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 Publishing Names project is experimental and is for documenting publishing group, publisher, and imprint names based on what's stated in source publications and other verifiable/reliable resources. A secondary goal is to track when these names were introduced and discontinued.

At present the names are only being documented in on the wiki side of ISFDB with one name per wiki page or article to make it each to organize the names into categories. At present three categories have been identified.

• 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 the category "Publishers" is not part of this project as it includes unverified names and also mixes publisher and imprint names.
• Imprints lists imprints used by publishers and publishing groups.

There is a forth category, Publisher verification sources, that contains the publications used as source references for the project.

Source Publications

At the core of the Verified Publishing Names 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 spread out over the life of the name. As efforts are made to establish exactly when a name was introduced or dropped there may be extra publication references near 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 some of the project's templates is a text string meaning you can use a date like "1978 or 1979 (estimated)" should you have a publication that contains information of interest to the project that can't be dated reliably. In that case the publication article should include notes that explain how the date was estimated.

To include 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 in the wiki. 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 a 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 Publishing Names 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.