THis is what the common name threads try to do all the time. Personally I've given up voting on these back and forth changes until something better comes along.

Quoting GSyren:

Quote:
Currently there is a contribution for Back to the Future II:

Quote:
Common Name Makeup
"Ellis Berman" 6 (Titles)
"Ellis Burman" 59 (Titles)
"Sonny Burman" 97 (titles) -> only 5 different titles!
in CLT

The contributor is probably correct that the CLT skews the results of TV shows so that what the CLT sees as 97 titles is in reality only 5 titles.

BUT... does that really mean that for the sake of determining the common name we should not use the data provided by the CLT, but rather try to figure out the actual number of titles.

The rules aren't really clear on this point, but it seems to me that if we are to get anything remotely useful from the common name system, we must have a deterministic method for arriving at the common name. And the only way I see is to use the CLT results as is.

I certainly see the logic in the contributors reasoning, but it doesn't really help us to come to a consistent way of determining the common name.

Any thoughts?

Like what has been stated the CLT cannot always be taken on it's face value.  When looking at the CLT you can usually see when you have a result where the numbers are off.  Sometimes when you can see that they are off it is easy to tell if there are little or no overlaps and get the correct counts without opening a "Common Name Thread".  But sometimes you have to open a thread.

But you can usually tell when you can use the base numbers or not.

As Pete said,

the "problem" arises because there is no consensus and no clarification by Invelos on how to treat TV-Show credits.
It's even made worse since not all TV-Shows are handled identical within the database (some have sub-profiles, some don't).

Originally I was of the opinion that TV-Show credits should only count 1 per season.
But I had to learn that this causes more problems than it solves, since in not only a few TV-Shows we have varying credits for the same person throughout one season.

So I nowadays tend towards Episode counting.
The problem here is that the CLT only goes down to Disc-Level and (in it's current version) cannot count Episodes correctly.

No matter how we take it here, the CLT gives imprecise results.
But, for me, it's perfectly OK to count 22 credits in one season as 22.

Quoting T!M:

Quote:
Quoting marcelb7:

Quote:
But indeed, the biggest obstacle is the counting of TV-series. There needs to be a set of rules that people adhere to, regardless of customs that have creeped in the last few years. We need consistency, and not "a rule with 1,000 variations". If that means that the entire title-system needs to be overhauled: so be it. If it needs a mass-conversion of data, I'll be glad to volunteer to sort things out for Invelos.

This.

Absolutely, until this is done the CLT numbers will be in question

Actually, going by 1 season/1 profile (which is how I believe it should be counted), Ellis Burman (13 titles) is the common name over Sonny Burman (6 titles) and Ellis Berman (1 title).

Quoting bigdaddyhorse:

Quote:
If we dropped disc level profiles and just put all the data on the parent, it would help clear up those TV numbers big time! Does anyone actually own say disc 3 from season 4 of Show X, but not discs 1 & 2? It's possible with ex-rental sales, but doubtful and anyone who does is probably looking to fill the set.

Oh, yes please! It's not even necessary from a 'credited as' point of view. If someone is credited as "John Doe" in episodes 1-22, and "John X. Doe" in episode 23, they both count as 1 in the parent profile.
Splitting the credits across multiple discs will only drive up the count, and for what reason exactly? <Answer: a gazillion topics on common names in the contribution forum>

Last year, I posted something about this on the Contribution Rules section of the forum, but nothing became of that. It's not available to everyone, but if you have access, you can read it here: click.

Well, here's the way I see it.

The common name system is just a way to make all credits for the same person to link. This can only work if everyone assigns the common name through a well defined standard. That standard is the CLT numbers. It doesn't really matter what the  numbers stand for.

For determining common names, one should really think of the CLT as a "black box". You feed it the name variants for a specific person, and it tells you what the common name should be. It doesn't matter how the CLT arrives at these figures, or what - if anything - these figures represent. The only important thing is that everyone can come to the same conclusion and assign the same common name.

If we don't take the CLT figures as is, that will never work.

Quoting bigdaddyhorse:

Quote:
If we dropped disc level profiles and just put all the data on the parent, it would help clear up those TV numbers big time! Does anyone actually own say disc 3 from season 4 of Show X, but not discs 1 & 2? It's possible with ex-rental sales, but doubtful and anyone who does is probably looking to fill the set.

On what I put in bold... yes I absolutely do! through gifts and such... people giving me the sets missing a disc or two and such.

I personally would be completely against not having cast/crew available at disc level.