R&S Example page/Date formats including Day of the Month

I raise the matter after recent discussion here and here. Help:Entering non-genre magazines says: "The ISFDB standard format for this field is "Magazine Name, Month Day, Year" for dailies or weeklies, "Magazine Name, Month Year" for monthlies, or "Magazine Name, Month1-Month2 Year" for bimonthlies. See Help:Screen:EditPub for more details. Follow the ISFDB standard insofar as possible." Help:Screen:EditPub does not seem to mention dates with day numbers. The last substantive discussion on the point, which probably led to that wording, but which didn't really come to a clear consensus, was Help talk:Entering non-genre magazines. -DES Talk 21:01, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

I would be fine with copying the rule above into the templates that build Help:Screen:EditPub and Help:Screen:NewPub, thus making this the standard rule for Genre as well as non-genre pubs on the ISFDB. Or, if someone thinks the rule should be different, let's come to a consensus and change both help pages so they are consistent. It has been suggested that date formats should follow the format used on the particular periodical, but secondary sources may not report this accurately. It has also been suggested that the standard format for the country of origin be used; this is not unreasonable, but i would prefer a single format personally. -DES Talk 21:01, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

What are people's views on the issue? -DES Talk 21:01, 6 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I would go along with the standard as stated for non-genre magazines being the same standard for all magazines. (And that all magazines have the same standard regardless of how they're stated in the magazine itself.) Strange how this never came up before. MHHutchins 21:14, 6 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Having just recently read the help text quoted above while trying to understand how to enter non-genre magazines, I can say I found it quite clear, unambiguous, and easy to follow. Makes sense to me to do it the same way on all magazines.  --MartyD 23:44, 6 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Agree with MartyD and MHHuthchins.--swfritter 17:51, 7 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I withdraw my opinion on "Date format in title is important" in the prior discussions as I can no longer see it as important in any way whatsoever unless it allows for things that the publication date alone doesn't make feasible. Which seems to be banned under the current proposal. I invite all of you to submit a justification for ANY regularisation of dates in titles. What's next - demanding Month names be entered in English, even for French language fanzines/magazines? You might lose some Canadian support for the "middle-endian" option... BLongley 21:41, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
 * There really is no current proposal. The current help is IMO unclear and the real proposal (IMO) is to clarify it, whether by stating a stating single format, a principle for choosing format on a per periodical basis, a statement that editors may chose any of a list of specified formats, or even a statement that editors may choose any format at all. As a starting point the single format specified in the non-genre help was put forward, but only as a suggestion and starting place, IMO. I really don't see how the proposal to have a standard can be "offensive". if any of my comments have offended you i am sorry -- there was no intent to offend. -DES Talk 22:04, 7 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Why did someone remove "This page is a work in progress, and has not yet obtained a solid consensus." See . I'm not Wiki-knowledgeable enough to know why this happened, but editing evidence to match a current proposal looks wrong to me. I'm annoyed. Severely annoyed. And I'd better go catch up on sleep before I start slinging accusations around. But something look severely fishy to me. BLongley 22:50, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
 * That edit was made on 10:57, 26 August 2008, almost a year ago. (double-check the time stamp of the link you provided, please.) I don't think that qualifies as "editing evidence to match a current proposal". The removal of the "Not Final" header came three days after this edit in which I asked "Are we ready to declare this help page as definitive as any of our help pages are?" and this edit by MHHutchins, in which he says "it appears to be in good enough shape to remove the warning." (and this further edit in which mike specifically compliments you, Kevin, and myself on having reached agreement so rapidly.) After getting that positive response, i waited three days with no further response on what had until then been a quite active talk page (including quite a few comments by you), before removing the "not Final" tag, and in the 11+ months since then, no one has significantly objected to the content of the page. (Oh and when i removed the "NotFinal" tag, I notifed people in this edit, dated 15:58, 26 August 2008 which is the most recent edit on that talk page to date.) i don't think that can really be called "changing help without consent?" If you do, then just how much "consent" should I have gotten? -DES Talk 23:26, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I admit to being a bit annoyed myself. Not that you apparently misread the date on a wiki edit -- I've missed more significant things often enough -- I missed a significant note in a pub I was moderating a change to just today, see User talk:Bluesman. But that you jumped to the conclusion that I, or someone, was "editing evidence to match a current proposal". I would hope you would know me well enough by now to know that while i have strong views on many subjects, and will argue from them as strongly as I know how, I won't do so by stealth or deception. If I edited a help page to make it consistent with a pending proposal, I would state that I had done so in the relevant discussion. More probably i would indicate what changes I would propose to make, as I have done often, posting drafts in discussion threads. -DES Talk 23:26, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
 * In this particular case I don't feel that I understand either why you are so annoyed with the discussion, or with me. Whatever you think should be the standard, fixed or flexable, for entering dates as part of magazine titles, do you disagree that the current help is less clear than it might be, and could be improved? Do you disagree that the non-genre standards and genre standards should be consistent? Those two things are the only things i really feel strongly about here. I did indicate my preference for a "fixed" format, which i gather you disagree with. I tried to give my reasons for that view. But I didn't intend it to be anything other than an opinion, and i said, and meant, that I was quite ready to defer to the views of those with more magazine experience here than I have. What is so annoying in any of that? -DES Talk 23:27, 7 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I find that most of the world's annoyances can be attributed to lack of sleep :) Ahasuerus 02:43, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

