Book edition properties
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I wonder whether there should be an optional editor property for book editions. I just added the book, The Right and the Good, by D.W. Ross. It was originally published in 1930 with no editor. It was re-published in 2002. The 2002 edition was edited by Philip Stratton-Lake. Given the current schema I had to put Philip Stratton-Lake as editor of the book, but this is misleading because it makes it appear that Stratton-Lake was the editor of the 1930 original.
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This is a good idea; I think we had a model that captured this at one point, but it got lost in a refactoring. The only issue I have before just adding the property is what the reciprocal property should be on the Author type. There are already properties for "Works Edited" and "Book editions published", either one of which could be confused with the new property. Any thoughts? One thing we could do, I suppose, is create a new type (Book edition editor or something), but I'd like to exhaust other possibilities first.
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I'm not sure why we need the "book editions published" property as a separate property. Why not split this up into two properties, "book editions authored" and "book editions edited"?
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Interesting point; if we did so, we would actually be storing two different kinds of assertions in the "book editions edited" property. One (the one used by "book editions authored) for the various editions of a book that the person has edited (e.g., Gardner Dozois edited "The Year's Best Science Fiction, 23rd Annual Collection", regardless of edition), and one for editions in which the editor has edited only that edition (e.g., the 2002 "The Right and the Good"), which might be confusing. (E.g., if you didn't know anything about the book, and saw that Stratton-Lake edited an edition of The Right and the Good, how could you be certain that he edited only that edition, and that his absence from the Book topic of The Right and the Good wasn't just an oversight?) Or am I just overthinking this?
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I think there should be an "edited by" property in the Book type which is for editors of a book regardless of the specific edition (such as Gardner Dozois in your example) and a different "edited by" property in the Book Edition type for editors who edited a specific edition of the work, but who are not editors of the work itself (for example, Stratton-Lake).
If it is too confusing to have two different properties by the same name, you could call the book-level property "work edited by" and the edition-level property "edition edited by". You could have a note in the "edition edited by" property description telling people that they need not duplicate entries that already applly to works as a whole.
Likely the "work edited by" property would be best used for works like compilaitons, anthologies, encyclopedias, and, topic focused academic books which have different authors for each chapter. In contrast, the "edition edited by" property would be used for works that were not initially edited works, but that have been re-published in a new edition with added scholarly apparatous and/or an editorial introduction.
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