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

Keith’s comments from the Goodreads Librarians Group group.

Merged and tagged as widely misattributed, and commented with a link to research on the attribution.

Librarians may want to be on the lookout for these, and I'd appreciate any pointers to shortcuts for dealing with and/or finding them. (We still can't really search on publisher internally, can we? Is there an easy way to track down author profiles with no spaces?)

HardPress appears to have a boatload of mostly PD Kindle editions for which, however they imported their data into Amazon, the author records were badly broken such that, for example, "Knox, John" became "Knox (author)" and "John (author)" on Amazon. It looks like, when the KCW script brought these into GR (at least some in Dec'15, possibly others before or since), it either added them to existing single-name accounts incorrectly, or created new ones. There is a good set of examples named John here which I've mostly left alone for now to serve as illustration.

Hey, Sisyphus; over here!

lethe wrote: "...both the English and the Russian profiles have (different) followers. What would (have) happen(ed) if they were merged? I can't find anything in the manual about merging author profiles."

Pending a more authoritative answer from Rivka, I would say that if both profiles are correct, it would be undesirable (or perhaps even a violation of policy) to merge them, but if they were merged for some reason then all followers would be migrated to the target of the profile merger. I can't think of any reason why we would want to merge a Russian profile into an English profile though, unless the author is not Russian and has never had a book translated into Russian.

Thanks particularly to Krazykiwi and Meg for pointing out the ASIN recycling issue, of which I was unaware: I haven't seen that happen, and especially for books without an ISBN at all (e.g., those which were only printed between 1923 and 1960 and have never had an ISBN and probably never will) it seemed like a good idea. Now I understand why it's not.

And K, feel free to shoot sown any of my ideas if they're not good—that's why I tend to phrase them in the form of a question—especially if you provide the reason along with the ammo. ;-)

My question has been very adequately answers, officially and unofficially, so if the mods want to lock out this thread, I have no objection and nothing to whine about. Maybe I'll go click on some ads and let that generate some revenue instead. ;-)

lethe wrote: "I had a look through the thread Keith linked to, and this is the link to Keith's comment: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/..."

Thanks, lethe; I started this thread from mobile and could only hold so many things in the paste buffer at a time.

I started a new thread on a policy question regarding part of the manual. Hoping that Meg will be among the people to look at it.

The librarian manual states:

"Do not add an Amazon-assigned ASIN to books that were released without ISBN numbers."

I've commented on this before (long ago in this thread), but a different angle just struck me. I don't have much reason to care whether Amazon makes money or not, but presumably they will only continue to permit Goodreads to exist as long as Goodreads makes a positive contribution to their bottom line, so I do very much care about Goodreads making Amazon money.

There are, so far as I am aware, only two things under Librarian control that drive Amazon revenue: the ISBN & ASIN fields that power the Amazon button. If a valid ASIN exists with the potential to drive sales to Amazon, isn't a policy forbidding that fundamentally a bad business decision in addition to being poor customer service? I don't understand why we actively prevent the inclusion of valid data that doesn't block more valuable data and which could be contributing to profitability on a social site where monetization is always the hard question.

rivka wrote: "Your suggestion to add a line to the Manual entry is a good one though, and we have done so."

Acknowledged; thank you.

Thank you to everyone for the hard work on a much needed and long begged for feature. I have one area left for clarification which I meant to include with my previous posts before I ran out of time. Admittedly, this is something of a corner case.

As all of us here know, the disambiguation hack we've been using for authors with the same name has been to include extra spaces before the surname. In the sort field, we have no standard defined for discarding those spaces, or where to put them if they are to be retained (since they cannot be before the surname, and will be truncated if left trailing in their natural place).

Do we care about sorting within same-named authors, so that John Stanley's horror movie books are not scattered among John Stanley's Little Lulu comics? If we do care (and I'm not suggesting that we have to care), I think it would be worthwhile to decide upon and document a consistent means for doing so. That could look like including the number of spaces—only in the sort field—as a number like "Stanley, John 2", or our other hack of john^^stanley, like "stanley, john^^" in the sort field, or...?

