Only one canonical name shows across all language sites

Across all the language sites, only one canonical name shows at a time, so that if one is added in another language, it shows on the English-language site.

Example:
http://www.librarything.com/author/williamiigermanemper has the English canonical name German Kaiser and King of Prussia, Wilhelm II, but is showing the last name added, which is from the German site, Deutscher Kaiser & König von Preußen Wilhelm II.

Previous mentions of this include when William Shakespeare was showing as William Szekspir (from the Polish site) http://www.librarything.com/topic/96560

There are two problems here, neither of which can be solved soon. First, we need to solve CK so that some fields are cross-language and some aren't. Second, author names—unlike work titles—are not currently separated across languages.

So, this is more of a feature request, and not going to happen soon.

You're saying that if someone enters Platon on the French version of Plato's author page (ETA or Πλάτων on the Greek site, or the Chinese equivalent on the Chinese site, etc. etc.), and it then shows Platon (or whatever) as the author name on all language versions, that's not a bug? How can that not be a bug? Why even allow entry into that field in multiple language sites then?

> 2: I can understand you saying that this is how the system works, and as such not a bug. I can also understand "not soon" if it's that tricky.

But bug or not, it's a real problem.

I have to say, this seems rather wrong. A "feature request"? How can that be? When I click on one of these authors, it shows a value for Canonical Name. That value is not what gets used for CN. And why? Because of order of operations. I'm going to be bold and change the status. Since Tim never explained the "rules" for doing so, I'm using my own judgment. If there's ever a topic that "needs discussion", I think this is it.

One of the things I was looking forward to with this bug system is that it would be easy to tell what bugs were still out there. I don't quite get how closing bugs because it's going to be a while before they're fixed really helps with that. If anything, it just promotes reporting the bug AGAIN, which leads us back to some of the same situation we were in before.

This brings us back to the need for distinguishing "closed forever" and "closed for now".

Ultimately, this is a case of technical language. In the language of development, it's not a bug. The system does not acknowledge people are named different things in different countries. We could add that feature, but it's a feature. The system wasn't designed for it. To handle it with titles—to allow a book to have a different title everywhere it's seen on the French or German site--LibraryThing has all sorts of extra tables and joins, and a logic of cascading from your language to the language of the book to English. These database and code structures don't exist for authors. Authors just have a name.

We could make a long list of such phenomena. Is it a bug that we don't distinguish between different covers for the same ISBN? ISBNs can have different covers.

So if there is only one name for an author allowed across all languages, then its a bug that it can be set differently* on every language site. You should probably do something like make the English site the only one where it can be set and have all the other sites pull from the English one. That's not ideal but its better than the current situation.

* ETA: Actually it can't be set differently on each language site, that's the root of the problem. But there's a field to set it on each languages CK which makes it look like it can be set separately for each language. That's the bug.

So it's a design flaw that there's a Canonical Name field on all the CK language version sites. Bug, design flaw, whatever, can we get rid of it?

Can we just get rid of the field on other language sites?

Why not limit it to the Dutch language site instead? Kidding, but you see the problem.

7> Ultimately, this is a case of technical language. In the language of development, it's not a bug.

I really don't think that's true, and I've been a professional developer for over a decade (and an amateur one for years before that). This is a classic example of Unexpected Behavior. It's unexpected in a number of ways.

First off, as you've pointed out, Canonical Title already works this way.

Second, LT's approach is to show you the correct name for your language site. It does this for book titles and authors. Well, at least I THINK it's supposed to for authors. I could never find an example where someone hadn't set the CN for an author. Yet this behavior causes it to show data on one language site for the author's name that came from another language site.

Third, as jjwilson61 said, you're providing them a field on all sites with differing information, even though it's global data. You're tricking the user.

A bug isn't only something that works not as intended by the developers. If you have a field and anything over 30 characters causes it to become blank, it's a bug. It's a bug even if the developer says "Yeah, that field is only designed to take 30 characters, don't put anything longer in it. I guess I COULD add a feature that allows longer values, but for now that's how it's supposed to work."

If nothing else, the wiki needs to be changed:
J. K. Rowling. In English the author of the Harry Potter books is known as J. K. Rowling, not Joanne Rowling or Joanne Murray (her legal name). In Germany, however, her books are ascribed to Joanne K. Rowling, so this would be the canonical form of her name on LibraryThing.de.
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Common_Knowledge#Canonical_title.2C_c...

