Difference between revisions of "User talk:Kay T"
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:::I think if we move this to the discussion page it should be made into a pretty neutral question, and I am not sure at this point what the question is: Should we have any special notices for self-published authors? for pages created by authors about themselves? I think we are venturing into squishy territory here! Probably most users seeing Publish America on the book page and anyone going to the website will pretty quickly figure out what they are seeing. Then they can decide on the basis of the author's work/website whether it is something they are interested in. In the case that led to this frustration, it was pretty unclear just what was published and by whom, but we should just leave that confusion there, I think.--[[User:Kay T|Kay T]] 17:01, 24 September 2007 (PDT) | :::I think if we move this to the discussion page it should be made into a pretty neutral question, and I am not sure at this point what the question is: Should we have any special notices for self-published authors? for pages created by authors about themselves? I think we are venturing into squishy territory here! Probably most users seeing Publish America on the book page and anyone going to the website will pretty quickly figure out what they are seeing. Then they can decide on the basis of the author's work/website whether it is something they are interested in. In the case that led to this frustration, it was pretty unclear just what was published and by whom, but we should just leave that confusion there, I think.--[[User:Kay T|Kay T]] 17:01, 24 September 2007 (PDT) | ||
− | Poking this again (move discussion?) because of [[Alathea Wright]] (new page). For an aspiring author, with no | + | Poking this again (move discussion?) because of [[Alathea Wright]] (new page). For an aspiring author, with no published credits and her first book coming out from Lulu, which is a vanity press (reputable). Leave the listing alone? We really should probably create a guide as to self-published versus not and whether or not RomanceWiki lists such. --[[User:DawnBurn|DawnBurn]] 15:40, 12 November 2007 (PST) |
:Maybe moving it will get more people to give an opinion. My opinion is to leave the listing alone. But we might also need some policy about the self-published thing. Do you want to write something or wait to get more ideas? --[[User:Kay T|Kay T]] 17:22, 12 November 2007 (PST) | :Maybe moving it will get more people to give an opinion. My opinion is to leave the listing alone. But we might also need some policy about the self-published thing. Do you want to write something or wait to get more ideas? --[[User:Kay T|Kay T]] 17:22, 12 November 2007 (PST) | ||
+ | |||
+ | ::I am of the opinion that an aspiring author without a published novel doesn't meet the spirit of the wiki. While I think it's very important to cover the breadth and depth of the genre, it seems to be time to start thinking about guidelines for self-published authors. The biggest problem in my mind is that so many of these entries are written as weird promotional items that don't work with the rest of the wiki content (yes feeling a bit cranky today). The positive thing is while these authors come in, throw up some content, and leave, most of this content is effectively buried in the site because there is no attempt to connect to the rest of the wiki. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ::I am turning thoughts over in my mind -- my come one, come all philosophy is warring with my standards-based mentality.--[[User:Romancewiki|Romancewiki]] 17:32, 12 November 2007 (PST) | ||
== Hi Kay == | == Hi Kay == |
Revision as of 01:32, 13 November 2007
Check the archive for older discussions.
Contents
2007 Rita Page?
Hi Kay, I was messing around with Laura Lee Guhrke's page and wanted to add her 2007 Rita finalist thing. I'm looking through all the books listed on the 2007 RITA page and they all link back to the generic RITA page, not the 2007 one?? (Well, I haven't checked them all yet. :) I guess as a larger question, is there an easy way to look up the 'wiki name' of a page when you want to create a link to it?
Since I started the review blog in May, I've read a whole lot of 'new to me' authors so that's been a big bonus. Of course the impact on my time and budget hasn't been as positive. :) I thought I would start with my best reviews and move down in creating pages here, so the ones I've done I really like. Glad you like them too. :)--Heloise Abelard 08:39, 23 August 2007 (PDT)
- easy way to look up the 'wiki name' of a page when you want to create a link to it? No I don't think there is an easy way to find the name of the page except through go/search. If you open another window it might help, "go" goes to the page, "search" finds pages with those words on it. Another feature that sometimes helps is the "What links here" which will show you the list of pages linking to the page your are on/editing. Finally, there is a page under "Special pages" that lists pages, but I think they are in some weird order.
- I am not sure about the RITA page links, because, although I created the 2007 RITA page I did not create many of the book pages (or if I did, I forget). Sometimes we just get lazy and put in the generic link thinking that at least it is a link and better than nothing! Maybe the thinking was that the person linking to RITA might just want to know what RITA was and the generic page was the best place to send them.
