Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
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Why Not Done by Program? Or Off-line Search? Or Maintenance Script?
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There are some cases where a period would be wrong. There is often an issue with the importing of diacritics (or accents). Pérez is often imported as "P rez" and "P. Rez" would not be a correction to this. In fact, I think it would make it worse because it wouldn't look wrong to a librarian. Stumbling across something like "P rez" makes you look at it.
Similarly, there may be two authors with the same name. If there are two John B. Smiths, simply changing "John B Smith" to "John B. Smith" might put the wrong books on the wrong profile and unless someone points it out, it may remain that way. Again, having the missing period makes this stand out to librarians.
A script would also miss incorrect imports like CS Lewis or JRR Tolkien - not realizing that the capital letters are initials and not words.
I would however quite like to see static lists that librarians can use to fix things. I know they have made some mention of forthcoming tools for librarians that will make things easier, I can only hope such things are among them!

Because GR finds free labor much more cheap and efficient. It's the perfect business model.

If goodreads is using or converting to one that will search and replace for missing periods after initials, that should work only in rare instances where adding periods would not require merging to another author profile. If there were 12 authors named "Xyz Q. Abcdef" disambiguated with various numbers of spaces, which one of the 12 would you have the script merge to?
What if the no period author profile had more or different information than author profile it was merged with? How are you going to write a search and replace script that when merging resulting profiles knows if the period-less profile with eight paragraphs about author's university and career info and book publishing gushingly full of typos should overwrite the two paragraph bio in a goodreads or non-goodreads author bio being merged to? Those descriptions in author bio need a human to read and rewrite something including both sets of details.
Merging two author profiles will lose info from one of them. One of few librarian changes that cannot easily get revoked.
If there were book titles in common and if a period-less author profile had no details other than the author name, if mind you, then script could grab that. But the likely outcome would be an even bigger list of books that now have to be disambiguated.

I'm not sure that would be effective because there is already a tool tip stating so when you are in author field. If that popup caption is ignored, not sure a more in your face message would have any more effect. Plus if developers are using tools that don't search capitalization, message would popup even when initials were correct.
Possibly a script to run posting a daily static list of new author profile names with single character words that could be eyeballed for missing periods in librarians group. Definitely could see an action list created for titles, degrees, etc. on newly created author names (I realize some existing pen names like "Dr. Seuss" are exceptions).
A static list of all new author profiles, considering 100+ indie books crop up every second on the blogosphere, might be too huge to eyeball/edit even if broken up alphabetically. But goodreads staff would have a better idea of how many new authors added daily, weekly, etc.
Last time we tried such a script, an author named Michael David who went by his initials was very unhappy.

Not sure why such a list would be any better than searches. Setting aside the issues of resources to run and store such scripts.

I like the idea of a static list for problem authors (as those with no initials would be) because it would be more efficient to find and correct.
Sure we can search for "John A" but then we have to wade through all of the "John A."s to find the "John A"s. Common names would be one thing, but there are tons of names that aren't common that we might never find. If we had a list we could work from, even if it's just created once, we could put a huge dent into the initial issue.

Has anyone ever suggested eliminating periods altogether?
If goodreads is using or converting to one that will search and replace for missing periods after initials, that should work only in rare instances where adding periods would not require merging to another author profile. If there were 12 authors named "Xyz Q. Abcdef" disambiguated with various numbers of spaces, which one of the 12 would you have the script merge to?
What happens now when books are entered in bulk/automatically?
A librarian would be asked to move it to the correct profile, just like now. And it would at least be findable.

Then we would probably just have the opposite issue. ;)

This has probably been asked before, but here goes.
Why isn't there a way for the program to automatically put periods after initials?
Or a script run to do so every week? Or every day for that matter, as there are so many.
Or at least an off-line search done every week to find them so librarians can fix them? If there are too many initially an off-line search could specify single a, b, c, etc., separately, I would think.
There should be something that can be done programmically - shouldn't there? Almost every name with an initial I encounter has 2 profiles, 1 with and 1 without a period.