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Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

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Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#81
post #66

I have strong doubts this is exhaustive or that it could be. For one, it doesn't contain the name "Genoveffa" which is the italianized form of Jennifer. There are wikipedia-level people named thus, so it's not that uncommon.[0] There's an infinite amount of misspelled/localized names outside their country of origin e.g. Maicol for Michael, Sandiago for Santiago, Uilliam, Villiam, Willian etc etc Aditional "anecdata":…

It's also missing all the names that are composed of multiple words (and thus contains spaces) which is very common for Dutch last names.

And Dutch first names: Gert-Jan etc.

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#82

I have strong doubts this is exhaustive or that it could be. For one, it doesn't contain the name "Genoveffa" which is the italianized form of Jennifer. There are wikipedia-level people named thus, so it's not that uncommon.[0] There's an infinite amount of misspelled/localized names outside their country of origin e.g. Maicol for Michael, Sandiago for Santiago, Uilliam, Villiam, Willian etc etc Aditional "anecdata":…

Swedish names are under-represented. For example, there are exactly zero hyphenated names starting with "sven".

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removal of Personally identifiable information (PII) from text data is the first obvious application that came to mind.

if you do that you will likely wipe out a lot of non-person-name data too, just think of common words used as last names, like "Brown"[0]. It seems to me if you have PII in text data you should treat the whole thing as PII. [0] although the dataset doesn't actually contain "Brown" as a valid last or first name, go figure.

Yeah, calling it "exhaustive" is plainly ridiculous. (It does have "Black" and "Green", if you want alternative examples, though "White" is also missing...) Seems like just scraping author names from a few bibliographic databases could've filled in some of the more obvious holes.

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#84
I appreciate the work on this repo to date, and as many comments below point out, it is not yet true exhaustive. For those of us with additional data sources we can and should submit a pull request.

Thanks for the effort, I intend to use this to enrich my test data generation scripts.

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#85

I have strong doubts this is exhaustive or that it could be. For one, it doesn't contain the name "Genoveffa" which is the italianized form of Jennifer. There are wikipedia-level people named thus, so it's not that uncommon.[0] There's an infinite amount of misspelled/localized names outside their country of origin e.g. Maicol for Michael, Sandiago for Santiago, Uilliam, Villiam, Willian etc etc Aditional "anecdata":…

Well, we've been found out. My family and I don't exist. We had a good run.

EDIT: Yeah, this list is absurdly non-exhaustive. My wife's maiden name isn't even listed and it's a common English surname, noun and verb.

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#86

I have strong doubts this is exhaustive or that it could be. For one, it doesn't contain the name "Genoveffa" which is the italianized form of Jennifer. There are wikipedia-level people named thus, so it's not that uncommon.[0] There's an infinite amount of misspelled/localized names outside their country of origin e.g. Maicol for Michael, Sandiago for Santiago, Uilliam, Villiam, Willian etc etc Aditional "anecdata":…

Well, we've been found out. My family and I don't exist. We had a good run. EDIT: Yeah, this list is absurdly non-exhaustive. My wife's maiden name isn't even listed and it's a common English surname, noun and verb.

Well, the list doesn't even have the names of the last three French presidents, the last two Belgian prime ministers, etc.

Actually, I just can't find any French name that I look up. Except for "Michel" (another former Belgian prime minister) but that one was not a very high bar.

So yeah, it's pretty much non-exhaustive and it doesn't take long to find it out.

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#87
post #81
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also missing all the names that are composed of multiple words (and thus contains spaces) which is very common for Dutch last names.

And Dutch first names: Gert-Jan etc.

Note that the list also misses out on Capitalisation. If you want to send messages to Gert-Jan then it needs to be Gert-Jan and not Gert-jan or gert-jan.

With last names this is also an important matter. McDonald is not mcdonald.

Then there is F.W. de Klerk. Not 'De Klerk' or 'de klerk'.

Some people take offence at their name being written wrongly, in this list by having no Title Case going on there could be a few people 'offended'!

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#88

I have strong doubts this is exhaustive or that it could be. For one, it doesn't contain the name "Genoveffa" which is the italianized form of Jennifer. There are wikipedia-level people named thus, so it's not that uncommon.[0] There's an infinite amount of misspelled/localized names outside their country of origin e.g. Maicol for Michael, Sandiago for Santiago, Uilliam, Villiam, Willian etc etc Aditional "anecdata":…

After a quick scan I could tell that the list of surnames has no names in it that contain letters beyond the basic latin alphabet. That by itself excludes a lot of actually valid names.

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#90
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it actually demeaning, but people often couldn't care less. There are laws in France from revolution times [0] that basically set your name in stone because anyone using whatever name they liked without need for any paper trail basically cause administrative and bureaucratic hell. But nowadays even the administration works around that to comply with the tradition with things like "nom d'usage" (you can see it…

In Quebec, changing your last name is not permitted since the 70s. So when non-English-speaking people use the same family name, we tend to assume they are siblings.

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