Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
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Book & Author Page Issues
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Steampunk List Help
Elizabeth, I'm not seeing any way to restore the deleted books. I'm not very familiar with listopia, but I'm not sure changes can be undone.
There's no way I can see to restore the list -- the changelog shows the books which were deleted but not the users' votes. Maybe GR staff will be able to do something about it tomorrow morning?
I don't think there's anything we librarians can do; I'd suggest contacting staff, as this person is clearly breaking the "Only delete books from the list that are totally miscategorized." rule, and according to the first post of the Feedback thread, has completely demolished the list.
This list has also had quite a number of deletes by one of the same librarians. http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/61...
I am one of the 166 people who had their books deleted. This is ridiculous! And in serious violation of Goodreads policies.I am not a happy person right now.
Re 5: As for that list, I'm inclined so say those are acceptable deletes; the list has a "If the book is part of a series, please only vote for the first book." note in the rules, and all the deleted books seem to be books that break that rule.However, looking back further, I see the rule was not instated by the creator, but instead by the librarian making the deletes. Definitely a gray area, I'd say, and maybe also something to bring up with staff since we're already discussing the other list?
Edit: Re the link in 6, most of the librarian's deletions from today are definitely not "gray" in any sense, and do constitute list vandalism.
Re 1: That list had 166 users whose votes were completely wiped out!!They were not "acceptable" deletes. Every vote except the OP's was completely removed. My books were perfectly within the scope of things, and, I might add, my first listed book was not one which has had a pattern of vote manipulation on every list it has appeared on. Unlike the OP's list.
That list is simply called "Steampunk." It is the first and foremost list anyone searching Goodreads will find if they search the term.
I smell an attempt to manipulate things.
Re: #5 - this is a list that is being used as one of the lists acceptable for a steampunk task in my challenge group. We had that list posted several days in advance of those deletes and I'm fairly certain it did not contain the part of a series language, else we wouldn't have used it.
If Rivka sees this, hopefully she can at least freeze the person's librarian privileges. This is vandalism. Not as bad as deleting dozens of actual books from the database (which I witnessed once in progress), but still vandalism.
Kim wrote: "There's another user who has also been deleting a lot - http://www.goodreads.com/librarian/us..."This is the user active on the lists in #1 and #5
The first librarian definitely looks suspicious. She co-moderates a Steampunk Group with the author of the book that is now first on the list, how coincidental?
Dammit, I have been working to try to keep these lists clean and honest.This is infuriating.
Should we start contacting people who voted on the list? We're still listed there, all 166 of us, even if our votes have been eradicated.
Vicky wrote: "The first librarian definitely looks suspicious. She co-moderates a Steampunk Group with the author of the book that is now first on the list, how coincidental?"Good sleuthing, Vicky.
Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "Kim wrote: "There's another user who has also been deleting a lot - http://www.goodreads.com/librarian/us..."This is the user active on the lists in #1 and #5"
The first one I saw was http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/... The two of them have done all the deleting.
What should be done first is PM anyone doing unauthorized deletes (if they accept PMs), and ask them to please stop. At least that puts them on notice that you see what they're doing.
Alessandra wrote: "We're still listed there, all 166 of us, even if our votes have been eradicated."You might want to get a screencap of that. Those whose had their votes removed will likely disappear from the list of voters once the list's cache refreshes.
That book that is now first on the list has shown up on nearly every steampunk list with a highly suspicious voting pattern. It always has #1 votes from every voter, and most of the voters never vote for another book. On http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/81... it has twenty-two voters who voted it number 1 and 2200 points and almost none of them bothered to vote for another book.It stinks of ballot box stuffing by ringer voters who aren't really part of the community.
Yeah... some of those profiles are definitely suspicious. Especially the ones using Amazon or Harry Poter Wiki pages for their personal URL.
The librarian linked in #6 has done hundreds of deletes today and changed many list descriptions.
Alessandra wrote: "That book that is now first on the list has shown up on nearly every steampunk list with a highly suspicious voting pattern."I came across a case of this scenario recently and reported it to the staff, who cleaned it up very quickly (taking care of at least a notable chunk of the ~70 fake/suspicious profiles I found on a list). Gather the account links that you think are suspicious and send them to staff in an email with your explanation.
