Priority vote: Contains/Contained or Other Authors?

Offering an alternative point of view in a separate thread...

Would you prefer to see Contains/Contained finished and released from Beta, or Other Authers set up with their own pages showing the works and their roles in them?

Vote yes for Contains/Contained
Vote no for Other Authors
Vote undecided for something new like maybe super-touchstones or lists

It's like you're inside my head! ;)

Voted 'Yes' for Contains/Contained.

Seems we have the same thread readings schedule!
Yes for Contains/Contained

I voted undecided as per your instructions, though I would have been happy to weigh in on contains/contained in vs. other authors.

I'd rather go for the bird in the hand so I changed my vote to undecided.

Ouch, what a choice! I would absolutely _love_ to see Contains/Contained finished - especially if it extends to short stories, etc. However, for me, Other Authors trumps it. Especially if it includes (or is a step towards) splitting authors. So I voted No. I'd have voted for Contains/Contained over just about anything else (certainly lists or super-touchstones), but cleaning up Authors wins, for me.

Well, since Contains/Contained is relatively new and Other Authors has been hanging there half-done forEVER, I vote to get Other Authors done.

I want them both, but voted for Authors, as it will be more useful to me, though Contains/Contained will be very useful too. Very close call.

Other Authors is definitely far more useful and necessary. I would hope that it would lead, ultimately, to having a book on each author's page.

That's what I would like to see, too. It would go a long way to fixing the issue of co-authored books which have one author first in the US and the other first in the UK. Not to mention allowing searching for a book by any of its authors, or by an illustrator, or ...

Other authors for me (but it's a close call for me too).

Well, since Contains/Contained is relatively new and Other Authors has been hanging there half-done forEVER, I vote to get Other Authors done. (#7)

Ditto. Other Authors was supposed to be finished "soon" but that was, what, a year ago?

I absolutely want both features to be finished. But since Other Authors was begun first, let's see that finished first. Now!

I suspect that most people are only comparing Contains/Contained and Other Authors and missed the part of #1 that instructed voters to use undecided if there are any other features that they think are more important.

ETA: I missed it until I read Zoe's post.

That is an important part of what I was trying to get at... a comparison between these long-standing partially completed features and the new things that Tim's talking about in the other thread.

So far it looks like it's 10 to 1 in favor of finishing one of these two over starting something new. (Unless there are a lot of people not reading the instructions.)

I have to admit that I did intentionally introduce that bias into the poll, but then it was Tim that gave me the idea in the way he phrased the other one. (Although, he didn't even try to provide any alternative.)

Maybe there isn't an alternative. Maybe Tim is considering implementing one of the two features in his poll and he isn't open to anything else.

It's funny - sometimes when we post "I'd rather you do A than new feature B", Tim posts about how it isn't a choice between A and B. Then he comes along and makes it about a choice between X or Y. I think, ultimately, all we can do is express our opinions as they are, even if they don't fit into the framing du jour.

16: Yes, that is most likely true. If he was open to any suggestions other than those two, he probably would have mentioned that in his post.

This isn't an official LibraryThing developer poll. It's just a user expressing frustration at the (lack of) options given in the other one.

>16 jjwilson61:

Perhaps so. But on the lists/book discussion poll I frankly don't give a rip about either. Yes, it's Tim's site, but it really irritates me when features I like are introduced, then left undone, and Tim seems to find new ponies to ride. "Ponies" in my nomenclature, of course. It *seems* rare that the undone things are ever returned to.

I automatically voted for contains/contained in, but now that I've been reminded that other authors has been hanging around for so long, I'm in a quandary. I think I'll switch my vote every twelve hours to even things up.

A quote from Tim in the Beta thread discussing Contains/Contained:
The problem here is data. I'd like to release this with data underneath it--a way to search for article and so forth, basically. We are in negotiations to get that
So there is a reason why that is on the back burner.

Other Authors I suspect is delayed just because it's hard. Imagine a book that's about 50/50 between two primary authors: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman (Neil Neil Gaiman Gaiman? I had to leave that!) and Terry Pratchett (unrecognized by the touchstoner). Presumably, it could be listed as Author Neil Gaiman and Other Author Terry Pratchett, or Author Terry Pratchett and Other Author Neil Gaiman -- each equally valid -- and it should appear on both authors' pages. But what if one single user puts Mark Twain (hey, it worked!) as an Other Author? Should it appear on his page? The way the system works now, it just picks one author and that's it, so there's no chance of it appearing on Twain's page, but if it paid attention to Other Authors, how would it know that the one user was just wrong? I don't know, though if looked like development was going to proceed, I'd be more likely to think about it.

Edit to add: 3 for 3 fail on the author name touchstoner... I'll forgive because they're all rather obscure.

LT is eventually going to have to recognize multiple main authors. When two authors are co-equal it doesn't make sense to relegate one to other author status. So maybe if most people list Gaiman and Pratchett as the main authors and one lists Gaiman, Pratchett, and Twain LT would take the most common set.

22> I think it makes sense, but only in terms of author order listed on the book itself. But then you got those anomalies where they do it differently in different countries. But I really have to think those are a tiny number of exceptions. And there are things we already do that have exceptions but it's worth it for the vast majority that aren't one of those exceptions.

21> It's the biggest authors that fail most often, in my experience - Stephen King has never once worked for me, while Larry Correia (whose second book has just come out) works perfectly... Why, I don't know.

Hmmm...

Stephen King - Well, with the new touchstone tools, I can get King to work.

Neil Gaiman
Terry Pratchett
Mark Twain

Yeah, the new touchstone tools work well. And I didn't go searching, I just entered the correct URL-form name (gaimanneil, for instance) and it worked.

Oh, I know you can make them work. But is it really too much to ask that it actually recognize a name? Why can't it get from "Neil Gaiman" to /author/gaimanneil by itself? It's only the same rule it uses to generate the author URL in the first place. (Actually, it doesn't appear to use that rule, it looks very much like it does a search and picks the first thing from the search results; that explains Neil Gaiman and Mark Twain although not Terry Pratchett which it doesn't find.)

Edited to add: Now suggested as http://www.librarything.com/topic/102120

I'd make the extension of the current "Other Authors" scheme to the earlier work records (the ones stuck with the single-field "other authors") a higher priority than either of these developments.

That wasn't one of the options. :-)

But yes, and it's probably a whole lot easier. (In my head it's a necessary first step in the complete Other Authors work, although it certainly could be done on its own.)

>26 paradoxosalpha:
I agree: what the hell is the holdup?

I have two LibriVox editions of Lady Susan in my catalog, and saying you're not going to at least finish the rollout of what you've already done would be like saying that these details are as complete as these.

And just for the record...