Talk:The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall

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2011 Note. Three days later, the contributor of the image slightly revised its file: Image revision, 5 June 2007.

--not my department, --P64 (talk) 17:06, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Major revision

I have completed a major expansion and revision but limited to the lead, Infobox, layout, and publication history of the stories. —no attention to the content of the five story sections.

The story sections seem too short to be Article Space "Sections". Anyway, I have provided Template:Anchors for links to the story sections, using the primary nouns of their titles, at least.

First Fall#survey; First Fall#PERN

First Fall#bell or The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall#bell links to "The Dolphins' Bell", for example

First Fall#ford

First Fall#weyr

The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall#run

If you restore Article Space "Sections", simply code the Section headings below anchors,

{{anchor|ford}}

==The Ford of Red Hanrahan==

rather than delete the anchors. --P64 (talk) 15:30, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

--P64 (talk) 14:54, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

"—no attention to the content of the five story sections."

Done. Now I have rewritten the story capsules.

This article must now warrant at least a C grade. --P64 (talk) 01:38, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

I disagree. This article is currently not more than a lead and plot summaries. According to the quality scale, a Start-Class article "Provides some meaningful content, but the majority of readers will need more." - I think this characterizes the current state of this article. --Olegkagan (talk) 23:03, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Collection format

The latest revisions at First Fall and [A Gift of Dragons]] are yours with identical summaries: (tidy up au Dragonflight, part 1; formatting for collection; date formats per WP:MOSNUM by script). I have alerted editor User:Mirokado.

Do these elements follow a wikipedia guideline or discussion for short story collections or for collections more generally?

• formal subsections with full story titles as headings (except special formats such as ^c)
• original publication data indented, regular font, sentence fragment is ok (I wrote the fragments and used em-dash plus small font)

Partly related, do you know where is discussion of initial semicolon in code?

Code for this line begins ';C'.

--P64 (talk) 19:23, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

I wasn't following any specific established format (that I am aware of), it just seemed a reasonable way to structure the article and have each story as a table of contents entry. The indented line for the publication details is just what I thought made the article look tidy. See Foundation (novel) for a B-class article which does roughly the same, but with italicised headings ( perhaps we should do that not convinced about that either, we italicise whole book titles, not chapter titles) and a less structured publication line (I prefer what we have).

For the leading-semicolon formatting, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lists#Association (definition) lists. The line starting with a semicolon is often used to provide a heading-like separation which does not appear in the table of contents (our Citations subsection for example).

In this case, the section titles for each story are natural targets for the redirects which appear in the bibliography. --Mirokado (talk) 22:44, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Comments

Per this request I've had a look at this page. I think the format is probably fine, though if it were me, I'd dump the subheadings and make a separate para for each story. That said, the subheadings aren't too bad. However the sentence fragments at the beginning of each heading detailing the first publication should be reworked into full sentences and integrated into the paragraphs. If I remember correctly this was published as a hardback and then at some point later perhaps as paperback, so it would be nice to find that information, and also to find info on the print-run, etc. Often that information is only behind a pay-wall but I have access to some limited databases and will try to see if I can find more sources. If I forget, please ping me to remind me. Thanks. Truthkeeper (talk) 14:57, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks.

Regarding format, my Sandbox now shows four ways to lay out identical information about the stories in series --four ways for a list of titles to grow up. User:P64/Sandbox#Four ways.

For "speculative fiction" the free database ISFDB provides much information about multiple editions [striving for all] and even multiple printings. Never print runs. Is it size of print run (count) in particular that is available from pay sources?

(response continued in the new next section) --P64 (talk) 16:41, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Your sandbox talk is redirecting to Template talk:Gcb, I think you probably want to move the First Fall discussion and other new sandboxy things back to your user space (just overwrite the redirect directives with new content for example). --Mirokado (talk) 18:11, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I have erased the redirect at User talk. (Even after ^R reload, I see some sandboxy display at Template talk, but not in edit mode, so I suppose it is a cache problem.) Management of User space has troubled me before this (espy accumulation of edit histories and internal redirects, rather than this aggravation). --P64 (talk) 19:12, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Bibliographic information about multiple editions

For "speculative fiction" the free database ISFDB provides much information about multiple editions [striving for all] and even multiple printings. For example, The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database reports simultaneous hc publications in US and UK; first paper (trade, tp) 11 and 8 months later, respectively.

Infobox

Regarding the catalog data in {{Infobox book}}, I have read its documentation, skimmed much and read some project pages at WP children's literature, science fiction, novels (never up at WP Books, which seems silly in retrospect), but have not asked questions until recently. Are there somewhere clear guidelines or even good advice about the treatment of joint US/UK or hard/paper first editions?

Here it's typical of my editing that I have named both US and UK cover artists, with a note, but have not provided any other data for the UK edition, nor even listed two "Country".

For hard and paper editions, the ubiquitous value of the Media parameter: "Print (hardcover and paperback)" is uninformative. I suppose I have never deleted it, but I have never entered that to cover a later paperback. Should "Print (hardcover)" signify that no paperback/softcover edition has been published to date, and vice versa? Sometime I have expanded the ubiquitous parameter value for clarity, as at Dragonquest:

then, "Print (Hardback & Paperback)"

now, "Print (paperback original; 1973 hardcover)"

Otherwise I have been satisfied to replace the report of Date, Pages, and ISBN from three different editions :-( with Pages and ISBN for one of the editions published in the Date year.

Publication history

User:Truthkeeper88 is primarily responsible for In Our Time (book) which provides bibliographic data only in prose --not limited to the "Publication history" in name, but that section may be crucial to the strategy.

For now it seems clear to me that {Infobox book} is inadequate, and should not be stretched, to cover all the bibliographic information that is important (beyond grade C, say). Page counts and ISBN for four different editions cannot be important unless the editions are revised but its common that there are enough important facts of US/UK and hard/paper publication to require treatment in prose. --P64 (talk) 16:41, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

I think you were correct in saying that In Our Time (book) is a bad example, and to be honest I rarely use infoboxes anymore. Here's an example of a page I wrote about a book in which I put the details about the separate editions in a separate section. I've done this for a variety of other recently released books but haven't kept the information on my page and can't remember immediately off the top of my head which. I'll search. Anyway, I think the infoboxes tend to detract from the opportunity to write prose sections, but that's only my opinion. Truthkeeper (talk) 16:51, 30 December 2011 (UTC)