Author talk:Jack London

• grits teeth*

Hi, I'd like to present the argument that short stories are best arranged as

• Collection of Short Stories
  • Story A
  • Story B

This way cuts down on the redundancy of saying

• Story A from Collection of Short Stories
• Story B from Collection of Short Stories, etcetera

It also allows people to find specific short stories, rather than only listing

• Collection of Short Stories

Any complaints? Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Rabindranath Tagore} 04:07, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

It seems useless to not have them alphabetized as they are on other author pages like Author:H. P. Lovecraft, etc. CL8 04:10, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Could just as easily point to Author:Leo Tolstoy, it's best not to rely on "other examples", because as Jay explained, we allow a fair amount of autonomy on Wikisource. It's better that we come to a logical agreement on what will make things the least crowded/redundant, while still being easy to find. You may also find, as you poke around other author pages, things are usually actually labelled according to year, rather than alphabetically. Though when years are uncertain, sometimes you'll see alphabetic, or sometimes you'll even see subjective attempts to list "the most important first". Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Rabindranath Tagore} 04:12, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Well it will be difficult for people to find the short story they want unless they know which collection it's in and if they knew that, they'd just go to the appropriate page. Listing them under the collections in which they were published doesn't seem to help in browsing. CL8 04:18, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Wow the organization of the Tolstoy page you pointed out is bizarre. It seems to be a strange hodge-podge of 2 or 3 organizational styles... CL8 04:24, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the Tolstoy page can be confusing, but it does have the added dimension of being a series of translated pages.

The first issue with someone like Jack London has to do with what version of the story should be considered canonical. With short stories and poems in particular most were originally published separately in magazines before they were made part of a collection. Each is a stand-alone work. I was just looking at The Man with the Gash as it originally appeared in McLure's, and feel concerned about the best way to reconcile this with what we have. Eclecticology 10:45, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

How about using a table where you can re-sort on any column? (Click the icons next to the column titles - JavaScript must be enabled):

Title	Published In	Year
The Death of Ligoun	Children of the Frost	1902
Demetrios Contos	Tales of the Fish Patrol	1905
The Dream of Debs	The Strength of the Strong	1914
In the Forests of the North	Children of the Frost	1902

... and the multiple, messy and verbose "style="border-top:1px solid black;"" entries seen in edit mode could be removed with an addition of a "wikitable" class to the "Common.css" file here like the one on en.wikipedia.org - making it much cleaner and comprehensible to maintain --Georgeryp 04:22, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Ten days after I converted the "Works" section into a sortable table, (with no comments from anyone) I went ahead and made a sortable table out of the "Short stories" section as well. A few observations:

1. For some reason "The Heathen" and "To Build a Fire" are entered twice on Wikisource, once on their own and again as part of a collection.
2. When the Jack London author page first loads, the stories are in the same order they were before I converted it (sorted by story name, ignoring leading "The", "A", etc) but since I chose not to make the table code even more verbose by using a hidden sort key, once you click to sort by story name they are resorted literally ("The"s and "A" and even quotes on two stories are NOT ignored). --Georgeryp 03:31, 17 March 2008 (UTC)