As I also just wrote in PM, Chow Yun-Fat is the worst example to present in this thread. His name is virtually the same across all his movies, American or Asian. It's always Chow Yun(-)Fat. So we have a parsing problem, but that's it.

The problem is with people who are credited differently in Asian or Western films.
Ling Bai vs. Bai Ling
Zhang Ziyi vs. Ziyi Zhang
How do you decide there so that it matches all across the board? If we had a basic setting how to proceed, we could get somewhere.

As Credited. Good idea.

Some Asian movie: Ling Bai
Some Western movie: Bai Ling
Everybody does As Credited and we get nowhere.

PLease try to understand that this is a global issue which goes way beyond R1 DVDs.

You may not have considered it, lopek. But I did and so did Dan very carefully in the preparation we went through to get ready to write the Rules, it was ALL considered VERY carefully. But you did hit the nail on the head, an entire continent getting themselves worked into a lather over what they consider a slight, the Euros are equally guilty of the same nationalistic self-pride, without even attempting to comprehend  what was being done and why.Or in some cases understanding what and why, but they were going to be offended anyway because it wasn't their way. We stii have this problem.

Now with Credited As piggy-backed on top of As Creditedit it is now possible to correct this.

My big sin was figuring the users had enough COMMON sense to understand what was being done and why. We knew the shortcomings going in, we also knew that they would ultimately become non-issues, but we figured that they would understand this, instead they shrieked like banshees on the prowl.

Btw we are also aware that we still have soime issues as it relates to oh, Kanji, Cyrillic, Greek, etc, but that is outside our perview and I certainly hope that one day Ken will have the program recognize those characters so that such listings can be PROPERLY dealt with.

Skip

Quoting northbloke:

Quote:
Skip, you have obviously missed the entire point of this poll.
This has nothing to do with "credited as", but everything to do with entering the common name.
How are we to use "as credited" as a basis for the common name when some profiles, for example,  list Ling Bai and others list Bai Ling? Which one are we supposed to know to use?

And RHo, thanks for the link - I intended to put that in my opening post but forgot. Unfortunately that thread never seemed to reach a resolution, which is why I started this poll. Though it looks like most people are as confused as I am over this issue! 

Being a Brit, I've always interpreted the phrase "last name" to mean surname, or family name. That's why I preferred putting the asian family names in the same field, even though they would place this first. That way, when you look at the database you would find all the family names in the same field, which may be an advantage to some people.
Obviously, if this would lead to confusion, with people wondering why the family name isn't in the "first name" field where they would normally put it, then we need a rethink.

Edit: I had to laugh at Chow Yun-Fat too Achim, that they use as an example the one asian name that they write the same in the West!

Edit 2: Bugger! I thought I'd pressed the "edit" button, obviously not...

This discussion isn't about how you work out which is the family name or which is the given name. If you don't know you obviously enter as credited until corrected.

This discussion is about what you do when you do know how the name is parsed. When you know the family name is Bai and her given name is Ling - do you enter it as Bai//Ling so it looks correct on screen, or do you enter Ling//Bai so the family name is in the same field as everyone else's but is parsed incorrectly on screen.
This poll is to try and work out which people feel is more important to have.
I also don't have enough experience with Chinese or Hong Kong documentation or traditions to know whether they even use the phrases "first name" and "last name".

In some places in Britain, you'd get hit for calling someone a European!   

Quoting richierich:

Quote:


EDIT

In MOST places in Britain, you'd get hit for calling someone a European!   

You can't blame me for trying to be diplomatic! 

North:

All I did was outline my basic procedures, which quite personally I think is the best approach. This is being donevery sparingly by at the moment and will prbably be awhile longer before I shift gears and focus on it. I will only say, that based on what i am seeing supplied by most users as documentation for any Common Name usage, let alone Oriental, is THIN at best. They seem to be operating on the assumption that similar names are the same person and are therefore only using the look-up tool. The common names I am presently even allowing anywhere near my databases are the ones that are demonstrating to me that they have satisfied themselves that they are more than similar names.

In the case of Oriental names, I doubt the lookup tool will be of much help at all, I reserve my ultimate judgment for a later time, but we may ultimately have to depend on users like xradman to help all of us here, and it would be my sincere hope that he and others will document his conclusions for all of our benefit and not base the conclusion on something vague.

I have a very strict set of Rules which I apply to myself, north. This doesn't mean i don't make occasional typos or skip a name.   But if I have to document something, I leave room for very little doubt, I have confidence in my work and I want you to have the same level of confidence. You won';t ever have to PM me and say...what because you say so?   I also never go into research mode with a pre-conceived notion of what the answer is and evaluate the data based on that notion, which I have seen MANY users do, I go where the data takes me. I see a lot of ummm  I can only call nationalistic or cultural offense taken over things. You will never, ever see that from me, I don't care whether it is H/B/C or H//BC nor do I care what culture says, I do care what the data tells me and if I can verify H//BC (strcitly an example) then I am a happy camper, if I can't then I am a happy camper, WHATEVER the data tells me is good. I don't know if you were here for the whole HBC debate, but what it finally came down to was we found a 1994 credit for HB-C, a 1995 credit for HBC and a 1997 for HB-C. You might ask why that is important, because taken on its own merit the 1995 MIGHT indicate that the actor had moved the 2nd name to the middle spot (it happens), the flanking credits indicated that while possible, that was not the case.

Rambling I know and covering a lot of ground. I hope this was useful for you.

Skip