Verified Publishing Names

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 these categories have been identified:

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

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.
 * Use Verified Common Name if the article is about an imprint or publisher's common name.
 * Use Verified Logo if the article is about a imprint or publishing company logo or mark.
 * Use Verified Publisher Series if the article is about a publishers series.
 * Use Verified Printer if the article is about a printer or book manufacturer.