The Credit Lookup Tool currently shows that his current common name is Ed Begley Jr. but it seems that most of these will be IMDb-mined as his entry does not have a comma there.  I own nine titles with him in (he is uncredited in Batman Forever) and, in each, he is credited as Ed Begley, Jr. so I have used the 'credited as' field to keep his common name.

It is obviously a case that the database contains a lot of information from the IMDb where he has no comma in his name as he is, as far as I can see, always credited with the comma.  Could someone rule that his common name is Ed Begley, Jr. as his official website has his name that way and to use the 'credited as' field when he is credited otherwise?

There was a similar situation with Robert Downey Jr. where his common name was comma-less.  Could the same be done here just to clarify things?

For illustration:
"Ed Begley Jr." is credited in the following 254 titles (394 profiles)

"Ed Begley, Jr." is credited in the following 180 titles (286 profiles)

This is really starting to be a major source of irritation. Not that I blame him, but Nosferatu now indeed managed to get an update accepted which changed an as credited entry for "Ed Begley, Jr." to "Ed Begley Jr. [Ed Begley, Jr.]".

I was the lone no-voter among 42 "yes"-voters. My concerns were, as I expected, ignored, and the contribution was accepted. Again: I don't blame Nosferatu, nor the "yes"-voters, but the fact remains that this is wrong, period. If you just look at the numbers, it may LOOK like the comma-less variant is the most-credited form, but if you take one or two minutes to actually look at a few pages of CLT-results, it becomes apparent quite quickly that the same titles are listed under both variants. It's not at all different to this thread, which shows the CLT declaring a name variant that is never even used at all as the winner. The CLT is a nice tool, but you do need to work with the results. Just looking at the numbers mostly equals incorrectly propagating the IMDb-name.

My problem with these suffixed names is that we could implement such "Ed Begley Jr. [Ed Begley, Jr.]" entries for almost EVERY suffixed name out there: the CLT will favor the commaless, IMDb-mined variant almost every single time, and except a few exceptions, almost all of them will have to be changed back at some point. It's the complete and utter pointlessness of it all: even the contributor has gone on record as only having "Ed Begley, Jr." entries in his database. I do, too (except a lone "Ed Begley" credit), and those 42 "yes"-voters probably all have mostly "Ed Begley, Jr." entries in their databases as well. Everyone of us knows this is wrong, but somehow we still end up with "Ed Begley Jr. [Ed Begley, Jr.]", and we all have to wait for the day we can change it back. And I saw only this one, but I expect Nosferatu contributed the same update to his other eight "Ed Begley, Jr." entries?

Am I the only one who is thoroughly annoyed by all this? And the whole thing could be solved by making just two little decisions:

1. We would need to decide whether we're going to enter all suffixed names either with or without the comma. We actually HAD such a consensus for years (which was WITH the comma), but it got torn down when "the most-credited form" was introduced.

2. Secondly, we would need to decide whether we'd use the "credited as" field for when these people were credited with the other variant, or if we'd just ignore that difference for DVD Profiler purposes.

I could go either way on both decions - anything instead of what we have now: endless propagating of the incorrect IMDb-style variant even though it's mostly not supported by actual credits, needless ping-ponging, ridiculous inconsistency, and separate, non-linking entries in the database for essentially EVERY suffixed name out there. Just imagine that Ken stepped in today and said, "Enter suffixed names WITH a comma" (or the other way around, for all I care), then we'd be done with this whole, seemingly never-ending mess right then and there. Hey: a man can dream, can't he?

Quoting Nosferatu:

Quote:
"Ed Begley Jr." is credited in the following 254 titles (394 profiles)

"Ed Begley, Jr." is credited in the following 180 titles (286 profiles)

Maybe that was the balance when you submitted these updates on Dec. 29th. But luckily, a few IMDb-mined entries have already been fixed since then. Current balance is 379x "Ed Begley Jr." vs. 302x "Ed Begley, Jr." (I've left out the number of alledged "titles" as that's entirely meaningless). Now only 39 entries to be fixed before we can ping-pong back again... 

The numbers I quoted were that way at the time of writing.  I will quite happily resubmit all those where I used the 'credited as' and change the the comma-less entries as long as there is some official consensus to back up going against the CLT.  The only reason I used Ed Begley Jr. [Ed Begley, Jr.] is because I was sick of having one person with two names in my profile. 

As it stands I'd be going against the CLT so would be voted down.

Here's a tip for you Nosferatu, that may help you. Lokk at the crossover data. For example, let's say you have just audited St. Elsewhere and it's Ed Begley, Jr. how many St. Elsewhere's are listed with Ed Begley Jr. (I call that crossover data), and it would be incorrect data, since you just checked and know what the ACTUAL data says. You can extrapolate that all the way through and add those results to your notes. Let's face it we all know where Begley Jr. came from for the most part, there may be a few exceptions. We also know that data is against the Rules to begin with and needs to be FIXED. As Tim, noted this is a known issue with the Tool and results in much bad data, some users are probably inoring thw Rules and getting away with it, but MOST of this data originates from Ken's transferral of old IVS data into the Invelos database, many of those titles are not even valid or have not been looked at by anyone for YEARS, literally. It's a MESS in one word.<shrugs> Just one of the reasons why I don't make use of it and don't intend to, I ONLY deal with AS CREDITED, protects what little sanity I have left.

Also as I have noted elsewhere. One would reasonably conclude that the Cast and Crew data would be the same for a given title no matter where it is shown. Believe it or not this is not ALWAYS true, it might true 99.5% of the time, maybe even 99.9% but not always. So it can be a real stick wicket.

Skip

Quoting skipnet50:

Quote:

Also as I have noted elsewhere. One would reasonably conclude that the Cast and Crew data would be the same for a given title no matter where it is shown. Believe it or not this is not ALWAYS true, it might true 99.5% of the time, maybe even 99.9% but not always. So it can be a real stick wicket.

Skip

I can confirm this. For example, the UK release of the Pixar film "Cars" uses a different actor for the Harv character & therefore has a different actor in the credits.

Ironically, it was Nosferatu who corrected the UK Blu-ray - "In the British version Jeremy Clarkson provides the voice of Harv not Jeremy Piven".

As a result, we do need to be careful when copying credits as even a simple thing such as a comma may not be present in every release of the same title.

I agree it is possible for different versions to have different credits, rarely, but still possible. So using the method a few of us have done, by putting up a thread with all titles asking for verification, MIGHT in a very few rare instances yield incorrect results for 1 or 2 versions of a film. But for the majority of the profiles, I'm pretty sure a single verified credit is probably correct, especially for determining a most credited form of a name.

I'm not sure I'd be in favor of blindly correcting profiles for discs that I can not verify. Determining a most credited form, and having that information available isn't going to propagate it throughout the database either. Given that we can not (or probably should not) correct a profile for a DVD we don't have, I think we are safe in assuming that a verified "filmography" of an actor's body of work in the IVC database is a safe way to determine the most credited form and/or proving the CLT correct or in error, and we can correct the profiles we own based on that.

I've been adding some of the Nunez profiles to my wish list, mainly to try to find who has been contributing on them and then harass through PM to see if they could check the credits. Several of the profiles are what I'd call dormant, they are port overs that have 0 updates here and are old enough they don't have any contribution note history in the IVS list either. Not sure what to do about those, but I'm going to note that they are dormant profiles in the thread. For all I know, those profiles are not even valid.