(Unindent due to length) Running through all the "dates in title" options as if we were starting from scratch: I think we can discard 1 and 2 immediately. Nobody is going to do the rework. So assuming we continue to live with "Month, Year" in that order, it's just where and what we want to record for the day. I think we can discard 3 but quite like 4. But there's another issue that hasn't been discussed. What if Day-of-Week is part of the title? E.g. "Saturday, 26th June, 1965". As I don't think any of us do "Day-of-Week" calculations in our heads, it would be nice to have it immediately obvious for us when a weekly changes day-of-week publication, or more likely when a regular fiction column in a non-genre weekly moves to a different day-of-week. That introduces OK, the last is two choices, but the choices are multiplying so I haven't added pros and cons to each, and lean towards 7 myself. I guess it comes down to "Make it a Fixed format rule", or "allow user preferences", or at least allow "preferred format" to be stated per magazine. (Presumably most Magazine editors stick with the ones they know.) BLongley 19:57, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
 * 1) "Exactly as stated" - Pros: accuracy. Cons: massive amount of rework. Confusion of years entered in 2-digit form.
 * 2) "Use ISO standard" - Pros: No possible confusion. Cons: massive amount of rework. Also duplicates the date as recorded in the publication date field already.
 * 1) Little endian Form (Day, Month, Year): Pros: most widely used world-wide. Cons: more rework than changing to Middle Endian.
 * 2) Middle endian Form (Month, Day, Year): Pros: most widely used by current ISFDB editors. We appear to have a volunteer to do the rework. Cons: annoys other ISFDB editors. May well annoy future non-North-American editors.
 * 3) Big endian Form (Year, Month, Day): Pros: I can't think of any. Cons: Inconsistent with dates without day. Most rework.
 * 4) Free choice of Little endian or Middle endian as appropriate to the magazine. Pros: nobody has their preferences stomped on. Cons: People will have to actually learn other national practices.
 * 1) (Day-of-Week, Day, Month, Year)
 * 2) (Day, Day-of-Week, Month, Year)
 * 3) (Month, Day-of-Week, Day, Year)
 * 4) (Month, Day, Day-of-Week, Year)
 * 5) (Day, Month, Year) (Ignore Day-of-Week although stated)
 * 6) (Month, Day, Year) (Ignore Day-of-Week although stated)
 * 7) Free choice of the above.
 * 8) Free choice of Middle endian and Little Endian but fix the order of "Day, Day-of-Week" that way or fix it as "Day-of-Week, Day".


