Distinguish multiple lifters with the same name
Finally the annoying thing happened: http://www.openpowerlifting.org/lifters.html?q=Emily%20Hu
The "Emily Hu" competing in Ohio and Massachusetts is different from the one competing in the other meets. We need some way to tell these lifters apart. That probably means that lifters need to be given a unique ID, although we don't want to do that across the entire database because then everything gets super unreadable.
Probably the way this should work is as follows:
- Appending
#
to a name specifies a unique ID for lifters of that name. So there would beEmily Hu #1
andEmily Hu #2
. The#
mark is required since some federations append numbers to names to denote multiple entries, and we don't want to accidentally give those numbers significance. - Lifters who don't share their names with anyone, which should be most people, can just omit the number like we've been doing.
- Tooling can scan every
lifters.csv
and find the list of lifters who require number specifiers. If a name in that list shows up without an ID, it can warn. - There needs to be a way to specify "I have no idea which one this is", at which point that lifter's data gets added to all the other ones. Perhaps
#?
. - Maybe some of the tagging can be updated based on age information -- but only USPA provides that.
- Rendering the lifter's name on the webpage just removes the number.