New rule regarding the display of Chinese and some other Asian names

For the longest time, IMDb has had problems storing text in a charset other than 128-bit ASCII, and apparently the problems partially still exist, but there is increasing amounts of support for other scripts, interestingly via UTF-8.

I don't know since when it is possible to save asian characters, but I like the possibility to search for the originally written title because it's often impossible to search for i.e. a russian movie because the in latin letters spelled title never turns up anywhere or in different writing on the net.

UTF-8 is by far the better approach because of its increasing usage in the www. It's like the CD to audio tape. IMDb coders should put their main effort to functionality than to the looks. I still use the classic layout because I miss infos at the head and I can't select/copy the names anymore.

I find it problematic that the IMDb company didn't bother to open up a discussion on these matters prior to amending the policy concerning them. I've complained before about them doing things like this. What really needs to be done is an overhaul whereby the proper display can be customized or something halfway to that effect in such a way as that it still clear which name part is the family name and which name part is the given name. Alphabetical ordering of people by full name factors into why one part of a name is distinguished from the other, but glyph-based languages do not have an alphabet nature. This "quick fix" breaks the ordering system where by family name takes precedence over given name.

Jeorj: I agree. Why not post a proposal for the rule change here, let people comment on it, then implement the rule? That would at least show that these issues had been taken into account.

This change is limited in scope and is meant to address a longstanding issue with some names, which were sometimes stored and displayed in a format that often different from how the person typically represented themselves. The original reason for that strict formatting was based on technical requirements (mainly sorting) that are no longer prevalent, so we are no longer asking submitters to adhere to it. It doesn't affect character names (which are always meant to be entered and displayed as they appear on-screen in cast listings) and it only affects those names that were previously stored in that particular format despite not being the same as the most common or preferred one. So, Gong Li can now be listed as "Gong Li" (the most commonly used and preferred variant of the name) instead of "Li Gong", but Jackie Chan will remain listed as Jackie Chan as it's always been.

The announcement specifically singled out Chinese name because they were the names that were most commonly affected by the previous restriction, but any name that is currently stored on IMDb in a format inconsistent with the way the person to whom it refers typically uses it can and should be corrected accordingly -- there are likely several Korean names that fall in that category, and possibly others (mostly, but not exclusively, Asian).
  

One of my main hangups has to do with the fact that the submission form always forces the presence of a comma in form fields that refer to people's names, reversing the parts of the full name around, which makes the process confusing in regards to names transliterated from Chinese and Korean, or the names of people in societies wherein everybody's full name in the language corresponding to the society is formed by the expression of the person's family name followed by the person's given name. I've observed the submission interface since this announcement, and I can tell there is absolutely no mechanism in place that detects full names transliterated from Chinese or Koren. For names like that, there shouldn't even be a comma in the stored rendition of the name! The problem would be solved.

It's true that the legacy 'name1, name2' format separated with a comma has several limitations, but for now we have to stick with it.

We will eventually address that and possibly move to a different format, but that's a much larger project that we can't embark on at this time.

I appreciate that Giancarlo_Cairella has taken the time to reply to some of the concerns other contributors and I have voiced, but “possibly others” is still an inadequate definition of which people are and are not affected by this change.

China is the most populated country in the world currently, but Asia also includes many of the world’s other most populated and most prolific film-and-TV-making countries.

In particular, Japan was the most prolific country after the USA for film production through a large chunk of the 20th century, but there has been no specific guidance so far on whether this change applies to Japanese names or not.

And what kinds of Korean names fall into this category, and which do not? South Korean cinema and TV has been attracting a lot of attention even in mainstream Western media in the last few years, so how much the policy affects the credits on them is also important to define.

“The way the person to whom it refers typically uses it” is a good start, but it is not yet a detailed enough rule for determining the correct order in many cases, because many people are credited by or give their name in different orders and with different spacing or hyphenation depending on the context.

For example, there is a popular actor and musician whose name is written in Japanese as 星野源, which is pronounced as HOSHINO Gen. On the cover images of his music releases from a few years ago or more, his name is written in Roman characters as HOSHINO Gen. But, on the cover images of his most recent music releases, it is written as Gen HOSHINO. JFDB orders it as HOSHINO Gen. On the front page of his official website, it is currently written as Gén HOSHINO.

Hungarian names are also conventionally switched into family-name-last order when used in English-language contexts. E.g., the site of animation studio Kecskemétfilm refers to its best-known film director as JANKOVICS Marcell on its Hungarian version but Marcell JANKOVICS on its English version.

So, to begin with, are we to use the order in which the name is pronounced in the context of the person’s native language? Or the order it is written in when it is used in an English-language context?

If it is the latter, how do we decide which order and which spelling to use when this differs across different times and different contexts?

And what do we do if we have no way of telling which order the person prefers? This is the case with most people who only worked before the Internet age (except for the few names that broke through in the West and some specific regions like Hong Kong where romanisation was more common); it is still the case with most credits other than cast, directors and the lead staff that make it into billing blocks.

There needs to be, at the minimum, a default order, romanisation system and format for spacing multi-syllable names for each culture affected to fall back to when the preferences of the person/their management/their estate cannot be determined.

Again, I do not object to this change in policy in itself (far from it; I think it’s come about 30 years too late), but I feel that the rules of it need to be much more fleshed-out before it’s ready to put into practice.

There are, certainly, a lot more ways of formatting names in the world than <personal name> <family name> or <family name> <personal name>, across Asia and other parts of the world.

