Canonical title etiquette

I'm pretty sure the canonical titles entered in the common knowledge for this work: (/work/944826/) are not necessary.

Is there a consensus on whether it is better etiquette to delete those canonical titles or to leave them alone?

Thanks

https://www.librarything.com/work/944826/

I have deleted both of them.

There are two main reasons for canonical titles:

1) The winning title has extraneous material on it like series information.

2) The title is in a different language fron the site you are on.

Canonical titles can make difficulties for combiners.

>2 MarthaJeanne: Oh, yeah, thank you for the linkification

>3 MarthaJeanne: Well, you didn't directly answer my question. Yes, it was because those canonical titles didn't serve either of those purposes that I was pretty sure they were unnecessary. I just wanted to make sure that I wouldn't somehow make things worse by deleting them (and not because I was worried about an edit war with whoever originally entered them). I believe that by deleting them you have indirectly answered my question. So, thanks again.

One can sometimes argue about whether or not a CT is warranted. There cannot possibly be two 'Authoritative titles'.

>1 Foretopman: Delete. :)

If there are two of them, someone messed up. You can have as many alternative titles as you want but the Canonical title is always a single (combinations can cause a bit of oddity).

And it should really be set when really needed - when the winning title is in a different language or when it is somehow malformed (extra material on it for example). Think of them as a new coat of paint - they make it harder to see the structural damage -- you still want it for cosmetic reasons but all structural issues need to be resolved before you go for the paint.

PS: And apparently while I was handling other things MarthaJeanne posted and cleared this one.

>7 AnnieMod:

One could argue the "(Models & Toys)" in the title is extra junk (series designator from Amazon?) and remove it in the Canonical Title. If that is done there are 5 or 6 other titles in the "Dover Models & Toys" series that can also be similarly tidied up.

>8 andyl: Sure, nothing in what I said contradicts that :) As long as there is no structural issue (miscombined works), the coat of paint can hide the junk in the title.

When this thread started, the poor work had 2 canonical titles due to an unfinished/uncleaned combination: https://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/changelog.php?f=21&item=944826&.... Keeping both was a bad idea thus the delete. :)

I personally rarely add a CT for series name in the title but I don't remove them if someone does add them unless a simple recalculate can get us there anyway and I am working on the book anyway and spot it.

Another common case that warrants a canonical is when you add info that differentiates it from different works with the same title, e.g. shorty story, movie, etc

And when the "winning" title is too edition specific.

But, yes, please use them sparingly.

What would be the best for manga series? The calculated title is usually the series name and the number of the volume, sometimes with the word "volume" or "vol." (or something similar in your language). For series which are not fully published in your country yet, or are not very popular but translated into multiple languages, it can look quite inconsistent.
Some series also have an extra title for each volume. Some editions have this title written on the cover, most don't. Imported data also rarely starts with this title.
How do you handle these two cases?