Portal talk:Speculative fiction/Article announcements

message: As such, I'll propose some high-level guidelines for discussion:
* The bibliography should include novels, collections, and nonfiction written by the author, as well as anthologies edited by the author.
:Sounds reasonable, but what about poetry collections (list as a separate section?), chapbooks (list with the novels?) and non-book content like music recordings? Ahasuerus 23:02, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: See my comments above. Basically, I think that it may be useful to add the most important reprint-related data elements -- "this work by A. Bertram Chandler was originally published in English... but in Japan!" -- to the author's article on a permanent basis. Less important reprint information can be captured anywhere for now and moved to the "work" level article slater, when they have been created. Definitely ignore multiple reprints of classic works, but try to include US/UK/AU reprints when the information is non-trivial or otherwise useful. Perhaps also hardcover/tp/pb info as a weak guideline? Ahasuerus 23:02, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Well, if we are talking about omnibus editions of H.G. Wells' books, then including all of them would likely be a chore. However, information about minor authors' omnibus editions can be quite useful, especially if it is non-trivial -- see M. John Harrison for the publication history of his Viriconium books. Ahasuerus 23:02, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

text: I am not sure if we can come up with a guideline that would be applicable in all cases. For example, S.P. Meek had a duology published in book form plus some unreprinted SF novels and two dozen YA non-SF novels, but he was not, arguably, a "predominantly short form writer". On the other hand, his most popular SF work was a series of a dozen short stories, which remain unreprinted as of 2006 (see Day). Even so, I would argue that they are worth listing. Also, what do you think we should do with novel length (well, for certain values of the term "novel length") works that were published in the pulps, but never saw book publication? List them in the "Novel" section? With the stories? Finally, what about unpublished works, especially by major authors? I could scrounge up the titles of John Taine's unpublished novel length manuscripts, but do we want them included? Ahasuerus 23:12, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Sounds reasonable. Ahasuerus 23:12, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposed guidelines

message: The overall structure of the bibliography section should be as follows:
* The section should be contained in a level-2 heading:
  ==Bibliography==
:==Works== may be a better term since it can easily cover CDs, albumbs (think Moorcock et al) as well. Or would be want that kind of material listed in a separate, non-biblio, section? Ahasuerus 23:23, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Where does that leave the non-fiction that the author has edited? As a sub-section of ===Nonfiction===? Or should we change ===Anthologies=== to ===Edited by XYZ===? Also, see my comment re: ===Poetry=== above, although it can get tricky since some folks publish mixed prose/poetry collection :( Ahasuerus 23:23, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

text: The problem with making series a 4th level subsection header is that popular series can (and often do) include short story collections or associated material (A Guide to Xanth/Amber/etc). See Viriconium in M. John Harrison again. We may be better off listing all series stuff up front, followed by standalone novels, collections, etc. Ahasuerus 23:23, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

text: That sounds like a reasonable guideline, but do we list them in order of the series' internal chronology or in the order in which they were published? As you will recall, it's pretty much a FAQ on r.a.sf.w. Ahasuerus 23:23, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Organization

message: * The general format for a title is:
  Title (Year) - Optional 1-sentence summary of book with zero spoilers.
* Long works (novels, collections, anthologies) should be italized with two single quotes:
  A Novel
* Short works (when necessary) should be quoted with double quotes:
  "A Short Work"
* When wikified, the quotes should be placed outside the link brackets:
  A Novel
  "A Short Work"
* Titles should be in the original publication language. Rationale: the first publication title is not subject to change, while translations of titles can be. The summary should describe the English language translation title, translator, and date of translation if known. If the work has not been translated to English, an approximate English translation of the title should be provided if known.
  Eden (1959) - Science fiction novel; after 
  crashing their spaceship on the planet Eden, the crew discovers it is 
  populated with an unusual society. Translated into English by Marc E. Heine 
  as Eden (1989).
  Wejście na orbitę (1962) - Not translated into English. Title 
  translates as Going into Orbit.
* What about publication details such as publisher, page count, ISBN, etc? I personally don't like ISBNs in the high-level bibliography, as books prior to the mid-70's don't have them, and many books are reprinted requiring the article writer to select a single ISBN among many. In general, I think all of this data should go into a more detailed publication history that would be part of an article on the work in question.
Alvonruff 02:19, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Title Format

message: So what should we do about William W. Johnstone's biblio, which is exceedingly long? Should we link his WP article to () or include the whole thing in the body of the article?
I think that WP's governing philosophy should be to try to incorporate as much biobibliographical information as realistically possible instead of linking to it on the Web since Web sites have proved transient over the last 12ish years. Besides, they can be down for maintenance, unavailable due to moves, etc. On the other hand, once you have something in a WP article, it gets propagated all over the Web in days or weeks and from that point on a search on, say, "William Johnstone ashes", will always come back with a useful answer. Online databases like the ISFDB will still be very useful if you want to do more involved searches, sort by title, look up related items, etc. Besides, it's not like we have to spend a lot of time on these time consuming authors right away, we can add it to the to-do list and somebody will get to them. Well, eventually.
However, I'll be the first one to agree that it can also make WP article very large and unwieldy. Decisions, decisions... Ahasuerus 00:47, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Very long biblios, e.g. [[William W. Johnstone]] 

message: Something else that comes to mind is that we may want to have yet another page, which may be related to the proposed biblio policy page. It would list all the "standard" biblio sources that one should consider checking for a typical speculative fiction article, from Bleiler and Reginald to the online list of corrections/addenda to the Encyclopedias of SF and Fantasy by Clute et al. It could also have useful tips on finding bio-bibliographical data on the Web (print.google.com, used.addall.com, catalog.loc.gov, etc) and in paper sources, etc. Make it into a template-ized checklist that editors could use either on this Portal's pages or on the respective articles' Talk pages, perhaps?Ahasuerus 03:23, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: One sample tip would be to check for pre-existing (or even missing!) article for other people with the same last name (or, for common names, "first name last name" combinations) when you have created an "author article". For example, when I uplifted S.P. Meek, I ran a WP search and discovered that there were half a dozen "Meek" articles already, but there was no disambiguation page. So I went ahead and created one and things are much tidier now. Another tip would be to run a search for the newly created author within existing Wikipedia articles (probably using Google rather than the built-in engine) and link them to the new article. Also, think of any other articles that should link to the newly created one and check them out. And, of course, always create redirects for different forms of the author's name, e.g. with and without the middle initial(s), different capitalization, pseudonyms, etc. Be extra careful with pseudonyms that are sometimes used individually and sometimes collectively -- you may want to create a dab page for them. Ahasuerus 05:10, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Tips, tricks and templates for bibliographers

message: There is at least one relevant pre-existing template that we may want to look into:

It's a citation template as opposed to a bibliographical one, but it's something to ponder. Ahasuerus 16:33, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Existing biblio templates