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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
342 Messages
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6.9K Points
2 months 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.
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jimthing
219 Messages
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5.5K Points
2 months ago
The same for Titles (et al.)?
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plur62
342 Messages
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6.9K Points
4 days ago
I’d like to add a quick suggestion regarding how we can actually handle the data.
Right now, relying only on manual, one-by-one user submissions to fix existing names is a massive bottleneck. There are easily hundreds of thousands of names and character names already in the database from countries like Japan, Turkey, Poland, Czechia, Romania, and the former Yugoslavian countries that use diacritics or special characters. Trying to fix all of those older entries manually will take years.
It would be great if IMDb could introduce a more efficient method or a batch-update system to complement this feature. For example:
●Automated Scripts for Specific Languages: Running internal scripts to safely convert standardized romanized or flattened spellings back to their native forms where there's no ambiguity.
●Mass Editing Tools for Trusted Contributors: Giving top contributors a "batch-edit" interface so they can update multiple credits for a specific person or film all at once, instead of submitting a hundred individual corrections.
●API Integration with National Databases: Syncing data directly with official national film institutes to automatically verify and pull the correct native spelling of names.
This feature is a huge step forward, but without some sort of efficient system to handle the massive volume of existing data, it's going to create a backlog that will take ages to clear.
(edited)
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