 * A nice analysis. You don't mention a further con for "exactly as stated": when working from secondary sources, those sources may have normalized dates to their own standards, so we can't reliably determine "as stated" without the original pub. You also don't mention one large advantage of a single fixed format that applies thought the database -- it makes constructing a search target for a specific issue more reliable, and thus a search that returns "no result" more probably means that the pub is actually not on file here. That would argue for moving optional elements such as day of the week to the end, but I'm not inclined to follow this logic that far. In fact, I am inclined to prefer "title, day-of-the-week, month, day, year" (for example "Geordy's Magazine, Saturday, May 18, 1887" [invented example and i didn't check a calendar]). But I would prefer a single fixed format, whatever it is to be. No free choice, please. -DES Talk 20:14, 7 August 2009 (UTC)


 * If people are going to search titles for dates, rather than search by the publication date we also record, I think that points at a lack of capabilities in our date search. One obvious omission is the capability to search by Day-of-the-Week - so adding that to the title might be useful. BLongley 21:09, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't, personally, as we don't have a lot of weeklies or dailies recorded, yet. But we've only recently agreed that non-genre magazines can be included at all, we have little real data to go on. And we still have no idea what people will search on: I know that when I first tried to figure out if a magazine already existed here I did a search like "Analog%Mar%1991", as I couldn't be at all sure how it was entered here. It gets you there, but only because of the Coverart record: the Editor records have been merged so you need to search "Analog%1991" and then ignore the ESSAY records and the COVERART to find the EDITOR record you want, which will then give you the list of Month options. Magazine searches are a mess, and I see no reason to stomp on national or user preferences in the meantime. Do you actually work on Magazines outside your area of expertise (apart from approving such edits)? For Mods, we hopefully do all check Month and Year are in that order? (For whatever reason we have agreed on that.) Why should we add more rigid rules and Mods have to check Day / Month / Year order, or Month / Day / Year order, or add even more complexity in checking anything including Day-of-Week? I don't find myself in favour of more work for Mods for something that adds no benefit to bibliographers and may actually destroy some (mildly) useful data. BLongley 21:09, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I have entered a few magazines, but not many. I have approved some magazine edits, but when such edits get complex I tend to skip them and leave them to those who are more expert on magazines. I have given my opinions above, but I will cheerfully defer to those who work on magazines more. i have entered a fair number of non-genre pubs from secondary source notes, mostly in reprint anthologies. It was partly because of my work on that, and my fondness for wiki editing, that I did a fair amount of drafting for Help:Entering non-genre magazines. I admint that I tend to like fairly regid rules of entry/formatting where these don't get in the way -- I look on these not as making work for mods, but as reliving editors (such as myself) of the need to figure out "the right way" every time.
 * I agree that our magazine searches need work - finding something like the June 1963 issue of Analog is a non-trivial exercise. I'm not sure if people do now search on titles with date included, or would if we were more regular in format -- the most I can say is that they might.
 * I started this discussion because of a few comments that the help on this issue for genre magazines was less clear than the help for non-genre magazines, and that the two ought to be consistent. I am in favor of clear and consistent help as much as possible. I care more that there is a single consistent and clear rule than i care what that rule is. As to "stomp[ing] on national or user preferences" we already do that with the "Day, month" standard. As to "destroy[ing] some (mildly) useful data" the only way I can see that date format data were commonly in the form actually used by the pub. But for pubs we are likely to date to a day, the secondary source problem makes that too unlikely to have much weight, i should think.
 * All that said, if you and the other editors can come to an agreement about what the standards are to be, even including "enter it any way you please", I will help document them and won't argue over-much. I note that three other editors above seem to like the standard described on the Help:Entering non-genre magazines page. -DES Talk 21:31, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
 * This troll asks, what are your thoughts on date linking? :-) I've stayed far-far away from that Wikipedia battlefield but it's similar to this thread. (For those wondering, it's the practice of wiki-linking dates and also there are people working on ways for people to enter dates in articles and for them to be formatted for display depending on the viewer's locale. It's resulted in long running contentious conversations and robot wars with the robots either adding or removing  date linking.)