Another one is Icelandic names, which take the format <personal name> <patronymic> (or, rarely, <personal name> <matronymic>), and when they are listed alphabetically they're sorted by the personal name. Because IMDb assumes that everyone in the world uses the <personal name> <family name> format, it mistakes the patronymics for family names and incorrectly sorts names by them rather than the personal name.

Back when IMDb was started, around 1990, China was known for having more than the rest of the world's population combined, so, at least then, there were definitely more people alive with a family name that came first than with a family name that came last (even more so when one factors in Japan and Korea). If the founders were planning on it becoming a global database that included all people with a credit on professional moving-image media anywhere in the world back then (which, to be fair, I don't imagine they were), then it would have made logical sense to work in a feature then that allowed the majority of the world's names to be both displayed correctly and alphabetised correctly, and it would have saved the current staff from the difficulty of starting to undo this oversight over 30 years later. But, well, that wasn't to be.

However, regarding finding out people's real names: what someone's real, legal name is does not determine what their displayed name on IMDb should be.

If someone's legal name has been made public, then it should be mentioned in their biography. As should their birth name, if it differs, and that should also be in the field specifically for those.

However, the guide for names states:

The primary name for a person in IMDb is the one by which they are most often credited.

So knowing a person's real, legal name is not needed for this. It goes on how their name is currently most commonly written in on-screen credits. When someone's name has been given as inconsistently in on-screen credits as daniel_francis_gardecki is describing, then deciding what is recent enough to be considered current or not is difficult to decide on, and there are no more detailed guidelines to help with these cases. I would suggest trying to find out what the person prefers themselves (from what is used on their or their agency's or production company's website and/or public social media accounts) and if that is consistent and also a name they are credited by on screen in at least a few instances to go with that, and provide links to those official sites and accounts and stills of credits on screen under that name with any submission to change the primary name.

But what their legal name is does not, as a rule, affect what their primary displayed name should be.

@RoberMiller With the way it has been implemented, it affects functionality in one significant way: it prevents names from being sorted alphabetically correctly.

Now names with the family name last will still be sorted by the family name, but names with the family name first will be sorted by the personal name.

It also makes names confusing to enter. To enter, say, Zhang Yimou so that it is displayed correctly (with the family name, Zhang, first), one needs to enter it as “Yimou, Zhang”, which is in itself incorrect.

On the plus side, names with the family name first will now be displayed correctly, which is arguably worth the trade-off in functionality. But it’s possible to imagine a way in which the change could be implemented that would take a lot more work on IMDb’s part but would preserve correct alphabetical sorting and name entry, by people having an attribute that would decide which order their names are displayed in (that could also be used to make family names capitalised, like they are on JFDB, which would make which order the name is in always clear).

I think, if you add i.e. cast to a movie, the automatic db-search-function when you enter the name should work . There should be (as with the movies) a db-section with alternate names. If the name isn't found or new, there should be a field to enter the original written name (as credited without the comma) to create the new entry and another field to select the regional origin to format the name for the db.
So if you add 濱口竜介, there should be a selection for „japanese“ to write the name as is. And if the name has an entry there should be a field for alternate names like Ryûsuke Hamaguchi or/and Ryusuke Hamaguchi - and a field to format this name - in this case „latin“. (or do it the other way around)

But with the amount of names that would have to be checked out (and often merged because of the different spelled/written name entries) it seems to be an enormous undertaking. But it should be done. And if you then would search for 濱口竜介 there should be the director's entry of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi popping up/down.

I'm afraid that if you're hoping for more Unicode support any time soon, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. It took about 30 years since the first version of Unicode was released for support for Japanese titles to be added. Considering that, I can't see IMDb supporting all writing systems for both titles and names within my lifetime – or, even if others come a lot quicker than that, not in the next few years, anyway.

I don't mean that as a complaint; I'm not a programmer, and I doubt that I could have ever done what they have so far in working in what support there is in any amount of years.

There are other, more-recently started databases of movies with full support for Unicode, which is much easier for them as they have the great advantage of Unicode already being around when they started, and so they were able to use it from the beginning. IMDb came a bit too early; converting it over has been an ongoing project in some form for most of its history – which is understandable in that it cannot be easy to covert something that is constantly having data added to and changed on it, but, were the staff to block changes to it, the database would risk losing its relevance.

Support for Han glyphs and Kanji glyphs recently came into existence for movie alternate title items, so now it is just a question of doing the same thing with names of people.

It's not, unfortunately, because people and companies don't have akas in the same way movies do, to begin with.

People only have akas as a result of the "(as …)" attribute being used with their name. The only way to add non-Roman akas would therefore be to make attribute fields Unicode.

For sure, the announcement represents something of a quick fix. The technical underpinnings of the submission form itself are unchanged.

You're right, plur62. I didn't notice that before, but I understood what was meant.

I kind of wish the submission form had two separate fields for family name and given name, but that's just wish versus the reality of how tough it is for IMDb developers to amend the fundamental paradigms upon which the database is built (and thereby add things like new genres among other things). Maybe someday, it will all be fixed.

At the least, it doesn't seem impossible that there could be a way to flip around names en masse in light of this policy change (if you think it’s a lot of work to individually correct Korean names affected by it, you don’t want to start thinking about how many more Chinese names are affected), considering the family and personal names are all separated by commas in IMDb’s system.

I'm worried that it might be tricky to discern which names have or haven't already been flipped around. I mean, this would be easy enough for those who have a two-syllable given name, but for the few who have a one-syllable given name and a one-syllable family name, it won't be so easy, and of course this is in reference to Chinese names and Korean names, as Japanese names are whole other ball game.