User talk:J-Sun

Welcome!

Hello, J-Sun, 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
• Field-by-field guide to entering new publications into the database
• Help:Getting Started
• What the ISFDB Wiki is for
• FAQ
• Wiki editing help - Tips on how to use the wiki-specific features when editing wiki pages.
• Wiki Conventions - How things are usually done on this wiki.
• Help:How to upload images to the ISFDB wiki

Note: Image uploading isn't entirely automated. You're uploading the files to the wiki which will then have to be linked to the database by editing the publication record.

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! Stonecreek 10:36, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Your edits were perfect! . . .

. . . thanks for submitting them. But nobody is constantly perfect and so the respective editors who submitted the initial shortfictions didn't catch it when submitting (and didn't so later) - so it's good to have a second look on everything!

On the matter of NONGENRE material: well, strictly speaking, they wouldn't belong here, but we overcame at one point to have all works by writers who are major authors of speculative fiction (and really are prominent through their sf work). Robert Silverberg does certainly fit into this category, for other writers this is debatable (and is debated from time to time) on the Community Portal or the page for Rules and standards discussions. Check it out or ask there if you are not sure in some cases. Again, thank you! Stonecreek 10:44, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the welcome and the comments. As far as Silverberg, while he is inarguably an SF giant, the problem with allowing his non-SF is that it then opens up a huge can of words, so to speak. He's written a lot of non-SF. But, as you say, I may take that up in the appropriate place later.

According to ISFDB:Policy, we include "[w]orks (both fiction and non-fiction) which are not related to speculative fiction, but were produced by authors who have otherwise published works either of or about speculative fiction over a certain threshold". Although this "threshold" can be hard to define in borderline cases, Silverberg is clearly head and shoulders above it, so ideally we should have all of his books listed. Ahasuerus 06:35, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

The challenge with prolific writers like Silverberg is the sheer number of works involved. We currently have 2,806 title records either attributed to Silverberg or related to him in some fashion (reviews/interviews.) It makes his Summary Page hard to navigate and puts an extra load on the server whenever it has to display the page. It's even worse when you ask the server to compile a list of suspected duplicate titles -- the poor thing has to traverse 2,806 titles 2,806 times, i.e. a grand total of over 7 million (!) comparison. And the total rises to 17 million in Asimov's case since we have 4,326 of his titles on file. We have a Feature Request to make the process faster, but I haven't had a chance to work on it yet. That said, adding Silverberg's softcore porn novels from the 1960s (under 300, right?) shouldn't have that much of an impact on performance. Ahasuerus 06:35, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

One more thing. At the moment, the software assumes that "NONGENRE" titles are always novel, so entering non-genre collections and especially short fiction is not really supported. We plan to make it either to enter them, hopefully in 2013. Ahasuerus 06:35, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

Speaking of, I've finally read the direct links the welcome template points me to and some follow-on links (there's an overwhelming amount of information here) but I'm still not sure I'm clear on what the appropriate place is for some things. Basically, I'm supposed to only respond on this page and ask questions on help or mod pages? Because, while it's not very important at the moment, I can't seem to edit User:J-Sun, which seems odd to me. So I should ask about such things at the help desk? It seems like most of those questions are about the real work of the ISFDB and not about "personal problems", so to speak. --J-Sun 04:38, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

Editors' User pages are typically used to provide information about yourself (entirely optional, of course) and/or as a place where the editor lists the projects that s/he is currently working on. Unfortunately, we have had numerous problems with spambots over the years, so we had to tweak our Wiki settings to limit new users to posting on Talk pages. Once you have accumulated a certain number of Wiki edits, you will be able to edit all Wiki pages, including your User page. Ahasuerus 06:40, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

The Pleasure of Our/Their Company

Hi. FYI, Locus1 lists both "Our" and "Their" variations of that title. Other places seem to corroborate that. So a variant was the right thing to do. --MartyD 12:13, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, that's good to know - and I'm glad I got it right despite not being sure about the titles. :) --J-Sun 04:40, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

O Correio do Tempo

Good catch - O Correio do Tempo turned out to be a Portuguese translation of Up the Line. Ahasuerus 03:19, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks and thanks for finding that out. I forgot to mention another case like that, except that it's a story: 1518433 ("Un loup dans la ménagerie") seems to mean "A Wolf in the Zoo" but I know of no such Silverberg title. --J-Sun 04:44, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

This list of French translations of Silverberg's works lists it as "(?)", so you are not alone. It's even (remotely) possible that the author was someone else, e.g. Larry Niven's 1971 "There's a Wolf in My Time Machine" comes to mind. We have a number of stories whose authors' names were mangled by foreign publishers. Ahasuerus 06:19, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

But I also (think I) know that he published no original short fiction in 1977. --J-Sun 04:44, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

Its first appearance as "Un loup dans la ménagerie" was in 1977, but the English original -- whatever it may have been -- was presumably published earlier. Ahasuerus 06:19, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

(This relates to the above point about proper places - should I drop a note to User:Hauck (primary verifier) or drop a note on a mod page or some other option? --J-Sun 04:44, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

Sure, you can start with Hauck's Talk page -- he is also a moderator and knows a lot about about French SF and translations. Ahasuerus 06:19, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

Some Will Not Die and False Night

I had to reject the submission to variant the first title with the latter one. The variant relationship is used to designate a change in author credit, or change in title. It can not be used to indicate a change in text. If the 1961 novel is a substantial expansion of the 1954 work, it is considered a separate title for ISFDB purposes. Unfortunately, there is currently no ISFDB function that is used to relate one title to another (expanded, abridged, revised, etc.) We have to resort to explaining the relationship in the title's note field. Perhaps that may change in a future software update. For now, we keep the titles separate. Thanks for contributing. Mhhutchins 04:08, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Okay, I understand - sorry about that. Thanks for the information. -J-Sun 03:07, 24 July 2013 (UTC)