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2.8K Messages
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29.2K Points
Increased Character Support for Names and Characters
Improving Name Representation for Our Global Community
At IMDb, we are committed to accurately representing the identities of the entertainment industry professionals in our database. To better serve our global contributor community, we are expanding the character support for names.
Previously, we only accepted a limited set of characters (ISO-Latin-1 character set). This left us unable to properly display names for some parts of the world, as we only supported some accented characters mainly used in Western Europe. For some time, contributors have been requesting IMDb to support a more diverse set of characters to allow the accurate contribution of names that contain characters outside of the ISO-Latin-1 character set.
Today we are pleased to announce that when submitting names, including character names, contributors can now use Latin Extended A and Extended B sets. For more information, please refer to the Supported Character Sets topic in our Help guide for submission top tips and tricks.
We appreciate your patience and support as we work to make IMDb more inclusive and representative of the global entertainment industry. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback.
- The IMDb team
plur62
340 Messages
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6.8K Points
19 days ago
It’s been a few months since the expanded character support for Names and Characters rolled out, and it’s definitely a good move. Having access to ž, ź, ż, ğ, č, ć, š, ś, ş, ṣ, ŝ, ı, ī, ō, ő and other ISO Latin characters makes maintaining accuracy much easier.
However, I've noticed some inconsistencies in how these updates are being handled:
Inconsistent approvals: While these characters work fine for most names, the system (or editors) often rejects corrections for high-profile figures. For example, trying to fix the spelling for someone like Shōhei Imamura or Andrzej Żuławski often gets blocked, while lesser-known names go through without issues.
This creates a bit of a mess where the database is half-corrected. It would be great if the approval process was more uniform, especially for famous names that still rely on simplified English spellings despite the new technical support.
It's a solid update, but it would be even better if we could get these linguistically accurate spellings accepted across the board without the arbitrary rejections.
Thanks
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jimthing
219 Messages
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5.5K Points
6 days ago
The same for Titles (et al.)?
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