Quoting T!M:

Quote:
Quoting Gadgeteer:

Quote:
Personally I agree with you and would rather see a very simplistic parsing with no exceptions. However, I don't think you'll get agreement across the board.

Glad to hear that. I agree that some of the more vocal users will probably protest loudly. While in fact, such a change would lead to less disagreements than the current situation does. Now me and Skip probably disagree about 200 names, of which probably less than five can be documented in any way. A change like this would result Skip in having to let the "culturally correct" parsing of these five go, while we would then suddeny agree on the other 195 names. All in all, that seems like a good result for everybody. So I don't really understand the resistance. Let's just hope that Ken makes a wise decision...

Quote:
I would like to hear reasons as to why it's useful to have H//B C instead of H/B/C? Other than to be culturally correct.

I don't think there are. As I said before: the Helena Bonham Carter debate is the single cause for my change in handling three-piece names. Before Helena Bonham Carter, I parsed them all alike. Now I try to assess for every name whether the middle word is either part of the last name or part of the middle name. Documentation on parsing is basically non-existant, so you usually have to decide by yourself. That's the whole story: with Helena Bonham Carter we opened a can of worms that cannot be easily closed. If we do want to end the confusion, the solution had better not leave anything open to interpretation - culturally correct or not.

Edit: to Skip, once more, documentation on what is (culturally) "correct" parsing is basically non-existant. Sure, someone managed to dig up a complete family history on Helena Bonham Carter, but I assure you this is an exception. Can you show me a dozen three-piece names that have been properly documented? For argument's sake, let's say there are indeed a dozen. Wouldn't you say that parsing those few "wrongly" would be a small price to pay to get agreement all accross the board on ALL hundreds, maybe thousands of other names consisting of more than two words?

Tim:

My point exactly. You are mmaking an assumption which cannot be supported, even CULTURALLY. You assumption MAY be correct and it MAY not be correct. It may be traditional to load a family name as part of a double-barreled last name, but tradition is not law and many traditions get changed and revised and in some cases totrally ignored by people ALL the time. If you are unable to document it, then what makes you believe your assumption is correct and I don't make assuimptions for the reasons I have outlined. I recognize that PBH, might be P/B/H and it might be P/BH, in view of the fields that Ken has given us, entering P/B/H is something that every user can enter every time with no additional research or knowledge. If you can document P//BH great do it, I'll back it, if you can't then don't use "I think" and "my culture says this or that". You don't see me saying that, because my culture is irrelevant, I don't care what the fields are called, I see three pieces of data and three fields, and we have a procedure for handling more than three. So that is where we start, because every user can do it every time with no additional knowledge other than what is on the screen.

I am amused at the current attempt to catalog Common Names for all of us, especially since some of the users involved have correctly pointed out that not every users will come here and read the forums, so how are those people to know what has been done. Some users don't even check their votes or may even be unaware that there is a voting system. The system HAS to be easy to implement independent of ANY particular cultural proclivities and the system I have described does that and eneables the data based on nothing more than what is seen On Screen to be entered by everybody in every instance. You have to try and decide wehether it is a family name, which could lead us down a bad road.

Let's take an amusing possibility, a bit bizzare granted but... George George George. I would do this as G/G/G, someone might thing it should be GGG// because George is a first name, someone else might think G//GG because George is family name and someone else might rationally conclude //GGG because George is a last name. Now the guy is unknown and you can provide NO documenmtation. OK Hot shot, pop quiz....what do you do?  G/G/G seems best based on what we have been given, three fields three separate and distinct pieces of data, any other way is dependent upon on someone's cultural issues which MAY or may NOT be accurate.

Skip

Skip: as for your example, I'd go for G/G/G as well, so you don't have to worry there... 

But hey, maybe we should indeed start bugging Ken about going to back to a single name field. No parsing at all - wouldn't that be nice...

Quoting T!M:

Quote:
Quoting Gadgeteer:

Quote:
At the risk of repeating myself, we just need a common, understandable & indisputable default starting standard, with the provision of documentation to allow for differing from the default.

At the risk of repeating myself: this will NEVER be solved as long as the name of the field doesn't match - even if only in the eyes of some of us - with what we're to enter into it. It is beyond me why you would want to introduce another discrepancy between the name of the field and its usage!

The "production year" issue is far from solved, too: try "correcting" to production year to 2003 when the end credits give a clear 2002 copyright date on a couple of profiles... Despite the rules, it's very hard to convince the no-voters, let me assure you.

Without renaming (or removing!) the field, you can put me down for a firm "no!".

It will never be solved as long as there are one or two or three who aren't willing to compromise, and who seem to prefer personal preference over a standard.

Quoting EnryWiki:

Quote:
Methinx the Rules should set different standards for different nationalities.

If we are talking of an American actor, we could presume that the "word(s) in between" actually is his/her Middle Name, unless proven otherwise.

If the actor is from a country where the Middle Name concept does not exist, using it would be nonsense in my view, and just bring confusion, so the "standard" should be a *national* standard, according to local usage.

...Unless Ken changes the fields to "first word in the name", "words in between", "last word in the name"! 

Nearly everybody has a middle name, regardless of what culture you come from.  It may be CALLED something different than "middle name" but it is what it is, nonetheless.  Frankly, I couldn't care less what method they use in other countries.  What is important here is what is done in Profiler.  Make the online database as generic as possible, as standardized in as many areas as possible - for ALL USERS.  If you don't like it that way, you can always do it differently in your local DB.  How hard is it to figure that out?

Quoting Rifter:

Quote:
In other words, you've been applying your personal preferences, and the online DB be damned.

Since the rules do not give any guidance on parsing names, that's what we all do. Every time you parse a name you're applying a personal preference - there's just no way around that at the moment. As I've indicated time and time again in this thread: I think it's time that we got some kind of "standard" in this department. I tried to make some suggestions and tried to show which areas may need special attention (the use of the term "name" for the fields causes different people to interpret its intended use differently). What was your contribution again? Oh, I remember: "do it by the rules". Yeah, that was helpful...

Quoting T!M:

Quote:
Quoting Rifter:

Quote:
In other words, you've been applying your personal preferences, and the online DB be damned.

Since the rules do not give any guidance on parsing names, that's what we all do. Every time you parse a name you're applying a personal preference - there's just no way around that at the moment. As I've indicated time and time again in this thread: I think it's time that we got some kind of "standard" in this department. I tried to make some suggestions and tried to show which areas may need special attention (the use of the term "name" for the fields causes different people to interpret its intended use differently). What was your contribution again? Oh, I remember: "do it by the rules". Yeah, that was helpful...

I've advocated First/Everything Else/Last for a long, long time.  Irrespective of cultural, traditional, social mores for naming.  What was YOUR contribution back then?

Quoting skipnet50:

Quote:
Let's take an amusing possibility, a bit bizzare granted but... George George George.

Seeing this bizzare credit I would assume that it's a stage name and go by GGG//. Again I would be happy,if somebody with more knowledge would corect me later. And I would not correct any existing different parsing without having some documentation to do so. But my intitial guess would be GGG// completely conforming to the rules.

Quoting Rifter:

Quote:
First / Everything in the Middle / Last    IS a compromise!  Everybody ought to be happy with that since it violates all kinds of cultural taboos.  Everybody has an ox getting gored.

Then we should apply this also to all the exceptions which are already mentioned in the rules (stage names, articles, titles, jr et al...). If we do this that consequent, we could as well ask Ken to implement the one field solution. So the comment to your statement would be that I would not be happy.