Right, Frankie. It's a terrible rats nest! The one cataloging "policy" for people's names is to use "natural order" in a single field over Lastname, Firstname in separate fields.
So, Alex - we're not going to be able to support your request. I hope that's not a blocker! Cheers, george On 3/17/11 4:34 AM, Frankie Roberto wrote: > > On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 9:21 AM, Alex Stinson <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > The standard use on the English Wikipedia is so that the last name comes > first, the first and last options allow the program to automatically > format it, > > > It's odd - lots of people seem to prefer (or just perhaps be used to) seeing > "Lastname, Firstname" - on another project I worked on, seeing names in this > order is one of the top user requests. > > Splitting a single name into first names and surname is doable, but not > entirely > trivial. You might think that you could simply hive off the last word from the > name, but you have to remember to account for hyphenated double-barrelled > surnames, and surnames prefixed with additional words like "von" or "van" (as > in > Dick Van Dyke). Plus there are a few special cases of people with double > barrelled surnames that aren't hypenated (such as "Helena Bonham Carter) which > you'd miss and would somehow have to fix by hand. > > Then, in any views, you'd have to remember to not rely on the surname field > being present, as there are plenty of people who don't have (or commonly use) > one (eg Madonna and many Brazillian people). So you'd have to have some extra > logic defaulting to just using firstnames if surname is blank. > > Finally, just to confuse matters even more, the convention in some countries > in > to place the family name before the given name (known as 'Eastern Order') - > however, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name#Name_order, > when transliterated into the western alphabet, some people choose to swap the > order around, whereas others don't. > > All in all, you can see why it's conceptually easier to just have a 'name' > field > for the most common form of someone's name, with 'alternate names' for any > other > forms...! > > Frankie > > -- > Frankie Roberto > Experience Designer, Rattle > 0114 2706977 > http://www.rattlecentral.com > > > > _______________________________________________ > Ol-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > [email protected] _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
