Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

So I'm not going to name names because I understand that's against Goodreads rules, but this is a pretty noticeable problem.

There's a specific librarian who keeps changing the default description of English-language books to the Chinese-language description. I've dug into the edits on some specific books that I've shelved and found that she's done it to each of them throughout this year, and though I've made threads to correct them, I don't know how many other books she's been doing this to. Is there any way to let her know to stop doing this?

Drace wrote: "So I'm not going to name names because I understand that's against Goodreads rules, but this is a pretty noticeable problem.

There's a specific librarian who keeps changing the default description..."

Hi Drace

If she accepts messages, you could message her & ask her to stop.

Or you could contact Support. Give at least three examples so they see it is an ongoing problem. Mention that you have had to get other librarians to correct this.

AFAIK, if this is the first complaint the librarian will just get a warning.

Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂ wrote: "If she accepts messages, you could message her & ask her to stop.

Or you could contact Support. Give at least three examples so they see it is an ongoing problem. Mention that you have had to get other librarians to correct this."

While the librarian's favorite books and about me sections are in English, all of her reviews are in Chinese and she seems to exclusively read Chinese editions. My Chinese skills are non-existent, so there's almost certainly a language barrier there.

I think contacting Support might be the way to go here. Do you know what topic this would fall under? "Report spam, abuse, or other issue" seems like it might be the right one, but I'm not 100% sure.

That or "other" would be right I think.

The subject line could say something like "librarian making against policy edits"

The librarian concerned (I would think) must speak some English though. Even before the quiz you had to write why you wanted to be a librarian.

Update: submitted a message to Goodreads staff using the "Other" topic. Gave them as much information as I could and linked them the edits pages for three books that the librarian has made incorrect changes to (one of which I have a thread going about right now).

Also worth noting that for some reason, she's deleting the original publication date every time she changes the description. No clue why.

I've seen the original publication date disappear sometimes when combining. It will for whatever reason grab the date from the one edition you're combining with the larger group (and the one edition usually has a blank original pub date) so it may not be a deliberate deletion of the original pub date.

I've also seen it where it will grab the description from the lone edition and set it as the default description. So it's possible she may be combining a chinese edition with other editions and it's pulling the description from that and setting it as the default?

Melanie wrote: "I've seen the original publication date disappear sometimes when combining. It will for whatever reason grab the date from the one edition you're combining with the larger group (and the one editio..."

I checked the edits log for three books I've seen the problem happen on, and as far as I can tell she's not combining anything. According to the "Librarian Edits for This Work" column, she's just changing the description and removing publication dates.

I suppose it's possible that the Librarian Edits column doesn't pick up combining, but I'm not a librarian so I couldn't tell you.

Well it took two goes but I combined a Portugese edition with the rest of Madam Will You Talk. The Portugese edition had the original year of publication & it retained that, plus it now has the original title. The changelog shows I have done a combine & my librarian edits show I have done a combine.

That doesn't mean the other librarian isn't experiencing a bug though.

I was editing some quotes earlier. Sometimes the book title stayed, sometimes it disappeared. Made editing the quotes a bit slow.

I'm pretty sure the original publication date deletion is a bug, not an intentional thing that the librarian is doing. I have seen that in some (not all) of my own librarian edits; pretty sure I sent a report to Support a few months ago.

The default-description change might be as well—I'm doing far, far fewer combines than I used to because I noticed that, often, doing a combine overwrites the existing default description with a blank or useless ('Excellent Book') description. It's not 100% of the time, though. Additionally, sometimes if you change the description on a single edition (even if you do not check the 'set this as default description' box), the system will decide that that should be the new default.

Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂ wrote: "AFAIK, if this is the first complaint the librarian will just get a warning."

Hopefully.

Thanks for the clarification, everyone.

While I'm here, in case anyone wants to correct the most recent default description change problem I've found, I have a thread for it here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Drace wrote: "While I'm here, in case anyone wants to correct the most recent default description change problem I've found, I have a thread for it here: https://www.good..."

That one was caused by combining the Chinese edition with the other editions.

Drace wrote: "Thanks for the clarification, everyone.

While I'm here, in case anyone wants to correct the most recent default description change problem I've found, I have a thread for it here: https://www.good..."

Since your issues may have been caused by a bug it might be best to contact Support again & link to this thread. :)