Quoting Kathy:

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If I see an accent, I enter it. If there isn't one, I don't.

No kidding, it's that simple.

Quoting lasitter:

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I am not that familiar with the name linking system and the associated problems. Could someone provide me a link to the thread that lays this all out?

I'm not sure any thread explained exactly all the linking problems.

You have correct linking inside dvdprofiler when clicking on the name of an actor, you get the list of all movies in your collection where he played.

dvdprofiler rules ask to enter names as they are credited, so when in several movies, an actor is credited differently, you have to use  a "common name" and the "Credited As" field to get a correct linking. On the contrary, when two different actors have the same name, you must break their link, using the birthyear field.

Main linking problems :

1/People changing their names
In many cases, the actor himself decides to change his name in credits. You have :
- married women
- people using sometimes stage names, sometimes their real name
- american actors using sometimes their middle name, sometimes not, and sometimes only first letter of their middle name
- different use of suffixes, as Jr, or Jr.
all those credits reproduce the name used by the actor himself at the time of the credit, and in that sense, they are "correct", so we need a rule to choose the "common name" used for linking. Invelos asks us to use the CLT tool, which counts the number of profiles where each different name is used.
The main problem associated with those cases is to know that Anna Thomson is the same person as Anna Levine, and search both names in the CLT. If the contributor ignores that, he will not use the common name system.

2/Contributor unable to reproduce correctly credits
Two main cases:
- credits in non roman letters (cyrillic, Asian, Arabic...): people have to romanize the credits to enter them in dvdprofiler. But no indication has never been given for this romanization. So, in the CLT, you can find, for example, the Russian actress credited as Dinara Droukarova and Dinara Drukarova. Asian characters also lead to many variants.
- accented names : when credits are in capital letters, the accents can be inapparent in certain credits. Even if the actor has always used the same accented name, Invelos rule that requests to reproduce what you see on credits generates different non linking variants. Most of European movies profiles are affected by this problem.

3/Asian names
In some countries, people reverse the order given name/family name to family name/given name. Invelos never said without ambiguity if first name field meant given name, or first part of the credited name. So most of Asian people have two variants in CLT: ZHANG Ziyi, and Ziyi ZHANG.

4/ Actors with same name
When you do not know the birth year of different actors with same name, or if their birth year is the same, you cannot break the incorrect linking.

but of course, all this is just beating a dead horse... 

Quoting surfeur51:

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Quoting Kathy:

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Removed my post because this sums up my thoughts much more succinctly.

Of course, you are speaking of the color/colour issue... 

You betcha.