According to an Irish Chess history website, this player - Timothy G Cranston - should really be <Thomas George Cranston>, 1877-1954, twice Irish champion.

A full explanation of the confusion can be found at http://www.irlchess.com/2011/06/25/... -- it's a slightly unusual case, in that there are actually two Cranstons, but all of the games currently in the database are attributed to the wrong one.

The solution might be to open a player page for each, but then we'd need at least one game played by the American, Timothy Cranston.

"So, how'd you spend the 4th?"

"Some of us were dropping librarian links on a chess site."

These two listings are the same player:

Miikka Maki-Uuro

<Each player in events such as Chess Olympiad (Women) (2010) would indicate that: (i) they can be catalogued by country teams, (ii) their profile's gender can be tagged. Perhaps a script for (ii)'s purpose can switch a bunch of biographies at a time.>

Brilliant! So issue "ii" (the gender) can be solved hundreds of players at a time. All we need to do is fetch a list of tournaments with (Women) or (Girls) in the title, and grab a list of all the players within them, and set them all to "female".

That is a really excellent idea--thanks a lot, gauer.

<In addition to batching games by tournament in their own viewer, FIDE's site usually suggests country info>

Oh I see, and that takes care of issue "i" (the country). You are referring to which page exactly, the one where you can watch the games in their chess viewer? Perhaps a script could grab that data too, straight from the FIDE website.

<and when one also finds the tournaments played in the past 2-year cycles by juniors, the birthyear of a pid can also be evident.>

I don't think I follow you there. Are you perhaps saying that we can draw conclusions from a child playing in an U12 one year and then an U16 the next year?

<When a correction/elaborate form is filled out, is it mandatory to click the 'other (specify)' box when one wants to add extra info, or does the form still expect an elaboration in the box (without checking other) if the only correction request is a "duplicate pid" or "spelling" adjustment?>

No. Whatever you type, the librarian sees. She will see a flag like "Problems: bad_year, wrong_white_player, other" so if you click "other" she will see that, and perhaps read the comments on the lookout for that third problem that is alluded to. So it's not mandatory but a nice courtesy.

<For the topic of when to mention an annotator of a game with notes, it mainly seems useful to record sentences or punctuation (?, !, etc) associated to lines & sidelines, rather than mentioning processes like "draw claim by repetition, but unsuccessful", or offers of draw as part of the annotator's notes (gid=1581553 was an early attempt of adding a transpositional sideline...>

The notes currently in J McDonald vs B Fiedler, 2008 is an example of the kind of annotation that we do not endorse. It uses a PGN extension called "RAV" (recursive annotated variations) which is, at best, confusing in most chess viewers. Different PGN viewers handle RAV differently, and some have gotten very good with it, but we still prefer simple text, like a book.

On the subject of when to give credit to an author: if the annotation is something as simple as an exclamation point then it's really a judgement call. In the past we tended to give authors credit for the tiniest notes, even something as simple as a question-mark. Some of Ray Keene's annotated games are like that. It seemed like the right thing to do.

<You are referring to which page exactly, the one where you can watch the games in their chess viewer?>

http://ratings.fide.com/view_games...."Bluvshtein__Mark(CAN)" - sends to a player page to a games/tournament pgn download page for the particular player.

http://www.fide.com/index.php?optio... (in the drop-down of "calendar" > "events" or "events archives" usually gives a hyperlink to a download site of pgns or regulations or cross-table), http://ratings.fide.com/tournament_... & http://ratings.fide.com/tournament_... offer other details. The latter site suggests that they have room in their library to attach a tournament file of the games.

<I don't think I follow you there. Are you perhaps saying that we can draw conclusions from a child playing in an U12 one year and then an U16 the next year?>

To truly address the problem, we need to have a "Great Renaming" and normalize all of the places and tournaments at the same time. At that period we should address the issue of how to deal with countries which are now defunct.

I'm sure many event/site combinations could be changed automatically, much as you handled the <Correspondence> problem. But I'm still finding a few stragglers from that, and for tournaments in general the leftovers would likely be numerous.

Here are some thoughts and suggestions, just as a beginning to discussion. This will probably be my most controversial post ever.

1) Any decisions will be arbitrary to some extent. However, the actual decision itself is probably not as important as simply making it, implementing it, documenting it, and sticking to it consistently. Doing so will maximize the utility of the database now, and provide for easier maintenance, update, or change in the future.

2) I would keep the contemporary names of places which have changed name, are governed by a different jurisdiction, or are now defunct. For instance, I would keep tournaments played in St. Petersburg (Russia) under St. Petersburg, those in Leningrad under Leningrad.

This will add to the complexity of any documentation specificing city/country names, as it would be necessary to spell which form was used when. But that's how much I dislike anachronisms.

3) In general, I would use the English form of name (e.g., Vienna vs. Wien). Of course, this is very easy for your typically monolingual American to say, but I think there are good reasons outside the U.S.-centric bias.

