Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I just noticed something... a bit odd:

Fyodor Dostoevsky / Фёдор Достоевский
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...


Is that how we deal now with different spellings of authors' names? Do you like it? Should I leave it? Should I change it? I personally don't like having the name written twice, but I don't want to be ruining someone's work... There's a librarian note attached... Suggestions?

I personally don't like the double name. It's really ugly and I think just having the name in one language is enough. We don't have double names for Japanese authors or Chinese authors.

Technically, the Russian (Cyrillic) spelling is the original one. The one that corresponds to the original language his books were written in. So if it were going to be changed to anything, that's what it should be getting changed to. But then the majority of GR users wouldn't be able to find his books.

So while I agree it's a kludge, I think we should leave it.

Then should we change all the Japanese/Chinese/other authors to reflect this as well?

Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy, Gogol, Nabokov - we stick with the English spelling there... (?)

Any of these kludges are (hopefully) temporary -- if they ever figure out how to make the aka feature work.

For me the main name should with English spelling and original name in section About this author.

The other way to do it is to have two author profiles which each contain a link to the other (eg, 望月 淳 and Jun Mochizuki). It makes it harder to combine books, but it keeps the author name showing up correctly and it keeps incoming books from Amazon or B&N showing up on the correct author profiles.

That's definitely the preferred method. If someone WANTED to go through the 1000 or so Dostoevsky books (or even just the few hundred in Russian) and fix them, that would be great.

Ok, I've got a question, I found my offender* and I want to contact her and ask to please stop mergeing and renaming Russian authors. Her profile is private and she's not accepting messages. Is there some secret way to contact librarians?

__________________
*There was more than just Dostoevsky. Tolstoy, Gogol, Pushkin, Nekrasov. "Boris Pasternak/Борис Пастернак" really got to me. It used to be 2 author profiles: Boris Pasternak and Борис Пастернак I'm in a process of reverting it back to how it was. It's pain in the ass.

And this is her: http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/15...

Kasia wrote: "Is there some secret way to contact librarians?"

No, although you could try using the Librarian's Note.

Yup, done.