Yikes! A bug, or did I screw it up?

[Angel]

I noticed that there were a bunch of books added under the author "Noel Streatfield" which is an incorrect spelling of "Noel Streatfeild" (yes, the weird looking one is the correct spelling). The correct author profile had a bunch of information about the author already filled in. The incorrect profile had none.

I went into the incorrect profile and fixed the spelling of the last name, thus merging the two profiles together. The issue is that doing so deleted all of the information (other than name, of course) in the resulting profile. I went back and filled in a few pieces of information that I could quickly verify, but I'm wondering what happened. Is this a bug? Did I do something wrong?

[Otis, Chief Architect]

It sounds like you did it right, but we'll take a look-see and make sure the author profile merger is working smoothly.

[Cameron]

Yikes indeed, I just did the same thing when attempting to correct the spelling on Eric Schlosser's name (a highly reviewed version of Fast Food Nation had an extra "h" in his last name), and this incorrect version had an author photo attached to the profile with a bit more bio, but that disappeared after I corrected the spelling and it merged with the correct profile, sans photo. Apologies! Is there a better way I should make these corrections without losing author information?

[rivka, Librarian Moderator]

What I have done (with middling success) is "correct" the correct one to the incorrect (assuming it's the incorrect version that has more info) to merge the versions. Then correct it back to the correct spelling.

It's probably also a good idea to keep another tab/window open with the "more info" version, in case you lose it when merging.

Sometimes I even remember to do that . . . . ;)