FWIW, if we're going to do it at all, I prefer the numbers rather than the carets, but somebody may have a better idea. Clearly my ideas are not always useful (and thanks to Krazykiwi for reminding me why ASCII sort is a dumb idea even if we don't use mixed case in the sort field).

And if we're not going to do anything about these cases, we might want one line in the manual to say "ignore intervening disambiguation spaces" or something like that, just to make it clear that the issue was considered and settled.

Thanks again!

The Manual does not seem to address fully what to do with numbers, and how numbers interact with suffixes such as Jr. and Sr..

With the title sort, it has been easy enough to replace "Volume XI" in Title with "Volume 11" in Sort, and even to replace "Volume 9" with "Volume 09" so that the single-digit volumes don't get scattered among the double-digit ones, like:

Volume 89
Volume 9
Volume 90

Particularly given that Roman numerals, duplicating letters, sort especially badly in name fields—regardless of whether they go "Surname IX, Forename", or "Surname, Forename, IX" as I believe they should—it would seem similarly advantageous to have at least a suggestion in the Manual that Roman numerals be replaced by the corresponding Arabic numbers: "Surname, Forename, 9".

This may seem an esoteric rarity to those who rarely see personal names beyond the fourth generation like Walter Cronkite IV, but once you start getting into monarchs like Louis XIV (duplicated as Louis XIV of France, and Louis XIV Bourbon), Popes, Lamas, and assorted other types of religious and civil nobility, it can start to get a right mess.

Relatedly, I note that Jr. sorts before Sr. alphabetically, and III sorts before them both, which also gets silly.

Sort as written:

Lopez, Anna [lopez, anna]
Lopez, Carlos [lopez, carlos]
Lopez, Carlos X. [lopez, carlos x.]
Lopez III, Carlos [lopez, carlos, iii]
Lopez IX, Carlos [lopez, carlos, ix]
Lopez Jr., Carlos [lopez, carlos, jr.]
Lopez Sr., Carlos [lopez, carlos, sr.]
Lopez V, Carlos [lopez, carlos, v]
Lopez XI, Carlos [lopez, carlos, xi]
Lopez, George

Sort with Arabic numbers:

Lopez, Anna [lopez, anna]
Lopez, Carlos [lopez, carlos]
Lopez, Carlos X. [lopez, carlos x.]
Lopez Sr., Carlos [lopez, carlos, 01]
Lopez Jr., Carlos [lopez, carlos, 02]
Lopez III, Carlos [lopez, carlos, 03]
Lopez V, Carlos [lopez, carlos, 05]
Lopez IX, Carlos [lopez, carlos, 09]
Lopez XI, Carlos [lopez, carlos, 11]
Lopez, George

Finally, I note for everyone who might've overlooked it that the comma before the suffix/number/numeral in the "sort" field is important to distinguish those from middle names/initials.

I have a few things that don't appear to have been fully addressed yet in any thread I've yet seen, nor in the linked section of the Librarian Manual. I'll put each one in a separate comment in this thread since that seems easier to track.

First the easy(er) one: given that there are innumerable standards, and non-standard conventions, regarding proper-name alpha sorting across hundreds of languages, and given that this is, fundamentally, a computer program running n English-language servers, might it not be easiest on everyone—especially our over-worked developers who are probably already deeply sorry that they tried to give us what we so frequently requested with full requirements documentation or user stories—to just have the sort-by fields all run off of ASCII/UTF-8 sort order?

At least that would be a single, canonical, discoverable, standardized rule common to computing for over 60 years, and likely easily implemented. Fundamentally, this is probably a question more for the development team than for us volunteers.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/6827...
https://www.goodreads.com/series/1232...

As far as I can tell, these are really the same series, created twice, probably by accident by different Librarians. Only one book in the former series appears not to be in the latter, larger series—Don't Know Much About Anything Else—or I'd just say delete the short list. Do we have a shortcut, or is it a matter of fixing that book and still deleting the shorter series?

