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mysociety / yournextrepresentative

A website for crowd-sourcing structured election candidate data
https://candidates.democracyclub.org.uk/
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Improve name search (to not get confused by middle names) #787

Closed JoeMitchell closed 7 years ago

JoeMitchell commented 8 years ago

I just duplicated a load of candidates because I used their middle names, and the search in 'Bulk add candidates' didn't spot them. Gah.

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JoeMitchell commented 7 years ago

Feedback from a user:

I recognised one of the candidates (Andrew O'Brien), as I remembered adding him last year for an election in the same area. But when I reviewed the list on candidates - I was not prompted to re-use an existing candidate. It appears that your search function didn't find him - maybe it has a problem with apostrophes in names ?

jf1 commented 7 years ago

In #870 @mhl indicated that there's already a fix available for the apostrophes in names problem.

JoeMitchell commented 7 years ago

Ah, so it might have been another problem he was having. Interesting. Ta @jf1 !

jf1 commented 7 years ago

The fix @mhl highlighted is in MySociety's YNR but I don't know if it has been added to DC by @symroe - it may still need to be applied.

mhl commented 7 years ago

@symroe applied the apostrophe fix to the DC version as e7086637a19fd4 - the middle names issue is a new problem, I think.

jf1 commented 7 years ago

Some more thoughts on middle and multiple names, and a proposal to standardise them in DC...

Currently DC uses: Name (shown as "Full name" in the add and edit candidate screens) Alternative names

These could be: Primary name - as used on candidate site and promo etc Formal name - the official name listed on the SoPN (usually includes middle names) Alternative/AKA - could have multiple AKAs, although I'd hope the above two cover most cases

Examples from GM Mayor include: (Fine in DC) Sean Anstee - this is his primary name, his full SoPN name is Sean Brian Anstee (Weird in DC) Jane Elisabeth Brophy - this is her full/formal name, but she's always known and promoted as Jane Brophy

I expect users would appreciate clear guidance, and that DC's data would benefit from a standardised approach that everyone complies with.