I’ve been trying all day to get Paperpile set up for co-authoring. I have gotten exactly nowhere, and I’m a little frustrated.
I have an existing stash of papers I intend to use in Zotero. Those papers, 300 out of the 3500 I have in Zotero, need to end up in a Paperpile shared folder, along with attachments and organisation.
Importing from Zotero is a little slow because I can only first get in all 3500, then prune whatever I don’t need. Fine.
But there’s no way to copy my folder structure over to the shared folder other than manually recreating and populating them. Not fun.
So I decided the just make sure everything was cleanly tagged in Zotero for those 300, dropped them in a single folder, imported again, pruned again (because PP doesn’t seem to do incremental updates from Zotero, just a full import, creating 3500 duplicates to deal with), but finally, everything is in, I copy the flat-but-tagged folder contents over to a shared folder, and “delete unused tags”…
And see all the tags in my shared folder disappear as well. Come on. No warning, nothing. But it gets better!
After emptying my trash, the shared folder is empty.
WHY?! Are we not supposed to actually use shared folders? This is crazy! The sole reason why I’d want to use GDocs is because it allows shared authoring, and shared authoring means shared folders. I have a nicely curated set of papers I expect to use, I don’t want my co-author to have to do the work again.