Bibliographic comments

Note - This page contains a proposal and is not ISFDB policy or guidelines. See Template talk:PubSeriesHeader for a discussion related to this page. The propose page contents follow.

Frequently we want to add bibliographic notes, comments, or other details about an individual author, series, publication, or publisher. The ISFDB database supports this with a titled Bibliographic Comments link on each record in the database. These links lead to individual pages within the ISFDB wiki. At present ISFDB does not support bibliographic comment pages for titles. A convention has developed to add notes about titles as a section under the author or editor's bibliographic comments page.

Content and structure
The only rule concerning bibliographic comment pages is that they should contain bibliographic comments or notes about that title, series, publication, author, etc. They should not be used used for biographies, synopses, or reviews, etc.

Some bibliographic comment pages are structured like talk pages and others may contain the final results of someone's research. The goal is information and the exact structure used to share that information is less important. It is left to the editor's judgment on if they should add notes or questions to the main page or the article's talk page.

A talk page convention is that editors should not modify another editor's comments and should not modify their own comments well after the fact. The goal is preserving the discussion. This convention does not apply to bibliographic comment main pages. An editor can restructure a talk conversation, deleting ~ references, for example, so that the page, or that section, summarizes research/findings, etc. If an editor feels the conversation thread should be preserved then the thread can be copy/pasted to the talk page before editing the copy on the main page.

Headers
A convention has developed that bibliographic comment pages have a header which contains a link back to the ISFDB database record that this page would be commenting on plus instructions on how to use that page. The available headers are AuthorHeader, SeriesHeader, PubHeader, PublisherHeader, and PubSeriesHeader. Please note that you are not required to use a header on a bibliographic comments page. These exist for convenience. To use one of these headers, for example on an author page, you would add  at the top of the bibliographic comments page. Note that some headers require additional parameters to help construct the link back to the ISFDB database record. Please see the help for the individual headers to learn about these parameters.

Category:Header Templates lists all the available header templates. Some of these are used under specialized circumstances, and not all of them are for bibliographic comment pages. Help:Header templates documents their usage.

Publication Series
There also exist so called Publication Series. Currently the ISFDB does not have database records for publication series, although it will have records for the individual publications, and the publication series may well be mentioned in the notes fields of such records. Many publication series also have wiki bibliographic comment pages, but these do not have links to the database, because there is no database record for the series to link to. Many, but not all, such pages use the PubSeriesHeader header template. Such bibliographic comment pages, like those for other series, may include lists of publications in the series. Some describe the history of the series. Some such pages are finished articles with discussions on the talk page, others may include discussions on how to organize the series, or on what to include in the series.

Magazine pages
There are also bibliographic comment pages for magazines. These do not generally have template headers. There is usually a single page for a given magazine, with a table or list of issues, as well as other information about the magazine. There are links to the database records of individual issues. These pages are indexed at Magazines, which also describes how to create new pages for magazines that do not yet have pages set up.

Biographies
Bibliographic comment pages should not be used for author (or artist or editor) biographies. Instead, use ISFDB's "Bio:" pages. These are similar to bibliographic comment pages in that they link to the appropriate DB record using the BioHeader template. The ISFDB has adopted a policy and guidelines on biographies. These favor the use of Wikipedia biographies when possible, and specify that biography articles on the ISFDB be "short, neutral, factual articles, professional in tone". This means that, in general, personal accounts, "what inspired the author", what the author's "visions" or intent is, and the like are not appropriate. Bio pages ought to be factual in content and the facts ought to be verifiable. If a matter is questionable, sources can be cited.