ISFDB Spoiler Policy Question
David Tate
stupid to figure out the ISFDB Wiki instructions.
Question: does ISFDB have a policy on spoilers?
Specifically, I note that authors and individual books may now have
associated *tags*. For example, if you go to Mercedes Lackey's author
page, you see the associated tags 'fantasy', 'occult thriller', and
'dragons'. If you click on 'dragons', you see a (currently very
short) list of individual titles by various authors.
That's great, and I can see how it would eventually be very useful.
However, some of the specific tags represent Big Honking Spoilers (tm)
for the books they tag. The tag "lost colony" seems like a
particularly likely suspect in this regard. I can think of several
books -- including some of the ones already tagged -- for which it
would be a major spoiler to know in advance that this is a "lost
colony" story.
I imagine there are other likely tags with similar spoiler potential.
Is this a concern for the ISFDB team?
Dave Tate
Ahasuerus
That's a very good question, thanks for bringing it up. I wrote the
current Tag help page (http://isfdb.tamu.edu/wiki/index.php/
Help:Screen:AddTags) in response to a few editors' questions some time
after Tags went live, but it didn't occur to me to mention our spoiler
policy. The Edit Title help page (http://isfdb.tamu.edu/wiki/index.php/
Help:Screen:EditTitle) has a comment about "non-spoiler" synopsis
data, so it's safe to assume that we want Tags to follow the same
policy. I will update the Tags help page and post a note on the Rules
and Standards board (http://isfdb.tamu.edu/wiki/index.php/
Rules_and_standards_discussions). Feel free to stop by and comment --
all you have to do is create an account by clicking on the "Create an
account" link at the top of the page :)
David Tate
> On Jun 24, 11:02 am, David Tate <d...@ida.org> wrote:
>
> > Apologies for posting this here, but I am apparently too old and
> > stupid to figure out the ISFDB Wiki instructions.
[...]
> Feel free to stop by and comment --
> all you have to do is create an account by clicking on the "Create an
> account" link at the top of the page.
Thanks for the reply. FWIW, my usability issues with the Wiki weren't
anything to do with creating an account -- it was in deciding which of
a dozen possible places might be the appropriate one to raise the
issue, and what the correct protocol for doing so might look like.
None of them looked very likely, and there were no precedents to
follow.
Dave Tate
Ahasuerus
> Thanks for the reply. FWIW, my usability issues with the Wiki weren't
> anything to do with creating an account -- it was in deciding which of
> a dozen possible places might be the appropriate one to raise the
> issue, and what the correct protocol for doing so might look like.
> None of them looked very likely, and there were no precedents to
> follow.
Oh, that! We have grown quite a bit since we re-enabled outside
submissions 6 months ago, but we still have only 22 contributors with
more than 1,000 submissions each -- and one of them is not even human
-- so unlike Wikipedia we don't need complex information filtering
mechanisms. The Community Portal, which is linked from anywhere in the
ISFDB Wiki, is as good a place to post questions/suggestions as any.
ObCrossThread: Speaking of Wikipedia, we have run into somewhat
similar issues at the ISFDB, e.g. Deletionism, even though our
database is orders of magnitude smaller and our focus is much more
narrow. Nature of the beast, I guess...
Robert A. Woodward
Ahasuerus <ahas...@email.com> wrote:
> On Jun 24, 8:09 pm, David Tate <d...@ida.org> wrote: [snip]
> > Thanks for the reply. FWIW, my usability issues with the Wiki weren't
> > anything to do with creating an account -- it was in deciding which of
> > a dozen possible places might be the appropriate one to raise the
> > issue, and what the correct protocol for doing so might look like.
> > None of them looked very likely, and there were no precedents to
> > follow.
>
> Oh, that! We have grown quite a bit since we re-enabled outside
> submissions 6 months ago, but we still have only 22 contributors with
> more than 1,000 submissions each -- and one of them is not even human
> -- so unlike Wikipedia we don't need complex information filtering
> mechanisms. The Community Portal, which is linked from anywhere in the
> ISFDB Wiki, is as good a place to post questions/suggestions as any.
Is there a way to quickly check to see if any of the books in my
collection are not in the ISFDB? (including variant editions). I
don't want to check titles 5000+ times.
--
Robert Woodward <robe...@drizzle.com>
<http://www.drizzle.com/~robertaw>
Ahasuerus
[snip]
> Is there a way to quickly check to see if any of the books in my
> collection are not in the ISFDB? (including variant editions). I
> don't want to check titles 5000+ times.
Do you happen to have a catalog of your collection? If you do, we can
write a program to compare what you have with what the ISFDB has and
generate a list of differences. If you don't have a catalog, then, um,
I am not sure what we could do, but we could try to brainstorm it.
Robert A. Woodward
Ahasuerus <ahas...@email.com> wrote:
I have the books listed in a Filemaker Pro database; I can generate
text files in various formats.
mark...@earthlink.net
Are you sure those deleting aren't uneducated lemurs with political
agendas?<g>
See my Wikipedia FAQK post.
Ahasuerus
wrote:
> In article <1182748937.062985.65...@w5g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>,
>
> Ahasuerus <ahasue...@email.com> wrote:
> > On Jun 25, 1:00 am, "Robert A. Woodward" <rober...@drizzle.com> wrote:
> > [snip]
> > > Is there a way to quickly check to see if any of the books in my
> > > don't want to check titles 5000+ times.
