How we determine which is the preferred name of an actor?

[yeozy95]

DDL has previously just took the first instance of the actor's name appearance in our database as generally the "preferred" version. Do we have a stricter logic for the OpenClimate Schema?

[evanp]

It's a matter of choice, and primarily for UI.

I think the preferred name would be the one we would show as default for a language, and the "name" column in Actor is the fallback in case there are no matches.

Preference might include these factors, in no particular order:

• Readability (Cocos Islands more readable than Territory of Cocos (Keeling) Islands, The)
• Briefness (Bolivia is briefer than Plurinational State of Bolivia)
• Frequency of use
• Official use (example: Mumbai vs Bombay, Alphabet Inc. vs Google, Deere & Company vs. John Deere)
• Current use
• Word order
• Clarity (example: United Kingdom is clearer than UK, North Korea is clearer than DPRK)

I think for 99% of actors, we'll have only one or two names in any particular language. In general, I'd probably defer to Wikipedia or Wikidata for names, since they have a lot of editors and contributors who put in a lot of time discussing the best name to use!

[evanp]

Maybe we should change this to a Q score. Like 0 -> 1, where 1.0 is the best name to use, and 0 is the worst name to use. If an Actor has lots of names, use the one with the best score.