One size does not fit all (a continuing series)

[firecat]

Sent to me in e-mail by webmaven:

"Falsehoods programmers believe about names"

Excerpt:

I have never seen a computer system which handles names properly and doubt one exists, anywhere.

So, as a public service, I’m going to list assumptions your systems probably make about names. All of these assumptions are wrong. Try to make less of them next time you write a system which touches names.

Shall I discuss why this is a continuing series, or do you already understand what I mean?

I consider myself to have a pretty simple name history. I was given 3 names at birth, which is traditional in the culture I grew up in and live in. I live in the US and the names I got were pretty standard WASP names. I changed my name three times: once to shorten my first name, once to change my first name, and once to change my last name. One of these changes is legal (i.e., my new name appears on legal documents).

Despite this simple history, I sometimes have to deal with the following falsehoods perpetuated by computer systems or organizational records (out of 40 listed):
1. People have exactly one canonical full name.
2. People have exactly one full name which they go by.
3. People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name.
4. People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.
5. People have exactly N names, for any value of N.
7. People’s names do not change.
8. People’s names change, but only at a certain enumerated set of events.
20. People have last names, family names, or anything else which is shared by folks recognized as their relatives.
32. People’s names are assigned at birth.
33. OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
34. Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
35. Five years?
36. You’re kidding me, right?
37. Two different systems containing data about the same person will use the same name for that person.
39. People whose names break my system are weird outliers.

Most of the time it's easy for me to deal with these things, but it's still annoying to have to deal with them.

I also have had to deal with this falsehood as far as computer systems and organizational records are concerned:
Two family members never have the same name.

I won't even start on the falsehoods that people in general (as opposed to people who program computers) have about names and my names in particular.

Comments

[graymalkin]

Heh heh heh... Yes, it's frustrating. As you know, I too have changed my name. I changed both my first and last names legally a long time ago and had a party to celebrate. However, when I went through one of the canonically enumerated events (getting married), I did not change my name. Also, I do not have a middle name. I was given one by my parents, but I discarded it. So I am a weird outlier as usual. Computer programs aside, I'm good with that.

[firecat]

I changed my name as part of the canonically enumerated event, but neither the event nor that particular name change was done legally.

My middle name that I was given at birth embarrassed me hugely and I kept it secret (I'm over the embarrassment now). It's still on a few official documents though.

[sqbr]

Ack, lost my reply.

Anyway: as someone whose job used to largely consist of trying to fit and match names in a rigid database via a series of kludges and statistical assumptions: yes. Of course, since we were dealing with government records, we also couldn't assume that date of birth was a constant... :/

[firecat]

People are so messy.

[quoththeravyn]

Which reminds me of a comic... here. As always with xkcd, mind the rollover text.

[firecat]

❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

[supergee]

Hal O'Brien has pointed out that his last name contains a weird furrin alien character with which a number of computerized programs cannot deal.

[ailbhe]

I really do think USian websites are the worst for this.

[eftychia]

US websites ... and HMOs, and government offices, and banks, and retailers, and schools, and ... the web, visible and annoying as it is, is the least painful aspect of this problem here. This is why different entities I deal with use something like eight different permutations of my name, and I have to try to keep track of which business or institution knows me by which version.

[lilacsigil]

I work in a pharmacy and have to deal with these limitations all the time. It's extremely frustrating, even with a fairly responsive software company which at least gave us a "known by" field to put the name that people actually use, which we can't put in the system itself because then our national healthcare won't recognise them. "People's names are always less than N letters" (which is on the list you linked) is especially frequent, along with "family members never share the same name".

[eftychia]

Oy, pharmacies. What with most wanting (reasonably) to sort by surname, many wanting to record names last-name-first, and my having what sounds like they could be four first names, picking up prescriptions is always fun. "Nothing here under 'Arthur'." "Okay, look under 'Glenn'. Then look under 'D. Glenn'. Then look under 'Donald'. Are you sure it's not ready?" So far none have actually filed me under 'Junior' yet, but I figure it's just a matter of time.

[eagle]

I can add a couple more that I've seen cause real-world failures:

41. People have at least two names.
42. Surnames cannot contain spaces.

Doing identity management for a university means one encounters just about every one of those at some point or another.

[eftychia]

43. First names* cannot contain spaces...
44. ... or hyphens.
45. Middle names cannot contain spaces.

[*] By which I mean not-surname-not-middlename, though I'm aware calling it "first name" is problematic because different cultures use different ordering. Is "given name" as useful term for this?

