Keith’s Comments (group member since Sep 19, 2008)

Keith’s comments from the Goodreads Librarians Group group.

A couple of related questions, to see if I've got this down correctly now, having re-reviewed the Manual:

Charles Wentworth Upham
Charles W. Upham
Charles Upham

These appear all to be variants of the same author. As he is long dead and his work now PD, his Salem Witchcraft has been published and republished under all three variants of his name. WorldCat and LoC seem generally to list him in the fully disambiguated form ("Wentworth"); however, AFAICT he originally published this work in 1867 as "Charles Upham", and as yet no import or record of this book has been attached to that profile.

So, first question, which may moot the rest, is: should these three records simply be merged together, since they are more properly variants of one name rather than proper pen-names or translations? If so, is it more correct to resolve on Charles Wentworth Upham, or Charles Upham? (To be safe, I added bio data to both so I don't have to repeat the research if one disappears.)

If not, then I must note that I am having difficulty saving the few attempts I have made to set the primary author as Charles Wentworth Upham, and the secondary as Charles W. Upham for one that had the latter name on the cover. When I saved the record, the secondary disappeared. I'm presuming that means "don't do that," but there is a small chance that could just be a bug.

Thanks, rivka (or whoever else answers).

So, if the later David Green doesn't match an existing record to merge into, should I make that 14 spaces, or just leave it alone? Or did you already fix it yourself?

D.A.-bully victims suffer more than a ★ on their commercial product wrote: "Deon wrote: "the same isbn can be used on more than 1 format, though it is not the standard approach"

No, it cannot."

I think Deon meant "can" as in "it has been known to happen, and therefore we must be able to deal with it," rather than in the senses of "may" or "is permitted." For an allegedly unique identifier, duplicates happen rather a lot, especially considering that we (often) track alternate covers separately.

Just ran into something odd while cleaning & sorting the various David Green records.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
and
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

are both David^Green (1 space), which I would have thought impossible. The newer one, according to the Librarian edits was created as a secondary author to the linked book on 16 March 2014, probably inadvertently. There are an awful lot of David Greens, running up to 13 spaces, and I would have thought this would get attached to the 8780 record rather than creating a new author record. (FWIW, 8780 is not the author record it should belong to either, though I'm not sure which one would be.)

Is this a bug? Should I report it in that thread? Or is this a harbinger of an author disambiguation feature yet to be fully rolled out?

Meg wrote: "I just wanted to reiterate that Nook and Kobo shouldn't be added to the edition field, as these all fall under the ebook format."

Is there a thread where this was resolved? I ask because this seems to violate the general database principle of "never lose data." I can see it for "retailer specific information" as described in the new LM, but this is also, often, a technological limitation: knowing that it's an "ebook" doesn't help me if I can't actually read this or that format, and this field would seem to be the appropriate place to list it unless we're going to expand the format dropdown (which would seem like over-engineering). Hopefully, the thread where this was previously discussed will teach me why this is a better idea, unless I just convinced someone who matters that it isn't.

Deon wrote: "literary awards allow or not allowed in the description"

I would think not, since this would be redundant to the existing Award field.

(Partial comment move from "Goodreads Author profiles needing merging BY GR STAFF pt. 9" per rivka's request; partially also rewritted and expanded)

rivka wrote: "Re 375: They are all the same author, but we don't merge distinctly different author names.

What then should I do with Tibetan authors who are mostly known only by one common (often ceremonial) name, but a use slew of obscure names assigned to different texts? I had been combining those to the common, canonical record. For example:

Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo (1820–1892): (Tib. འཇམ་དབྱངས་མཁྱེན་བརྩེའི་དབང་པོ), Pema Ösal Do-ngak Lingpa, (also: Dorje Zijitsal; Jigme Khyentse Nyugu; Kunga Tenpai Gyeltsen Pelzangpo; Osel Dorje Tukchoktsal; Osel Tulpai Dorje; Tsangse Gyepai Loden; Tsokye Lama Gyepaibang; Tsuglamawai Nyima Tsokye Shonnui Langtso).

Can I get away with ignoring this rule in this special corner case since it has little to do with publisher databases and is largely of interest only to specialists?

If not, what is the current best practice for cross-linking multiple profiles for the same author? I've seen a few cases where a pseudonym is mentioned in the real-name profile and vice-versa, sometime with both names included in the book record—as with Lauren Kelly and Joyce Carol Oates—but this would seem to be a non-starter in the Tibetan cases where it is relatively common for a single author to have upwards of six names used in print but only one name commonly known in the West.

If anyone wants to see how far this issue extends, I've been trying to compile a sort of master record here, though it remains (probably forever) woefully incomplete: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...


Closely related issue: we don't include honorific titles in author names, but many Tibetan teachers publish and are best know as "Rinpoche," which means "Precious [one]," for example Dudjom Rinpoche, Gelek Rimpoche, and perhaps most famously Sogyal Rinpoche. Since these are the names used by their publishers on their book covers, it is acceptable (and perhaps preferred) to retain this format in these cases, correct?

rivka wrote: "For general policy discussions, please start a new thread in the appropriate folder."

Will move.

Meanwhile, a more obvious set of merges is:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
into claimed:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
along with these three, which need a bit more detailed cleaning:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
into GRA:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

Variant misquotes merged into
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/219863
to combine with QotD
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9292

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
to
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

I have again combined several variants here:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/787720

Which should ideally be merged into QotD:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6403


Likewise with this misquote:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/673505

And this QotD:
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7286

I have combined several variants into this (slightly misquoted):
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5078...

Which should ideally then be merged into QotD:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8406...

Keith wrote: "https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
into Lon Milo DuQuette"

Rivka, you missed the second link there please—or can I just make such empty profiles disappear on my own without worrying about the connection to the real (claimed) author profile?

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
into Lon Milo DuQuette

Milkweed L. Augustine

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
is the master record for all of the following variants:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

rivka wrote: "Absolutely. User edits have higher priority than all imports."

Though see my Mar 14, 2014 07:43PM report in comment 282 in this thread above (which may have been fixed).

Dmitry Merezhkovsky could use some attention from someone who knows the language better than I do. I'm fairly sure there is a lot to be combined here, but I can't quite tell.

Here's an odd one that also seems to result from either sable or ingram imports:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/edits/...

Lee added secondary authors Feb-2012, then ingram and sable made updates without any record of removing those names, but they were gone when I got there. I have restored them, along with fixing the rest of the record, but this may be indicative of an area where (a) there is insufficient change logging, and (b) where scripts are still overwriting user changes.