Can you separate books within an edition?

Let's discuss Battleship. Specifically, Battleship (game) and Battleship (film).

Then let's bring up https://www.librarything.com/work/28176145 and https://www.librarything.com/work/28176148.

These each are single edition works with multiple copies, with at least one copy for each of the game and the film.

How does one fix this?

On the editions pages we can see that none of those editions have any identifying information that would indicate whether the users were trying to add the game or the movie. Therefore, the only thing that can be done is to leave them alone. (or combine the two unknown works together, but that wouldn't actually fix anything.)

How do you know some are game and some movie in editions with no info other than title? I don't think anything can be done except combining two entries that are just title, leaving it separate from either the movie or the game and writing disambiguation notice that if people want their work to appear on a proper page they should add more details so that it can be separated and combined where appropriate.

You can put more identification on your copy to pull it out of the edition.

>3 SandraArdnas:
If you look at the users book page, you can often find other information that pretty clearly indicates.

https://www.librarything.com/work/28176145/book/146324605 - Has an Info Field of Milton Bradley
https://www.librarything.com/work/28176145/book/170631584 - Has a member uploaded movie cover and is in a collection Video Vault

https://www.librarything.com/work/28176148/book/171343683 - Has member uploaded game cover and both a collection and a tag of board game
https://www.librarything.com/work/28176148/book/121550311 - In a DVD collection

The problem is not that we don't know which, rather that we know it is both.

Editions are determined based only on Title, Author, ISBN, and media type. Unless one of the users changes one of those pieces of information for one of their items, it cannot be separated from the others.

>5 IrrationalDM: Ah, OK, it wouldn't occur to me look beyond what's available on editions page, largely because we can't separate them anyway unless there's a difference there. Until users add some data that would make it a distinct edition, whether it's author, different title, identifying number, etc, there is no way to separate them.

Putting DA might entice some to add more data should they ever check the work page. As it is, we can only leave the third group of undifferentiated works on its own.

https://www.librarything.com/work/11298371/book/216596980 (School Club account that I have control of) should be fixed at least, and I think I fixed any clearly wrong ones, but for the rest, <shrug>

If you have examined through to the individual book page, and are especially motivated, you could send a message to its owner giving them suggestions for how to pull out their copy from the ambiguous edition (eg. adding the author or ISBN or a suffix to the title). Possibly only worthwhile when the owner is still active (eg. from recent activity or their latest book entry date). For myself I have only done that a handful of times when it's been a minuscule extra effort on top of a big cleanup that I had already heavily invested time in doing, and the user's other books/contributions looked like they'd want to know.

>9 Nevov: Be very careful if and how you do this. Each member has the right to list their books as they see fit.

Nevov (#9):

If you do this, please make sure you phrase it as a suggestion and put it only in terms of how it would benefit them specifically. We are prohibited from asking people to make changes to their catalog data solely to improve data quality overall.

Great advice to underline, both >10 MarthaJeanne:, >11 lorax:. Actually, maybe now we have lost wall comments, it could be something that's consigned to the past, as an actual private message about it would feel a solid step more intrusive than a wall message in the past did, which was out in the air for everyone to see (was such a rarity that haven't crossed my mind how to do things since the messaging changes). Yeah, maybe a bit too on the "nosy neighbour" side of things now.