Make it easier to edit your own book than it is to edit common knowledge

I know this isn't going to happen, but...

When you go to the Main Page for a work, you are presented with a list of editable fields including title. ("Canonical Title" isn't going to mean anything special to a new user.) If a new user wants to edit the title of their book, this will be the natural and obvious place to do it. Likewise the Other Authors section with "Add other authors" is right there.

In reality, of course, for a user to edit information about their own book, they have to go to the Edit Book page, but why would they do that?

My suggestion is that the Main Page should shown the Common Knowledge and Other Authors fields in non-editable form, and if the user owns the work, there should be a section for editing the most common fields of the user's book record, with a link to the full Edit Book page (multiple sections if the user has multiple copies).

Common Knowledge and Other Authors should only be editable from the Common Knowledge page, with a clear indication that it is shared information that must apply to all copies of the work.

I've seen too many instances where the Canonical Title of a work has been edited so that it clearly reflects an individual's own copy, or instances where users edit the work's Other Authors without editing their own, and then wonder why their copy doesn't link to the right author page.

Actually, this makes sense. I'd support this change

So would I. From Your Library, the default settings logically put the title in the first or second column and clicking on that takes you to the shared main book page. To get to the edit page they have to click on the pencil icon which isn't nearly as obvious. So I agree that the navigation tends to lead the user to the main work page where he is presented with some editable fields where it may not be obvious that they're not editing only their record.

This is an excellent suggestion, and I would like to see it implemented yesterday, or even last week. When I was first editing books, I made changes in CK before I realized that it was singular, and that my changes affected everyone. It's not remotely obvious if you're new to the site that editing your own book and editing CK are not all one and the same.

Brilliant suggestion, and I hope that this one's quickly acted upon. Soon.

I too think this is a very fine suggestion, and would help with new-user confusion on how to edit the titles and authors they see in their catalog.

Bump in response to a long-time user not realizing that Common Knowledge affected anything other than her own books:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/205717#5349378

Or at a minimum, put the "you are editing CK which affects everyone" popup on the work page as well as in the catalog. It only shows up once in a while (if you don't edit CK for a while, it comes back), but it's something at least.

Pop-ups don't work. usability studies show that people click them away without reading. Goodreads has solved it in a clever way. If you click on a book to edit, you are taken to the edit-page. The first half of the page is data of your copy/edition (clearly labelled as such), the other half of the page is the data of the work. Again, clearly labelled as such and with a warning text above.

Dunno, popups work for me - that is, when it pops up I always glance at it and am reminded oh yeah, CK. 99.999% of the time I know perfectly well it's CK, every once in a while I've forgotten that field is CK. And personally, if I'm given a long page with sections, unless that warning is in red with a Blink tag I'm likely to skim over it looking at the fields where I can actually do things. YMMV - belt and suspenders is probably the way to go, add the popup to the work page and also a notice that "this is not _your_ data, it's shared".

>9 jjmcgaffey: Agreed. Let's keep CK off of the edit book page. I think that would add to number of people who make mistakes.

Yet another user unaware that they could edit their own data:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/219585#5491729

>11 r.orrison: and she's a 5+ year active member.

Popups are annoying and people are used to click them away without reading. Perhaps it could be possible to use different colors for fields that affects everyone? The textfields have different css IDs, so it should be possible.

I'm new here and for me it would be helpful to understand, what is only my book and what will affect everyone.

Bump. Another user who thinks CK fields are for personal data: https://www.librarything.com/topic/236765

Bump. A user who found it easier to report a bug than fix their own data: https://www.librarything.com/topic/254750

Bump: Here's a book, entered by only one user. That same user has set the Canonical Title, rather than editing the title of their book: https://www.librarything.com/work/11372362

(I don't disagree with what they've set as the Canonical Title, but if that's what you think the title should be, why not edit your own copy?)

Because they use the series information in the title in searching? Which is kind of silly, but at least setting the canonical title makes it invisible to anyone who doesn't chase down the book in their library.

I can't tell, on that one, if it's an example of someone who didn't realize the difference between CK and their own data, or someone sophisticatedly using CK to mitigate the way they want their own data to be.

Most of them, yeah, it's just not understanding what CK is.

If your title is different from the Canonical title, you're going to see the way you entered it. So it doesn't make sense to use Canonical to fix your own title, because it won't.

>18 PhaedraB: That depends what columns you have set to display. If you have the Title & Author (however it's specifically labeled, I don't recall) one, that pulls from CK. I used it initially, it saved a column, but it made me nuts seeing stupid stuff in it so I had to stop, lol.

>19 .Monkey.: That sounds like a bug.

>20 jjwilson61: No, It's called 'Work: Title and Author'. It is specifically meant to be the work information. Set it up in your catalogue next to your title and author and it becomes easy to see combination problems.

Yeah as MJ said, not a bug. It's the work info, and for whatever reason it's the only option for combining the title & author into one column. Annoying, but whatever.

If development time is being spent on CK, please consider this.