How to delete or remove empty authors

I have found an author with no works, members, or any other related data. Can it be removed? David Lindley and Rob DeSalle are two separate authors (and both have actual author pages).

http://www.librarything.com/author/robdesalleanddavidli

Nope. They stick around forever, just in case someone else adds a book by an identically-broken author in the future, or something. Tim considers retention of the ghosts of bad data past to be a feature, not a bug, so it's unlikely that this will ever change.

....which raises the question as to whether these workless shades are best severed from their (near) namesakes to wander in a solitary purgatory or rather left connected, if only at a distance, with the books they had once seemed to have written.

But not all empty authors are empty in the same way as empty works. Lots of them do have works attached, which just happen to be sitting on a joint author's page, and could be tipped back to the 'empty' author the next time a copy is added. I think it might be very hard to do anything about the genuinely empty cases without messing up the authors whose works are temporarily elsewhere.

Recently I also found a few of my books that had moved themselves to author pages of the unresolved variety, leaving the proper author page high and dry with no works, but all the CK.

>4 EveleenM: I take your point, Eveleen, but I'm thinking of the decision that has to be made after a work is combined with it's fellows after combining the 'wrong' author with the 'right' one - do you separate the now workless 'wrong' name from the 'right' one or to leave it combined, showing in the 'Also known as.... line'.

Say you find My Life in Retailing by John Smoth - the only work on that author page. You recognise the mis-spelling and know that John Smith actually wrote the work. Combine the authors - Smith and Smoth, combine the Smoth copy with all the Smith copies, then what? John Smoth is listed there as one of the alternative names of John Smith, a copy of My life in retailing by John Smoth can still be seen in the editions list, but if you click on John Smoth's name, his page is empty. Do you then separate Smoth from Smith or do you leave him alone?

If there is then a rush of entries of the work under the name of John Smoth they will stay on the John Smith page if Smoth has been left combined with Smith, but go to the John Smoth page if he had been separated. Of course, if an author whose real name is John Smoth appears you would not want his works to appear on John Smith's page....

My inclination is to separate the 'empty' author.

>My inclination is to separate the 'empty' author.

Please do not do that. Because this means that you are separating authors from my catalog from the works - so I cannot click on an author to see how many books I have by them -- the author do not lead to the author page anymore. Which breaks the way the catalog is supposed to be working. The empty authors are not a problem - just leave them in the combinations.

In general, as AnnieMod says, don't separate authors just because they look empty. There are likely people who have those entries in their catalog, and they should remain connected to other variants of the name.

In this particular case, however, where the entry is actually two people, it shouldn't be combined with either individual author. (Since "Rob Desalle and David Lindley" is not the same person as either "Rob Desalle" or "David Lindley".) It does make sense to combine with other entries that consist of the same two authors, and I've done that.

>7 AnnieMod: OK, AnnieMod, I will leave them combined. Where we are looking at mis-spelt authors, however, separation only stops you accessing the right author via your wrongly spelt author. Your book page will continue to give you a link to the correctly spelled author - as (otherwise under John Smith) - whether or not the wrong name is left combined.

>9 abbottthomas:

It is not wrongly spelled - it is simply in another language. And no - I do not want English spelling on my Bulgarian books - or you cannot force German users to use English spelling... And all multilingual people want to see all their books on the same page -- regardless of language. And sometimes it is as easy as misspelled name on the cover - I want my record here to show what is on my covers :) Add to this the people that put years in the author names (for some reason) and so on - you cannot force people to change their private data -- and if there is no good reason, there is no reason to get these names separated and to break the view for users

CK for author names does not work at all (whatever you set in ANY of the language sites becomes the name on ALL language sites). So that is not even an option. And even if it was - these are my books -- I can call the author whatever I want - as long as it is not breaking some other author data... it is not an issue

1. A book can have an author which its work does not. That is, books have an author field, but the work's author field is based on the majority author. This prevents authors and works from being a blizard of weird data, while also allowing members to rule their own catalog to their heart's content.

2. Authors get their work list from the work level, not from the book level. So an empty author may not be empty when it comes to books.

3. I have no perfect solution for completely empty authors. I think it's better to connect misspellings, but leave separate authors separate. Unfortunately, the line between the two often involves questions of intention that nobody but the original cataloger can answer. I would look to the result first and the "reality" second.

4. If an author is truly empty, it also has no data attached to it. Here, for example, is an author:

http://www.librarything.com/author/spaldingtimothyedward

I just created him. And nothing links to him (except this post). Why would anyone care whether it "existed" or not? If you don't look at it, it doesn't exist.

5. As said before, the author system is actually more primitive than the work system. The work system is composed of books->editions->works. There is a table, called work aliases, composed merely of edition numbers and the work they go with. Authors have no intermediate table. It's just name->name. This is something I'd like to change, but it's a project of a few weeks and can only be done by me, so it will have to remain on the future list for now.

>11 timspalding: Thanks, Tim. That is helpful.

>10 AnnieMod: I should know better than to get into this sort of interaction BUT - I did not suggest that you were mis-spelling anything, I would not want to "force" anyone to do anything at all on this site, even had I the power to do so, I can recognise languages other than English and have enough sense not to mistake them for mis-spelt English, and it is no concern of mine what you do with your books or what you call your authors. OK?

>12 abbottthomas:

:) That was just me getting heated on something we had talked about a lot - nothing personal - sorry if it felt like this :) (Partially because someone keep separating my Bulgarian-written authors from authors like Tolkien and Grisham and getting them back is not that easy - I even had a thread somewhere about those)

>13 AnnieMod: Thanks, AnnieMod - I did feel a bit misunderstood! ;-) I do sympathise over your Cyrillic problems.

Figured when I saw your response - sorry again - it was not personal or anything like this. But every time I need to recombine these, I tend to have not very nice thoughts about the people that separate these :d

The only thing about "empty authors" that I don't like is that I often can't combine them. I figure that if someone in the past accidentally created that empty author, someone in the future might do it too, so they may as well be combined with the correct name. But generally when I find those empty authors they are un-combineable.

> 16
Feel free to post here for such - all you need is a real book in the empty one when you do the combine -- but technically if the account cannot be combined, it does not have anyone using them at this point. But if you want to get them in -- we can do that.

>11 timspalding:
Tim, regarding your fourth point, "If you don't look at it, it doesn't exist."

I found "David and Rob" in a search result for David Lindley. And now there are two of them!
http://www.librarything.com/search_author.php?q=David+Lindley

edit: After visiting both results, I see that they have been combined.