I have to agree with Hal on that.

Quoting Taro:

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The way I see it, is that I'm trying to meet you halfway, but you keep standing on the high ground where you are, unwilling to even take one step towards my direction. If anything, it is users like YOU who make the database useless to users like me for the time being, not the other way around.

Do you really feel that the database is useless because you have to enter Francois Truffault instead of François Truffault? 

Quoting hal9g:

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Do you really feel that the database is useless because you have to enter Francois Truffault instead of François Truffault? 

If there was only this problem, I also think we could live with. But I have hundreds of asian names that are also totally incorrect in my database. Since I had to fix locally all of them, the online has lost much of its interest...

I think the online database is still useful for people who do not mind to link properly actors, do not mind to have spoilers in overviews, do not mind about linking studios, do not mind not to find titles entered as T4xi, do not mind having old covers that do not match with theirs, do not mind having wrong roles... All those examples have exactly the same origin than Francois Truffaut: blind use of inadequate rules.

Quoting hal9g:

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Quoting Taro:

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However, I think we differ on these points:
- I feel both should be online (the credited as & the real name)
- users should locally be able to choose which one of the two is displayed in their Profiler

I understand this desire to use "real names", however, who is going to be the final arbiter on what a person's "real" name is?  You mention French linguists and some French organization earlier in your thread.  Are the contributors here going to be required to query such organizations to find out the "real" name that should be used for someone?  How is the average user supposed to even know that what appears on screen does not "qualify" as the "real" name for the person in question?  What "official" organization should be conferred with when it comes to Spanish names, or Indian names, or Bosnian names, etc., etc.?

Then there's the issue of the Common Name.  You are suggesting that for an on screen credit of "Francois Truffault", we should enter it as 'François Truffault [Francois Truffault]'.  However, the Rules currently tell us to use the most commonly occurring form of the person's name as the Common Name.  What if that is actually "Francois Truffault" according to the CLT?  Are you suggesting that we ignore the results of the CLT and over-ride it with the "real" name?  Not much use in keeping the CLT if we're going down that road.

Personally, I think the Common Name/CLT method should be eliminated, and the main database simply have another table to directly link all variations of a person's name to each other.

Until then, entering the credit exactly as it appears on screen is the only way to record the data and eliminate any question about what should be entered. Using the current Common Name method for linking is the best we have for now, but it is far from the best we could have.

I have to agree with what Hal says here. Currently we have to deal with the CLT and the common name it spits out. While I disagree with what it spits out quite often, we all need to be on the same page. But it is an imperfect system and hopefully we can move towards Hal's idea or many other poster's suggestions here.

If we went with a seperate Cast/Crew database, the common name, as I suggestion would be auto generated to pick the most credited form. This of course could be changed via documentation as Taro suggests. A few rules would be in place to where exactly this info could come from. As soon as solid evidence suggested a change and it was approved via voting or screeners, it could then be locked by an admin or something. This would only be necessary if ping-ponging started to occur. The online's common name would make little difference though, as locally you could select which name you'd like to see.

But as I said, at this time, we shouldn't be concerned with "real names" as when you document your "real name" as a common name for one title, there are hundreds of others that you may not own and will be treated just the opposite (using CLT). Your documentation will only be read (maybe) by those who own that particular title.

So then we'd have half the credits with common name of "X" that CLT supports, and half the names with common name "Y" which have been documented as the "real name". This would be a mess except for those people who do all their own audits and make their database the way they want it.

As for the FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT debate. From my understandy, Surfeur is correct on one aspect which I think is worth looking into. As the rules state to make an all capitalized credits into correct lowercase use, wouldn't that make this François Truffaut correct? I don't know any sort of french but am I correct in assuming there isn't a capital version of "ç"?  Of course not every user would know to do that, myself being one of them, but knowledgable users such as Surfeur would do such a change, therefore making CLT more lean towards what is a correct translation.

Romanization could be treated in a similar way. Whenever a credit is in asian characters, a person who is knowledgable to do the tranlations into text for submission purposes probably has the knowledge of at least one form of romanization. Just use that one? Of course people will be using different forms but I dont' know if there's really a way around that. A linquist like yourself Taro, would have no problem because you know all the rules, all the forms, but other users may only know one way. CLT would still have lots of variations of the same name, but we could still use the credited as feature to link all these names together, just on a title by title basis and it may not have the "common name" you *want* to see at this time.

