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 <[email protected]> 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 <[email protected]> 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 >> _______________________________________________ >> Ol-discuss mailing list - [email protected] >> http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss >> Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ >> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to >> [email protected] > _______________________________________________ > Ol-discuss mailing list - [email protected] > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss > Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > [email protected] _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list - [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
