Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I apologize if this post is confusing. If so, please reply and I'll try to make it less confusing. :)

This started out as a post for the disambig update request thread. (And I will doubtless post about this there later.) Then I realized it was a little ... complicated. So I have a few questions.

First, we have Charles^Finch, the author of mysteries set in 19th century England. And also Charles^^Finch, the author of various books about Africa.

Somewhat horribly, this author is apparently also Charles S. Finch III. And Charles S. Finch. (See his bio for more info.)

(I haven't been able to fully separate the works of these two authors, as I've gotten "An unexpected error occurred." pages when I tried to view them. I'll try again later.)

To further complicate things, a (probably different?) Charles S. Finch is listed as a co-author on one edition of Art of Walt Disney (but not the others).

He's also listed as the author of Norman Rockwell: 332 Magazine Covers. I have the feeling that this is the same books as Norman Rockwell 332 Magazine Covers and that Charles S. Finch shouldn't be listed as the author.

I think that American Watercolors has Charles S. Finch incorrectly listed. Worldcat and my local library's catalogue both seem to list only Christopher Finch as the author of the above three books, and not Charles Finch. (Setting aside for the moment whether Christopher Finch and Christopher Robin Finch are the same person -- I suspect they are.)

So, I guess my general questions are -- we still don't have an AKA function, right? And policy is to not homogenize author name variations when they match what was on the cover?

Specifically -- does anyone else have any information that might indicate that Charles S. Finch is properly or improperly listed as an author for the three books I mentioned above? I'm very strongly tempted to remove him. (I can get physical copies of at least some of these books and will delay pending either that or other conclusive evidence.)

Idle meta question: assuming that Charles S. Finch is incorrectly listed on the books mentioned above, any idea what might have caused that? If it is an error, it seems to have propagated throughout most of the Internet, or at least the portion of it that's concerned with books.

The only part I feel equipped to answer is this:

Nikki wrote: "Idle meta question: assuming that Charles S. Finch is incorrectly listed on the books mentioned above, any idea what might have caused that? If it is an error, it seems to have propagated throughout most of the Internet, or at least the portion of it that's concerned with books."

Amazon. They are the source of 99% of the bad book info, largely because their API is so popular.