Problem with Palle Vibe

I just spent an hour or so putting male/female, birth date/year etc on about 50 authors. I noticed a funny thing with a few of them, but lets just take one of them.
I have a book by Palle Vibe, but if I find the book in my catalogue and clicks on Palle Vibe, I get to a listing of books that doesn't include mine.
What's going on?
http://www.librarything.com/author/vibepalle
Ah, there's another one:
http://www.librarything.com/author/vibe
but that's the same guy. How do I combine them?

Anyway I think the bug I'm reporting is that
I get http://www.librarything.com/author/vibepalle from my catalogue view, but that guy is not connected to the book otherwise.

A somewhat similar situation just occurred for me. I also was assigning genders, and when I clicked on Margaret A.V. Gill, she only has one title, there is only one copy in the system, and I do not have it. So why is she in my list of authors?

Unfortunately the last name only variant apparently won in work combining. Yeah, this is one reason why it's important to combine as many variants of any author name as possible. Even if they seemingly have no works attached to them, a user may loose/miss author connection from his/her catalog.

(The combination is suggested on the Vibe page by the way. If there is no other author with that last name you could combine them. Trying to float the work to the right page would be more elegant though.)

> 2: You have a work (http://www.librarything.com/work/1521250/book/6304825) you attribute to Margaret A.V. Gill but which is listed on the Margaret A. Gill author page.

Yeah, just figured that out and combined them. Now all serene. But it was very weird for a bit there. What I don't understand is why my book was attached to Margaret A., when I had entered the name as Margaret A.V., as you can (fairly) clearly see on the cover image. I suppose some other misguided or lazy person with the same book just entered the first initial, and it won.

Thanks, Matt!

Closing.

On the editions page, 4 show "A V" and 3 show "A". Presumably this is a case where "recalculate author" would fix it.

In response to the first message, there are actually quite a few authors with the surname "Vibe", so the surname only page shouldn't be combined with any particular one. I've separated it again.

#7 and #8: I'm still confused. I think I hear what you are saying. The book "Oiufaels bog" is connected to the "Vibe" author and I should somehow move it to "PalleVibe" rather than combine the two?

Is there any way I can find these weird connections (short of checking all the author pages)? I looked under Statistics/Memes but didn't find anything useful. (I was looking for something like a author statistics with "you have xx books by this author" and with 0 showing up for the weird ones).

Is there any way I can find these weird connections (short of checking all the author pages)?

Not that I know of. After all, the book is correctly assigned to an author page. Nothing weird there. It's just not an author page you / we like.

#10: yes, but it is an author page that most likely doesn't connect to any of my books.

9:
When different people enter a book with different author names, in this case "Palle Vibe" or just "Vibe", the system picks just one author page for the work to appear on; you can't really control which one it chooses*. If you've put in "Palle Vibe" (it should, of course, be entered as "Vibe, Palle"), the author's name in your library will link to the page for Palle Vibe, but if more people have just put in "Vibe" the book will show up on that page instead of Palle Vibe's page.

You shouldn't combine the two, because if someone with a book by, e.g. Gail Vibe, has entered just "Vibe" as the author, you'd be causing her book to link to the Palle Vibe page.

* Sometimes it's possible to cause a book to move from one author's page to another by entering more copies of the book into the system. You could put in a couple more copies of "Oiufaels bog" with the author listed as "Vibe, Palle", and it would probably move to the correct page. However, once you delete those extra copies, there's no guarantee that it won't move back to the Vibe page.

#12: I took a look at the catalogue of one of the owners of "Oiufaels bog".
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/lene.soegaard/yourlibrary
The way her books are entered causes all kinds of grief including the vibe/vibepalle problem.
I'll try and see if the "add more copies" trick works for me.

Thanks.

The trick worked, I think. There is still a Vibe author with a book claimed to be in my library, but it is not there when I follow the link.

Current status is that there is a slightly weird Vibe author, but with no connections to my library. That's fine with me :-)

Thanks x 2

Re # 11 (Originally posted as Re # 10) : Yes, I understand - these things suck.

Added some more copies, but unfortunately it only stays on the Palle Vibe page as long as I don't delete them.

Re # 10: Yes, I understand

*checks phase of moon*

Matt, you twit, you're talking to yourself.

Admittedly, sometimes that is the best way to get an intelligent conversation.

You get that at my age.

As long as you don't let the argument get out of control and punch yourself in the nose!

I've just fixed the work mentioned in #4 using the new Recalculate Author link on the work page. Thank you Tim!

Fixed, then!

I do have question about the weighting of the author name on various editions. Ouifaels bog, questioned earlier http://www.librarything.com/work/3161196/editions shows:
   Oiufaels bog / Vibe, Palle (1 copy)
   Oiufaels bog / Vibe (1 copy)
   Oiufaels bog / Vibe, Palle (no current copies)
When I do Recalculate Author, it still comes up with Vibe. Not wrong, but even the slightest push from the no current copies edition should have moved it to Palle Vibe.

However, I'm sure I could find counter-examples in which it's better to ignore the zero-copy editions. It's only going to be an issue with very low edition count works anyway.

Thanks. I've given editions of all types a tiny, tiny role in the math. It would take 1,000 zero-copy works to equal one one-copy work that disagrees with it. But anyway, your example is now fixed.

Thanks. If I find any case where it's clearly going wrong, I'll let you know.

Would it make sense to give a lower weight to single name authors so as to favor author names where both first and last names are entered?

Meh, I don't want to get too complicated. Change the canonical fields.

jjwilson61 is talking about cases where a single work has editions with "Fred Smith" and just "Smith". We can't combine the two authors (because there are so many other Smiths), nor can we set the Canonical Name field on Smith, because there are certainly books there by other Smiths. It would be nice if, for the work that has both, the system preferred Fred Smith to Smith.

Thank you. That is what I was talking about and I don't see how setting a canonical field helps.

Got it. Still, meh. You could see where a longer version would get wrongly promoted. Some problems aren't fixable so long as LT relies on user data underneath.

I never thought it would be perfect, just better. There *is* a place for heuristics.

I guess I needn't bother suggesting lowering the weightings for authors like Anonymous, Various, and No Author. There were a few other suggestions floating around as well a few months ago.

You're thinking of http://www.librarything.com/topic/93378