Discussions on Author

This is a good start. There are a number of issues to address before we can use this, though. One is that when pseudonymous authors are added to a book (story, etc.), they will be co-typed as a person because person is an included type of author, which they shouldn't be. Since many people don't know which authors are pseudonyms and which aren't, the data is going to become very messy. When the exclusive types feature is implemented, this will be less of a problem, one hopes.

Another problem is that pseudonymous books and stories are often re-published under the author's true name (or under a better-known pseudonym), which means that a work will be attributed to multiple authors, all of whom represent the same person, when what we mean to say is that different editions/publications of this work have been published under these different names. Ideally, we would be able to indicate which versions were published under which names, but we haven't worked that out yet.

House names and shared pseudonyms pose another bibliographic problem, which is attributing a specific work to the true author as well as the pseudonym. For example, a number of prominent writers wrote books under the house name "Ellery Queen", and it would be useful to show which were by Theodore Sturgeon, which by William Tenn, etc., rather than just asserting that it was used by those authors. Shared pseudonyms have the extra complexity that they were sometimes used by two authors, sometimes by one, and sometimes the other -- not all stories by "Lewis Padgett" were written by both spouses, for example. But this might be too complex for now, and we should probably focus on the main issues first.

This will also a concern for the other media domains, but it's probably of most interest in publishing.

I'm not sure what the best way to handle names like Mark Twain will be, since although most people know it's a pseudonym, and it's probably worth recording, most people also don't make a distinction between Twain and Clemens.