Discussions on Short Non-fiction

Works of short non-fiction themselves don't typically have ISBNs or issues. These properties are contained on the types for the object(s) they were published in (typically book editions or periodical issues). The way to record places of publication is via the property "published in/published as" (this property is actually on the type "published work", which should be automatically added when you create a new short non-fiction). See the help topic Entering the Contents of a Book or Periodical for more information.

This was definitely an oversight. Although individual publication dates are handled in the place a work was published (e.g., if a short story is published in an issue of The New Yorker and then collected in a book, the publication dates are on the magazine issue topic and book edition topic). It looks like we've been inconsistent about implementing a more general notion of a written work's date in our other types -- for book we used "copyright date"; for poem, short story, and play "date written". Although copyright date and date written are pretty different concepts, and none of them are the same as "date of first publication". So do you think we should we have three properties (date written -- useful especially for older works; copyright date -- for more recent works; and date of first publication -- useful for published works of all ages)?

For my purposes, I really just need to keep track of when an article was first published.

I guess it might be nice to know the approximate time it was written, but in many cases no one will know that anyway. Copyright date may have value for some applications, such as those doing IP work, but I don't have a use for it personally.

I think there is definitely value in "date written" for all literary work types, especially in the absence of "copyright date". I'd like to see it captured in Freebase.

Literary works (fiction or non-fiction, long or short) with staying power are often collected and published again and again, in which case the gap between "publication date" and the age of a non-fiction only gets greater with time. Within the category of short non-fiction, consider private letters involving notable personalities (usually dated but often not published until years later) and famous speeches (with the five known manuscripts of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address -- written on different dates -- a particular interesting edge case), for example.

Good points. I've added "date of first publication" to the short non-fiction type, since there's an immediate demand for it. It sounds like "date written", "copyright date" and "date of first publication" are useful on all (or most) written work types, but I want to wait until we get the property aliasing feature working to add them all, which will ultimately make these more consistent across types.