I'll try to stay in the realm of the reasonable, and ask for three things I think can be fairly easily implemented and would do a world of good immediately:

- Have the contribution system ignore parsing differences;

- Have the contribution system ignore capitalization differences;

- For TV sets, move the season/disc indicators out of the title field(s), leaving those free for just the show's actual title, which would allow the CLT to count those credits properly.


If, however, we're talking really wishful thinking here (thus: highly unlikely major overhaul), then I'd have to go for storing only one set of cast and crew for every film in the database, instead of dozens of them, spread over the various regions and localities. As it is today, the wheel has to be invented over and over again for each of the, say, 46 different profiles for a given title. Every time one of these profiles is updated with a common name shift, with a newfound and much-needed birth year, or an (uncredited) cast entry is documented, that's wonderful, but then there are still 45 profiles left that also need that change. It's just not going to happen. But if those 46 profiles shared the same cast and crew data, that wouldn't be a problem. And it would clear up the CLT numbers immensely: no more thousands of ill-maintained, IMDb-mined profiles in smaller localities messing up the CLT numbers: there'd be only one "master"-set of cast and crew that needs to be fixed, not 46 copies of it.