Verified Publishing Names

This page is a work in progress, and has not yet obtained a solid consensus. It was first created (or significantly revised) on 14 September 2008. Do not take the information on this page as firmly established ISFDB policy or guidelines. Feel free to discuss any issues with the content on this page on its talk page. If in doubt, before accepting the guidelines on this page, feel free to discuss the matter elsewhere, perhaps on the Community Portal. This notice will be removed when the page obtains a reasonable consensus on its contents.

The verified publisher project experimental and is constructing publishing group, publisher, and imprint articles based on what's stated in source publications and other verifiable/reliable resources. The goal is verifiable and documented back to the source articles about publishing groups, publishers, and imprints as many of the current Wikipedia articles are not citing references plus with publishers merging and advent of publishing groups "who is who" has often been speculated rather than being based on facts.

To help support this project an easy thing ISFDB editors can do when entering and verifying publications is to make sure that the publication record's publisher name field accurately reflects what's stated on the title page. For example, rather than just "Ace" you could use the full imprint or publisher name as stated on the title page such as "Ace Books", "Ace Books, Inc.", or "Ace Science Fiction Books".

The results of this project are contained in four categories:

• Publishing Groups lists companies identified as "publishing groups" in the source publications. Sometimes these are identified by the words "Distributed by ..."
• Verified publishers lists companies identified as the "publisher" for a publication. Note that Category:Publishers is not part of this project as it was constructed from unverified sources.
• Imprints lists imprints used by publishers and publishing groups.
• Publisher verification sources lists publications that are being used as source references for this project.

Source Publications

At the core of the verified publisher project are the publications that we use as source references. Only one publication is needed to establish that a name is used but ideally an article will reference three or four publications, ideally spread out over time. As efforts are made to establish exactly when a name was introduced or dropped there may be extra publication references neat the start/end dates. For example, The earliest verified publication for an imprint may be July 1983 and if you find one for May 1983 you would add that to the list of references for the imprint.

Ideally you select publications that can be reliably dated. Secondary sources for dating is ok. The reason for this is that a goal of the project is to document when a name was used. The PubDate field used in the publication related templates is a text string meaning you can use things like "around 1978" should you have a publication that contains information of interest to the project that can't be dated reliably. Obviously in that case the publication article should document the method used to date the publication in detail.

To use a publication as a reference for this project then from the ISFDB publication record click on the Bibliographic Comments link. This will take you to a Publication: article. Edit the article and add at the top

{{SourcePublicationHeader|Title|Author|PubDate}}

See Template:SourcePublicationHeader for usage information on the Title, Author, and PubDate fields plus additional notes for what should go on the publication page.

Imprints, Publishers, and Publishing Groups

The structure of the imprint, publisher, and publishing group articles are similar. All of them should start with

{{VerifiedPublisherHeader}}

to insert the standard notice box.

The goal is that information should not be added to an article without citing the source references. The best sources are physical publications. Sources such as Wikipedia should be used with extreme care. Of course, these other sources can be used to help locate primary source references that can be cited as part of the verified publisher project.

Three templates are provided to help cite references within articles.

• Use {{Ref}} to add a reference in the body of the article.
• Use {{Note}} to add a footnote at the bottom of the article.
• Use {{SourcePublication}} within a footnote to reference a source publication.

The article should also include one or more of these which will file the article under the appropriate categories. The general convention is that these go at the bottom of an article.

• Use {{Verified Imprint}} if the article is about an imprint.
• Use {{Verified Publisher}} if the article is about a publisher.
• Use {{Verified Publishing Group}} if the article is about a publishing group.