by STSH » Fri Jun 15, 2001 10:29 am
I take it the thrust of this message is about changing names to something structurally different, which makes it more difficult to search on a known name.<br><br>This raises another question - what about adding English names ? I mean here when an English name is added and the rest of the name is not changed. If a Chinese name is xx yy zz, the name can be changed to, say, Bob xx yy zz (if that is the person's known name) without affecting the ability to find the name by xx yy zz.<br><br>Would you prefer these sort of changes to be notified as well ?<br><br>Also, this connects neatly to an issue I have been raising repeastedly - the need for a naming policy. I do NOT mean by this that there should be dictated one particular way of writing names. See the post misleadingly headed "Who Moved Shi Jun" for more about this subject. Briefly, Shelly and I traded views on the subject of naming. Shelly's position, if I understand it correctly, is that there is usually one correct way to transliterate any particular name, and that that correct way can be found in authoritative sources. Reading my posts under this thread, I hope to have comprehensively disproven this method. Basically, I content that most Chi names on this Db probably need to be multi-aliased, and list the reasons.<br><br>A good recent example is Cheung Gwok Chue. Someone, and it weren't me, changed him to Chang Kuo-Chu. Now, considering that this guy is a Taiwanese actor, the correction is accurate. However, whoever did the change forgot that this actor has been on the Db from day one as Cheung Gwok Chue. Those who didn't know he was Taiwanese, or who read his name and sounded it in Canto, may not be able to find the name after this change. And only because whoever made the change neglected to alias him. Fortunately, I noticed this, and aliased him in Canto (hooray for me). The one comfort is that this change must have been recent, as I have added CGC to several movies in the last few months, and he was still CGC then. -> Just to illustrate the original point of aliasing. Fellow editors, pls don't neglect this !