Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
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Book & Author Page Issues
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Can someone explain this to me?
The manual says the following on capitalization:"Enter in the official title of the book as it is shown on the cover or binding. Use proper capitalization and punctuation (i.e. do not use all-caps or no-caps). Make sure to check your spelling since improperly spelled titles may make the book harder to find in the Goodreads database."
I can not understand why she de-capitalizes the correct book titles.
She has screwed the titles for The Lord of the Rings as well and changed the author to J.R.R. Tolkein. What an idiot. I've reverted some.
She has PAGES and PAGES of this crap. I am going through and reverting it all. It is taking a while since you can't revert original publication name stuff.This person should lose her librarian status. It will take me hours to fix all thois.
I also undid some of her changes where I'm sure I know the book title.
I noticed she was changing authors too and deleting publication dates for NO REASON. Shit like that pisses me off.WTH is minimalist capitalization and WHY would you do that for TITLES!
Can someone remove her privileges and find out what's going on? Or contact her directly??
She isn't accepting messages or I would have told her to stop. We have to wait for an employee to be one, which won't happen til Monday. Maybe rivka will pop on.In the meantime, I am leaving her edits page open and I will refresh and revert it once a day until she loses her power.
I just realized I posted this on the wrong section. Fixed!Also... got to page 4 of her edits where it "APPEARS" to have stopped or at least slowed. That is as far as I am going to go. From there on they will just get fixed as people see those books, HOPEFULLY!
I messaged rivka so if she gets the time maybe she can stop in and put a stop to whatever is going on. That's really hard to believe.
I think there should be a new rule: in order to be a librarian, you must be able to receive messages.
Lobstergirl wrote: "I think there should be a new rule: in order to be a librarian, you must be able to receive messages."Agreed.
I lied... I just got to the bottom of page 4 out of 32 and still reverting stuff and having to manually fix the original publication titles.I think I will sleep now... 4pm and I haven't slept. DAMN PPL!
Also I agree Lobstergirl!!!! SO MUCH!
I don't know how no one saw this. I guess it is a minor thing when you only see it on 1 book. The only reason I looked is because someone fixed it and she "fixed" it back.
Would it be inappropriate to comment on one of her status updates and ask if her acct has been hacked, if not to please stop 'fixing' the books?
She hasn't been hacked. This is weeks if not months of changes. She has been doing this for a while now. I wouldn't post on her status.Rivka has been notified at LEAST twice. She will lose her privileges soon. Until then I can revert them as she does them.
EDIT: Her lowercasing titles goes all the way back to July. There is no way I can fix them all. They will just have to get fixed as other librarians visit those books.
Lobstergirl wrote: "I think there should be a new rule: in order to be a librarian, you must be able to receive messages."and maybe a member for longer than a month?
But it said she just joined in July of 2012. 1 month? And under her friends it says "Naomi hasn't connected with her friends on Goodreads, yet."
Krystal109 wrote: "Also... got to page 4 of her edits where it "APPEARS" to have stopped or at least slowed. That is as far as I am going to go. From there ..."The bottom of page 19 is also lower-case changes and date deletes. I started in the middle.
I almost wish there was a TEST you had to take that proved you READ the manual.People just get on here and think THEIR WAY is the right way. I know I skimmed the manual, but if I was doing something that wasn't obviously correct (based on every other book being done the same way) I would look it up.
There should also be a certain amount of perception required. I never read how to make series and I did it fine. Seeing people make 5 series with 1 book each of a series annoys me. I started refreshing the series page once a day and checking all new series. The amount of duplicate series is INSANE. People will make a new series for the 2nd book instead of adding, etc.
If I'm not perfectly sure how it is done, I get back to the manual. Even if it is stuff I already did a hundred times, as soon as there is the slightest doubt in what I'm doing, I make sure it is alright. There are a few things like 'number of pages' which I check over and over again. I just don't want to mess anything up, especially since I know how much work it is to put it right again. But being a perfectionist certainly helps a lot ;) !However, I remember that I "experimented" a lot in the beginning. It took some time to get the things how they were supposed to be. It was a process of learning both the policies and the site mechanisms. Making mistakes is just natural, but one has to learn from them.
So perhaps a guided tutorial or a probation period would be quite nice.
Rivka is not usually available on Saturdays. Is there anyone else we could contact?
