Removing books from Listopia lists?

[Stephen]

I've voted on a number of lists but have been very very hesitant to remove any books from any lists due to the dire warnings that accompany the removal.

However, there is a list called "what to read after Harry Potter" that I recently reviewed and it brought out the librarian/editor in me.
http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/55...

This list clearly states "If the book is in a series, please only vote for the first book or boxset/omnibus edition)" and yet this request by the original list maker has clearly been disregarded.

All four twilight saga books as well as the box set are on the list, with similar entries for the Narnia books, as well as several other series.

This list is now pretty unwieldy with over 900 books in all. (As an experiment I tried the "remove duplicates" function and five duplicates were removed)

What is the feeling about pairing the books from this list that clearly don't meet the list creator's original intentions?

Is there any way to consolidate the votes on the related books before any eliminations are made?

[Banjomike]

There are a few lists with the admonition to only add "the first book", not the entire series and it makes perfect sense. I would definitely do the 'paring'.

This page is especially bad:
http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/55...

I think the votes get lost.

[Amanda]

It looks like the line about the "first book" was the same one who was deleting books and altering listopia lists earlier this year. A number of lists were altered to add that line, which may not have been the original purpose of the lists.

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/9...

I would proceed with caution when deleting anything.

[Vicky]

As Amanda noted, the bit about only voting for the first book was not added by the original creator.

If you scroll to the end of the list but before the "People Who Voted.." box you can see the name of the original creator. You can then view the librarian change log for the list to see the name of the person who made the change. In this case I would not remove the books unless the list creator comes forward and asks.

For lists that have been set up with rules like this by the original creator I would say it's fair game to remove books after book 1.

[Stephen]

One note/follow-up question...

I was reviewing another Listopia list and saw that two different editions of a book were on the same list. The most popular had 92 votes the less popular version had 11. I went to list edit and used the delete dups option then checked the list again... The least popular version was now gone but the other version showed 94 votes.

Is there some programmatic (albeit buggy) consolidation of votes in this script.

It COULD be that 2 additional people voted for this book while I was working but that seems unlikely as the count hasn't changed in the 15 minutes since.

For what it's worth the list was
http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/17...
and the book that I saw consolidated was Obsidian

[Amanda]

Probably a caching issue. There is also a chance some of the people who voted for the book did so twice.