- Another thing to get the hang of (which I have not yet figured out) is how to carry on a conversation here. One side on one user's page and the other on the other??? Aaghhh! Keeping it here for now. --Kay T 13:23, 23 August 2007 (PDT)
- For what it's worth, I use search first (search is a girl's best friend, if you ask me). That lets me get the correct name of a page. I'm not sure if this answers Heloise's (love your name, it's so romance) question, but as I've (slowly) added the RITA-winning books (and finalists), I've linked back to the specific category (see [[The Husband Trap). For finalists, however, it might make more sense to link to the main RITA page as, at least for very current years, we're listing finalists and winners there. Which, I see now, I didn't do.
- As always, I remain open to suggestions.
- When it comes to page management, I am an avowed, fanatic user of Firefox, which allows me to have many tabs open simultaneously. I can work in one tab, search in another, have Google open in a third, the category page in a fourth, Amazon in another...is it obvious that I'm a lunatic? I know Safari does tabs and believe (though haven't tried as I'm on a Mac) that the new Internet Explorer is a tab-friendly place. Generally, I'm doing a lot of research and back-and-forth, so this works really well for me.
- Finally, and I feel bad about cluttering up Kay's page (okay, I don't), is it time to start a list for discussion, etc? Thoughts? Ideas? I've also considered starting a RomanceWiki blog, but it's more thought than action (obviously....--Romancewiki 21:36, 24 August 2007 (PDT)
Wow, thanks for the thorough answers/discussion. I'll try using search more as I'm moving around looking for pages, and it sounds like "What links here" would also be very useful. (You mean I don't have to try every single link on the whole dang page to find one that links back! Duh, Heloise.) I think my problem with the 2007 RITA page was that the name of it actually includes the word Winners. Too much for my brain to handle without some caffeine.
- Thanks for the nice comment on my name. I was very pleased to see Heloise and Abelard mentioned on one of the History of Romance pages! I was a Medieval History major in college, eons ago!--Heloise Abelard 13:45, 27 August 2007 (PDT)
Page Deletion Flagging
Hi Kay T. Thanks for the notes on my mistake. However, in other work I did discover a double of a page for the same title and flagged one for deletion. Page flagged for deletion versus more corrected formatted pagetitle. I have also linked the second for a Title disambiguation page since there is more than one Mirage book listed. Thanks. --DawnBurn 13:00, 31 August 2007 (PDT) (bad sig, correcting)
- Per Romancewiki I changed the 'by' author page to Mirage - Monica Burns and changed all the associated links. --DawnBurn 13:33, 31 August 2007 (PDT)
Also (and this is only a somewhat related question) Do you actually have the power to delete? Can you tell me who does? I have put redirects on two ampersanded titles that I'm aware of - Bewitched, Bothered, & Bevampyred, and Rejection, Romance, & Royalties, but they still exhibit some weird behavior - showing up under the "AUTHOR NAME" whatlinkshere, and sometimes coming up as empty pages under "First Word, Second Word/Everything else gone", and showing up under double-redirects because the ampersanded page is un-editable (and technically, no links are titled FW, SW/Nothing Page, even though they link there) ...or at least, I've had all these problems with Firefox for the Mac. Example:
http://www.romancewiki.com/index.php?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=AUTHOR_NAME
Any way we could make it a priority to delete ampersanded stuff (and maybe add that to the style manual...I haven't checked to see if it's there)? I suppose this is a good lesson for me in how to become less anal, but until I learn it, I think this is going to drive me nuts. especially since "Bevampyred" is an anthology linked to ~80 times --Robini 08:16, 20 September 2007 (PDT)
- Yes! I have the POWER!!! Whooo! My only concern is that someone might try to recreate the ampersand version of these titles (because that is how they appear in print) and then we are back where we started from. The redirect is for those who might type it in? I think I did add in the style manual not to use ampersands. The pages are actually editable in Internet Explorer. Let me think on it. It used to drive me crzy when Romancewiki would not immediately delete my requests (see nagging on her page), but now that I have the POWER I feel more cautious - Ha! --Kay T 18:38, 20 September 2007 (PDT)
- I saw that!!! Yes, I am insanely busy with work right now (and averaging a 3-hour a day commute), so Kay has all sorts of magic powers. Plus she's way more organized than me. I tend to do "clean-up" stuff in fits of passion (much like the way I clean my home), so it's good that Kay can be the Mistress of Deletion. Hmm, she needs a better title than that... Off to work on fresh content. --Romancewiki 10:07, 22 September 2007 (PDT)
Maintenance
- Oh oops. One more thing. I have a person who isn't a romance reader, per se, but is needing some work tasks for a few hours a month. She works for the husband and he has extra time. While I have a long list of *my* projects on tap, I was wondering if there was anything specific you wanted done. Think more along the lines of maintenance, etc.--Romancewiki 10:07, 22 September 2007 (PDT)
