Quote:
Originally Posted by speakingtohe
If for example, I have an author listed as Francis Paul Wilson and F. Paul Wilson whom I know are the same (human intervention  ) How would them being listed in the folder structure as 8079 and 11136 and then being consolidated to 11136 make a difference from them being consolidated to F. Paul Wilson? |
First and aforemost, if you have *only* F. Paul Wilson, but decide to use his full name and update it to Francis Paul Wilson, then – with numeric directories – you have no on-disk changes at all, only metadata changes. Ditto for book titles (which I edit more often then authors)
In case of merge, if we insist on 1-1 between id and author, then copying turns necessary. But maybe one could just let have a few id's mapped to the same name - then again, no copying.