Fixing authors

Greets:

We need a better method, even if it's staff intervention, to fixing problem records.

For example this work: http://www.librarything.com/work/10426352

The author is listed as Wilson, not Garth A. Wilson, the actual author. That's coming from bad Amazon data it appears as I just added the work and it came down as Wilson.

Now I could contact each and every user who has that book but that's a hassle. Most of the users have it as the author being Wilson.

As far as I know, there's no easy way to correct that.

thanks,
-drmike

Wouldn't this be what the work-level "Canonical Author" suggestion is about? So you can set in CK what the author SHOULD be for a given work, to help fix problems where bad data is simply overwhelming the good data.

ETA: This:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/98370#2198180

>Wouldn't this be what the work-level "Canonical Author" suggestion is about

Probably. I threw that up there in a fit of annoyance.

3> As well you should. I'm not saying it shouldn't be bubbled, just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.

I've been agitating for work-level Canonical Author for ages now. It also makes pseudonyms easier to deal with.

In some cases, where there aren't many copies of the works, I have contacted the individual users who have it wrong, but when they haven't added a book since 2007 there's not much hope they're going to do anything.

Much bad data like this comes from Amazon (most of the rest is from the bulk CSV importer, with bad data in the source file); you can contact Amazon to fix the record, if you have an account with them, and hope that eventually enough people will add the book with the correct author to "float" the right version to the top. (That's Tim's solution to this problem, that given infinite time good data will drive out bad, but it doesn't seem to be working reliably.)

In the case cited in the OP, the author of the work is Wilson. Please do not set the canonical name for Wilson to Garth A. Wilson as there are undoubtedly lots of other Wilsons who are not Garth A.

I did look at just combining Wilson with the Garth A. author but, as you note, there were too many other Wilsons in there. I did do it last night with another author but 1) they had a very weird last name and 2) they were the only one with that name.

6> The author of the book is Garth A. Wilson, as is shown on the cover of the book. Not Wilson.

Canonical Author cannot be set, though, as there is not a work level version of that option, and there are other books on the Wilson page not written by Garth A. Wilson.

Fixing Wilson was going smoothly until I found a Woodrow Wilson book in there. And merged it over. Through merging Wilson with Woodrow Wilson. Then separating.

Unfortunately, Wilson now has as an author picture Woodrow Wilson. Though Woodrow Wilson has been separated out (along with the Woodrow Wilson book).

If we had this, it could be applied to surname-only author entries as well.

10> Yeah...but what about one-name authors? From the classical (Homer) to current children's (Avi), LT would have trouble if it assumed a single name was a surname and the same as the current if it didn't.

9- that's why i still use the secret url method of combining.

10:
What I'm proposing wouldn't cause a problem with that. First, I'm not saying that all single-name authors should be marked as deprecated, clearly those examples shouldn't be. Second, the deprecation would only apply if there was a better choice for the system to use. If everyone entered Wilson as the author for a book, then it would have to be listed under Wilson.

I'm not sure how an entry would get marked as deprecated -- a staff only function, a CK entry, a poll attached to every author page? Anyway, that's a discussion for the other thread, if anyone's interested.

I already added my comment to the other place you posted this. Do we have to carry on the exact same conversation on two threads?

12> I do not know that secret.

15: Drop BrightCopy a comment. He appears to be the keeper of the secret knowledge. Make sure you do the secret handshake. :)