[Papercuts] Records with author names in all upper case

There was at least one forum discussion where this was mentioned and the issue was resolved by changing the Wiley translator. See:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/12638

This problem is not unique to Wiley. I request that we revisit the issue of implementing a right-click "sentence case" tool similar to that with the article title.

I recognize that after using such a tool editing might be required for names including "de", "von" and the like. This would be more simple than retyping the entire name to get the case correct.
  • I'm fine with having that option, but the solution is really to fix the translator - this is usually (not even) a line of code to add, so if you point to something this will mostly happen within days, if not hours.
  • The HighWire translator allows all caps author name import. The last time I tried so did the RIS.

    Here is an example of Highwire translator import of a journal article with all caps author names:
    http://archpedi.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/summary/I/2/113

    I thought that it would be more simple to do a user interface change once than to add the case conversion to each translator. It would most definitely be better from a user standpoint to have the translators do the case conversion automatically.

    Thanks
  • Avram, Dan, Simon - do we have good code for this in any existing translator?
  • Matbugat.ru and Bezneng Gajit (incidentally, both Tatar):
    if (item.creators[i].lastName == item.creators[i].lastName.toUpperCase()) {
    item.creators[i].lastName = Zotero.Utilities.capitalizeTitle(
    item.creators[i].lastName.toLowerCase(),true);
    }


    That only does the last name, but that's pretty much the idea.
  • edited December 6, 2011
    thanks - I'll have a look at Highwire. For the title I'll test whether it's all caps first.
    Less certain about RIS - what do you think?

    edit - oh I see how that works. Very clever. I'll have that out for Highwire later tonight.
  • I'm not comfortable putting logic like this into the RIS translator, since I feel like the imports should be faithful. We can add it to site translators when we know that the site has this problem.
  • yeah, I was thinking that would be a concern.
  • I've sent the highwire pull request - should make it to your browse within the next couple of days.
  • Updated HighWire is now up and will be out to clients within 24 hours. Update manually from the Zotero preferences to get it now.
  • I thought that it would be more simple to do a user interface change once than to add the case conversion to each translator. It would most definitely be better from a user standpoint to have the translators do the case conversion automatically.
    generally, the aim of Zotero is to require an absolute minimum of user manipulation of data. Ajlyon especially, and more recently me check every time someone reports malformed data from a translator if there is something we can do to improve it. In the larger scheme of things it's easier if users have a "worry-free" experience and don't have to learn little tricks like "right-click on the title and select...
  • Highwire is working perfectly now. My sincere thanks to those concerned.
  • The Wiley Online Library importer doesn't convert all upper case authors to mixed case.

    http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-5930.2011.00548.x/abstract

    I understand the philosophy (stated above) that Zotero should minimize the effort needed by a user. Hence, author name case should be handled automatically. However, in my experience this frequently doesn't happen and I need to hand-edit authors' names. The case problem also still happens with some RIS imports from the clipboard. There are times that I use sources that require cutting and pasting of all the data into Zotero. When the source is all upper case there is no translator to automate anything.

    Please, please reconsider the reluctance to implement a right-click case change for authors similar to the article title field. This would make me very happy.
  • DWL-SDCA: No one suggested there shouldn't also be a right-click option. Someone just needs to implement it.
  • That is good news. Given that there is already this function for the title field, am I wrong that this shouldn't be so time consuming?

    Is there a way for end users to specifically target (perhaps, substantial) donations to cover the cost of hastening the implementation this and other papercuts issues?

    Off topic: When I last contributed my donation went to the Center for New Media. There didn't seem to be a way for specifying that it was for the Zotero project. Now, and for the past several months I am receiving frequent snail mail requests to donate to the GMU and to the Alumni Fund. My only connection with GMU is my use and support of Zotero.
  • Is there a way for end users to specifically target (perhaps, substantial) donations to cover the cost of hastening the implementation this and other papercuts issues?
    no, but clearly something like that would be good - Sean has mentioned the idea of some type of bounty system that could be used for that purpose - I'm thinking something like - community devs would get 75% of the pledged amount for submitting an accepted patch or the amount could server as a crowd-sourced mini grant for core-devs. Seems to me that that requires some care to set up, though and is only worth it if it's going to be used by more than the hardened enthusiasts.

    Sean mentioned that they received hardly any donations with the "donate" button on the Zotero page, which is why they took it off - I agree it's unfortunate that there is no more direct way of giving - but if it's for 5-10 people per year it's probably not worth it.
  • edited March 22, 2012
    Technical note: I wonder if there would be any downside to us just doing capitalizeTitle inside cleanAuthor.

    EDIT: one tiny flaw that I ran across already is using capitalizeTitle with things like "L. von Meyer", we would probably need to fill in a lot more skip words in capitalizeTitle or maybe have a variation of capitalizeTitle within cleanAuthor that would be preposition-aware.
  • @aurimas - yes potentially. Even if we check that authors are in all caps, this would still mess with acronyms - think OECD, UNESCO etc.
  • @adamsmith - we can do capitalizeTitle only on names that we determine to be personal names, that should leave all the acronyms untouched (I think)
  • yeah, I thought about that - I'd be happy with that, but see e.g. ajlyon concerns about faithful imports above.
  • Probably not the most graceful way of doing this, but we can have a fixCase flag that we could pass to cleanAuthor so we can avoid doing this on import.
  • actually I like that a lot! Writing that code every time is tiresome, plus, with the flag in clean author we might be able to put it into the FW, too.
  • I'll push a commit. We'll see what the core devs have to say about this.

    I was looking at some of the capitalization rules on Wikipedia (would love to reference a primary source of this, but I can't find one right now. Does anyone have a link to one?) and it seems not very straightforward. It seems to vary a bit between locales.
  • I started a new thread for this: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/22585/proper-capitalization-of-personal-names/
  • In the meantime - Wiley is updated.
  • Thank you.

    Please do further consider the bounty idea. I realize that ideas and how they are implemented will still need to be approved by the dev decision-makers.
Sign In or Register to comment.