>
> > Do you happen to have a catalog of your collection? If you do, we can
> > generate a list of differences. If you don't have a catalog, then, um,
> > I am not sure what we could do, but we could try to brainstorm it.
>
> I have the books listed in a Filemaker Pro database; I can generate
> text files in various formats.
If you want to export it in basic CSV format (or any other plain text
format that you like) and send the resulting file to my e-mail
address, I'll see what I can do :) Our primary programmer, Al von
Ruff, is currently busy saving the world, but many other moderators
have access to a copy of the database and can run scans/exports/etc.
Robert A. Woodward
<1182889899.7...@n60g2000hse.googlegroups.com>,
Ahasuerus <ahas...@email.com> wrote:
What data fields do you want? (besides Author & Title of course).
Ahasuerus
> In article
> <1182889899.793287.259...@n60g2000hse.googlegroups.com>,
>
> Ahasuerus <ahasue...@email.com> wrote:
> > On Jun 25, 11:26 pm, "Robert A. Woodward" <rober...@drizzle.com>
> > wrote:
> > > In article <1182748937.062985.65...@w5g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>,
>
> > > Ahasuerus <ahasue...@email.com> wrote:
> > > > On Jun 25, 1:00 am, "Robert A. Woodward" <rober...@drizzle.com> wrote:
> > > > [snip]
> > > > > Is there a way to quickly check to see if any of the books in my
> > > > > collection are not in theISFDB? (including variant editions). I
> > > > > don't want to check titles 5000+ times.
>
> > > > Do you happen to have a catalog of your collection? If you do, we can
> > > > write a program to compare what you have with what theISFDBhas and
> > > > generate a list of differences. If you don't have a catalog, then, um,
> > > > I am not sure what we could do, but we could try to brainstorm it.
>
> > > I have the books listed in a Filemaker Pro database; I can generate
> > > text files in various formats.
>
> > If you want to export it in basic CSV format (or any other plain text
> > format that you like) and send the resulting file to my e-mail
> > address, I'll see what I can do :) Our primary programmer, Al von
> > Ruff, is currently busy saving the world, but many other moderators
> > have access to a copy of the database and can run scans/exports/etc.
>
> What data fields do you want? (besides Author & Title of course).
Probably all of them -- we can always ignore irrelevant columns like
the internal catalog number.
For those who are interested in the internals, the ISFDB has fairly
extensive database documentation available online. You can also
download and review our latest MySQL backup, which is self-documented
if you are familiar with MySQL. We have detailed online instructions
explaining what kind of data we expect to be entered in what field,
e.g. how to enter pseudonyms, variant forms of the title, etc. I will
post a few pointers to the relevant ISFDB Wiki page once the server
wakes up.
The executive summary is that we try to capture the following data
elements for each printing (note: each printing, not just each
edition) of each publication:
Title as specified on the title page (as opposed to the cover/spine or
the copyright page)
Author(s) exactly as specified on the title page (including middle
initials, non-ASCII characters, etc)
Publication Year (not the copyright year or the year of the first
publication)
Publisher as stated
Number of pages (the "vii+243" format is supported, the last page with
relevant text is the last page number for our purposes)
Publication type: novel, collection, anthology, magazine, non-genre,
non-fiction, fanzine, omnibus (there is an order of precedence in case
a book is, e.g., both a collection and non-genre)
ISBN: 10 digits only at the moment; if there is no ISBN stated, we
capture the publisher's catalog ID
URL of the cover if available on the Web and if we have permission to
link to it
Price: primary (typically US or UK) price only, other prices (e.g.
Canadian or Commonwealth) go into the Notes field
Artist(s)' name
Binding: mass market paperback size (18 cm), trade paperback size (>18
cm), hardcover, digest, pulp, etc
Notes: free text information about this particular printing
We also collect higher level information that applies to all editions
and printings of a given book:
Synopsis: no spoilers, please
Series name
Series number
Date of first publication (for books, it's the date of first
publication in book form, serializations are linked via a separate
mechanism)
URL of the related Wikipedia article (ObCrossThread!)
Notes: free text information about the book as a whole as opposed to
the printing-specific Notes field above. For example, if a book is a
fixup, this is where we would enter a list of stories that it was
based on
Naturally, all of this data is internally normalized, tabularized and
otherwise massaged. Our online editing tools let you do all kinds of
other things, e.g. designate different titles as "variant titles",
create pseudonyms, enter collection/anthology contents, add author
data and create special magazine editor bibliographies. We also walk
dogs :)
To go back to Robert's question, we wouldn't want to use a database
dump like the one he is proposing to populate the ISFDB database since
it would likely introduce a number of errors. However, if we could
write a quick and dirty scan that would compare Robert's database with
what we already have cataloged, we could then generate a list of
discrepancies and get the number of books to be manually entered/
reviewed down to a more manageable level.
Ahasuerus
> On Jun 24, 10:55 pm, Ahasuerus <ahasue...@email.com> wrote: [snip]
> > ObCrossThread: Speaking of Wikipedia, we have run into somewhat
> > similar issues at the ISFDB, e.g. Deletionism, even though our
> > database is orders of magnitude smaller and our focus is much more
> > narrow. Nature of the beast, I guess...
>
> Are you sure those deleting aren't uneducated lemurs with political
> agendas?<g>
>
> See my Wikipedia FAQK post.
Lemurs with a political agenda? Lemuria? Ah, so the vandalbots that
have been trying to spam our Wiki are deros! That certainly explains a
lot :)