See, it's such expected behavior, it's got into the wiki as such.

10> It's a problem, but if there really can be only one, than it ought to be the English site.

An alternative would be to copy the CN to all language sites whenever it is set on any of them. If that is done though, I think there should be a big scary pop-up that explains that setting it will set it for all languages with a choice of OK or Cancel. (The pop-up probably shouldn't show when CN was blank before though).

I agree there's a bug in the CK-ness of it. CK should separate fields that are shared and ones that aren't shared.

13> Yay! To avoid derailing this discussion:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/99383#2222680

By the way: if only one form of an author's name is used site wide, then why does Therese of Lisieux show in two different forms in the "Died" column of "On this day" today? (They are combined).

15> Get yer own bug!

No, seriously, you should log this if you haven't already.

Maybe it deserves its own bug report, but it *is* pertinent to this discussion as it conflicts with Tim's explanation of what is going on with this bug.

> 16: Yes, I should have done that too. Ah well, these things happens fairly often - so next time I notice it.

Deferred. We are going to add some features around CK and languages.

Bump.

Reopened, because I think those language features have been added but this is still a problem.

Bump.

Bump.

See

http://www.librarything.com/author/svevoitalo

http://www.librarything.com/author/kehlmanndaniel

(both names, for me, show up in kyrillic letters, and I'd feel bad deleting Russian CK)

What if I go to the French site and if I add the canonical name in latin letters ? Will the name show up on each site with latin letters ?

24> Yes.

>24 Louve_de_mer:

Yes. And if you add it on the Russian or Bulgarian site with Cyrillic letters, this is what wins on all sites. Not that anyone in LT cares about the non-Latin based languages.

I just added it on the French site, sorry for those who use the cyrillic letters. Each time I find an author with CK not on the French site I save his informations on .fr, nothing to do with the care I have for cyrillic letters or not.

Is the bug related with the author's automatic combination ?

(edited for typo)

>27 Louve_de_mer:

Nope. It is just the way the CK works for author names. One day maybe someone will bother and fix it. Probably before 2023.... but then maybe later.

For Pete's sake.

Bump: http://www.librarything.com/topic/157875

Isabel Allende's canonical name is correct on the English site, yet the page title -- and with it, her name on the work pages for her books -- is stuck as Исабель Альенде.

Easily fixed by just reaffirming the name in Latin characters, but illustrative of the problem.

>34 Nicole_VanK:
But wouldn't create the reverse problem on whatever Cyrillic-using language's site that version is?

36> Yes, but for now someone has to win and most users use Latin characters.

>37 jjwilson61:
Which brings us back to the issue of users' expectations of site behavior (as opposed to the behavior the developers "intended").

Me either.

Just "corrected" Plato and Marcus Aurelius. Hate doing so, because the Cyrillic type isn't really wrong. Feels like an editing war. :-(

It is an edit war, sadly, but it's also the only option at present.

>34 Nicole_VanK:, 42 @BarkingMatt: I'm guessing this issue is why Euripides' name shows up in Cyrillic (Эврипид), even though canonical info is correct?

Per this topic (http://www.librarything.com/topic/156623), I recalculated the name to 'fix' it for the moment. But sheesh: Is a fix really that complex, programming-wise?

>31 Collectorator:, 39, 41 @Collectorator: Agree completely!

Edited to state I have updated Euripides.

>44 LibraryPerilous:

Or you can just press Save on the canonical name in English again.
The problem is that canonical names are on a "Last in wins" principle - the last "saved" canonical name on any site shows up on all sites...

I removed a few more, all ancient Greek and Roman authors. I noticed that Virgil has a canonical name in Russian, but it didn't show on the English site.

>47 al.vick:

It won't show up if the English one is the last saved one. Then the English one wins on all sites...

I think we should not fight this bug by correcting its effects again and again. Rather, we should keep our hands off the canonical name field for a while and let the bug grow (maybe even feed it like >46 Collectorator: suggests;-). The bug will get bigger and more visible with every new canonical author name in a foreign spelling or alphabet. Once it's big enough, somebody will fix it.

>46 Collectorator:, 49, 50 We need a double agent with a Russian account. Just sayin' . . .