Amara wrote: "I came across a case of this scenario recently and reported it to the staff, who cleaned it up very quickly (taking care of at least a considerable chunk of the ~70 fake/suspicious profiles I found on a list). Gather the account links that you think are suspicious and send them to staff in an email with your explanation. "I probably should do that. Last month I started a whole list for books I have discovered that have used suspect and sometimes obviously fake accounts to vote books in like that:
http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/21...
Wait ... I thought you could not delete books from a list if they had more than five votes. Am I wrong?
I emailed GR a list of what I thought were about 23 sock puppet accounts that had voted for a very highly-ranked book on one list I frequent. The book didn't disappear from the list, but it did drop from 4th place to around 18th place, once GR did their investigation.
Alessandra wrote: "Wait ... I thought you could not delete books from a list if they had more than five votes. Am I wrong?"That is wrong, yes.
Alessandra wrote: "Wait ... I thought you could not delete books from a list if they had more than five votes. Am I wrong?"I'm almost sure you can delete books from lists regardless of the number of votes...?
Edit: I see Lobstergirl beat me to it with a more definitive answer. ;)
Alessandra wrote: "Wait ... I thought you could not delete books from a list if they had more than five votes. Am I wrong?"Just looked and you're thinking about deleting a book with more than 5 adds, which takes a super librarian. Nothing to do with listopia.
But ... but all those votes, all that thought and care by all those people, all that honest work to build something useful and helpful, all the time put in by so many people ...Are things really that vulnerable here, that one person with librarian privileges can wipe out years of careful accumulation of data and helpful recommendations in minutes?
I've had two thoughts niggling in the back of my head for some time now that I've always been sure would be hugely unpopular: 1. authors shouldn't be allowed to be librarians and 2. there should be a quiz based on the librarian manual as part of the approval process.This behaviour just reinforces those beliefs for me...
ETA: I'll be happy to help put the books deleted back on those lists if anyone thinks that's an appropriate response to this...
Dang it, feeling vengeful here, but I think the people doing this should be banned from the site and their votes undone, and every one of the members whose votes were wiped out should be PMed with an explanation and an invitation to re-vote if they choose.
Alessandra wrote: "But ... but all those votes, all that thought and care by all those people, all that honest work to build something useful and helpful, all the time put in by so many people ...Are things really ..."
If it helps you feel any better, there's a notice on the deletion page that if you are caught vandalizing lists, you will at the very least lose your librarian privileges and quite possibly lose your account, too.
Yes, I've seen that notice. I deleted 2 books from a list once. It was a list for South America and the books took place in Mexico, which is North America. I wondered if I'd be contacted, but I felt justified in removing those books. In any case, the wording of the notice is VERY strong.
I've seen that notice too. I started some early lists of best books of the year, and had to prune a few books that had been published in another year. The notice is very sternly worded, but it doesn't actually stop you removing books.
❂ Jennifer wrote: "ETA: I'll be happy to help put the books deleted back on those lists if anyone thinks that's an appropriate response to this..."I'd say don't put them back until staff "takes care of" the two librarians creating the problem, whatever "takes care of" turns out to be.
As for the idea of a quiz, I wholeheartedly support that. (Not the author bit, though, because I do intend to be published at some point and certainly don't want to have to quit volunteering here!) Bring it up in Feedback, maybe?
I would strongly suggest that if there is a list important to you that you make a web archive of it NOW. It's too late for these lists, but I have backed up some others that are important to me in case they get meddled with.
❂ Jennifer wrote: "I've had two thoughts niggling in the back of my head for some time now that I've always been sure would be hugely unpopular: 1. authors shouldn't be allowed to be librarians"I would support this. At the least, it would make sense for authors to be able to make edits to their own works, but only those, and no other areas of the site.
Amara - I might suggest the quiz in Feedback, thanks for suggesting it. It won't solve all the problems, but at least GR would know that the manual was read and understood by new librarians.
Maybe there should be a limit as the number of deletes than can be done in a 24 hour period.
