Long-time users may remember that back in the day we didn't have any common name system. For a while it was anarchy as to what we were supposed to enter, then it got clarified that we were supposed to enter whatever it said in the credits, even if this meant the system said the same actor played Ares and Silent Bob and different actresses played Jenny Curan and Audrey Dunn. Then, we the common name and "credited as" features, where all of an actor's credits will be under their most common name with birth years used to differentiate people with the same common name. In practice, there have been numerous problems with this. Theoretically, you could have two people with the same common name and birth year. If someone isn't a major celebrity, you may not even be able to find their birth year. More importantly, it's often unclear what someone's common name is. For instance, Robin Wright started going by Robin Wright Penn. We had to wait for the Robin Wright Penn credits to pass up Robin Wright, then change every profile she appears on. If she gets divorced and changes her name back, which almost happens, as soon as the Robin Wright credits are in the lead, we have to go through and change everything again. Inevitably, some more obscure profiles will never get done. This is on top of the endless disputes about Asian names.

What I propose is that the common name not be a name at all: It could be an eight-digit hex or somethign that allows a similar amount of values. Each person would be given a value that doesn't change. When you entered a name, you would get a list of people who have been credited under that name or something similar and what movies they have been in, so you can select the right person. If a person gets duplicated, we can just go with the lower value. I'm not sure of all the details on how this would be implemented, but it would be way better than the current system. As long as we are doing an overhaul, we might as well finally go to a common database for cast and crew.