Gender and English name

[STSH]

Editors : When you add a person's English name, PLEASE remember to change them to male or female.

It doesn't take long and, if the person is unidentified and has any acting roles (now or in the future), it makes it just that little bit easier to ID them.

Also, and I know some people have strong views on this one, if the surname is the same in "English" and Chinese, please put the English name on the first line.
It makes it much easier for non-Chinese to read.

But please be careful if the surnames don't match
e.g. David Chiang (fine) aka John Keung (fine) but not John Chiang or David Keung.

[bkasten]

Editors : When you add a person's English name, PLEASE remember to change them to male or female.

Agreed. Who added a person to the DB without setting the gender attribute?

This is partly my fault. This absolutely needs to be a required field. I'll fix it.

[STSH]

Editors : When you add a person's English name, PLEASE remember to change them to male or female.

Agreed. Who added a person to the DB without setting the gender attribute?

I'm mainly talking about people's names which are already in the Db but have no gender.
I'm saying that if the English name is known, there's a good chance it can be "sexed".

This is partly my fault. This absolutely needs to be a required field. I'll fix it.

NO ! Gender should not be a required field. If a non-Chinese editor (and I believe most of the editing is done by Westerners) adds a Chinese name, there's a high probability that the gender is unknown.

[MrBooth]

there's a high probability that the gender is unknown.

Absolutely! It's generally a 2 stage process of adding the names and then figuring out who they actually are, and the gender often only becomes clear at stage 2.

I have picked up quite a lot of editor points by "genderising" a cast member who's had an English name or a role name of "X's sister/mom/wife" but still have an "unknown" gender field

I guess the reply I just wrote in the English names thread should have ended up here

[bkasten]

Understood. But by making it a required field, it would force the editor to select "unknown".

By the way, maybe we should generate a list is current "unknown"s?

[calros]

I "created" about 9.999 new people "without gender".

Sometimes they do not have "english name".
Sometimes they are "crew members".
Sometimes they have an ambiguous name: "Leslie" (Leslie Nielsen [m] or Leslie Caron [f]?), "Chris(topher)" (Christopher George [m] or Christopher Norris [f]?)...
...also I am not english.

[bkasten]

I "created" about 9.999 new people "without gender"

To be precise you "created" 4491 new people, ALL of which were "without gender." Of course, many of your new people additions are crew members, etc., so it is difficult to know.

More generally, though, the DB contains 2830 people identified as males, and 1878 people id'd as female. To be honest, I am surprised it's that high...as Chinese names while usually somewhat clear, can also be ambiguous.

I can fix some of the completely obvious ones.

[STSH]

Understood. But by making it a required field, it would force the editor to select "unknown".

If it makes one more field mandatory, I'd say no, don't do it.
This gets back to another old topic and long-wished-for feature - multiple submissions.
To create, say, ten new people to add to one movie, one must laboriously add each person individually to the Db, then atttach each one to the movie.
Given this state of affairs, even one more field being made mandatory take a whole lotta extra time, and some measure of frustration.

So, how about multiple submission capabilities, like IMDb has ?

By the way, maybe we should generate a list is current "unknown"s?

Agreed.
But it would be one helluva long list.
Perhaps we need a dividing principle for such a vast list - first, divide by main job (e.g actor, director etc), then by the year in which their first movie was made.

[STSH]

I "created" about 9.999 new people "without gender"

To be precise you "created" 4491 new people, ALL of which were "without gender."

Ah, spoken like a true fellow pedant

More generally, though, the DB contains 2830 people identified as males, and 1878 people id'd as female. To be honest, I am surprised it's that high...

Hear hear. I'm amazed too.

as Chinese names while usually somewhat clear, can also be ambiguous.

I can fix some of the completely obvious ones.

How does one tell which ones are obvious ?

I've been hammering away at this issue for ages, and only got not far enough.

Are there any simple rules for "sexing" a Chinese name ?
The only ones I know are -
* If the name contains the "woman" character as one of the radicals
* If I know more than one actor or crew with that name, and I know that person's gender.

I swapped a few emails with a Taiwanese guy a few years ago, who said that if he saw a name, he could be at least 80% sure of the gender.

[calros]

Sorry Mr. STSH but again I have to disagree.

Aman Chang [m] and Sharla Cheung [f] have exactly the same chinese characters.

ONLY 4,491 ?

[STSH]

Sorry Mr. STSH but again I have to disagree.

Aman Chang [m] and Sharla Cheung [f] have exactly the same chinese characters.

I said 80%+, not 100% !