Ken:

One thought, I am running into  a number of Cast and Crew which involve typos, it would seem these will need to be eliminated. One of the more obvious that comes to mind recently is Jirina Trebická, now her Actual OnScreen credit involves a number of diacriticals which we current can't deal with, but one of them is NOT á, this is apears to be a typo based on the name detail used in the On Screen credit.

Skip

Quoting skipnet50:

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I'm ready for it ken. testing sounds like a great idea to me

Snarbo, you misse the point of HBC debate, methinks, because of our sysetm with Contribution Notes, which gives us a "paper trail" documentation is the single biggest issue. If you rpvide documentatio I will accept almost anything.

Skip

No I did not miss the point on the HBC debate. At least I don't think I did.

Even when documentation was provided some people still argued the it should be parsed H/B/C despite documentation proving H/BC. But then that is water under the bridhe as they say.

I can also see the point hydr0x is bringing up concerning the asain names, until we as westerners learn that our way is not the only way this debate will continue until the sun goes supernova.

It might be a good idea for the name parsing / foreign names to be sorted before this finalised, but agreed it should be beta tested first by just a few instead of all premium users.

Steve

Quoting Tracer:

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Unless I missed something here, Ken's tool is only going to help us determine what the common name should be according to the Profiler DB.  It is not going to eliminate name phrasing, or other issues that crop up such as typos.  Nor will it eliminate the need for the contributor to do research before making a contribtution.

Example actor named Jonny Smith has been credited as in all his films as Jonny Smith but, let's say just once as John Smith.

Another actor named John Smith has been credited as John Smith in all his films.

Using the tool a contibutor could easily make the determination that all Jonny Smith's films should be John Smith thinking that they are the same actor.

Am I right in my thinking Ken?

That's the biggest stumbling block I can see with the "credited as" system. If a contributor is not familiar with an actor's work, how are they to know that what is in the credits is not their common name?
Having said that, I still think it's a good way of linking performances together, if we can get the common name hurdle out of the way! 

I also don't understand why so many people attacked Hal's suggestion so quickly (although I have to admit Hal, it took me a while to work out what you were suggesting!), I quite liked the idea of minimising the increase of the actor's database until the "common names" system was fully implemented. The biggest problem with it though was, again, even if you do find a similar name already in the database, how are you to know it's the same person?

Quoting Tracer:

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Example actor named Jonny Smith has been credited as in all his films as Jonny Smith but, let's say just once as John Smith.

Another actor named John Smith has been credited as John Smith in all his films.

Using the tool a contibutor could easily make the determination that all Jonny Smith's films should be John Smith thinking that they are the same actor.

I don't know if this is already in Ken's plan for this as a feature, but something that may be helpful would be if this lookup also listed the the movies associated with the actor as well.  So then we could see the links all ready established for that actor under that name and could help narrow down who's who with some of those close names.  Well, assuming you are all ready familiar with the person's work, but at least it gives you a hint that you got the right person.

In an ideal world, if you entered a credit that was already in use as a "Credited As" name (other than the one matching the Common Name), the program would so notify you, and ask whether this is the same person.

Heh, and I ditched my post about not needing to know the common name, only a common name.

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If Joe Schmoe does 10 films where he is credited as Joe Schmoe, that becomes his common name. But then his next 11 films have him credited as Joe C. Schmoe.  Does his common name then need to be updated again at that point?

If it's easy to identify and make the change for, I wouldn't mind that at all.  For example, in the Name Variants plugin you can click on one name out of a set and simply select that as the 'common name', and it will automatically update all the related records with appropriate common name + credited as.  So if you can see that for a given common name with, say, 30 entries, only 10 of them use the common name and the other 20 different (consistent) spelling, swapping them around so only 10 use Credited As would seem fine.

Of course this depends on how direct a transfer this becomes, and how much peer review is available.  Random design idea:  view a long list of possibly related names.  Select one set of names from that list (like the plugin, mainly).  Have a checkmark on each name variant where you can select the related names, and then hit a button to say that 'this' one is the common name for that set, and submit that information for review.

Whether that is only reviewed by Ken and Gerri, or if it goes to some sort of voting system like the disc updates depends on how elaborate this becomes.  Probably need to be able to submit notes on the selection process anyway.

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Importantly, changing the common name for particular DVDs to align with the most common credited as field will have no effect on the lookup.

I'm not sure I understand this part.  If you change the common name for particular DVDs (but not all the DVDs that that name is present in), how would you not be affecting the lookup process?  Or are you saying that the online lookup would be read-only, and we'd still be changing the values through the program?

Of course that goes back to a question I asked months ago and never got answered: If we change the common name locally and upload that profile, will that change be propogated to other profiles that refer to that particular name?

Edit: wow, I missed 2 pages of posts. May need to update this....

Quoting Ken Cole:

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Quoting hal9g:

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It is my understanding that not only will you see the "most common occurrence" of the name in the "credited as" field of the main database, but you would also see a list of all of the names that are already linked to that "Common Name".  That will help in many cases, but for fairly new (or seldom occurring) actors, it may not provide much in the way of direction.

Ken, please correct me if I have mis-spoken.

This is correct.  As mentioned above, it also will show the films which list that credited name.

Hopefully a later program version will do this locally too, at least for names in my local database.

If I am not mistaken, then the current program will tell me that the actor doesn't exist, if I type in "Robert DeNiro", as he is actually "Robert De Niro"...