Creating Series for Editions in a particular language

Yes and in that cases we have already added different series for the respective languages.

A list of 103 different languages in a single series will always be unwieldy no matter where you try to hide it :wink:

I agree, even if most of the work series are identical at least for the main languages, we will have to add many of them in different languages because of the listed reasons anyway…
And since I’m a big fan of “clear solutions” the best solution is creating a seperate series for every language.

PS: It’s often really hard to find the series names of the translated series, since they are not mentioned in the editions in many cases and in the online databases you only find the original series names.
That increases the need for the series-series relation “is a translation of” and the author-series relation “written by”

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First: Thanks a lot to aerozol, monkey and kellnerd for talking in this thread
I’ve thought long and hard how to best describe my thoughts on this.
In general, the points that they have brought up are things I have myself thought too, they are a lot better at explaining!

Now, I want to make it absolutely clear that I’m not here to “make my own norwegian database” or think that my changes are “elevated above others” or similar and I reject any such allegations.

Bookbrainz, like MusicBrainz and the whole of MetaBrainz are open source, libre info, international databases that are welcome to all languages, we already have indy adding a ton of german works which is great!
So I am here adding norwegian works and editions because that’s what I have access to - I only add what editions (and works) I actually have infront of me, so that’s why I based the original Danish works’s name on: what was written in the books I have here: “originaltittel” (original title).

And for the first set of norwegian translations, that title was there (which, I agree made me wonder why was different, but as I didn’t have access to the danish books it was an honest mistake, not done in afront)

I agree that the community must decide policy - this is a core pillar in MB policy!
I guess an issue arises that for the longest time basically I was the community - happily this is now changing, and people coming over from bookogs are a part of that.

But I must asses that the community must be a BookBrainz community, not a bookogs community.
Our datamodel is closer to that of MusicBrainz than that of discogs.
So I ask you to, kindly set aside any pre-conceived notions of how a database of books should be organised, and instead think from a fresh outlook, it might even help to try using MusicBrainz to add a few musical releases (or audiobooks! :​D)

Now I think:

  • original set of works as thought out as a series by the author(s) should be a series of works
  • editions published in the original language can be a series if it makes sense to do so. prime example here is Harry Potter where the editions have had several “runs” where a set of the 7 books can easily said to be from a specific “series”, often the covers are thematically similar.
  • works that are translated should be linked to the original works and have “translator” relationship - not yet have we figured out how best to connect it to the author, it is not right to say that an author wrote a translated work, they simply didn’t write a work in a language they might not even be able to understand.
  • translated set of editions that belong to a consistent idea (often these will have matching coverart or be illustrated by the same person, or similar) should be their own series.
  • despite definitely seeing the logic of wanting to standardise everything, sadly Reality™ simply doesn’t want to do that - authors, like artists in mb, will defiantly do their own thing.

Some final thoughts: BookBrainz is still very much an unfinished website!
The datamodel is still oh so so very very young, we are still in “beta” and the uh “finalised product” (sp?) thingy is far from finished.
We have the ticketracker: lots of tickets are there, many of issues you have noticed already have a ticket there, many even written by myself or other community members.
Secondly the shortcomings of this still immature database-model is not set in stone!
You should have seen the enormous changes the MusicBrainz model has gone through just the 18 years I’ve been with it. I can only imagine where BookBrainz will be in 18 years!
Already we have several big projects and changes coming, Artist credits, GSOC projects: a new combined entity editor; an admin and relationship edition interface. and more and more.
So please, please be patient with BookBrainz yet, help make a great database, search in and use the ticketracker for problems, ideas and new improvements. Keep getting involved in the community, talk here and on irc and the (coming) onsite notification/communication interface and ticketracker tickets.

~cat

ps, an aside: my pronouns are they/them, not hen, in english. :​)

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