Generally speaking, putting some emphasis on the last name is useful for any kind of cross-referencing, and I would hate to lose it.

Having separate first and last names (and even middle names) is not a big issue. Or it would not be, if we at the same time come up with some clear rules, that work worldwide.

Something along the lines of:
Family name (including hyphenated) goes into Last name (including parts like de, van, le, von where applicable),
First first name goes into First name,
all other names (middle name, additional first names, whatever) go into Middle name.

Stage names into First name only (trusting some day the field will be long enough).

That would leave some cases where documentation on the family name is required (Bonham Carter type), and also stage names which are ficitional First Name, Last Name type (John Wayne).

Nothing too complicated surely.

Quoting Staid S Barr:

Quote:
...
Stage names into First name only (trusting some day the field will be long enough).

That would leave some cases where documentation on the family name is required (Bonham Carter type), and also stage names which are ficitional First Name, Last Name type (John Wayne).

Nothing too complicated surely.

In most cases we ignore stage names that 'look like a real name'. I have never seen anyone here try to enter 'Cary Grant' or 'Nick Cage' into the first name field only, but both are stage names. It is just names like 'Queen Latifah' that end up in the first name field only.

Here in the US when an actor joins SAG, they pick a name to be credited under. It could be their 'real' name if no other actor is using that name, or it could be one that they just make up. My best guess is that basically the same thing is done in other countries with their own actors unions.

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And if pigs could fly...

What we need is linking that works. Like I said, there are ways to keep parsing and still have something that works in practice, not just in an utopian theory.

You guys are all joking right?  You know that parsing names makes the database more usable for a variety of reasons.  See this article on database normalization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization

Personally, I don't think there's enough parsing of name data.  We should have separate fields for Title (Dr., Father, Revered, Sir, etc), name suffixes (Jr., Sr., etc.), and nicknames.