Talk:Unknown (magazine)

Early comments

There's another, different Wikipedia article on the same magazine, which I created awhile ago: Unknown magazine. I'm not sure but I think that was before it was possible to put parentheses in an article title. I guess the thing to do now is to combine the articles. Joel Schlosberg

Well, I combined them. It probably needs more work. I hope I kept the spirit of both articles, though of necessity some of the words had to go. Notinasnaid 09:41, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Copyright

I just checked for copyright renewals; Street & Smith renewed copyright on several of their magazines but not this one, so the covers are all public domain. Mike Christie (talk – library) 22:09, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Fanzine source

I've cut this:

Campbell hoped to start publishing Unknown-style fantasy stories in Astounding in addition to science-fiction, and announced this in a December 1943 editorial; however, ASF reader reaction was so hostile that Campbell had to abandon this idea. Nevertheless, some unpublished Unknown stories did end up in ASF.<ref>[http://efanzines.com/EK/eI45/index.htm The Unknown ''Unknown''] by [[Will Murray]].</ref>

because the cited fanzine is not a reliable source. It's a pity, as I think the information is interesting and probably accurate; I'll readd it if I can find another source for the data. Mike Christie (talk – library) 13:45, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

This is american mag right?, so shouldn't it be canceled not cancelled?

A user changed the spelling of canceled to cancelled. This is an American mag so per WP:COFAQ#ENGLISH shouldn't it just have one "l"? ToeFungii (talk) 04:17, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

You're mistaken, I was changing it to one L. —Jonny Nixon (talk) 04:21, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

You are correct and I apologize. I guess I got cross eyed because you are 100% correct. TY for the correction and the fix of my mistake. ToeFungii (talk) 04:22, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

No worries at all. Have a good day. —Jonny Nixon (talk) 04:28, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Um....

Why are was there pictures of penises and naked Lady Gaga?!--Lerdthenerd wiki defender 13:56, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Vandalism. It's been removed. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:14, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Who did it? Abdullah Al Manjur (talk) 16:03, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Changes to table

ThePersecuted, re this diff: I agree that the colour can be removed from the table, but what was wrong with the rest of the layout? It was built that way to be as compressed as possible, so as not to waste page space. I'd like to put it back that way so I'd like to know what your reasoning was. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 19:42, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

• Per MOS:FONTSIZE, font size should only be altered through percentage & not absolute values. In addition, forcing the the line-height also creates potential accessibility issues. ThePersecuted (talk) 23:25, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
• To add, the wikitable class is the standard for tables & therefore I see little reason to alter it from table to another. If the tables on Wikipedia need small line-heights, that should be address on the global CSS level and not table per table. ThePersecuted (talk) 23:30, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

  It's not the line-height per se that was intended; it's reducing the white space around the contents of each cell. Is there another way to do that? I and a couple of others spent a lot of time trying to figure out a way to do this and this was the only way we came up with. There are enough columns that a little white space in each cell adds up to a lot of wasted space. That's a negative for the article as it narrows the text to the side, particularly on small screen sizes. If you still don't think it's justified, I'll raise the topic at a MOS talk page to see if another way to achieve the same result can be found. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 23:36, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

  I personally don't think it's justifiable due to causing issues with accessibility. In addition, I feel it craps up the info in the table more than necessary with any further "cramming". if the table doesn't suit well floating to the right of the main text, it may be better to just put the table on its own line. 04:31, 7 May 2020 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by ThePersecuted (talk • contribs)

  RexxS, I know you’re an expert on accessibility issues — would you mind commenting? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 05:33, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

Issues of Unknown, showing volume/issue number.

Year	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
1939			1/1	1/2	1/3	1/4	1/5	1/6	2/1	2/2	2/3	2/4
1940	2/5	2/6	3/1	3/2	3/3	3/4	3/5	3/6	4/1	4/2	4/3	4/4
1941		4/5		4/6		5/1		5/2		5/3		5/4
1942		5/5		5/6		6/1		6/2		6/3		6/4
1943		6/5		6/6		7/1		7/2		7/3
John W. Campbell was editor throughout.

Issues of the British reprint of Unknown, showing volume/issue number

Year	Win	Spring			Summer			Autumn			Winter
	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
1939									2/1	2/2	2/3	2/4
1940	2/5	2/6	3/1	3/2	3/3	3/4	3/5	3/6	4/1	4/2	4/3	4/4
1941		4/5					4/6
1942			5/5			6/1				6/3
1943	6/4				6/5					(nn)
1944	(nn)				(nn)			(nn)
1945		3/4						3/5			3/6
1946					3/7						3/8
1947		3/9			3/10						3/11
1948		3/12			4/1						4/2
1949		4/3			4/4						4/5
Underlining indicates that an issue was dated with the season ("Spring 1945") rather than the month. John W. Campbell was editor throughout.

