Recalculate authors - not adding new author and duplicating others

On some books there appears to be a bug when using the "Recalculate from members' books" tool under the "edit other authors" pop-up - found on a mac (tested with Chrome and Firefox), not sure about a PC.

When I use the recalculate tool, the new authors I have added are not showing up. I also noticed while testing that existing 'unconfirmed' authors which do not have a role assigned to them are getting duplicated every time the recalculation is run.

One example is with Wind in the Willows:
http://www.librarything.com/work/8288/book/123276743

Charles van Sandwyk (a new illustrator) does not come up in the list after recalculating. And many unconfirmed no-role secondary authors are duplicating when I run the test, e.g. Nadine Amadio, Jane Asher, Ingalill Behre - 6 times so far (mostly from my testing - sorry, but I was making sure I wasn't imagining things...).

The link you added after the Wind in the Willows is a link to Alice in Wonderland, not sure what you meant here? I see Charles van Sandwyk in the list of "Other authors" on the Wind in the Willows work page. I don't think the author's name is listed at the top of the work page, because he is not the illustrator on *all* editions of that work, only some.

On the book page for Alice in Wonderland that you linked to, I do actually see Charles van Sandwyk's name at the top of the page, but not on the overall work page (as I would expect):



You may need to check back on book pages within a day or so to see if your author recalculation takes place - sometimes it needs a little time. I don't think this is a bug.

What *does* seem to be a bug is the duplication of other (unconfirmed) authors when you're clicking the "Recalculate title/author" link. I'm seeing the same example on the Alice in Wonderland "Other authors" section. Lots of duplicates there. Will keep this open for a developer.

Those dupes have been generating for ages. Never thought of reporting it, can't believe there isn't a bug for it already btw.

Yeah, those dupes have been around forever; it never occurred to me that it was a reportable bug, I just thought it was slurping up every secondary "other author" from each edition without any attempt at de-duplication.

>3 JerryMmm:; >4 lorax: I agree. Just a normal trade-off between processing time and cleaner data. I'm fine with the dups if it keeps the data from taking too long to appear.

>2 kristilabrie: Sorry - yes, the link in my original post was correct, but not the name - of course I did mean Alice in Wonderland. And I do still have the same problem - Charles van Sandwyk is listed as an illustrator on my edition, but I can't make him come up on the main list of 'other authors' so that I can confirm it for the work, even after waiting several days and hitting the "recalculation" link. So I assume this is still a bug?

>5 aulsmith: No problem if it is a trade-off for faster processing (I like fast processing!), but I am pretty sure it wasn't always a problem as I have added many illustrators to the 'other authors' lists for a single work and the duplication didn't always occur. For works where there are lots of editions and illustrators (like Alice) I assume the recalculation could occur often and the list of duplicates starts to get really out of control (Alice, for example, is up to 1380 authors already, and increases by several hundred every time someone hits recalculate.)

>6 skullduggery: Oh! Yes, I see what you mean. (I also just noticed the Touchstone for Alice in Wonderland seems to be going to the modern work instead of this: http://www.librarything.com/work/8288 - just to keep things clear). Van Sandwyk should be listed as an "Other author" on the work page, and the work should show up on his author page: http://www.librarything.com/author/sandwykcharlesvan under "also by".

From the work page, I clicked on "Add/edit other authors" and was able to add "van Sandwyk, Charles" as a secondary author, Illustrator, on some editions. He's now showing up in "Other authors" on the work page, and the work is on his author page, at least for me. Are you seeing the same thing? Let me know if you tried adding him from the work page instead of just using the "Recalculate from members' books" tool.

Summary for admins: Adding other authors works as expected. But, the "Recalculate from members' books" tool isn't finding other authors from some books, and it's creating duplicates of other authors from other books.

>7 kristilabrie: Thanks! Yes, he's now showing up for me after your edit. I did only get the error via the recalculate tool, and I didn't try adding him from the work page on this book because I wanted to make sure other people were seeing the same issue (the recalculate authors tool does seem to work on some books/authors but not others, but I wasn't able to figure out why only some were affected from researching my own library).

Fixed, apparently :)