The reason these were disabled is that it was an easy way (via
accident or abuse) for someone to mess something up in a way that
couldn't be easily undone. We had a few people who did large merges
that required developer attention to undo. We have very very little
developer time available for Open Library and figured making this
admin-only would cut down bad merges. You can just email us and we'll
take care of it. It's a very lean team on the back end and even though
it's a big project from a userbase perspective.
Building a voting back end to support a merge upvote thing is a great
idea and we'd love to do it if we had dev time to devote to it which
we don't at this point. Same thing with work/edition merge. Great
idea, unlikely to happen in the short term.
Jessamyn
librarian.net ::: jessamyn.com ::: jessamyn.info ::: box 345, randolph vt 05060
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 11:08 AM, Ben Companjen bencompan...@gmail.com wrote:
Great question, Jon. I assume it was for the reason of misuse, or
mistakes. I made a mistake once or twice and it may be harder to undo
than to do the merge, I guess even more if the merged author is
edited.
Not sure if I ever said it out loud, but perhaps suggesting merges to
experienced editors who can accept or reject the merge suggestion with
the click of a button could be a useful feature. For many types of
edits in MusicBrainz, suggesting the change is the default and other
users can then vote for or against the change. Such a system has a
higher entry barrier, but shouldn't put a lot of extra stress on IA's
one(?) editor as any user could vote.
Then the next question is: can we have Work and Edition merge too?
Some people also used algorithms to find possible duplicates in the
past. If the manual votes for suggested changes are fed into a machine
learning algorithm, I envision machines can support editors suggesting
or voting on changes. I wish I had the time to try work this out :)
Groeten van Ben
On 25 February 2015 at 11:16, Jon Leech oddh...@sonic.net wrote:
AIUI, author merges using the Magic Merge Wand were supported
sometime in the past, but now are restricted to OL staff. I came up with
a few dozen of these while processing my library, a fair number of which
I reported and are getting processed, but it got tiresome after a while
and seemed like a poor use of my/Jessamyn's time with all the extra
steps involved. Was the author merge tool restricted due to misuse?
Might it be restored at some point?
Jon
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