Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I was trying to make a trivial correction to Fyodor Dostoevsky by combining some editions, and I must have clicked somewhere stupid without realizing it, and accidentally combined Crime and Punishment and The Idiot into the former...

It took a few moments for me to realize the gravity of the accident, and I stopped... can it be undone?!?

I left them combined to keep from doing further harm, so it's a mess right now.

Are all those reviews (1755... groan) now inextricably intermixed?

Awww, I feel terrible.

Richard, We've all made mistakes and most, including this one, are fixable. After every set of combined books is a link called separate tool. If you click on the one that appears after this set of incorrectly combined books, you'll be able to separate out one or the other (or if there are more than two books you can still separate where necessary.) Then, you can recombine the editions/books that should be combined. If these instructions don't make sense, feel free to post again. Thanks for letting us know what happened.

Edit: Richard, Did you delete any editions? If you deleted one or more editions and those deleted editions merged with the incorrect book, I'm not sure if there's a fix for that.

Other librarians?

Richard, it's okay! There's a new-ish librarian function called the "separate tool" just for accidents like these -- at the bottom of that Crime/Idiot list of editions on the main "combine editions" page you'll have a link for "separate tool", and clicking on that will give you a page where it's easy enough to break the two books apart again.

I don't think you did anything that isn't recoverable. The only way reviews are moved from one edition to another is when one edition is deleted. So all you have to do is separate out each edition of "The Idiot" then recombine them. I imagine your biggest problem will be all the foreign language editions - knowing which belongs where.

Yes, I know about the separate tool, but are reviews and ratings attached to the specific editions? Are you sure? Then, yes, if so it will be easy to back out.

No, I didn't delete any editions, but I recalled how that makes all reviews and ratings combine into the dominant one, so I was afraid to make any other changes.

Richard, Since you didn't delete any editions, there are no worries. The separate tool is all that's needed to undo the incorrectly combined books. It might take a bit of time but the fix is easy.

OK, I'll get to work on it.

Thanks. The only reason it will take time is that each book has so many editions.

Yup. Okay, done as far as I can.

It is ironic that one of the books was The Idiot, which is what I feel like.

Using a combination of Worldcat and Babelfish, and not listing the obvious ones (such as 'Crimen y castigo'):
Crime and Punishment:
* Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Russian)
* Преступление и наказание (Russian)
* جنایت و مکافات
الجريمة و العقاب
* Verbrechen und Strafe (German)
* Schuld und Sühne (German again? but "Debt and ?")
* Misdaad en straf (Dutch)
* Zbrodnia i kara (Polish)
* Brott och straff (Swedish)
* Kejahatan dan Hukuman (Indonesian)

Idiot:
* Идиот (Russian)
* ηλίθιος (Greek)
* ابله

There are a lot of what I suspect are Farsi/Persian titles in Dostoevsky's books that need to be combined. Or Arabic... I'm no expert.

Richard, Thanks for fixing it and thanks for the information.

You might want to put those foreign language books with a request for combining to librarians who know the language(s) into this thread:

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/8...

Thanks!

Hi everyone

I've accidentally merged editions of different books but the separate tool isn't loading for me; https://www.goodreads.com/book/separa... - is it working for anyone else?

Is there another way to restore these books back please?

Loads for me.
I separated the two "Tweet of faith" from the "System error" books.

Wow - many thanks for the super fast help Gerd - much appreciated