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Quoting goblinsdoitall:

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But I'd opt for working with the system we have, it may be far from perfect, but I seriously doubt, that yours is any better.

What you call my system is what we had two years ago, before Ken's clarification. Can you explain me why it worked at that time ? I remember I made a total linking review of my collection in the Intervocative-Invelos transition period. I had quite no linking problems except on asian names (that's why I've asked many times for a tick box to reverse names). At that time, accented names were correct (of course I speak only for titles I owned, but for those ones, present database is an horrible mess)

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Quoting surfeur51:

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Quoting goblinsdoitall:

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But I'd opt for working with the system we have, it may be far from perfect, but I seriously doubt, that yours is any better.

What you call my system is what we had two years ago, before Ken's clarification. Can you explain me why it worked at that time ? I remember I made a total linking review of my collection in the Intervocative-Invelos transition period. I had quite no linking problems except on asian names (that's why I've asked many times for a tick box to reverse names). At that time, accented names were correct (of course I speak only for titles I owned, but for those ones, present database is an horrible mess)

May I have a chance to get an answer to this bolded question ? T!M explained me I'm silly and do not propose anything workable, and Goblin that he doubts this system is better. How a system that worked in the past can be worse than a system that doesn't work at present time ?

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The problem is that, if I recall this correctly, it didn't work. At least not in total.
French credits were fine in French speaking localities, Scandinavian in their region and so forth, but outside of these not two profiles of the same movie were alike.

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... (or disinterest) of the users.

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What I would like to see is some method whereby some unique identifier - whatever that identifier is - is assigned to each cast and crew person.  For those persons who have the same name, the burden of proof would fall upon the contributor to identify that Joe Smith (A) is different from Joe Smith (B), just as it is now with the BY issue, but once Joe Smith (B) has been identified as a different person, he would get assigned a specific identifier.  Perhaps it could work off their first known credit?

Then, once Joe Smith has his identifier, there would be a way to plug in all the permutations of his name so that those alternate names link to him.  Somehow the number of credits for each variant would link to this, so that the name that would come up for him would be his most credited version ...

So, using the actor George "Gabby" Hayes (whose common name I'm still trying to find) as the example:

Name Variants:
- George Hayes
- George "Gabby" Hayes
- George Gabby Hayes
- Gabby Hayes
- Geo. F. Hayes

All these would link together via the Identifier.  Whichever name came out as the most credited would list as his main name.

At least, this is how it conceives in my brain.  I am not a programmer, so I have no idea how well this would work IRL.

But it would seem to me that the first thing that would have to be done is to clean up the DB.  A lot of incorrect credits exist in the DB as it stands, credits that were mined wholesale from IMDB and have not been looked at in years and years.  For instance, right not the common name via the CLT for Gabby is George 'Gabby' Hayes - with single quotes.  But I have yet to find any film where he is credited this way.  I believe this variant may not actually exist outside of IMDB at all.

So, since there is no actual hope of a new linking system on the horizon, it would seem the best choice for all of us is to try to clean up the DB as it exists now.  Get the credits correct per the film first, then we will actually know what the correct common name is.  That seems the logical thing to me anyway.