Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
Questions (not edit requests)
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(answered) Problem editing author profile: GR wants me to merge two profiles instead
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P.S. Here's the list of "similar author names" for Charles L. Wrenn:https://www.goodreads.com/author/simi...
The others have author IDs that are very close to one another, and NONE of the names have extra spaces to differentiate them. I wonder if that's a clue to the underlying problem?
That is a bug that happens sometimes that identical names are created while that shouldn't be possible. Trying to save something on the profile can indeed lead to that page about merging. You can just merge those extra profiles into the right author and then make your edit to the profile.
Good information -- thanks! Now this newbie librarian gets to learn how to merge author profiles.I'm thinking that I should add an extra space to "my" Charles L. Wrenn (the British scholar and editor), because he has only a few books. The "no extra spaces" name should probably belong to the other one (the American illustrator), because he has many more books -- or will have, once the profiles are merged.
The author you're working on seems to be listed as C.L. Wrenn on the covers I saw. If that is always the case, that name is enough. If not giving him the second profile is the logic order.
That makes sense. I suspect this author is always published as C.L. Wrenn, but will check to be sure. Thanks for the helpful and sensible advice!
It has an old list of name variations and a broken link to a non-existent author profile (https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...). I’d like to clean up the info and change the link to go to this profile: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
But when I try to save my link change, I get this message:
Found existing author
We already have an author named Charles L. Wrenn. You can cancel your edit or merge these authors. One author profile will be kept, while all the books, quotes, and videos of the other will be merged into the kept profile.
(Note: There’s not just one other Charles L. Wrenn — GR has at least 10 that seem to be a different person than "my" author 18664635.C_L_Wrenn. The message above links to one of these 10 profiles.)
I cancelled my edit, because I don’t want to merge these two profiles — I just want to correct the broken link in THIS author profile.
Am I doing something wrong? Is there an experienced-librarian tip that can help me make my simple correction? Or do I need to contact Support?