TheAuthorsDue

The Author's Due JosephLoewenstein [ISBN 0226490408 (amazon.com, search)]

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A handly title to use as a tag for Author pages. Click on the title of this page to see all the author pages so tagged thus far.

I (PhlIp) propose we only use pen-names. MarkTwain, not Samuel Clemens.

Vote: [3 for, 0 against]

I'm not so sure (JamesBullock). I am sure the simple policy dosn't cover the domain of pen-name to human's name relationships, or the uses. Domain:

• AnneRice? writes under several pen-names. She is best known for stuff under the name "AnneRice?".
• Perhaps more relevant, SamuelClemens sometimes published under his own name. (Interestingly, later in his career GeorgeOrwell did not, while earlier he did.)
• HarlanEllison would publish infrequently under CordwainerBird? - when he was sufficiently ticked off about something. Most of his stuff is as HarlanEllison.
• Trevanian, the author of record for TheEigerSanction, and Shibumi is a pen-name. The author's name is RodneyWhitaker, who published under his own name, and also used another pen-name: NicholasSeare.

Uses:

• Find everything from / by an author.
• Find everything from / by one pen-name.
• Find all the pen-names of a particular author.
• Find everything from / by all the pen-names of a particular author.

• Find everything from / by all the pen-names associated with the author, given a single, known pen-name.
• etc.

I'd suggest something like this:

• Book entries use the name under which the book was published - no aliasing there.
• Put TheAuthorsDue content one place for any given author.
  • When the pen-name is what is best known, MarkTwain, GeorgeOrwell, put the content there.
  • When the author's name is best known content goes there.
  • Carry the "other" names in the main entry for that author.
    • As names if there's no book under that name
    • as Wiki names if there is.
    • Pages for aliases always point to the page with most of the content.
    • Distinct, non-redundant content about the persona of the alias can go in the alias page.

This scheme reduces to the previous suggestion in the simple case, while accommodating the more convoluted cases consistently and without redundant information. (Yes I was a database geek at one point - does it show?) Seems also to support the intention of Bookshelved - helping readers leverage each others' experience to find really good books they'd like.

So for Trevanian, his works under NicholasSeare would list the author as NicholasSeare. Those written as Trevanian, for example Shibumi would list Trevanian. The author's content would be under the most well known name - Trevanian. NicholasSeare would be a pointer to the Trevanian page. And if he wrote anything under his given name - which he did - that would act just like the weaker pen-name. All three names would have tags for TheAuthorsDue, so we can find the guy. If he hadn't written anything under his given name, you'd have to go to the Trevanian page to find out the guy was RodneyWhitaker, and that name wouldn't show up in the list of authors.

Having said all that, I'll put up the worked example for Trevanian. Glad to undo it if the convention doesn't fit. And I'll probably end up changing the suggested convention based on actually doing the work. But he's the most convoluted case that comes readily to mind, and his work is worth cataloging here. -- JamesBullock

I finally put in the example I promised some time ago, and of course not exactly the scheme as I proposed it. See: RodneyWhitaker, Trevanian, NicholasSeare. - jb

The following is a quote from www.Trevanian.com...

"I deeply regret to inform you that the author who went by the pseudonym Trevanian, the maiden name of his wife, passed away in l999. He was a friend and also a coworker. Indeed, even though many have assigned to him different personalities based on the plots in his books, he simply was a Federal Government employee who wrote his novels in the evening after work while he was a bureaucrat during the day. Sometime in the late 1980s after writing The Main, the rumor was he sold his author's psudonym so that any book therafter was by the new Trevanian.

Indeed, Trevanian was the maiden name of Jack Hashian which he used to write the books that made the name Trevanian famous, born in l923, he passed away in l999. He was a coworker of mine at the US Department of Labor in Washington,DC, mainly in the Public Informations area. He did his writing in the evening after office hours as a way to relax from his bureaucratic doldrum. The locale of The Main is that he had lived there as a youth so knew it well. He attributes his writing ability developing into such an author from a seminar he took once at Harvard on writing novels, if I recall correctly. My understanding that he took that course on a lark, he was not a regular student at Harvard. After he retired from the US Department of Labor he lived on, after having had a heart attack, in the NorthEastern? part of the US. He was of Armenian descent and also wrote under his own name at least one novel with an Armenian theme Mmigon (Coward, Mc Cann and Goeghegan, New York: French translation as Le Sel de la Vengeance, Stoc, 1985. He copyrighted the book in l982 as J. T. Hashian, His full name was James T. Hashian. His other books under Trevanian pseudonym was copyrighted to Trevanian, such as The Main in l976.I hope this will be of interest to you, sincerely, F.A.K

Trevanian commented. 'One of the problems of keeping a low profile was that it was possible for people to pretend, and to convince their friends and creditors, that they were Trevanian. Some did this as a lark, others for larcenous reasons, yet others because they were desperately hungry for praise and recognition. This poor fellow was one of these. He hovered out there for more than a quarter of a century, and managing to take his deception as far as the New York Times." - Al Navis

Would our inimitable host be willing to develop a technological solution? Surely there is an easy way to mark a Wiki page as an alias to another. For example, if a page contains nothing but "alias", followed by a space, followed by a valid Wiki page name, then the engine would immediately redirect to the specified page. Thus, SamuelClemens could immediately redirect to MarkTwain. -- BrentNewhall

Actually, if you look at SamuelClemens now, you will see I did just that. I used the #REDIRECT command to redirect Samuel Clemens directly to the page for Mark Twain -- an interested bystander.

Have a look at how the TourBusStop page works. It's a nice technical fix, though I sure am glad I don't have to develop anything - tweaking Usemod in the absence of a solid suite of unit tests is more adventurous than I like. And I think James has a good point : the policy will evolve from the neatly simple starting point which Phlip recommends, based on what exceptions come up. James mentions Cordwainer Bird, but has anyone here read PhilipJoseFarmer? ? (I used to be fond of the other Cordwainer : Paul Linebarger.)

So, we have a wide range of options to choose from - and, I'm sure, the wisdom to select the appropriate one according to the situation. -- lb

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A BookOnTheBookshelf