Quoting Lord Of The Sith:

Quote:
I was doing updates this week and I have noticed something I really dislike.  People are taking away from the current cast info.  In many of my profiles cast members have a birth date to differentiate them from another actor or actress with the same name.  Lately I am finding cast updates that are just removing the birth date.  Therefore, I would like the ability to lock single cast members.  Sometimes on an update I want other cast info but have to lock the entire cast because I do not want to loose existing info on a single member.
I think maybe a check box when entering or editing a cast member which says "LOCK"

+1 

I agree not only with the above reasoning, but also because I am in Australia (Region 4)  and have a lot of Australian movies & TV shows in my collection. Sometimes there are Australian cast/crew with common names as British/American/Canadian etc. cast/crew but am unable to verify bio details without a great deal of research, and where possible I include a birth year to differentiate.  For many minor/supporting cast members, this is not always possible, but I would still like to incude them in my database for both completeness and consistency reasons.

When I import a DVD with a cast/crew with a name in common, my cast/crew name database gets
compromised because the cast/crew in my newly imported title gets erroneously accredited to my local cast/crew member.

The same can also happen when the profile is uploaded and the Australian (or British/US/Canadian) cast/crew member has an in common name with a cast/crew in the Invelos Profiler database.

Perhaps a Common name check could be implemented after a profile is downloaded with a prompt or a flag to follow-up before merging the profile into the database.

This is also where the Credit name lookup breaks down, and imho should be abandoned. I have seen many examples of common name lookups to be completely out of the ball-park but have been accepted purely because more profiles have included the incorrect/different spelling than the correct spelling, so the incorrect spelling becomes the de facto acceptable name. It is possible for a 100 profiles to be incorrect and 1 correct, but with this Credit name lookup, the incorrect spelling can win out. British director "Andy de Emmony" springs to mind as a prime example and last time I looked the incorrect "Andy Deemony" won out.

Overall, I consider the cast/crew system with Invelos to be severely compromised for a wide variety of reasons, and I personally would not like to sit down and put in place a unique identifier for each and every cast/crew member. Putting in place a set of rules would in general be open to many interpretations and I doubt whether many members would bother dealing with anything more complex than what we have to put up with now.

The inconsistencies are even greater with nicknames, aliases, Titles (as in Lord, Lady, Prime Minister, Rt. Honourable etc. included in the First name field), Women's family/maiden names, Hyphenated or not hyphenated first names or middle and/or last names, Anglicised names, Asian names with the family and given names transposed. It gets even more complex with Music DVDs.  Band Names, performing names etc. ("Slash", "Sting", "Edge" etc.) just making the task even more difficult than it should be.
 
In the meantime, when updating a profile, I prefer to LOCK down anything I don't want compromised by these vague interpretations and that usually means cast/crew and studios.