Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

It's my understanding that for "foreign" authors (ie. author's whose native language does not use the Latin alphabet) the policy or at least the accepted practice on GR is to have multiple profile pages, and to put links directing to the other page(s) in the biographical info field for each author profile.

However from time to time I notice that these author profiles are often switched around, deleted, or merged, so that either the English/Latin page disappears, or the native-language profile disappears.

Is there any way to un-do these author profile merges?

A recent example is http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...

What we see now on the author profile page is the Persian name, but the English bio info. Previously there were two pages, one in Persian (Iranian) and one in English. I don't know how the two were merged and the languages got mixed up.
BTW, I was the one who added links in the biographical info field to link the two - that is, when there were two separate profiles. At the time, the English editions by this author had the English name as primary author, and Persian editions had both the English name and Persian name, as primary & secondary authors.
Now the English editions have the Persian author name appearing twice, in two author fields.

Another example is http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...

I had on my shelf a Greek translation of the author's work. When I first created the book entry, I typed in the author's name in English as primary author, then the two Greek translators as second and third author entries.
Now, I see the primary author of my book entry has switched to Arabic. When I go to that author profile I see that all the info that used to be in English is now in Arabic, but that *another* profile in English for this author exists!
Did someone merge the profile in English with the profile in Arabic, keeping the Arabic one and deleting the English one, and then someone else re-created an English page?
It feels like we are playing musical chairs with the author profiles...

okyrhoe wrote: "It's my understanding that for "foreign" authors (ie. author's whose native language does not use the Latin alphabet) the policy or at least the accepted practice on GR is to have multiple profile pages, and to put links directing to the other page(s) in the biographical info field for each author profile."

That is correct.

"However from time to time I notice that these author profiles are often switched around, deleted, or merged, so that either the English/Latin page disappears, or the native-language profile disappears.

Is there any way to un-do these author profile merges?"

Unfortunately, no.

"Did someone merge the profile in English with the profile in Arabic, keeping the Arabic one and deleting the English one, and then someone else re-created an English page?"

Probably.

The only thing that can be done is to re-add any missing profile, with detailed librarian notes.