@Mike Christie and ThePersecuted: The main accessibility issue is the fixed point size for text. It should always be set as a relative value (use % or em). Different skins can have have different fonts and different base font sizes, so editors will have set their browser zoom to be comfortable at that size. Vector, for example, has a base font size of 14px, while Monobook has a base font size of 12.7px. So if you set a piece of text at 10px, it will look smaller (71%) when viewed in Vector skin than on Monobook, where it is 79% of the surrounding text. The line heights should really be left alone to change with font size for similar reasons.

I understand Mike's desire to keep things compact, but these are not huge tables. If width is an issue, then it's really best not to float the table inside text, but to let it have its own space. In this case, though, I don't think the table is wide enough to need that.

If I were to mark up the tables, I'd do it like this with captions and scopes. You'll note that in each case the footer text is no less than 90% of 95% (=85.5%), which is as small as it is allowed by MOS:FONTSIZE. Hope that helps. --RexxS (talk) 20:00, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

Hi, RexxS, thanks! Very helpful; I appreciate you putting in the time to do that. I'm going to slot in all three formats below, just to visually compare them. First is the original, then your version, then the version on the page right now:

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
1939			1/1	1/2	1/3	1/4	1/5	1/6	2/1	2/2	2/3	2/4
1940	2/5	2/6	3/1	3/2	3/3	3/4	3/5	3/6	4/1	4/2	4/3	4/4
1941		4/5		4/6		5/1		5/2		5/3		5/4
1942		5/5		5/6		6/1		6/2		6/3		6/4
1943		6/5		6/6		7/1		7/2		7/3
Issues of Unknown, showing volume/issue number. John W. Campbell was editor throughout.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
1939			1/1	1/2	1/3	1/4	1/5	1/6	2/1	2/2	2/3	2/4
1940	2/5	2/6	3/1	3/2	3/3	3/4	3/5	3/6	4/1	4/2	4/3	4/4
1941		4/5		4/6		5/1		5/2		5/3		5/4
1942		5/5		5/6		6/1		6/2		6/3		6/4
1943		6/5		6/6		7/1		7/2		7/3
John W. Campbell was editor throughout.

Issues of Unknown, showing volume/issue number.

Year	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
1939			1/1	1/2	1/3	1/4	1/5	1/6	2/1	2/2	2/3	2/4
1940	2/5	2/6	3/1	3/2	3/3	3/4	3/5	3/6	4/1	4/2	4/3	4/4
1941		4/5		4/6		5/1		5/2		5/3		5/4
1942		5/5		5/6		6/1		6/2		6/3		6/4
1943		6/5		6/6		7/1		7/2		7/3
John W. Campbell was editor throughout.

I understand the FONTSIZE requirement has to be met, but I'm disappointed that we can't make the table more compact. I agree it's not big enough to be absolutely necessary, but to my eye the two less-compact versions are distressingly low in information density. But if you tell me that the effect I'm hoping for can't be achieved while complying with accessibility requirements, I'll believe you. I don't have a strong preference between yours and ThePersecuted's versions, but if yours is better for accessibility reasons we can swap that one in -- is that the case? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:58, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

@Mike Christie: I'm not sure what skin and browser you're using, but those three tables look pretty much the same size to me. The third one (mine) is slightly narrower at 463px versus 468px for the others two. The three heights are 147px, 158px, and 176px, but of course mine has a caption – which is pretty much compulsory for accessibility now (see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Accessibility #RfC on table captions) – so if you added a caption to the other two, I don't think you'd find much difference. If you wanted to, you could reduce the text size of the whole table as low as 85%, but then the footer row couldn't be reduced in size any further.

As I added column and row scopes for screen readers, (see MOS:DTT), I'd recommend that version. Of course, you can still play around with it, as long as you keep the caption and scopes, and don't let any piece of text go below 85% of the normal font size. HTH --RexxS (talk) 01:21, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

Interesting that it looks the same to you; see this, which is what I'm seeing -- not a huge difference, but it seems very noticeable to me. Yes, I'll go ahead and substitute your version -- thanks. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:29, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

Here's a trick for you, Mike. Compare these:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Unknown%20(magazine)&useskin=vector
• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Unknown%20(magazine)&useskin=monobook

It's a nice quick way of showing what content looks like in different skins. The difference in the table widths between skins is entirely down to the fixed point size in the first one simply being a smaller fraction of normal in Vector (10/14) than it is in Monobook (10/12.7). Cheers --RexxS (talk) 01:50, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

Very handy; I didn't know about that. Thank you. I've gone ahead and implemented your code in the article, and I really appreciate your help -- I notice from a couple of other posts that you're very busy at the moment, so thank you again for taking the time on this. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:54, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

References