The first time I deleted something I was so worried and it sort of "scared" me! I have been reluctant to do it again! although, of course, nothing ever goes away here at the wiki. I am so non-technical, I can't even imagine the maintenance type things that have to be done around here. Did you see I set up a chat page? I am not sure there are any technical things that might make that easier. Oh, did you ever figure out if bots work here (am I behind the curve on that one?)?? We could probably use something automated to do some clean up, but with the new worker-bees around here, categories, orphans, etc. are getting cleaned up like magic!--Kay T 14:35, 22 September 2007 (PDT)
Hi Kay T
Thanks for the welcome and creating the Harlequin category -- nice unmbrella page for lots of pages :) --Amy 11:57, 31 August 2007 (PDT)
Same Title Multiple Authors
Replying here so you definitely see it...I looked at the page. The only thing that jumped out at me is that the example given seems to be incorrect--It's given as "Between the Sheets - Tricia Adams" instead of "Between The Sheets - Tricia Adams" with the "The" capitalized. We're still going with everything in a page title should be capitalized, right? At least, that's what I thought we were doing, and how I've tried to do it (at least since I figured that out), so that it's standard (whereas if some words are capitalized and some not, and someone does a search for it one way and doesn't find it, they might start a page, even though there's already one for it the other way). But then I couldn't find anywhere that it was specified that everything in a page name should be capitalized and wanted to make sure this definitely was the way it should be, so we can put it somewhere and make sure all contributors know it. --Leigh
- This was my fault Leigh and thanks for catching it. I didn't know the Manual of Style of caps yet so I did it wrong. Sorry about that and thanks to you & Kay for fixing it! --DawnBurn 16:13, 7 September 2007 (PDT)
To Have And To Hold
Kay, I set up the page for the To Have And To Hold imprint as To Have And To Hold Series since there are several books with that title so I was leaving the general To Have And To Hold page for those. I see that you shifted it over to the general page. If you don't want it called To Have And To Hold Series, what should it be called? To Have And To Hold Imprint? Because there's going to need to be a Same Title Muliple Authors page on the general one. --Leigh
- replying over here...I can move it back, since I'm going to go ahead and make that Same Title page (which I probably should have done in the first place, so my bad). Do you think it should be titled Imprint so there's no confusion, because that's fine with me too. Thanks. --Leigh
- Maybe save the "series" for numbered series and make this an imprint? Whatever you decide is fine. We can also put a note at the top of the page, something like:
- For books entitled To Have And To Hold see here. and link to the new page.--Kay T 13:27, 13 September 2007 (PDT)
- I bumped it back to the Series page for now, because I realized that all the individual book pages I set up link back to that and would have to be changed too, and I'm feeling lazy at the moment. But it probably should be changed to Imprint (with all the book pages to match...luckily it was a short-lived line). I'll try to get to it sometime soon. --Leigh
- On second thought, I think I'm going to leave it as Series. I realized that the reason I called it a series in the first place is because it is a Numbered series, like all the Harlequins and Silhouettes that appear on the Numbered Series category page. Plus, when I found out there was a book called Love and Laughter, I changed the Harlequin Love and Laughters to Love And Laughter Series, with all the book pages to match, so all those would have to be changed again as well, which seems like a lot of unnecessary work. Hope that's okay. --Leigh
- I bumped it back to the Series page for now, because I realized that all the individual book pages I set up link back to that and would have to be changed too, and I'm feeling lazy at the moment. But it probably should be changed to Imprint (with all the book pages to match...luckily it was a short-lived line). I'll try to get to it sometime soon. --Leigh
Sounds good. --Kay T 14:47, 14 September 2007 (PDT)
Sorting out the messes
And also, this might deserve to be its own page, but honestly, AS DawnBurn has pointed out, does Romancewiki have a policy on self-published titles? On the one hand, I am not opposed to letting self-published authors use the wiki raise awareness for themselves (I file it more under "help the reader find books they might be interested in," once you add categories and so on) - and hey, additional content is additional content, if we don't have to add it, all the better - but I am quickly arriving at "If an author can't be bothered to put together a professional-looking, well-organized webpage, and a traditional publisher can't be bothered to print it, is it really worth my while to take whatever mess the author submitted, and spend my time formatting it?". In terms of dealing with unclear series titles and pages that make me listen to gothic music alongside my iTunes, I used to answer "yes," but now I'm leaning towards "no."
Now, as to whether we delete the content, leave it as and have ugly pages, or is format it thereby spending our time to add credibility to a self-published title with a bad webpage, Well...That's up for debate.
