about the data source into the Notes -- "Note for Moderator" is not saved, so anything that should be preserved about the publication needs to be put in "Notes" instead. Thanks. --MartyD 12:02, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Stephen King

Hello. A few points about your submissions : 1) I'm not very fond of the noosfere-based splitting of the J'ai Lu publications (particurlarly for the main SF line), but I'll let you judge of this; 2) I've put the category in the notes section, instead of the price; 3) if you're allowed by the site, you can link directly to the noosfère page from the notes field with the appropriate command <a href="your link here">your comment here</a>. Hauck 20:21, 17 December 2011 (UTC) Note also that the France Loisirs pub is probably a HC instead of a TP. Hauck 20:26, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

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