Allow CK editing on author sub-pages

So when you combine an author and both author pages have common knowledge entries, the author that "loses" has the CK suppressed. It isn't shifted to the main page, and you can't see it unless you get it from the CK search. I don't know why the CK doesn't shift, the way it does (or is supposed to) with work pages, but I can see a sort of logic in it, especially when it isn't uncommon to combine two different authors just to get a work to combine properly. You don't really want all the CK to get stuck on only one of them. (Not sure how much that happens lately, but it does.)

Therefore: please make it possible to view and edit the CK of a sub-author. Sometimes the CK attached is wrong, or there's a canonical name attached which makes things go weird, and at least with wrong CK, it can be a real pain when tidying entries to get to it and change it.

Or, at least, and this is probably more difficult, don't make the CK editable, but still display it and have a button to clear the value only.

Or, just have the CK transfer to the main author and disappear from the sub-author, like with works. (not recommended)

Incidentally, this happens with work pages too. At least with authors, you can separate them and edit and then recombine. With work pages, the data often becomes completely inaccessible, attached to a work number that's combined with another one, but not visible on the new work page.

Being able to see the suppressed CK would be great. It's often difficult to tell which author page will end up as a dominant one in a combination, and it's very frustrating to find that an author page with lots of good CK gets suppressed by one with none.

Yeah, it was the bug report for the work pages that made me think of suggesting this for authors, since the combination thing works slightly differently for the two.

ETA, response to 3: omg, I can't believe I didn't even make a clear statement for that in the original post, but that's definitely an underlying assumption of "this should be done" on my part! Even if we can't edit or change it without separating, if the code is too difficult/complicated/impossible, at least make it visible!

Please...

This might also help with that author picture thing that came up in another thread.

I realy would like easier access to CK from other then top level author urls.

I just combined http://www.librarything.com/author/camusschriftstellerf&norefer=1&all=1 ; It was on my todo list.

Because I bookmarked the url to the CK of that author url you will see that it is still accessible (as known theree multiple line entries can not be seen).

Regarding the original request to be able to edit CK I want to point to another think that may be changed:

The searchlink for "Cannonical names" Camus, Albert displays today five entries from three LT language sites.

It would be a great help if a column with links to the relevant CK author urls would be inserted between the fields "What" and "Field".

I just cleaned up the "American" Nationality, so I'm linking to it to show why this would be crazy useful.

http://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/search.php?q=american&f=18&u...

If you check the page, you'll see currently 27 authors listed. Several of them have the nationality "USA (xxxx-American)" that I did back in July, before I decided to put ethnic information into the short biography instead of the nationality field. Others are "USA (born to American parents)" - since these show up properly on a USA search, changing them isn't a priority.

However, the other names currently on that page - either the CK was set on a non-.com site, which means it's a pain in the ass to log in on the appropriate one and I don't even necessarily know what the proper translation is in the alternate language site, OR the CK is on an author sub-page, which means in order to change it, I have to separate the authors, remove/fix the CK, then combine them again.

This could be a non-problem by adding the proper CK to the main author page, but then the incorrect CK form will show up in the drop-down list for future additions, which will encourage people to use the wrong format.

Being able to see the CK on a sub-author page would also help if one has been incorrectly combined, to determine easily which one it is, without having to examine the URL strings. And completely incorrect data should be able to be removed.

I fully support this request because combining authors will neither shift / preserve CK nor links to the main url. I assume that it shifts pictures at present.
FYI: Author links might not be (manualy) duplicated directly to top level author urls. This concerns WP and other pages. If you need to add an identical link you may add the original link appending &dummy=1 then you edit the link and remove this workaround.

Why not make a new way to be able to search for works to combine the way you can search for authors to combine, so you don't have to combine two authors that shouldn't be combined in order to combine a work.

That sounds way too dangerous to me. Combining 3 or 4 authors in one go is fairly easy to disentangle, but combining two works that each contain 3 or 4 editions (and often more) is very complicated to clean up. I don't know if that's why it doesn't work that way, but I'd support it as being a good reason.

Well, I think that combining authors in order to combine works is just nuts. There must be some way to put safeguards into place to make directly combining works safe.

Yeah, it is nuts, but I don't know what kind of safeguards could be put in place that would still make it (where it = combining works from search) useful.

Well, Tim recently added some safeguards so that combinations of works with huge numbers of editions cannot be done by members. Why isn't that enough?

Because huge numbers doesn't necessarily mean lots of editions joined together. I've seen works with only 20 copies, but 6 different editions (at least) where this kind of thing would have been useful, because of multiple authors. And, of course, the more copies a work has, the more editions it's likely to get (where edition means variations in title, author, and ISBN), so if someone were to combine some from the search page, it'd be incredibly troublesome - like when someone gets it into their mind to combine works under a single author name. And that's troublesome because when there are tons of copies, there tend to be a lot of variations, which means a lot of disentangling - the reason for the 200 copy failsafe currently in place.

With works with multiple authors, you're more likely to get lots of different editions with fewer copies, I think, basically. So what kind of safeguard could be put into place? Especially since the author combining is done when the works don't show up on each others' "suggested combinations" list already.

Isn't that what Tim did though? That is make combining works with zillions of editions more difficult? After all, you're right the total number of copies isn't important it's the number of separate editions. And that can happen with works that the system gives you a combination suggestion for just as easily as work combination that you search for yourself (if Tim implements my suggestion).

No, the block is if there's 200 or more copies of both works being combined.

If there's 20 or 200 copies doesn't matter if there are 6 editions (variations) of each. It's just that it's more likely that as you get more copies, you'll get more variations. BUT with the kind of work combining that requires author combining first, you're as likely to get many editions/variations with fewer copies, because of the multiple authors.

Also, yes, it's as likely to happen with suggested combinations, but those tend to be limited to same author or ISBN. General search is a lot broader, so will pick up more non-matching works (depending on the search being run, of course), which means it's much easier to not be paying attention and make a mess.

But maybe the messes I make where I don't read the confirmation screen because I'm going too quickly aren't as common as I think, I don't know. I do it a lot more than I'd like to when I'm working on some projects, though (usually involving other languages, because I don't notice small variations as quickly).

a complementary request: Links, Pictures, Common Knowledge Transfer on Author Combinations

another complementary request: indicate the existance of « Common Knowledge » at second level author urls