Re: [xbiblio-devel] Fwd: Ho to express nicknames and unknown names

[Rintze Z. <R.M.Zelle@TUDelft.nl>]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 1:49 PM, Jakob Voss <jak...@gb...> wrote:

>  I found http://www.beadsland.com/weapas/ and in RefMan you can add
> nicknames as author synonyms. However most styles I know recommend to
> use the full name or the nickname instead, so I could also just put the
> nickname in the "family" or "literal" field.
>
> The broader question is which name to choose if a person is known under
> multiple names. Nicknames are only one case and they can act as
> given-name replacement or as mononyms:
>

Just the other day I noticed a reference including a name like "T.R. (Sean)
Doe" (not sure if it was from a style in use though). I'm getting convinced
adding support for nicknames would be useful, but there are quite a few
questions to answer with regard to disambiguation, sorting, etc. But I feel
it might be handier to hold off on this until we have the input model
completed for the current CSL 1.0 spec.


>   >> My second question is about unknown names. How do you express
>  >
>  >> 1. a single unknown name ("anonymous")
>
>  > Existing CSL styles typically test whether a name variable is empty.
>  > If it is, the "anonymous" term can be used. Would that suit your need?
>
> Yes, if this will explicitely be stated in the spec. Otherwise the empty
> name variable will get lost somewhere in the process of copying the data
> around because some implementations will silently remove it. However
> multiple empty name variables of the same role should be normalized to
> one, right?
>

Sorry, I don't follow. In my understanding, CSL doesn't distinguish between
an empty variable and a non-existing one. Also, each role only has a single
name variable (which can be an array of multiple names).

 >> 2. the fact that there are more names but you don't know them ("et
>  >> al.")
>  >>
>  >> A workaround would be to use a dummy literal name like this:
>  >>
>  >> "author":[{"literal":"unknown"}]
>  >> "author":[ ..., {"literal":"et al."}]
>  >>
>  >> But we could also define a third type of name (beside name-parts and
>  >> literal) that can only ocurr once at the end of the list of names.
>  >
>  > What is the use case here exactly? Reading this, this topic about
>  > thousand-author papers came to mind:
>  > http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/10718/
>
> Yes and also many other publications with only five, four or three
> authors: if you just copy the citation from another citation that does
> not list all authors, you must either ignore the remaining authors or
> add a dummy author named "et al.". I think the latter is the most common
> workaround.
>
> In summary there are the following cases to cover:
>
> 1 Alice and Bob.
> 2 Alice, Bob et al.
> 3 anonymous.
> 4 anonymous et al.
> 5 Alice, Bob, and anonymous
> 6 Alice, Bob, anonymous et al. [*]
>
> I am not sure whether case 6 is really needed but you need case 4.
>

Right. As with nicknames, I'd suggest we revisit this at a later point, as
any solution will have quite a few implications. Feel free to create
tickets, though.

Rintze