While I do NOT NOT NOT agree with what she is doing, I will point out that the capitalisation of all the words in a title, i.e. Take Me Home as opposed to Take me home,
is a U.S. style attribution - in a lot of other countries, they don't capitalise any word after the first word in the title.
from grammer.about.com:
Sentence case (also known as Down style)
Capitalize only the first word of the title and any proper nouns: "Rules for capitalizing the words in a title." This form, recommended by the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association for titles in reference lists, is popular with many online and print publications. In fact it's now the standard form for titles and headlines in most countries--but not (yet) in the United States.
http://grammar.about.com/od/grammarfa...
So technically, in this one change, she's not doing anything wrong, just against our convention, I suppose. I personally don't like Sentence case for titles, it looks wrong.
If she isn't accepting PMs, people could leave comments on her reviews and statuses and she'll (presumably) see the notifications.
Krystal109 wrote: "I almost wish there was a TEST you had to take that proved you READ the manual...."Or volunteer mentors who guide new librarians until they've done ## of changes like Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreading project has.
(Gutenberg's DP project does have a test, too.)
I understand that things might be done differently in other countries, but if I were to find that many titles I ASSumed were done incorrectly, I would have to wonder if maybe I was the problem and refer to the manual.
Goodreads is headquartered in the U.S. so unless things are specified otherwise, titles should be capitalized as they traditionally are in the U.S.EXCEPT for foreign editions. French titles, for example, only capitalize the first word and I have always adhered to this.
Unfortunately the manual is not as specific as it should be on this.
http://www.goodreads.com/help/show/26...
As I said, I'm not saying she's right or saying that what she's doing is ok - merely trying to point out that I think she's probably not changing the case of original title to be malicious or destructive.Perhaps the manual could be amended to state that we use Title Case in all English editions per The Chicago Manual of Style.
❂ Jennifer wrote: "As I said, I'm not saying she's right or saying that what she's doing is ok - merely trying to point out that I think she's probably not changing the case of original title to be malicious or destr..."Perhaps not, but jeesh, it is extremely hubristic to be a brand new librarian and go making all those changes. Why would you think that every other librarian had been doing it wrong, and your way is the right way?
❂ Jennifer wrote: "Perhaps the manual could be amended to state that we use Title Case in all English editions per The Chicago Manual of Style. "The Chicago Manual of Style doesn't mean much to the rest of the world.
Lobstergirl wrote: "Why would you think that every other librarian had been doing it wrong, and your way is the right way?"Exactly.
Do new librarians get any kind of instructions? Like, "Don't go apeshit! Don't go hog wild! If you have ANY doubts, ask in the Librarian Group!"Because some new librarians are extremely hesitant and will ask every single question they have in the librarian group, all sheepish and apologetic, but this is infinitely preferable to the bulls in the china shop who think they know everything and go ahead and wreak havoc.
*groan*... honest to god I'm not trying to be argumentative. I agree she should be stopped, I've said all along I think she's in the wrong. I'm just saying she might honestly believe she's in the right. Or not - she might be cackling maliciously over her keyboard as we speak. But the manual is unclear on this issue.I've been a librarian less than 9 months and I've read that manual through at least twice and I refer to it frequently. BUT, no, I never got any kind of instructions beyond 'don't screw up'. So I read this group religiously and try to learn from others mistakes, ask if I don't know something. But not everyone is the same of course.
And no, I don't imagine the Chicago Manual of Style means anything to the rest of the world, but since the rest of the world doesn't use title case, why does that matter? I suggested only that we clarify the manual and state that GR chooses to follow the style as outlined in that guide. I'm sure there's a style guide in Poland we care nothing about, but if GR was in Poland, they might choose to follow it.
*ack* even newbie me would never alter the capitalization from how it appeared on the book cover. I would not purposefully be editing books that were a foreign language edition to me either(I did correct one odd character for the German edition of a book because an author told me the umlaut was missing over the u and I could clearly see it on the cover)
Lobstergirl wrote: "Do new librarians get any kind of instructions? Like, "Don't go apeshit! Don't go hog wild! If you have ANY doubts, ask in the Librarian Group!"Because some new librarians are extremely hesita..."
I don't think there's really any instructions, they just point you to the Librarian Manual and encourage you to join the Librarian group and reference the two if you have any questions.
Personally I'd rather ask the question and feel silly than mess something up that another librarian will have to fix.
I suspect it may be AACR2, the real world librarian manual. However most of us irl librarians get that like many places GR has in-house rules different from those we were taught. At the moment I see an honest mistake over this not malicious intent.
Lobstergirl wrote: "I think there should be a new rule: in order to be a librarian, you must be able to receive messages."I would think this would cause some major privacy issues for Goodreads.
