Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
Book & Author Page Issues
>
Why do books sometimes retain the work title in a language different from the most popular editions?
date
newest »
newest »
The award pages are maintained by individual members of the website. Whoever added the book to the award page is responsible for having added the Dutch edition. Someone else could edit and change it to a different language edition.
Mod
This is entirely incorrect. Awards apply to all editions of a work, and any librarian who is comfortable adding/editing awards is welcome to do so.
They also have nothing to do with what appears on the editions page of a work.
I'm guessing it's a caching issue, but not sure why it's hanging around so long.
Yeah, it is very weird. I couldn't believe when I came back to GR last summer that it was still that way a whole year since I last looked. I've also refreshed cache and stats on the Dutch edition today, and the author stats on the author profile, to see if that makes a difference. I have a feeling I've done the latter before though, to no effect.
Antonomasia wrote: "A Horse Walks into a Bar is a strange example of this. The work title, and therefore the listing of the book on award pages, appears in Dutch, although Dutch is not the original language of the book, and the Dutch edition is only the 5th most popular, after several English editions. "Look at the difference between the "all editions" page, sorted by num ratings and the "separate tool" page.
https://www.goodreads.com/work/editio...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/separa...
It's a bug I've reported multiple times where the default edition is not the same on all pages. English hardcover on the first linked page and Dutch paperback on the second. On the second page, the English hardcover edition is missing completely and the Dutch paperback is listed twice. Also: English hardcover is showing as default on the book page of any of the other editions and Dutch paperback is showing as default on the award page.
Recently for a similar example, separating and recombining seemed to work to 'reset'/'refresh'.
Did separating any old edition work, or did it have to be either the one that should have been the default, or the one that is incorrectly the default (i.e. the Dutch one here)?
Antonomasia wrote: "Did separating any old edition work, or did it have to be either the one that should have been the default, or the one that is incorrectly the default (i.e. the Dutch one here)?"Sorry, I can't remember. I guess I've separated the incorrectly default.
Thanks very much Arenda - I think it's sorted now, but the process was also a bit weird. I thought I'd separated the rest from the Dutch edition, but the most popular English edition was still combined with it.
Tried to separate either of them. For the English one, got an error message I'm not sure I'd seen before or not for years, saying it wouldn't let me combine or separate the book because it had more than 10000 reviews. (I rarely work on very popular books.) And the Dutch one, with far fewer reviews, couldn't be separated because the system was defining it as the most popular edition.
Tried again a few minutes later and it let me separate the Dutch edition - it seemed to have stopped defining it as the most popular.
It then let me combine the most popular English edition - which was now acting as the main work, with the award listings attached to it - with the rest.
Have just recombined the pesky Dutch edition and hopefully it won't become the default again (unless the book suddenly becomes hugely popular there!)
Yes, it can be a pain to separate a specific edition when the book is affected by this bug.
I think there might be a bug whereby adding an award gets the default edition stuck to an older one, and stop it changing automatically. I found five like this just from this year's International Booker longlist, and the four I adjusted each required slightly different processes of jigging about until they settled on the correct default edition. (I left one because it's defaulted to a US edition that's soon to be published, and which is likely to become the most popular edition within a short time anyway as there is already only a narrow difference in numbers between it and the actual most popular.)
Found this had been happening to books with the award listings from 2017 and 2018 as well, but those from 2016 all had the correct default edition. Seems like the bug might have started some time between spring 2016 and spring 2017.
I have refreshed the book page cache and its stats several times in the past but it has not changed this.