Talk:ISFDB Editing Guide

This page should give general background people need before editing. The individual articles that fork off from here should be focused on a particular application (like editpub.cgi), so that particular application can have a help link embedded in it, which will refer back to an appropriate wiki page. The individual wiki pages probably need to have a link back to this page, since someone may go through this process:
 * 1) They're looking at a particular publication, and notice an error.
 * 2) They think "Hey - what's this edit link do"?
 * 3) They see a big form and aren't sure what to do. They click on "Help".
 * 4) The help wiki page obviously has a lot of data, but contains a message at the top of the page, that says "read me first before continuing".
 * 5) They click that, and they get here. They presumable read the overview. (They won't, but let's presume they will).

There may be the need for separate howto's, which describe the multiple steps needed to accomplish some editing tasks. For instance, when adding a magazine, the rough order of steps are:
 * 1) Enter the magazine via "Add Magazine".
 * 2) If a wiki page exists for that magazine, add the issue to the wiki page (see guidelines for editing a magazine wiki page).
 * 3) If a wiki page does not exist, make one (see guidelines), and add the new article to the main magazine page (see guidlines).
 * 4) Optional followup: Scan titles in the magazine for known series, and fix those titles up. Merge the editor's individual editor citations into a single annual citation.

Alvonruff 10:29, 17 Jun 2006 (CDT)


 * To rephrase what you're saying, there are two ways to organize the help; by tool and by task. Perhaps both belong here on or under the Editing Guide; or maybe one belongs in Help instead.  I'll start trying to assemble some of this material and we can work out where to put it as we write it. Mike Christie 19:45, 17 Jun 2006 (CDT)

List of tools with script names, link text, and function
This is a table showing the editing tools that have been written, with the name of the cgi script, the name of the link that appears on the ISFDB page to link to the tool, and a brief description of the function of the script. I'm creating this as a reference to guide the help text creation.

these authors together:


 * Click on Advanced Search in the navigation bar.
 * In the section labeled ISFDB Author Search form, enter common terms into the term1 field (in the Heinlein case, just enter "Heinlein") and press Submit. When merging a canonical name and a pseudonym, the search query may be more complicated ("Robin Bobb" OR "Megan Lindholm").
 * All of the authors that match the search strings will be displayed in a table. The first column contains a merge checkbox.
 * Select the checkboxes of exactly two authors to merge, and click on Merge Selected Records.
 * Any conflicts between the records will be shown on the next page highlighted in red. You need to pick which values you want to have retained.
 * There is an additional set of radio buttons at the bottom of the page which controls how the changes are applied. XXX