I don't think we should be in the business of policing what is 'acceptable' romance (aka 'wiki worthy'), which means no deleting, but...I also question spending so much of our time on self-submitting authors with very little or no distribution. I feel we'll be a more useful resource if we can cover what people are actually reading, and we are supposed to be a resource first, even if we are an outlet for self-promotion in some capacity. So perhaps we could make a policy of not deleting pages for self-published authors, but warning any wikigoers that the page is author-submitted content? We could have a box like the "marked for deletion" one.
That's my off-the-cuff $.02. --Robini 11:49, 18 September 2007 (PDT)
- This is the thing that would be so perfect for the Community Discussion page, but until then... I am with you on getting fed up with authors who can't make a wiki page like other wiki pages. Some of them I sort of take to and fix and others I just think - WHY would I buy your book if you can't even use proper grammar and formatting here?? Thus you and Dawn and Amy have been finding the remains, the real dregs of the clean up job on non-categorized, orphaned pages - things I just got too annoyed to fix!! Ha! My take is to ignore them when you can (or when you get fed up). Some of them are just so bad.
- On the topic of self-published, I agree with you, Robini, that it is a service to our users who may want to read these books and thus we have not had any policy about excluding any type of romance (so far).
- On the other hand, I don't think we can "warn" users that the info comes from the authors themselves since most/a lot of content does come from the authors themselves. Just my $.02 so now we almost have a nickel. --Kay T 18:54, 18 September 2007 (PDT)
- I agree that we should not be policepeople, but I have, in the past, made judgment calls about certain content that I felt did not meet the spirit of the wiki. This wiki is specifically for romance fiction. In my mind, that encompasses a lot of things -- from most women's fiction to erotica -- but sometimes content simply doesn't meet even that basic requirement. One thing I like to remind people, of course, is that authors like M.J. Rose and Mia Zachary started with self-published works.
- Like Kay, I used to do a lot of clean-up on the "messy" pages, but it's a lot of work. The good news about the uncategorized, messy stuff is that it gets buried in system. The bad news is that when people stumble across this stuff, it creates a definite impression (which is why we were forced to add ReCaptcha for new users. @!@$# spammers!) I like the idea of noting -- much in the style of Big Wiki -- that the content hasn't been verified or vetted. Thoughts? Yeah, I guess we should move this to the discussion page. I'm all about democracy as I'm not the only one working here.--Romancewiki 16:04, 24 September 2007 (PDT)
- I think if we move this to the discussion page it should be made into a pretty neutral question, and I am not sure at this point what the question is: Should we have any special notices for self-published authors? for pages created by authors about themselves? I think we are venturing into squishy territory here! Probably most users seeing Publish America on the book page and anyone going to the website will pretty quickly figure out what they are seeing. Then they can decide on the basis of the author's work/website whether it is something they are interested in. In the case that led to this frustration, it was pretty unclear just what was published and by whom, but we should just leave that confusion there, I think.--Kay T 17:01, 24 September 2007 (PDT)
Poking this again (move discussion?) because of Alathea Wright (new page). For an aspiring author, with no published credits and her first book coming out from Lulu, which is a vanity press (reputable). Leave the listing alone? We really should probably create a guide as to self-published versus not and whether or not RomanceWiki lists such. --DawnBurn 15:40, 12 November 2007 (PST)
- Maybe moving it will get more people to give an opinion. My opinion is to leave the listing alone. But we might also need some policy about the self-published thing. Do you want to write something or wait to get more ideas? --Kay T 17:22, 12 November 2007 (PST)
- I am of the opinion that an aspiring author without a published novel doesn't meet the spirit of the wiki. While I think it's very important to cover the breadth and depth of the genre, it seems to be time to start thinking about guidelines for self-published authors. The biggest problem in my mind is that so many of these entries are written as weird promotional items that don't work with the rest of the wiki content (yes feeling a bit cranky today). The positive thing is while these authors come in, throw up some content, and leave, most of this content is effectively buried in the site because there is no attempt to connect to the rest of the wiki.
- I am turning thoughts over in my mind -- my come one, come all philosophy is warring with my standards-based mentality.--Romancewiki 17:32, 12 November 2007 (PST)
Hi Kay
Thanks for the welcome! The RomanceWiki is very cool. Thanks for making it so easy to add/edit entries.
Lisa :)
Anthologies with same title
Hi Kay T. I replied to your post over on my discussion page but wanted to make sure you saw my reply. I like your solution of using the publisher name if two anthologies share the same title, so I'm going to add that to the help pages as well. Thanks for your input :) --Amy 13:58, 23 October 2007 (PDT)