Changing main author: how bad is it really?

Look, I get it, I get it, the warning is there because it's bad and not to be done lightly. No argument. But...

I'm coming across an increasing number of books entered with the last name of the author only, and only one title. Examples include A Pedagogy of Kindness by (Catherine J.) Denial and Manufacturing Freedom by (Elena) Shih. (To increase the fun, both of those authors are already on LT under their full names, but I did figure out that aliasing a last name into a full name is just asking for trouble down the road.)

I suppose one answer is to split the author and alias, and that's fine. Maybe even better because when the next book for that last-name-only comes in, the path is clearer. But I do wonder if this is a reasonable case for "just fix it."

A better solution than aliasing would be to see if there are copies under the author's full name (yes in both cases), and use workbench to combine copies. I will admit that where no other version of the work exists, I have fixed the author in this circumstance.

>1 hipdeep: Recalculating the title/author fixed A Pedagogy of Kindness, and Manufacturing Freedom was fixed when I combined it with a stray work. I always recalculate title/author and look for combinations first, but I'm on the side of "just fix it" if those methods don't work.

>1 hipdeep: I'm unsure what's going on, but both of those books have a full author name. Are you sure you're not seeing ratty data of your own entries? Because automatically calculated main author is as it should be already, it's not that someone edited them in the meantime.

>4 SandraArdnas: see amanda4242's post. Originally these were showing up as hipdeep said, but have been fixed.

Those need to be corrected. While it is generally better not to change the primary author away from what people have entered, it is also not good to leave it on a wrong author page away from all the people who have entered it correctly.

>4 SandraArdnas: Both works were fixed by combining and recalculating.

>1 hipdeep:

If there is a clear mistake, such as the ones you give, it's fine to change it.

>5 rarm: Ah, these were originally strays that needed combining. In general, this will be the case in cases with only last name, or reversed first-last name and such. The number of members who catalogued it as such is another indication it just need to be combined with the larger group where it belongs.

In my experience, the cases where the author name needs fixing manually usually involve added honorifics and titles like Professor, Sir and such. These crop up relatively commonly when it's not just a stray copy that needs combining, presumably as a result of an Amazon record with those being the most used one.