This problem would be again mute if we had a centralized Cast/Crew database that any method of romanization could be linked to another. And one user's preference could be change locally to make them happy.

(Sorry for the wordy post  )

Quoting surfeur51:

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Quoting Vittra:

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I don't know any sort of french but am I correct in assuming there isn't a capital version of "ç"? 

In fact we have had capitalized versions of ç, é, è, ê, ù since the use of computers with typing programs, as Word. When we had only typing machines, these characters didn't exist. So for recent movies, we can find those capital characters, and their transformation is easy. For older movies (before 1990), you have to speak french to decide if E is e, or é, or è ,or ê, and C is c or ç.  Of course, I would be happy to help for correct transformation, if people agreed that it is better to have correct name than something that doesn't exist in "true" world.

Of course, we have the same problem with Spanish, or scandinavian, accentuation, and some specific letters, as in Germany. Help from Spanish, Scandinavian or German users would be better than a blind stupid transformation.

As long as it involved this specific instance of changing all capitals to lower case, I see no problem with it (I'm only one user though  ). I do believe that the credited as "Francois Truffaut" should not change though, unless of course the common name is "François Truffaut" in which case it would be "François Truffaut [Francois Truffaut]". 

As much as it probably would bother you to have "Francois Truffaut" as the common name (if it is), changing the as credited or switching the common name to fit your preference could cause a lot of problems if we ever do throw out CLT for an improved system. Not saying you do this, or would even want to, just stating the idea in a general sense as it applies to more than French names alone.

I can understand that this is a wide world, with many different languages, spellings which do not translate, and alphabets with nonshared characters. But, as generous as the offer is, contacting a French user in order to submit a US Region 1 profile in case one character, one actor/actress, one crew member might have a French name which has a character that I must enter with more than pressing one key with more than a shift on my USA keyboard computer seems odd and exceedingly difficult. I now know that there might not be a French name Francois because it is always François, but to attempt to determine that FRANCOIS is François and not Francois is beyond a worldwide computer program. While I might be able to find a screencap if I searched for days, but could there be a US released film where François Truffaut is credited as Francois Truffaut, and not as FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT? How do I, whose French is almost as poor as my Italian, neither being as good as my Japanese, and none as good as my 2 years of C- high school German taken 44 years ago, determine "real world" spellings and non-USA standard characters?

The current system is not perfect, but in order for the common database to be used by idiots like me who know very little French, we must enter the data: (1) by what we see on the screen exactly, or (2) by using the capitalization rules of the country in which we have the greatest experience. The voting process can aid us when we go from ALL CAPS to Upper and lower case, but we must begin with what's on screen, otherwise our data will often be more incorrect than right, and subject to repeated changing from "real world" information to "on screen" data, both interpreted by users with varying language skills could be a detriment to the effectiveness of the common database.

One person can have many different names and spellings of each name. A solution to linking them is better than random users inputting what they think is "best" or "real world".

Quoting VibroCount:

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How do I, whose French is almost as poor as my Italian, neither being as good as my Japanese, and none as good as my 2 years of C- high school German taken 44 years ago, determine "real world" spellings and non-USA standard characters?

When you have a doubt, you could see what they use at IMDb. I know that, here, it is supposed to be "crap" , but the fact is I rarely saw there spelling mistakes for accentuation of names in French. As it is not a French site, we may suppose they are also correct for other countries, and we can check with Wikipedia or other sites about movies. And I have some difficulties to imagine legal issues because we would have used a correct spelling...

Quoting Unicus:

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I have a feeling that Ken agrees with you...at least in part...as he has already ruled that we are to use a 1 to 1 formula for converting from all caps to mixed case.

Please quote rules about that. I have not seen it.

I found only "If the credit information is entirely capitalized, use standard capitalization rules instead." and not "If the credit information is entirely capitalized, use US standard capitalization rules instead. "

This problem has already been discussed monthes ago somewhere in the thousands of pages of those forums, but recent updating of rules do not mention it.

Quoting VibroCount:

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Quoting surfeur51:

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When you have a doubt...

Again, not knowing French (or Norwegian, or Farsi, or Russian, or many, many more), I thus need to have doubts on every name I read. What's a French name, an English name, an Armenian name? Must I look up every name of every actor/actress/crew member on evry film I want to submit?

Your concept makes me want to never submit another profile ever again.

Far too much work to please the ç rather than c crowd.

The whole concept is unworkable, IMHO.