I wish this would get fixed. Not just so that English speaking members don't have to see Cyrillic, but also so the Russians, Israelis, ... don't have to see Latin letters on their authors.

Indeed! I do feel bad about "correcting" these. We now have over a dozen variants of the site that use other scripts - and in total there are thousands of users on them.

ОК, I'll cease and desist ))

Thanks, zmeischa - sorry, and I hope Tim gets this fixed so you can go back to work without having your work undone by others (including me)!

A question, though. I sometimes read books which are translated into Russian from the languages I don't know (German, for example). If I add such a book (with a Russian name) do I change the canonical name for all the users? And if I do, what's the remedy?

No, you can enter the name in any language, script, etc. in your own catalogue without causing this effect.

You may have to do some author combining though.

That's what we're saying - we're just asking that the solution to the canonical title also be applied to canonical author name. They've already got the code, just need to apply it.

zmeischa, because it's not 100% clear from the responses:

You can enter a book or an author in Russian without changing anything for anybody. You may need to have that book or that author's name combined with the untranslated or untransliterated version; you can do this yourself if you're comfortable with it, or ask on the "Combiners!" group. You can even set the Canonical Title in Russian, if you're working on the Russian version of the site. The only thing that doesn't work (i.e. sets it to Russian for everyone) is setting the Canonical Author.

Thank you for being so understanding, by the way.

Are we still not supposed to "fix" author names in cyrillic script on the English site (or did I misunderstand something?)? Because lately, I've been coming across a few ones again after not noticing any for quite a while!
I really, really wish this would get fixed!

HI! Reading 25 contributions on a mobile phone. Since more then a year it was possible to enter any CN in any language via the English interface selecting the appropriate language with "more". Then you need only to use "Recalculate author" if English CN was set long time ego.
You do neither need to "Save" the English value again and again nor do you need to show how polite you are deleting some / all other language versions.
Please confirm the "Recalculate author" workaround.

I don't believe that's correct, gangleri. It's a "feature" of Tim's code and doesn't work like the rest of the CK data. He made Canonical Title tied to language, but Canonical Name (on authors) does not work like that.

leselotte: Overwrite it with English. It's all we can do until Tim makes the site work in a rational fashion.

I have written that it worked for me at the time I was more active here. Please remember that all deleted CYRL HEBR ARAB GREK content is lost forever and can not be restored by normal users.

P.S. Changed typing errors after arriving at home.

Please hand your phone to the person next to you. I'll wait.

...

Hello. You may be wondering why this person just handed you a phone. I will give you 100 American dollars if you run as fast as you can as long as you can.

>63 gangleri: It was in the bus. It is midnight here ...

>63 gangleri: Please provide an url where the "Recalculate author" workaround did not help.

#66 by @gangleri> What you're seeing here is that the "recalculate author" is equivalent to clicking in the CK field on that site and clicking Save again. It doesn't actually fix the problem but just makes THAT site the last one to save the CN. If you go to another site and reload the author, you will see that now the name has been overwritten by the other site.

And in case this is the cause of confusion, no one is suggesting deleting the other language CK. We're only saying you overwrite it on the English site, which created an English CK entry (this is how all CK works). That CK becomes the last one saved and becomes the single name used for all sites even though they may have local CK that SHOULD do otherwise. Clicking on recalculate author is basically equivalent to that. The underlying bug has still never been fixed.

68 - All changed back.

A new account with 'bug' in the title which has been changing the canonical name's to Hebrew, Russian, Georgian, Persian, Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, etc.

Not suspicious at all.

>69 BuiltByBooks: No, not suspicious at all, but remarkable. Did you notice this bug's ID number? Did you notice the type of books in the account? I thought someone setting up some testcases. That's why I didn't interfere and just posted here. Suppose I should have added some explanation.

I don't think an LT developer would need that many test cases and I doubt that they would use such popular authors for test cases. I don't see what the types of books in the account has anything to do with it.

71 - The titles were the only part I found funny. Someone here does have a sense of humour;

The Bug
A Bug Hunter's Diary
Bug-fixing and code-writing
etc.

Definitely not a test case.

Edit: Ah, now I get it. The hint was in the classics. The author's changed are a who's who of Tim's library.

This is an important issue, but it's not going to get fixed in the near future. Author names are not language-specific in the current system, and making them so would be very taxing. Therefore, it goes no the deferred list.