There have been a few threads here about quizzes and stricter librarian policies before, but I can't recall the PTB every responding to them.
It is possible that librarians have too much power on Goodreads. My husband is a mod on a writers' forum, and he is one of only a handful of people who have the power to delete threads, and that only on the particular topics he moderates. When he asked me why I was upset and I told him about this, he was shocked at how much power the librarians on Goodreads have.What we librarians can do here is actually pretty extreme. It's awfully easy to abuse librarian priveleges.
Maybe that had better be re-thought.
Alessandra wrote: "It's awfully easy to abuse librarian priveleges."I would amend that to, "It's awfully easy to abuse librarian privileges on a weekend." Any other day of the week, rivka or Kara or someone would have swooped in by now and looked into what needed to be done in terms of picking up the pieces. Unfortunately, whether intentionally or not, these deletions are taking advantage of the staff's "days off".
The one thing I would like to see given this scenario, though I'm sure it would be low priority given the many other things the staff have to focus on at the moment because of the site's growth, is that they look into implementing an "undo" feature for Listopia edits/deletes. It's easy to cleanup book record vandalism, but it's a whole other story with a Listopia. Again, something to bring up in the Feedback group. (Which is really where we should be having this conversation in the first place, but...)
I don't think it's extreme. I don't think what happened with the Steampunk list should have happened and I definitely think there should be proper repercussions. But this sort of thing doesn't generally happen.
I've never heard of a Listopia being completely destroyed as this one was. It's probably happened, but it's not a usual occurrence.
Every once in a while one librarian does something completely absurd, but it's not as though librarians are running rampant and abusing their power all over the place.
Unfortunately, Vicky, it isn't just the Steampunk list that started this thread. The librarian in Post #6 above has sabotaged several lists today.
I don't know that I'd call that librarian sabotaging, there are some questionable deletions that I've noticed, but...I looked through a bunch of her edits - most of them were removing duplicates and books outside of the first of a series. Which is questionable, yes, since she added that clause to each list. But I don't think she had a malicious intent, I think the first librarian did.
When you are removing literally hundreds of entries and changing descriptions it cannot be called anything but sabotage. Who is she to decide only the first book in a series is legitimate? Some series don't have to be read in order, some books are better than others. Look, these aren't my genres nor books that I read, but one of the lists is books with a strong female lead character. What she has done is simply wrong.
Vicky wrote: "I don't know that I'd call that librarian sabotaging, there are some questionable deletions that I've noticed. I looked through a bunch of her edits - most of them were removing duplicates and bo..."
And the "first" librarian came in after the one in the link in #6 - she was the first to make the deletions.
Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "When you are removing literally hundreds of entries and changing descriptions it cannot be called anything but sabotage. Who is she to decide only the first book in a series is legitimate? Some series don't have to be read in order, some books are better than others. Look, these aren't my genres nor books that I read, but one of the lists is books with a strong female lead character. What she has done is simply wrong."In those cases, I'd *guess* it's probably just a misguided attempt to reduce clutter; I'm sure she's seen the rule elsewhere, and she might have thought adding it to other lists was acceptable instead of incredibly inconsiderate (and so she needs to be discouraged from doing so at the very least).
On the other hand, there is at least one list I saw that she removed completely valid books from for no discernible reason. I don't really know what to make of that.
Edit: I also see rivka has commented on this in the Feedback thread. So I expect this one will likely be closing soon. ;)
I'm not saying she was right.I'm not saying she has the right to decide that only the first book in a series belongs on the list.
I'm not saying she shouldn't face the same repercussions as the other librarian.
What I am saying is that I imagine she thought she was doing a service by cleaning up the lists. I don't think she intended to be harmful and thus I don't think "sabotage" is the right word for her actions.
She edited the Steampunk list on June 30th - eight days ago, she made 14 deletions from the Steampunk list.
The most recent librarian to edit the list deleted 74 books and left the list with only books she herself voted on. That has malicious intent, that is sabotage.
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with these edits
http://www.goodreads.com/list/edits/1...
With 89 edits, mostly deletes. I'm not a Steampunk fanatic, but because of a challenge group have looked at several lists and believe not all of these deletes should have occurred.