author's name on the title page [of every fanzine novel]

[morgandawn]

Posting this here at the request of a non-DW member who is working hard on Fanlore fanzine entries. She tells me she's in contact with the Fanlore Gardeners, but thought that others may be witnessing similar issues.

PS. Yes, she has entered thousands of fanzines since July.  Amazing.

Edited PPS. In re-reading her entry, it occurs to me that adding an author's name to every fanzine novel when there are no existing duplicates is overkill. It is a good tool *when* there *are* duplicates - but it seems (if I read her comments correctly)  it causes problems when used in every case as the 'norm'.

"Hey, Can I just have folks revisit this decision to put the name of an author's name on the title page [of every fanzine novel]? I think it's creating a lot of problems.

: makes it difficult for a user to search for the name of a novel she or he wants to find. Most folks don't make a distinction between "search" and "go." And even knowing the difference and then using them doesn't get the information needed. The odd search engine just snarls all this up even more.

: makes it difficult to accurately enter information, creating duplicates and worse

: creates problems down the road when (1) one enters a novel without knowing the author and then locates the author later, this causes confusion and makes more work, (2) one uses a pre-1995 name with initials and then finds out the full name can be used after all (3) one uses a name that later turns out to be one the author says she or he doesn't want used. Every single one of these instances require some fancy footwork and duplications of a lot of effort.

: brings up the political issues of putting an author on the title header but not the artist, which I've been told if the art is "noteworthy" then the artist should also be included, difficult for the same reasons as author names, but also because one often doesn't have the cover on hand AND is also asked to decide what's noteworthy and what isn't

: and why a single author on a novel, but not a single author anthology? It seems awfully arbitrary.

Can folks revisit this decision? I mean, I've added thousands of zines in the last six weeks (revising all of them will be a big headache) but I've still got thousands and thousands to go. Why not nip this now? Please?

Mrs. Potato Head"

Comments

[ratcreature]

I agreed with this in the wiki talk but I'll second that here too. I have the same problems when editing there. I have entered less zines (though some too), but collated a whole lot into lists so that they can be found and so on and added stuff and proofread, looked for duplicates, and this name thing is a lot of hassle. It makes it harder to find duplicates because the search engine sucks so much and it adds dozens of variations, none of which the search engine necessarily finds even if you click search not go. It forces everyone to move pages around constantly and then edit the links in the lists, and get rid of double redirects which is also extra work (because that's what happens if a zine is first entered as "random title - sue f." then later it turns out that sue fangirl is okay with the full name online so it gets moved to "random title - sue fangirl" only then it turns out it wasn't a novel after all but an anthology of related stories and it gets moved to "random title (fandom x)", because others with random title already exist, and you have double redirects.

I also dislike that artist thing.

[morgandawn]

the only time I've added an author/fandom to a zine title is when there is already one with the same name. hopefully, if we follow that as a rule there will be fewer edits down the road.

on a side note: I go back to the pages I create from time to time to see what edits/changes the Gardeners make so I can do it right the next time. although like Mrs P, when transferring this much data over, total compliance is hard.