Since any decision will likely not please everybody, I think we need to look at the purpose of this site. The database exists not to provide much needed geography and language lessons, but to allow users to find and discuss games in the most efficient way possible. Using English will provide greatest ease of use for the greatest number of users, and also provide easier programming/maintenance for the English-speaking administrators.

If a history of olympiads or women's championship ever gets built (like the main championship has), then collections of meta-tournaments might be a good source to change many games of a tournament to a standard notation at once. Using a round or date # can often infer the other for those earlier pre-WWII olympiads, & it gets one wondering if a refinement to a pid sort by game number on the listings page is to sort by tournament or date (as opposed to year) when given - but a sort of that type would be more useful mainly in a premium search option.

When navigating with a click from a gid to a pid page, it can at times be useful to see if the player was ever part of a team or track the individuals (rather than having to click a few more times to get to the main page & do a pid search to look up the team & individual account stats seperately) near the bio section. The "annotated by" link above the bio is nice, & might be an alternate option to calling a list of favourite team (tandem) games (ie a most "notable game" of a pid might be one that was found to be really only played in a simul or team tandem event, listed under a different pid).

One could also do a similar idea with olympiad style team games, but it could be useful to hang on to a team name (on a per-tournament basis, since team members can change from one event to another), board number, & total # of rounds (since olympiad style team swisses are paired with much more flexibility than regular swisses) in a pgn-style header.

One can also learn the hard way (using chessbase 9) that tracking as much as possible in a header in a tournament of some style (swiss, team, rr, rrx2, etc) is easier to delete later than to try to add across in later on. Processes of elimination with 2 team cross-tables (team rank & swiss rank by individuals) & only a few scoresheets (ie the 2011 Cdn post-sec championships submitted) can often track down a lot of other round's colour allocations, & finish times can often say whether an equal position might've had to be played on for a win to earn a team win after a result just came in beside on the same table.

All simple corrections pointed out in posts should be taken care of. As for posts on other topics, I'll be responding to them one by one in this post.

<myschkin> I merged Hazenfuss/Hasenfuss, but can't find any further info on the initial R.

I can't find a player record for Irene Hönsch either, under several variations of the name. If you uploaded some games of hers, it would be great.

<Nina Myers> I merged away the duplicates for Lensky vs Olga, 1949 (one of which is preserved as the alternate score). Could someone explain the provenance of this game? Is it a composition?

<Stonehenge> Thanks, I merged those players with special characters in their names. The current policy on special characters is that we transliterate them in the standard way, and don't allow special characters in player names for technical reasons (including them in the bio is OK and encouraged). For German I know that's "oe" for "ö", "ue" for "ü", "ae" for "ä", but for most other languages it's unclear to me. (Knowing Spanish (sort of), I'm uncomfortable writing "Nuñez" as "Nunez" as I know an ñ isn't even the same letter as an n, but that's how it is for the time being.) If anyone wants to explain some other cases to me, it'd be helpful.

I think we can again handle the "Hiarcs in event/site field" issue with a script to fix them all automatically.

<Domdaniel> and <Phony Benoni> I agree that the time control and tournament/match/exhibition conditions of a game are actually two different categories, but the main purpose of game typing is to exclude from player statistics games that are non-standard in some way. So as <chessgames.com> said, it makes more sense for games from the Capablanca tour to be classified as exhibition.

<gauer> Sorry, the questions on PGN submissions and on making crosstables from PGN are outside my area of expertise.

As for names, ideally the format CG uses, "first last", is best. But especially for players with more games, the software is smart enough to recognize the player and combine the games. If an admin has merged two player records in the past, like merging "Kasparov" into "Garry Kasparov", then the former will stay as an "alias" to the latter with regard to PGN uploading, so all games by "Kasparov" uploaded in the future will automatically go to "Garry Kasparov". Still, it's best to use in your uploads the name the CG database uses. If you're going to copy-paste a PID, you might as well copy-paste a full name, no?

A TID is assigned to new games based on the exact spelling of the event name in the PGN, so if they're not identical they will be given separate TIDs. If you submit a correction slip, I can change the TID to consolidate games that are from the same tournament.

On duplicate player pages, it's better to keep the bio on only one, and no bio whatsoever (not even country or birth date) on the other. With two bios, they can get out of sync and when I merge them I have to check both bios to decide which to keep "on top". It's just a bit more work for you and me.

To submit/fix the annotator, submit a correction slip with the correct annotator's PID/name/player page link.

<gauer> On player pages, tournament pages, and search result pages, the sort actually is by full date, not just year, but since the vast majority of games only have a year, tournaments annoyingly get mixed in with one another.

I think the suggestions about teams are all great, but I don't know how hard they'd be to program. Again I defer to <cg.com>.

<Benzol> Fixed. I've mostly been working from the newest items on the list so some corrections have been temporarily lost in the flood, but I will get to them. Feel free to bump a correction by submitting a new one on the same page.