 * One of the things that bothered me about the existing ISFDB date format stuff in the help is that it does not explain *why* ISFDB is asking for specific formats. Title searches don't find magazines and so it does not seem like regularization buys all that much. --Marc Kupper|talk 09:06, 8 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Um. Title searches may not find magazines directly, but they often turn up contents (cover art, editorials, other columns) that can lead one directly to the pub.  (Admittedly, this is not the case for non-genre magazines, which is apparently where this discussion started; I'm sorry, I just saw it at this point.) -- Dave (davecat) 21:52, 9 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I knew about the covers and such but don't consider them to be reliable as a magazine may get entered without a cover artist credit, etc. --Marc Kupper|talk 00:11, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Perhaps for the same reasons that ISO has date format standards?--swfritter 14:26, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
 * The magazine date is already formatted in ISO format in the year field and presumably any code that needs a machine readable date would use that field. That's why I'm wondering why ISFDB is asking for specific date formats in the title field. --Marc Kupper|talk 00:11, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I've asked the same question myself, Marc. It seems that the original designers thought that the entry format for magazines should be EXACTLY the same as for books, and frankly, IMHO, had to compromise.  If magazines had their own entry format, especially in the header fields, we wouldn't have to place the date of the issue into the title field.  There would be a field for the title of the periodical, and one for it's date, fields for issue number and volume/number, fields for other masthead roles, none for a ISBN/catalog #, the binding field would have a drop-down menu showing the common formats (pulp, digest, etc.) with the ability to add the odd-shaped/sized one.  Searches could be done by periodical title with an "and" field for year or year and month. As it is now, those searches only bring up contents, not issues.  Books and periodicals may not be apples and oranges, but they're at the most tangerines and oranges. I think it's too late to change now, but it's what we have to work with. MHHutchins 04:08, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * The human mind, like a computer, processes data in a more efficient manner when it is in an expected format. The ISO standards also apply to human communications. Read Scope and application of the standard section on Wikipedia.--swfritter 12:54, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * The ISO date syntax does handle common periodical dates well and is also unlikely to be something a human would "expect." Many people will be finding the magazine pages via Google and would be puzzled by a title that says "Analog 2009-08-10".


 * I'm of a "free choice" formatting mindset. With that in mind I'd propose loosening up the formatting standard to allow anything that's unambiguous while also following how the periodical formats the date. Help:Entering non-genre magazines seems reasonable enough and seems to allow for common periodical dating practices which can be no date (issue # alone is used), a season, range of months, range of days, week, etc. Item one on that help page asks for "A day, month, and year" immediately followed by an example with "month day, year" implying that both 17 January 1925 and January 17, 1925 are valid. That help page does not encourage nor prohibit abbreviated dates, 17-Jan-1925, other than the examples spell out the date in full. 17-10-1925 is also a valid interpretation and fully meets what some will "expect" while also satisfying the requirement for "A day, month, and year." With that in mind I'd ask for
 * That the editor follow the date formatting used by the periodical with the following rules applied so that the dates are unambiguous.
 * That the month be spelled out though three-character abbreviations (Jan, Feb, Mar, etc.) can be used if that's how the date is formatted in the periodical. In other words, enter "10" as "October" or "Oct".
 * That the year will always be expanded to four digits.
 * If a magazine uses unusual symbols, such as "Jan &bull; Mar 2005" that the editor can use the "best fit" based on their own judgment.
 * Editor's are allowed to develop a consensus on a consistent format from issue to issue for a periodical. This allows someone to reformat the dates so that a listing of issues looks tidy. Such a consensus should try to follow the magazine's formatting as closely as reasonable. The formatting may change from era to era if the magazine changes. On other words, don't try to force the same format for the entire lifetime of a magazine if the magazine's dating practices changed at times.
 * A periodical may be dated starting with its founding or some other epoch. For example, "January 17, 10" may well mean that it's in the tenth year. If so, consensus should be developed on if those should be entered literally or translated in some way though it is suggested that both the literal and translated date be included in the agreed on format. A goal to keep in mind is that a page may be found via Google or some other method meaning whatever format is used should be intuitively readable. While it may seem redundant to state "Star date 2134" it also means someone unfamiliar with the consensus developed format is likely to recognize the date for what it is.
 * While "free choice" makes it harder to develop code that allows for searching for an issue (or range of issues) I see that the coding work is also not too much of a challenge. --Marc Kupper|talk 20:14, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I did not say we should use the ISO standard. I was making the point that there are reasons for standard formats.--swfritter 14:19, 11 August 2009 (UTC)