Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

We added a neat new feature today - the ability to view who's been changing data for a given book or author!

This is useful in case something gets messed up, you can check the change log and see what the old value was. We've been keeping a change log for some time now, but haven't been storing what was edited. As of today we now store the actual edits.

To find the change log for any author or book, click on 'edit', then 'librarian edits'.

For example, check out J.K. Rowling's changes: http://www.goodreads.com/author/edits...

*tests*

8)

I'm assuming this isn't retroactive, but tracking from now on?

Neat, thanks Otis! :D

And looks like it is retroactive, John. I've been poking around the edited logs and saw some as early as August '07.

It's only partially retroactive. Anything before the new changes is listed as "so and so edited such and such book" but does not actually explain what the edit was. New edits actually include what the change was, which is much more informative.

Oh, cool, I see the difference. Thanks for pointing that out!

Michael is right - we've been tracking who edited what for some time, but only yesterday finally figured out how to track the exact changes.

Er, how is it that "deleted member" is making lots of edits?

Rivka, Good catch. Was assuming they had to be making the edits before they were deleted but these are very recent.

*LAUGH*

I think I figured out who "deleted member" is! It's GR/Amazon doing automated edits -- that's why it doesn't know who to assign credit to! :D

lol. You are totally right Rivka!

I'll have to do something about that :)

Aw. ;)

It was kind of funny once I knew what it really was. But I see you've fixed it already.

Yay, this is an awesome feature.

Though regarding what Rivka said, do changes on Amazon update entries on Good Reads? I could see that becoming a problem.

#13 - "I could see that becoming a problem."

Absolutely. A hung number of the edits I make are correcting Amazon errors...if they should somehow be able to undo them...

Awesome! Yet another thing I've often found myself wanting. Thanks GR crew!

AFAIK, Amazon's API only fills in empty fields. So a book with no description will get one, one with no book cover will get one, etc.

It does not (and Otis, please correct me if this is wrong!) displace existing information.

You are correct Rivka, we don't replace existing data. The only exception to that is sometimes we refresh data from Amazon (descriptions, covers, etc), but only if nobody on the site has changed them.