EditBug:10080 Unmerge on short story has unexpected results

• EditBug:10080 Unmerge on short story has unexpected results OPEN I am pretty sure this is a dataloss bug, rather than as designed. I had edited a collection of Aldiss's to have "Brian Aldiss" throughout, rather than Brian W. Aldiss; then I realized I'd made the same mistake we've been discussing since the other pubs for those short story titles probably used "Brian W. Aldiss". So I unmerged a short story, "Out of Reach". It had been in three pubs: this one, this one, and this one. After the unmerge it disappeared from two of them; it's only in the second one of the three above now. Prior to the unmerge three pubs were listed; I was expecting that after the unmerge, two more title records would be generated, each pointing to one of the three pubs. Mike Christie (talk) 09:58, 6 Jan 2007 (CST)

This is like the merge problem that Ahasuerus reported - the merge and unmerge tools were designed purely to break up novels, collections, etc., not for individual titles within a collection. I've removed the link to unmerge until I have time to completely redesign it.

In fact, I'm not exactly sure what unmerging a shortstory from a collection SHOULD do. rmtitle will remove a title from a collection, which sounds like what you needed from the description. Unmerge creates new titles from the publication name, so the unmerge above created two new stories in Aldiss' bibliography:

• Galaxies Like Grains of Sand
• Authentic Science Fiction, #83 (August) 1957

So it pretty much did exactly what it was designed to do. I never expected people to use these tools on shortfiction, so it's best to put them aside for now. Alvonruff 10:12, 6 Jan 2007 (CST)

While we are on the subject of Unmerge, how do we determine which unmerged Title gets all the Awards associated with the original Title? Ahasuerus 10:14, 6 Jan 2007 (CST)

Good question. I've removed the bogus titles from the two publications in question (which removed them from the Aldiss bibliography as well), but I have not added back the story to either of those two publications. Alvonruff 10:17, 6 Jan 2007 (CST)

I'll fix up the pubs; no problem. Yes, I should have used rmtitle; it just occurred to me mid-editing that the unmerge would do the same thing, so I tried it. Thanks for the explanation. Maybe we should have a requirements page to figure out how the unmerge should work? Mike Christie (talk) 10:23, 6 Jan 2007 (CST)