[HN Gopher] Some problems with 'first name' and 'last name' fiel...
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Some problems with 'first name' and 'last name' fields in data
Author : ingve
Score : 14 points
Date : 2023-08-12 17:27 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (utcc.utoronto.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (utcc.utoronto.ca)
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| This may drive DBAs nuts, but in some cases, perhaps you could
| have a naming_convention variable that is filled out first, and
| it has a certain number of limited values, and it determines the
| number and order of "name" fields that get filled out. Then you
| have a catch-all naming_convention that just produces one "name"
| label that's very long, and you put the whole name in there.
|
| Then you can have, say, "Western" naming convention, "Asian"
| (reverse order), "Spanish", "Catalan", "Hungarian", "Ancient
| Roman", and some of these are going to look very similar. And
| then if Madonna Ciccone or Beyonce Knowles comes around, you just
| use the catch-all for the mononymous.
|
| It's not an elegant solution and it's not going to work for user-
| oriented forms, but perhaps on the backend, I don't know, for
| Wikipedia or something. Wikipedia already tags many biographies
| with the naming convention that is used.
| benj111 wrote:
| So if you're dealing internationally, and names actually matter.
| You may need to think a bit harder about names.
|
| Although the proposal still doesn't solve all edge cases. And the
| current edge cases have presumably found a solution, like my
| girlfriend that has 2 last names, and is from a 'western'
| country.
|
| My parents address is stupidly long and doesn't fit in to most
| address boxes, so you also need to allow arbitrarily long
| addresses.
|
| Oh, and your email validator is wrong too.
| sjmulder wrote:
| Even bog standard Dutch names are often a problem e.g. "Jan de
| Wit" being addressed as "Jan de", "Jan Wit" or sorted under the
| letter d.
| stephenr wrote:
| Is the "de" somehow different to a "regular" middle name?
| ssss11 wrote:
| It's part of the last name.
| Daimanta wrote:
| It's not a "middle name", rather it's an "infix". Some
| countries/languages have this feature where there is a
| generic "infix" part of the last/family name. This generic
| part if fully part of the last name but is so common that
| it will cause an imbalance in the distribution of names.
|
| To understand this as an English speaker. Imagine people
| aren't called John Smith, but rather John the Smith and not
| Bill Boston but Bill of Boston. Now imagine that a large
| percentage of people had an infix in the name. It would be
| impractical to order stuff by last name and find a massive
| index on the letter "o" because all the last names starting
| with "of" or at "t" starting with "the". To balance this
| out, parts that would translate to words like "from",
| "the", "of", "to" or "on" would be considered an index.
| Part of the last name, but not considered part of the name
| index. John the Smith would be found at the letter "S"
| usually structured as "Smith, John the".
| stephenr wrote:
| Ah ok. So the issue is not so much how to store it, but
| how to _sort it_.
|
| It's the iTunes "The ..." problem.
|
| Thanks for clarifying.
| Quekid5 wrote:
| Think "da Vinci". It's not exactly the same, but similar
| enough.
| cratermoon wrote:
| I worked at an place tied to 60s US legacy technology from the
| airline industry, and yes, everything was first name/last name. I
| don't know how it works interoperating with airlines serving Asia
| or anywhere with non-US naming. The same system was strictly
| ASCII, too (I think very technically EBCDIC deep in the inner
| workings). Also, because of TSA rules and the security line, the
| names are used for more than personalization, they are legally
| required to meet certain criteria.
|
| Previous to that I worked at place with a key customer in Japan,
| so everything was pretty well i18n and I got used to seeing given
| name/family name or similar. I discovered I had muscle memory for
| typing 'surname' instead of 'lastname'.
| brodock wrote:
| Last names are also not limited to ASCII. There all sorts of
| special caracters depending on the language like uaaaeec-' (the
| single quote is specially important because its normally blocked
| due to SQL injection, but its a common character in
| italian/french/spanish names).
|
| Preventing people from writing their own names because you decide
| to use a regexp from stackoverflow is also bad.
| someotherperson wrote:
| I'm trying to figure out what the issue is here. The Spanish
| example given isn't even a real problem: even Spanish speaking
| countries only use two columns ("first names" and "last names"
| plural). It really feels like it's trying to invent a problem
| that doesn't exist, or to try to cater for the extreme edge case.
|
| Once you have the data, how you present it as a separate i18n
| thing. Do you want to address an <ethnicity> crowd by their last
| name? Cool! That's a rendering issue, not a database problem.
| agubelu wrote:
| I understand that the author's point is that we should replace
| "first name" with "given name(s)" and "last name" with "family
| name(s)" if we are going to have two fields instead of just one
| for the full name. It's true that it would be more clear in
| some cases, since in many cultures the "first name" is the
| family name, which is probably not what the system expects.
|
| Though I do agree that it's mostly a matter of i18n. In Spanish
| you should ask for "nombre" (name) and "apellido(s)" (surname),
| if you say "given name" and "family name" users will be
| confused.
| K0nserv wrote:
| Instead of complicated schemes that attempt to be locale aware,
| it seems simpler to use a general scheme that will apply
| regardless.
|
| Collect two values:
|
| 1. What do you want to be called? e.g. if we send you an email
| we'll say Hello {name}
|
| 2. What is your legally recognised name i.e. what's on your
| passport and official documents.
|
| #2 is only relevant in some domains, in many cases #1 alone is
| sufficient.
| NomDePlum wrote:
| Names are much more complicated than this. A starting point is
| pretty much all systems processing names need to consider all
| possible permutations across all cultures, and select some
| constraints to operate by. There is no silver bullet here, and in
| all honesty the authors suggestions seem well intentioned, but
| don't address any real problem space.
|
| When it comes to these considerations for instance, it's possible
| to have a first name, but no last name and vice-versa.
|
| Also, never mind how many words make up a first or last name, but
| what's the minimum number of characters allowed for each?
|
| What characters do they allow, and which shouldn't they?
|
| Also, what version of the person are they attached to? Is Dr. J.
| Stevenson the same identity as Jonathan Stevenson, or Jon Adam
| Stevenson?
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