On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Alan Millar <[email protected]> wrote: >> Generally yes, but a lot of "authors" are just names, numbers, multiple >> persons, titles of congresses etc. It would be helpful if we could >> delete this entries. > > Unless an author ID has *never* had any works associated with it, I > would argue that such entries still should be redirects, not > deletions. That's the point of the ID; it should be usable over time, > hopefully incorporating corrections and improvements.
Unless the entry was nonsense to start with. In that case, I don't really see the value in a redirect. >> - Wrong entry: numbers, multiple names etc. (no redirect useful; > > Multiple names should be split in the work into their component author > IDs, and the multi-name-entry eliminated. > > But I would still argue that it should not be deleted, but redirected > to one of the authors. Not perfect, but still a "bread crumb trail" > for someone following old data. A redirect to me says "this new one is equivalent to the old one." If it was "John Smith," "Bill Williams," or any other two common names where the record represents the conflation of two, three, or more authors, which new record is equivalent to the old one? Hopefully none. If "Bill, Sue, and their colleagues" results in an author named "their colleagues" do we really need a signpost which points there direction it went? If so, I'd argue that we establish a master "this should never have existed" record and have all the redirects point to that, although I'm not sure that offers a lot more value than having it just 404. Tom _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
