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Ken,

As we get deeper into creating a "Common Names" list for Invelos, we are going to run into a lot of situations where we already have someone in our local database who is entered many times in more than one format, such as "John Doe, Jr." and "John Doe Jr.", etc.

The only way to fix these today is to select one of the two as a "Common Name" and then change all of the other profiles to put in both the Common Name and the "as credited" name.  Then you need to delete the "Uncommon name" from the "Common Name" list.

It would be great if you could write a utility that would do a Global find and replace searching each profile for a name and replacing the "find" name with the "replace" name, while entering the "find" name into the "as credited" field.

I know you don't have anything else to do, but this would be a great help to us as we finalize how we are going to determine the "Common Name". 

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Quoting hal9g:

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Ken,

As we get deeper into creating a "Common Names" list for Invelos, we are going to run into a lot of situations where we already have someone in our local database who is entered many times in more than one format, such as "John Doe, Jr." and "John Doe Jr.", etc.

The only way to fix these today is to select one of the two as a "Common Name" and then change all of the other profiles to put in both the Common Name and the "as credited" name.  Then you need to delete the "Uncommon name" from the "Common Name" list.

It would be great if you could write a utility that would do a Global find and replace searching each profile for a name and replacing the "find" name with the "replace" name, while entering the "find" name into the "as credited" field.

I know you don't have anything else to do, but this would be a great help to us as we finalize how we are going to determine the "Common Name". 

Question:  Who gets to determine which "common name" to dump?  Doesn't that put us right smack back into the personal preference arena?

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Quoting hal9g:

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Ken,
...
It would be great if you could write a utility that would do a Global find and replace searching each profile for a name and replacing the "find" name with the "replace" name, while entering the "find" name into the "as credited" field.

Well, I'm not Ken, but...

The next version of Name Variants (see this thread) is due within the next days.  You will then be able to pick one of the name variants for a person as the common name and the program will update all the affected DVDs accordingly to enable full cross-linking. The existing variants will be moved to the Credited As field.

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Quoting hal9g:

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Assuming that this is run against your local db, it could generate different results for different people.  That coud be a problem if they start contributing them.

It evaluates your local data but you choose which of the names to make as the common name.

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While it will take some time, I plan on looking at the credits for a lot of the variants found in my db to check and see if the profiles are correct.  I think just creating a common name based on the fact that an actor seems to have 2 different credits is huge leap of faith in some cases. Some of the variants I've seen look like a middle initial is in the first name field (Bill W./ instead of Bill/W. ) which is an error and not a true variant. I have also found spelling errors in the profile, not the credits (I just submitted a bunch for 24, most of which I submitted originally).

So while the plugin is a great tool, it can not replace common sense and verification that the various names exist in the film credits. 

One interesting bit of trivia, have you noticed that a lot of the name variant people have their IMDB STARmeter index going up significantly in the last week? Looks like we are all trying to find out who some of these people are. 

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It's done now. More infos in this thread.