But maybe supers could have the ability to contact other librarians that don't accept general messages? This would reduce the risk of it being abused and give us (librarians as a whole) a way to curb this type of behavior during the non-working hours.
Alternatively, perhaps some sort of flagging feature where a librarian could flag a fellow librarian which would "pause" their librarian status until such a time when it could be reviewed by GR.
Alternatively, perhaps some sort of flagging feature where a librarian could flag a fellow librarian which would "pause" their librarian status until such a time when it could be reviewed by GR. Not a fan of this idea. As we observe every day, not every librarian acts responsibly, whether intentionally or unintentionally. I could see this going haywire.
The super idea is a good one, though.
I like the idea of supers being able to contact them.I understand making a few mistakes as a new librarian. I have made a few and rivka has corrected me, but they are usually something small that I post about here and then go back and fix.
I agree that if you are noticing something wrong on EVERY book you visit, you might want to consider that it is YOU that is incorrect.
I prefer the librarians who post EVERY small "dumb" question on the group. Being part of this group should be mandatory too.
Yea, even though it says send messages you really can't. It's weird like that. She hasn't made any edits since early this morning so I am hoping she is busy for the weekend.Got my eye out for reverts though.
She is back and is continuing with minimalist capitalization crap.http://www.goodreads.com/librarian/us...
http://www.goodreads.com/book/edits/1...
If she starts changing the spelling of Tolkien again...
So just to clarify, since someone further up mentioned first letters and proper nouns. Are we allowed to decapitalize non-nouns? Example: "Lord Of The Rings" to "Lord of the Rings"
Is there a difference between how it's normally done in the US and UK? Decapitalizing proper nouns would just be plain wrong though, anywhere, I'd hope.
The Lord of the Rings is probably a bad example since the "of the" part is nearly always in small caps. In general I would say that "Lord of the Rings" is correct.http://www.goodreads.com/book/photo/5...
Sandi wrote: "Is there a difference between how it's normally done in the US and UK?I don't believe so.
Decapitalizing proper nouns would just be plain wrong though, anywhere, I'd hope."
Um, I'm pretty sure the people who speak any of the multitude of other languages where that is not the case would disagree with you. Just because they're capitalized in English doesn't mean every language capitalizes them.
Mel wrote: "Um, I'm pretty sure the people who speak any of the multitude of other languages where that is not the case would disagree with you. Just because they're capitalized in English doesn't mean every language capitalizes them. "That is why we should, mostly, use the format that appears on the book itself.
Mel wrote: "Just because they're capitalized in English doesn't mean every language capitalizes them. "Right, sorry I was mostly thinking of English and German. I can think of several of the top of my head where this wouldn't be the case, French, Italian, Japanese...
Mel wrote: "Um, I'm pretty sure the people who speak any of the multitude of other languages where that is not the case would disagree with you. Just because they're capitalized in English doesn't mean every language capitalizes them. "+1
Adding Finnish to the list. We only capitalise the first word in the book title unless it contains a proper noun that should be capitalised everywhere.
I would just assume that people only edit books when they are familiar with the language. If I need help fixing a book in a language I'm not even partly familiar with, I can always look for a native speaker in the Librarian Group. That always works.
Cloudedleopard wrote: "The manual says the following on capitalization:"Enter in the official title of the book as it is shown on the cover or binding. Use proper capitalization and punctuation (i.e. do not use all-caps..."
This is what the manual says and this is where she is breaking the rules.
Also, not to be rude to other language speakers, but this is an English speaking website and therefore it has rules that are English standards.
Do I think that this is always correct, no. But if you want to use the website you need to follow its rules.
Mel wrote: "Um, I'm pretty sure the people who speak any of the multitude of other languages where that is not the case would disagree with you. Just because they're capitalized in English doesn't mean every language capitalizes them. "That's right. In Dutch only the first word is capitalized. With the exception of a name (person/location), which is always capitalized.
Krystal109 wrote: "Not to be rude to other language speakers, but this is an English speaking website."I don't take your comment personally but still, you have the opportunity to add non-English books and change your preferred language. I'm not an native-English speaker but as many others pointed out, I'd only do changes to titles and such if I'm sure I'm right. It's one thing to think you're right and be pretty offensive or think, well, I'm not perfect, so why should I change titles and author names...
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Why is this librarian capitalizing all these works? Why is she deleting publications dates?
Is there something I should know about original publication titles NOT being capitals?