Merging author profiles

[J_BlueFlower]

Hello,
I am a newly minted librarian. I would like to make these changes:
Guy Boothby
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
merge with
Guy Newell Boothby
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

These two profiles seems to be almost empty misspelled ”Guy Boothby”
Cuy Boothby
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

Guy Newell Boothby Boothby
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
I think the two last author profiles needs deleting rather than merging.

Also
Artur Conan Doyle
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
merge with
Arthur Conan Doyle
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

Can I just do that? Maybe it would be a good idea if somebody check my changes to see if I do it correct? (I haven't done anything yet).

[Empress]

How to merge author profiles: https://www.goodreads.com/help/show/1...

Edit: merge misspelled authors into the full profiles. Doing it the other way around will result in loss of profile information.

Example. Change Artur Conan Doyle's profile, that will merge it into Arthur Conan Doyle.

The system will ask you if you are sure if you want to merge them so there is another step between editing the name and actually merging the profiles. That is the place where you can cancel.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

For Conan Doyle, go ahead and merge the misspelled one into the correct one, exactly as Ellie explained.

Boothby is a bit more complex. There are covers with Guy Boothby and some with Guy Newell Boothby. The first question you should ask is whether there is any reason to believe that the two versions of the name are being used to deliberately separate different genres or anything like that. That does not appear to be the case here.

So you want the final profile to end up with the more complete version of the name*, Guy Newell Boothby. HOWEVER, if you just merge into the Guy Newell Boothby profile, you will lose the photo, bio, etc. from the Guy Boothby profile. So instead, you should merge into that profile, and only then edit it to Guy Newell Boothby. Then merging in the two misspellings should be easy.

*If very few covers have the longer name and all the recent ones do not, we often stick with the less complete but more used name. That's not the case here.

[J_BlueFlower]

Ok, done all of it. Seems ok. Hope it is good.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Looks good!