Talk:Edison's Conquest of Mars

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Novels
Literature Portal
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Novels, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to narrative novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit one of the articles mentioned below, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and contribute to the general Project discussion to talk over new ideas and suggestions.
Stub This article has been rated as Stub-Class.
Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale.
This article is supported by the 19th century task force. (with unknown importance)
This article is supported by the Science fiction task force. (with unknown importance)
Assessment comments

[edit] Bogus publication date

The infobox now has a publication date of 1947, but that's a reprint edition of the original serial from 1898. Unfortunately, it's cataloged as "1st Ed". I've filled out a Library of Congress catalog error form to get this corrected. This matters, because it's out of copyright, and it's bad for Wikipedia to create the illusion that it's still copyrighted. --John Nagle (talk) 22:10, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Its a tricky one as it isn't technically bogus but it might highlight the limitations of the infobox. It seems that the information is right: published in serial form in 1898 but first published as a book in 1947 (so technically it is a first edition).
Have a look what they do for The Hound of the Baskervilles which was published as a serial in Strand Magazine - the best parallel with this.
That is just a stopgap solution and I think it might be wise to add in extra fields to book to cope with this kind of fiction - {{Graphicnovelbox}} allows for both graphic novels and trade paperbacks which are the comics equivalent to books and serials (respectively). Note it includes the original date for the series and a date and ISBN for the first collection. (Emperor (talk) 22:34, 7 April 2008 (UTC))
There was recently a discussion in WP:WikiProject Novels, regarding year categories for serialized novels which may some bearing on this discussion. It is a book infobox some of the fields (e.g. ISBN, OCLC, pages) don't make sense in a serialization context. I'm also not sure that copyright should be inferred from the date in the infobox. I think it's meant to be a publication date (of the book) and nothing more. The lead paragraph does mention the date of the serial publication, and there is a publication section which also mentions the earlier date. I'm going to go ahead and expand the publication section to bring it inline with the novels template.--Rtrace (talk) 02:46, 8 April 2008 (UTC)