User talk:MartyD/ProposedDateHelp
Use this page to discuss the proposed revision of the date help text. Use one section per specific topic. Edit the topic's section to comment/respond. Start a new section to discuss a point not yet under discussion.
Topic 1 Here
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No Publication Date
We have one more special date:
- 9999-00-00 - when the book is rescheduled for the future but does not have an exact date yet.
While rarely used, it is an option when a book is added early, looks stable and gets all weird just before publication. Annie 13:17, 18 January 2022 (EST)
- Oops. I knew that. Good catch, thanks. --MartyD 08:39, 21 January 2022 (EST)
- I put all of the future date stuff into a section of its own and also added 9999-00-00 into the special dates list. See if that looks better. --MartyD 09:58, 21 January 2022 (EST)
Missing sources
Where will Goodreads and other bibliographic projects (FantLab for Russian (and Russian adjacent), databazeknih.cz for Czech and so on) fall into this list? The English language ones (bar Goodreads) are in our verifications list but there is nothing there for the non-English ones (yes, some may cover some books but...)
Same question for library sources which are not OCLC - due to their policies, some library sources may have better information than OCLC - DNB often has a month for the German books, some others may record even dates - none of that gets into OCLC even when OCLC links the record. Annie 13:27, 18 January 2022 (EST)
- I would also add publisher social media accounts as a source, that in some cases can be more accurate than catalogues or websites. The former suffer from long lead times and so might not reflect reschedulings (e.g. the current Tor US catalogue looks to have been produced in May 2021 going off the filename); the latter may not be properly maintained (e.g. Penguin UK). In theory at least, publisher accounts on Twitter (and presumably FB, etc) should be pretty up-to-date; I usually check the UK ones every Thursday/Friday as they tweet anything they've published that day. ErsatzCulture 14:27, 18 January 2022 (EST)
- Yeah - media accounts and other official accounts on mass sites - I was thinking if these fall under websites/catalogs or if we want to call them out separately. Annie 14:36, 18 January 2022 (EST)
- My thinking is that this list should only be providing guidance as to which secondary information to prefer and which secondary information to treat with some degree of skepticism. Buried in help about how to fill out a date field is NOT the place to provide an authoritative list of all possible secondary sources. Ideally, this section could refer to such a list, located elsewhere. But perhaps it's already overly specific and should be condensed. What do you think of something like this instead?
- The publication itself; this includes direct statements as well as dates encoded in number/date lines.
- Parties directly involved with the publication (publisher, author, artist, etc.)
- Later printings/editions.
- The ISFDB bibliographic Verification Sources (list and details)
- Other fact-oriented parties close to the publication (new book seller, review/announcement, bibliographer/database)
- Calculation based on codes, known announcement + publication timings, etc. (e.g., for book clubs)
- Sources with non-fact focus or removed from the publication (used book seller, interview, etc.)
- Perhaps with a warning about relying on anything in Wikipedia. :-) It's still long. Maybe even better would be to list #1 - #4 and then just state that other sources may be used, but information from those four take precedent. And encourage editors to seek corroboration for more less reliable sources such as used book sellers and interviews. --MartyD 08:34, 21 January 2022 (EST)
- My thinking is that this list should only be providing guidance as to which secondary information to prefer and which secondary information to treat with some degree of skepticism. Buried in help about how to fill out a date field is NOT the place to provide an authoritative list of all possible secondary sources. Ideally, this section could refer to such a list, located elsewhere. But perhaps it's already overly specific and should be condensed. What do you think of something like this instead?
Handling pubs with different dates for different territories
It would be helpful to have explicit notes [*] on how to document pubs that have more than one date - typically for "transatlantic" publishers that put out the same editions in both North America and UK/Commonwealth territories. Examples: Titan Books, Severn House, Solaris/Rebellion/Abaddon. (I don't think I have any physical editions from any of these publishers - I am curious if/how they address the "Published in <month> <year>" info on the copyright page in cases like the ones I've linked to, where the pub dates are in different months?)
When I've seen such cases, I've generally entered the earliest date in the pub date field, and added the later one in the pub note (same for the price) - but I've gotten the impression that perhaps the more rules-compliant way would be to use the date associated with the country the publisher is based in, although I believe this isn't as clear-cut.
[ * As such cases are fairly rare, I'd be more than happy for this to be on a separate help page, and just have a link from the main pub date help ] ErsatzCulture 14:39, 18 January 2022 (EST)
- Yeah, I don't know about that. In the only cases I specifically recall, we made two entries, one for each country (using that country's release date and that country's price). Of course, if everything's identical, there's no practical way to determine if a book in hand is one edition or the other. Earliest date seems most practical if not separating. --MartyD 08:38, 21 January 2022 (EST)
Text shortening
I'm all for the longer text, as it is quite clear. ../Doug H 15:59, 18 January 2022 (EST)
- Yeah - I think that the text is not really too long - dates are kinda important and making it as clear as humanly possible is a feature and not a bug :)