Reassignments for Split Authors

Just checking--

When we reassign all the books for authors to change their numbers (for example, to make a lesser known author #2 to make a popular author #1) does all the CK need to be manually swapped? Or, is there an easier way to do this?

>1 aspirit: All CK, links and all aliasing needs to be manually swapped.

I find numbers reassigning a very bad idea. People may have links to the split part somewhere outside of LT. And you lose all the history of CK, Links and so on because they are now in the wrong place. What exactly would you improve by changing the numbers that way? Leave the numbers alone once they are assigned.

Also, can Events on LibraryThing Local be reassigned?

I seem to have made a mess of two Steve Russells.

>2 AnnieMod: On the disambiguation page, authors are ordered by the popularity of their books on LT (going by total cataloged). That put an author with one work with not very many books entered before an author with many works with higher counts. I found the way it was disorienting to the extent that I initially reassigned an Unknown to the wrong split.

So, I tried to make the splits cleaner.

The problem is split authors are notoriously messy, and I should remember not to add any CK for them anyway. Then I would be less likely to look at the disambiguation page. Doing anything with these author pages too often feels like a waste of time.

I'll be back later to decide what to do with the Russells from this point.

>4 aspirit: So in order to fix a visualization issue that you are annoyed by, you are creating a big mess, losing history and causing who knows how many more issues for people all over the place.

As i said - a very bad idea.

CK can be added by anyone. If there is no alias, split author’s CK is the only place to add data. And people will add data there. And Links. Invaliding all that data and disconnecting all the history because you (one person) do not like how something looks is not very nice.

>5 AnnieMod: I was the person who had added almost all of the CK data to start with, but yeah, sure. I'm mean for trying to make things better.

I've returned the split to how it was and reedited the disambiguation notice. The rest of the of the CK I had entered then prepared to move can just stay gone. I am really done with split authors. They're the hazard zones of this site.

>6 aspirit: Want to read what I actually said? The action is not very nice. I did not say a word about you - besides the fact that you are changing the data based on your preferences.

You came with a generic question. Then you came up with a case where you proved the point I was making - changing it is not trivial and leads to issues people don’t think of (pictures also need swapping if there) on addition to the lost history. And in the long run achieves nothing - who knows where more books will be added tomorrow inside of that split.

There was intended to be a way to reorder the authors on the split author page but it never worked without causing too many problems and so the option was removed. (This is why it says "Do not use this page to "renumber" authors. Use "Renumber divisions" instead." at the top of the split author page even though that option is not anywhere on the page.)

It's one thing to reorder, for example, Stephen King, but in this case the top two Steve Russells are only about 150 copies different. Steve Russell 2 might be the most popular now but Steve Russell 1 could easily be more popular a year from now.

There's allegedly a better author system coming soon, so hopefully it won't have to be like this much longer.

When first splitting an author that hasn't been split before I try to get them numbered according to how many books (i.e. "correct" order) but after that I don't sweat it. Life's too short and there are waaaaaay too many authors to adjust. And as has been pointed out the author who is number 1 one day might be number 3 a week later.

It sounds like you're convinced of the pitfalls, but one more reason not to renumber is because the page doesn't show any works that currently have 0 owners, so they remain assigned invisibly to where they were originally placed.

If it helps you rationalise things: because the disambiguation page is set up to auto-sort the authors by popularity there's no need to also worry about the author number matching this order, the page takes care of displaying them to always match the latest information, and the number is essentially arbitrary, or a curio snapshot of which was the more established at the time of split.

>3 aspirit:
I wondered about Events recently too, but it transpires they can't currently be assigned to a specific division, they show up on every author involved in a split.

>8 AnnieMod: What you said was derogatory and based on wrong assumptions. I wouldn't have started the swap if the majority of the data wasn't what I had just entered. I was asking about manual vs. automatic processes, not asking for your approval for the specific case or opinion of how "nice" it was.

The barren, hidden mess that's there is more popular than any attempts to set up the pages for more (still accurate) information. That's mildly interesting but not my territory, apparently.

>9 norabelle414: I vaguely remember having a conversation about the division renumbering before. Unfortunately, it didn't come up in search results.

We'll see what comes with the new system in the future, perhaps.

>10 Crypto-Willobie: Got it.

>11 Nevov: I don't see the value of worrying about which author is assigned to zero-member works, as they don't show on the author pages, but of course I could be missing something.

>11 Nevov: It's when someone else later catalogues the 0-copy and it autocombines with the existing work, changing it now into a 1-copy, which reactivates on the author page. It reappears in the split where it was originally placed, but the ground has moved from under it and it requires someone to go and alter the assignment.

This can lead to some awkward situations, such as a children's book author who gets renumbered, and later an adult work (sometimes very adult!) reappears in their split, which the person doing the renumbering had no idea existed. For a new user I imagine this can be disorientating since it looks like the site acted randomly (I mean, it can act in ways that seem random! but this one we're responsible for causing). As it's obscurer material (since we're talking about 0-copy works), if the online footprint of the author is long gone, it can mean works end up thrown back to the Unknown-split, or someone else has to redo research that a previous helper already did once.

>13 Nevov: In that case, I would think disambiguation notes and author links (to exterior sites) would be very helpful. We would possibly have more of those if more members were unafraid of editing split authors.