Quoting skipnet50:

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I have said this a number of times. EVERY actor has as part of his contract the way in which he will be credited for his work on the film.

I'm sorry but I saw credits where the actor is credited in different ways in the same end credits (for example Zoe and Zoë).

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Chow Yun Fat, while being normal for Asian culture, is NOT normal for Western culture, since he is appearing in a film which is Western based in one way or another, shoulkd he not require trhat his credit be handled in a way consistent with the culture in which his credit is read. Similarly in an Asian film Wayne John would be more appropriate than John Wayne. This is merely a devil's advocate discussion, but one which I believe puts a bit of a lie to the Cultural argument.

The way names are credited depends not on the culture where the film (credits) come from, it depends on the culture background where the actor come from. I saw a couple of credits in this way:

FAMILY NAME given name (asian/hungarian actor)
given name FAMILY NAME (western actor)
given name FAMILY NAME (western actor)
FAMILY NAME given name (asian/hungarian actor)
FAMILY NAME given name (asian/hungarian actor)
given name FAMILY NAME (western actor)
FAMILY NAME given name (asian/hungarian actor)

Quoting northbloke:

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I still believe the better way to deal with these names is to parse them as seen on screen, but have some sort of checkbox telling us that the family name is in the first name field and so on. That way, rather than having to update all the profiles involved we simply have to update the person once in our database and it would spread through the database the same way the BYs do.
Hopefully Ken would also be able to change the sorting so that it also took into account this checkbox.

Full ACK

What is really irritating me about this argument is that only a few of the participants have any stake in this issue.  As someone with more than 1500 Asian titles, it has a bit more meaning for me than people who have a dozen or so and won't run into this problem.  The fact that people want to make me do at least double the work to satisfy some odd idea that parsing should be different for other countries is ludicrous.

According the posters here, we need to create a common name that isn't a common name at all!  For example, I'll bet you that the films that have credited Chow Yun-Fat as Yun-Fat Chow can be listed on one hand -- if at all!  So we are creating a common name that doesn't exist.  As for the credit lookup system, it's useless when it comes to Asian titles.  The majority of them are IMDB clones.  I should know, since in the very early days (before voting or the rules were around), I used to contribute them!  But the odd thing is that according to some here, I wouldn't be able to fix them properly using the proper names.

And speaking of parsing, you may find the same actor parsed in multiple ways.  Sticking with Chow Yun-Fat, we could see:

Chow/Yun/Fat
Chow/Yun-Fat
Chow/Yun Fat
Yun/Fat/Chow
Yun-Fat/Chow
Yun Fat/Chow

Since there's no standard, the names are all over the place.  Plus, it requires someone to know which is the family name and which is the given name.  It might be easy for someone famous to even Westerners, like Chow Yun-Fat, but what about an actor with a name like Wang Li (or should that be Li Wang?)  Two common family names.  Are we supposed to reverse every actor we see on screen, then use the "as credited" system to correct the names to what they show on screen?  Why the hell should we double the work of entering cast and crew just to satisfy someone's need to have the family and given names put in Western order?  That might not be a big deal you out there with only a few releases, mostly big titles from Region 1, but it would be a nightmare to me with obscure titles from all over.

It amazes me that there were arguments on here that Korean films that had the English title printed on their covers should be listed under its phonetic interpretation of the Korean characters in that locality (despite the English title present), but that we should alter the names for cast and crew in that country to reach some Western standard.  On those same DVDs, no less.

This is why I won't regularly contribute cast and crew for Asian titles anymore.  For example, I entered the full cast and crew for the recent Johnnie To film "Mad Detective" in my own database.  The existing profile was incomplete, missing several names in both cast and crew.  But due to its use of these so-called "common names" I would have to justify my changing of actors under these ridiculous "swaps" to their proper names, adding a lot more work to a simple profile change.  So it sits locally.

And if it goes the way many in this thread want it to, these updates will remain local.  And it is a shame, since there are very few of us actually contributing Asian titles.

My last plea is to just make it simple like the rest of the world: What is on-screen should be what is in the profile.  If the actor is Chow Yun-Fat, it should be Chow/Yun-Fat.  The rules can than be specified to deal with the major issues, like the "English" name issue (i.e. Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Tony Leung Ka-Fai, etc.) or the parsing of two given names (should be used in the second field, since the names are one whole name, like someone who only goes by Billy Joe).  Otherwise, count me out.  Life's too short.  This is supposed to be a hobby, not work.

More to say, but I realize that I shouldn't get as irritated as I am about this issue, so I think I'll end my rant here.

I think I know what you mean, but I think it's no more a problem than we currently have with some Harrison Fords having a BY and others not. Yes, eventually those profiles that have a common name of Li//Gong would have to be changed eventually, but as it stands now they're still not linked to the profiles where she's known as Gong//Li, so we're not breaking anything by introducing this, we're just trying to create a consistent way of dealing with these names so it makes it easier to link them.
Maybe a tool could be written for those who have parsed them differently, so they can flag all affected names and reverse them and tick the box en masse? Save them from having to re-do their database.

Quoting schizzzo:

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There are a lot of arguments pro First name=given name, last name=family name and none against.

Well except how do we name a field that is actually the last name? To say it always means family name will cause this problem. Also the last name of lot of Chinese Actors is actually the last name of their nickname phrase and makes no sense back to front. Where they do use their correct names it's much better to sort on the last name since there will be a lot less repetition.

Quoting kdh1949:

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OFF TOPIC:  Does anyone know why Japanese and Hungarian grammar/word order are closely related?  Was there some cross-pollination between the cultures over the decades so that the languages are similar?  In a Japanese history course I took I learned how the language structures were similar, but not how that happened unless by sheer coincidence.

I don't know of any particular Japanese-Hungarian crosslinks, but I remember to have heard that the Hungarians descend from a steppe people of Asian origin (related to the Huns) called the Magyars ("Hungary" in Hungarian is Magyarország).