[firecat]

Needless to say, your 41 causes endless fun in this household.

[snippy]

This is a kind of "fun" I prefer not to have!

[firecat]

Me too but if it's gonna happen I might as well have fun with it.

[eftychia]

All the more frustrating since it's a Very Old Problem, not some New Surprise, yet every year I see fresh examples coded as if by freshman CS students who've never ever heard that three-never-changing-names-and-no-suffix isn't universal.

[redbird]

A lot of the comments at the linked article say things of the general form "this is only a problem across cultures" (with the implicit "you should have a name of the 'normal' form for your culture): but the person I know who considered changing their name on marriage because the computer systems couldn't handle a surname with an apostrophe lived in Ireland.

I wonder how many would now argue that it's unreasonable to expect systems used in a country of "only" a few million people to be designed for that country rather than for the United States.

[tedesson]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ
Because you can never have too much Fry and Laurie.

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

How about the assumption People's Names are Short! If I use First Name then Maiden-Married Last Name, the whole Last Name doesn't fit! If I do First Name Maiden Name, then Married Name (so that the family will be filed together), then First Maiden Doesn't Fit! Or the Maiden Mysteriously Disappears. I still Like my Maiden Name, even though I've been married for 32 years.
And don't get me started about III. Moose is a Third, his father doesn't use Jr or II. But a lot of systems aren't set up for III or dare I say it, anything behind the Last Name. Dumb. Then they try to throw out one of the Harolds as a duplicate! I happen to know there are two of them (there used to be three) and one is much younger than the other one. :D It's hell in Airline Registration Systems especially, where they are playing matchy matchy with mysterious lists.

[firecat]

Yep, computer systems don't handle all that stuff very well either. Grr.

[clever-doberman.livejournal.com]

it used to be that if you had the name Christopher as either a first or last name, your name was truncated because that name is longer than 10 characters.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons I changed my name when I married Ken is that my full name before that was frequently too long to fit in the number of squares allowed on forms. This was 1990, so mostly before computers were an issue. How I wish I'd also legally changed my first name to just "Jo" at that point!

[clever-doberman.livejournal.com]

and, I like to use all 3 names, and I will often include my first and middle in the first name field, but indeed it still gets shortened to an initial. aarrgghh.

[7patches.livejournal.com]

I use the name I had a birth: first name, no middle name, hyphenated last name.
My least favorite computer system error is the California DMV:
They don't print hyphens, even if they see them on the screen. When the IDs were literally a photograph of the typed license document, I could draw in the hyphen before the picture was taken. Now that the license card is directly computer generated, there is no hyphen. This was a problem when I had to replace my social security card, using my driver's license as a proof of ID.

It is common for a person or a system to decide which part of my last name is my real last name, or to assign a middle initial based on part of my last name. I learned a long time ago that any credit card offer addressed to Patrice B. Bennet-Alder would be unsuccessful if I actually applied and they ran a credit check.

I do some systems credit for trying. My first computerized school report card printed my last name as Bennet 1/2 Alder.

[firecat]

Bennet 1/2 Alder

LOL!

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

The accented character in my first name gets rejected or changed to a different character (such as having the high bit stripped) by web sites a lot.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Last names are always one word. My (Dutch) birth name threw every system I encountered during school for a loop. That was one significant factor in my decision not to resume my birth name after the divorce.

Even LibraryThing has this problem. Every time I enter a book by (for example) A. E. Van Vogt, the "author name" field comes back "Vogt, A. E. Van" and I have to correct it manually. You have no idea how much it pisses me off that this still happens on a book-lovers' site!

[jenk]

L'Engle breaks a lot of sites too.

[firecat]

I'm one of the volunteer librarians on goodreads.com and don't even get me started about
Guin, Ursula K. Le
Le Guin, Ursula K.
LeGuin, Ursula K.

[yarram.livejournal.com]

My SO has two middle names, which does not fit neatly on the standard 3-name-fields system. I know people who have 5 names: birth name, given name, baptismal name, generational name, and family name.

There is also a database I've worked with that does not output extended ASCII correctly (let alone extended Latin or Unicode), and converts things like é to random glyphs. This means having to look up the original registration form after a file export to verify the exact spelling of munged badge IDs. *grumble*