Emily wrote: "We did discuss this as a group, and we decided that we would need to make some infrastructure changes before adding single issues (for example, filtering on series pages and author pages, adding new formats to the edit book page, modifying search slightly, etc.). Until we can make those product changes, we won't change our librarian rules to allow single issues on the site.

However, we'd love to make those product changes to allow single issues sooner rather than later, especially since we could work with Comixology (another Amazon subsidiary) to import some of their data. We'll keep you updated on any product or policy changes that we're able to make."

In case someone is actually working on this already, I would like to add my support for the recommendation that we consider a new entry in the Format drop-down for these comics, which also may aid in the filtering mentioned above. (If they wind up under "Paperback" I shall be very cross, and probably not alone in that.)

I'm not 100% positive about this pair, but they look to me to be related enough (they both have "Shadow Wars" titles & connections to M Knepper) to think they might be the same person, or at least in need of transferring some books from one profile to the other.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show... (GR)

I couldn't find this particular case addressed in this group anywhere, so... new thread!

There are these two Goodreads authors who seem pretty clearly to be different people:
Lisa Morton
Lisa Nohealani Morton

Among other places, they were both contributors to Nightmare Magazine April 2013 as noted at http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/iss...

I added both to the book record, but only the two-name author stuck. Editing again still didn't add the three-name author. I've seen similar things before where, e.g., Sean Kelly (GR Author) and Sean Q Kelly (name on cover, no period) won't stick to the same book when I'm editing it, though it appears that some scripts—or maybe Goodreads authors themselves?—are able to make such edits.

Is there a workaround for this or a trick I'm missing? This seems like a well-intentioned feature which didn't contemplate the corner cases (or perhaps later Goodreads naming policies) thoroughly at engineering time.

Or should I copy this to the Bugs folder in the Feedback group?

rivka wrote: "Just a reminder: this group is not the place for a discussion of any specific librarian's edits. If you believe an edit was done incorrectly, please flag it."

BTW, if an edit of mine were to be flagged, for example, would I get a notification of any kind about that, or just some Staffer/Super somewhere? I presume no notice since I've certainly made some mistakes and never received a notice before. Nevertheless, when flagging someone else's edits I'd rather that be informative than merely "tattling" or getting someone in trouble. (More often I simply re-edit a mistake to correct it, unless I see a pattern of mistaken edits.)

Ioana wrote: "Is there a way to let users know that a profile of an author they are reading is the same as another author?"

I am sometimes in the habit of linking to the master (primary) author record in the description field of subordinate records, especially if those have no existing descriptive detail. I believe Sergei Lukyanenko serves as an English-language master record example, with Sergej Lukianenko as a German-language subordinate record.

(And I note that the Сергей Лукьяненко Cyrillic record disappeared again only to be recreated at Сергей Лукьяненко. I've fixed the master description again; some of the book records on the subordinate profiles still need cleaning to conform with policy. ETA: I think I got them all, but it would be handy for someone with better Cyrillic skills to have a look.)

Several times I attempted to change the author of https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9168 from Hal Abelson to Harold Abelson, a day after having keyed all editions of the book to the latter name, which appears on the cover of every edition for which I was able to find a cover (they had been mixed between the two, but mostly the latter). However, every time I click the captcha and save, the attribution reverts to Hal, despite Hal no longer being tied to any edition of the book. This didn't used to happen. Regression bug? Database corruption? UI change? Halp? Thanks. (Just in case it matters: I'm a Super.)

Sidonie wrote: "https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

This profile doesn't need merging but deleting: it's empty but for his "quote" section, which contains spam advertising magic spells..."

A Super (such as myself) could handle this, but I'm not sure if I should since Admin might want to see the spam before it's killed, so I'll wait.

Meanwhile please merge:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show... into
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

rivka wrote: "While these don't sound like they do, please keep in mind that some student guides do also include the original work, and therefore often should be combined with other editions of it."

Thanks for the reminder; I'll keep an eye out, but so far all of these appear way too short to include more than a very brief quotation of the original. CliffNotes look like War and Peace in comparison to these.