Okay, so I haven't seen any discussion of this around here yet, but as anyone who ever saw my work at Moby should know, game credits are my passion. One problem I always had with credits on Moby was the way aliases were handled. They had to be manually entered on a per-game basis, were far too easy to lose when updating data, and got to be a real mess when you had, say, a translated alias with a known real name attached to a translated company name.
One place that seems to have a pretty good grasp of how to handle aliases (and developer profiles in general) is VGMdb. Take a look at this profile for an example -- you've got a dedicated field for original characters if someone has a non-English name, a list of aliases (which is populated automatically based on what credits have been linked to them), links directly to companies and organizations the individual has been associated with, and even sub-entries if someone has particular distinct aliases that they use.
The works list shows what titles they've been credited on, what they were credited for, and even what alias they were credited with -- which makes it really easy to do research on a particular person. The actual release pages list what was actually credited, alias or not, but still linking back to the person's main entry. There's also a dedicated discussion thread for each developer, making it a simple task to discuss, say, splits/merges, known aliases, or bio details before they go into the main entry.
Another thing they do that I was always amazed Moby never had is profile pages for unknown aliases. Quite often people used the same (or similar) aliases throughout their tenure at a company, and even if their real name is unknown, it's still incredibly useful to have them linked together for research purposes.
If we'd had these features, the work I did on Moby to clean up, say, old Sega credits would have been much easier.
Anyway, that's my spiel. Thoughts?
One place that seems to have a pretty good grasp of how to handle aliases (and developer profiles in general) is VGMdb. Take a look at this profile for an example -- you've got a dedicated field for original characters if someone has a non-English name, a list of aliases (which is populated automatically based on what credits have been linked to them), links directly to companies and organizations the individual has been associated with, and even sub-entries if someone has particular distinct aliases that they use.
The works list shows what titles they've been credited on, what they were credited for, and even what alias they were credited with -- which makes it really easy to do research on a particular person. The actual release pages list what was actually credited, alias or not, but still linking back to the person's main entry. There's also a dedicated discussion thread for each developer, making it a simple task to discuss, say, splits/merges, known aliases, or bio details before they go into the main entry.
Another thing they do that I was always amazed Moby never had is profile pages for unknown aliases. Quite often people used the same (or similar) aliases throughout their tenure at a company, and even if their real name is unknown, it's still incredibly useful to have them linked together for research purposes.
If we'd had these features, the work I did on Moby to clean up, say, old Sega credits would have been much easier.
Anyway, that's my spiel. Thoughts?