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Terminology

Last Name = Surname, Family Name, or primary Cognomen. Basically the name used to index a player in a collated list.

First Name = Forename or Given Name. Basically the next name given when indexing a person in a collated list.

Middle Names = Names given after the First Name in a collated list.

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General Rules

Background from Daniel Freeman:
chessgames.com chessforum (kibitz #22549)

Use the least amount of information to uniquely identify the player in the <Short Name> and <Long Name> fields. For modern era players Chessgames.com will tend to follow the name given by FIDE for the <Long Name> field.

Player names should be anglicized. There is a practical reason for anglicizing player names: Most users tend to use the standard 26-letter English alphabet while visiting English language websites. More technical reasons involve the Chessgames.com "fixpgn" script, which when run, rewrites player names in the PGNs to match the <long name> field for uniformity purposes.

The basic conversion rule is that foreign language letters should be converted to their English equivalent. In the case of Germanic names (German and Austrian), any letter with an umlaut should be converted to the English equivalent with an extra "e" added, i.e. ä, ö, and ü, should be converted to ae, oe, and ue.

Examples:
Böök = Book (Finnish)
Чиго́рин = Chigorin (Russian)
Vázquez = Vazquez (Cuban)
François = Francois (French)
Hübner = Huebner (German)
Lipschütz = Lipschutz (Hungarian)

The exception to this conversion rule is that, when known, a player's preferred English language spelling of their name should be used.

The native form of the player's name should appear in their biography along with the anglicized version (see below).

In cases where a player has changed their name, Chessgames.com uses the English version of their name most widely associated with that player during their chess career. For example, Steinitz was born Wolfgang Steinitz in Prague, Bohemia. When he moved to Vienna, Austria, he changed his name to Wilhelm Steinitz and continued to use that name while residing in England. When he moved from Europe to America he changed his name to William Steinitz, but for the bulk of his playing career he was Wilhelm Steinitz so that is the name used on Chessgames.com.

Nobiliary particles in a player's Last Name (Wikipedia article: Nobiliary particle) should be left in their lower-case form if not part of the alphabetically collated Last Name. However, if a nobiliary particle has become part of the collated Last Name, then it should be capitalized following the rules of English; and in such cases some documentation should be added to the biography for future reference.

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Short Name

General case: First and Middle Name Initials + Last Name (34 characters max.)

The more famous the player the less identifying information is needed. World Champions, World Champion contenders, National Champions, and players who placed first in a Master Class International Tournament can omit their initials in the <Short Name> field due to their fame in the chess world, i.e. Pillsbury, Marshall, Teichmann, Rubinstein, etc., unless additional information is deemed necessary to prevent confusion, i.e. Lasker vs Ed Lasker.

This is the name that is displayed in the list of games returned by a search. This field has a length of 34 characters in the Chessgames.com database.

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Long Name

General case: First Name + Last Name (64 characters max.)

First and Middle name initials should be given in cases where a player has not been identified. Examples:
E McCutcheon
A E Jordan

Add Middle Names, or middle initials if the full Middle Name is unknown, if it helps to differentiate players whose playing careers may have overlapped, i.e. these three men named John Young:
John Young (from Canada)
John William Young (from England)
John Welsh Young (from the United States)

If two or more players have the same exact name the Chessgames.com current approach is to add the country code to the less active or less famous player, i.e. these three men named Daniel Fischer:
Daniel Fischer
Daniel Fischer (GER)
Daniel Fischer (CAN)

In the event two players from the same country whose playing careers have overlapped, the next attempt at disambiguation is to add the player's year of birth:
Juergen Boehm (1960)
Juergen Boehm (1966)

There is a practical reason for limiting Middle Names in the <Long Name> field: This is the field used by Chessgames.com to search for players, so any Middle Names will trigger a match when searching by a player's Last Name, which tends to add extraneous search results (as most users are not searching by Middle Names).

This is the name displayed at the top of player pages and game pages. This field has a length of 64 characters in the Chessgames.com database.

Note: It is permissible to use a player's Middle Name instead of the First Name in cases where the player was known by that name during their chess career, as in the case of the Hill brothers, see F Arthur Hill and W Elford Hill. ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Biography: Full Name

The native form of the player's full name should appear in their biography along with the transliterated/anglicized version for non-English names. This includes any/all known Middle Names, full Last Names (Wikipedia article: Spanish naming customs), along with any honorifics, such as Dr. or a royal title, and suffixes such as Sr, Jr, II, III, etc. English/American honorifics should appear with any military rank given first, any religious titles second, and finally followed by any educational titles. Example: Samuel Warfield Peterson.

If a player changed their birth name it should be noted in the biography section using the French né for males and née for females, to denote the original name. Examples include Nicolai Jasnogrodsky, Leo Forgacs, and Nellie Showalter.

This name is only displayed inside of the player's biography box shown on the player's page.

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Useful set of non-English characters:
ä ë ï ö ü (Diaeresis)
á é í ó ú (Acute)
à è ì ò ù (Grave)
â ê î ô û (Circumflex)
ǎ ě ǐ ǒ ǔ (Caron)
ő ű ӳ (Double Acute)
ß (German)
Ç ç (French)
ѣ і й ъ е ѝ ѵ ѳ (Russian)
Æ æ Œ œ (ligatures)

https://www.chessgames.com/playerli...
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