Author combination issues

I want to assign a work to the conductor Bruno Walter, who has a disambiguation page for multiple authors of that name. Going to that page, I saw only a Bruno Walter (2), no (1), and a ton of unassigned works. I assigned one of the works to (1) and his photo appeared there, but no other CK data. On the disambiguation page there was a warning that he had "issues that need to be cleared up". Clicking that took me to a bunch of CK data but no indication of who it's attached to.

I think that what happened is Bruno Walter (1) got somehow deleted or moved and the remaining unassigned works and the CK data are now orphans. I planned to just move it all back to (1) by hand but I wasn't sure if there was something else going on here that I'm missing.

I believe the CK for that author dates back to before the page was split. When a split happens any existing CK (bar the disambiguation note) shows up in the "Combination issues" section where you currently see it, and nobody has yet cleaned it up for that author.

I think it's not that (1) was deleted, but that after the split nobody assigned any works to (1), perhaps they weren't certain enough to assign so left them as Unknown (though I can see many works have been now assigned). The history of the split and the assignments is visible at the end of the page: https://www.librarything.com/author_split.php?author=walterbruno&page=assign

So you should be fine to transfer the CK for the conductor into (1).

However be aware that there is a bug that will block you from clearing all the German CK so don't worry if some fields seem "undeletable". Bug report is here if interested.

Edit: clarified first paragraph.

Thanks! And duly noted about the German CK.

The playwright Teddy Lamb transitioned to Tabby Lamb. When attempting to combine, I keep ending up with Teddy Lamb as the main author when it should be Tabby Lamb. Thank you for helping.

>4 gaytheater: Already responded to: https://www.librarything.com/topic/343462#8060209

>4 gaytheater:
>The playwright Teddy Lamb transitioned to Tabby Lamb. When attempting to combine, I keep ending up with Teddy Lamb as the main author when it should be Tabby Lamb.

I think this is unavoidable; the system uses the most-catalogued name (for the URL and for the calculated name at the top of the page), when author names are combined. I think what would be appropriate here is to set a Canonical Name in the author page after combination, and a disambiguation note. But I haven't encountered a case exactly like this, you might want to seek further advice in the Combiners! group if that doesn't answer it for you.

(Edit: ah I see, my reply crossposted with you >5 AnnieMod:)

>6 Nevov: Thank you both.

>7 gaytheater: >6 Nevov: >5 AnnieMod:
Looking further at the author pages, the more popular name is the new/current name. So not exactly sure why the combination is going the opposite way around (could it be books in private catalogues?), I've tried a couple of times and I get the same happening. Might be worth trying again tomorrow (to give the server a bit of time in case it's got stuck with cached information and thinks the numbers are different) and if you still get the same happen, maybe worth a bug report.

A second question: LT assigns the British playwright JJ Green (no punctuation) to the prolific British-Australian science fiction author J. J. Green. Would I solve this by separating the authors and adding the Canonical Name JJ Green to the appropriate record?

>8 Nevov: counting Works vs counting books if I remember correctly. On the surface, one of the names is more popular but when you dig down, things change a bit.

>9 gaytheater: No because for LT, they are the same author record: greenjj - punctuation is ignored for the ids. So you cannot really separate. You need to split the record basically and then assign a canonical name to the split portion of needed.

>11 AnnieMod: Thank you. Done

I do not know if this an author issue or a work issue. When attempting to enter a work not yet cataloged on LibraryThing by Mojisola Adebayo (the work is "Mojisola Adebayo: Plays Two) the work Toller: Plays Two by Ernest Toller is displayed. The Toller work is incorrectly attributed to Adebayo on her author page and does not appear on his page. Thanks for the help.

If you look on the 'Editions' link on that work (in the left hand panel), it shows what items have been put together to make the work. When I looked, I saw the following in there:

Mojisola Adebayo: Plays Two/Adebayo, Mojisola/Manual Entry (1 copy separate)
Mojisola Adebayo: Plays Two/Adebayo, Mojisola/ISBN 1786828006 (1 copy separate)
Mojisola Adebayo: Plays Two: I Stand Corrected; Asara and the Sea-Monstress; Oranges and Stones; The Interrogation of Sandra Bland; STARS (Oberon Modern Playwrights)/Adebayo, Mojisola/ISBN 1786828006 (1 copy separate)
Toller: Plays Two (Oberon Modern Playwrights)/Toller, Ernst/ISBN 1783191260 (1 copy separate)

You can see the two different titles in there together, which means it's been miscombined in the past, either automatically or by someone's error. I will separate it now, not a tricky thing to do, things like this can be raised in the Combiners! group if you hit other ones like it (there is a "Please Fix This Book" thread):
https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/460/Combiners%21
Or you can learn yourself, if it is the sort of helping you like to take care of yourself.

>14 Nevov: Thank you for the fix and the education. Done.

Oh dear. I tried to combine Conrad Dobler with one of his names that had been entered as dobler. It defaulted to dobler. I can’t figure out how to point it to his full name. Can anybody help? Mr. Dobler died yesterday so people might want to look at him and I’d like to clean it up and enter his data.

>16 varielle:

Well, first, full names should not be combined with a page that is surname-only. There are a slew of other authors with the same surname.

I have separated the pages, entered Dobler's full name as the author of They Call Me Dirty, and that put the book on the correct page.

>17 lilithcat: Thank you. I was tearing my hair and I don’t have much hair left.