I would love to see this feature - searching for tiny differences in the format of an author's name across multiple items to prevent unnecessary disambigation is very time-consuming.

if there a duplicate contacts, these may be merged and (I assume) all prior versions are combined and tied to a GUID. A similar tool could be used in zotero to occasionally clean the database.

This might not be quite as straightforward in Zotero, since some people may want/need to cite the author as listed in the particular work. We could still link that representation of the name to other representations via a first-class creator object (which actually exists already behind-the-scenes—it's just unsupported in the interface), but then what happens to disambiguation in the document?

Either way, when it comes to translator saving I'm not sure there's going to be a good solution—as a rule we don't interrupt the save process with user prompts, even if it means some clean-up is required later.

This might not be quite as straightforward in Zotero, since some people may want/need to cite the author as listed in the particular work.

I think before we'd move forward on any particular solution to this very real problem, we'd want to interrogate this assumption. To me, allowing this creates more problems than it solves.

... then what happens to disambiguation in the document?

The only sane position is to say that a person is a person. So, hypothetically, you have two authors:

John Doe
Jane Doe
If you have a style that initializes the family names, then you need the full given names to be printed. If you have some source that lists the first one as "J. Doe" but know in fact it's "John Doe" then you have to treat it as such. E.g. in answer to your question, I don't think it makes any difference: you'd no longer be comparing strings to figure out when to disambiguate.

People who change their name on marriage?

(Multi-lingual would also need to be covered, but that's another bundle of issues.)

There are also cases of misspellings and mis-ordering of initials/names. I cite a few papers that the publisher misprinted author names (and these are normally carried over to all bibliographic databases too). I usually want to cite these names exactly as published, as this is the best way to guarantee that my citations will be linked to the original references and for the author's/article to get credit for a citation in the databases that store such information.

So you're saying that you wouldn't allow multiple representations for a given person in the database?

At least as a first step, yes.

If you're arguing we can make this "simple" initially (to get it working), then fine. But am I correct that you'd have no objection to eventually go to a more complex system like Dan describes?

But I do believe that there's something really bizarre/wrong about adding additional complexity to a system to accommodate errors. I mean, as an author, if someone spells my name wrong in my publication, I sure as hell don't want people repeating that mistake in subsequent citations!

Drifting off topic, but...

Copying mistakes straight from the source is very different than copying erroneous citations from someone else's bibliography (which also happens quite a bit). If a citation is meant to represent a particular work and make it easier to locate, then there is a good argument to use data exactly as-published (even if you knew the publisher screwed up). It may bruise the ego a bit to have your name misspelled so much. However, at least in the physical sciences, it is great ego boost to see that citations to your works are actually counted by the bibliographic databases.

Further to the exchange between bdarcus and noksagt, if we start from zotero today, we have a citation-centric model. We grab data from catalogs, indexes, electronic journals and so on, with attendant mutations, inconsistencies, and downright errors intact. Zotero happily takes in whatever we feed it.

This approach is hardly "adding complexity...to accommodate errors"; on the contrary supporting any concept of "person" or "work" beyond the present citation-based model raises numerous modeling issues, some quite complex and difficult. Consider above how above immediately we need to start talking about "aliases" and "personas." Or take a look at previous discussions of multi-lingual citations (here's one). From a more pragmatic perspective it implies quite dramatic changes to the UI and user interaction, and I suspect difficult tradeoffs between data integrity and ease of use.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of a rigorous model for information about writers and the things they produce (or even more ambitiously, creators and the things they create). But that's a pretty tall order. It also has all sorts of uses, way beyond the things zotero does. Perhaps that's another project (it seems inevitable to me), one that zotero will eventually integrate with. A more feasible way forward for zotero might be to incorporate tools for identifying and correcting inconsistencies, within the existing citation-centric data model. See the OP above, or consider the frequently-discussed issue of duplicate detection.

About the question of whether to cite "as published" or not, certainly style guides have something to say about this. I don't have the Chicago Manual handy, but vaguely recall it wants you to make an author's names consistent. BUT I'm pretty sure not to the point of "correcting" e.g. names that change due to marriage or for other reasons. Another scenario is publications in a language where the name is rendered differently, often handled by having a separate bibliography. So the notion of "consistency" breaks down pretty quickly.

And, I wouldn't be surprised if there exists a style somewhere that requires citing precisely as published, with errors intact! There seems to be a style somewhere that requires anything you can imagine.

Just a tiny note: "multi-lingual" is probably the right nomenclature. A name can be transliterated with no change to its original formatting characteristics (e.g. KUROSAWA Akira), or the formatting characteristics of the target script/language domain can be imposed on it, which is, in a sense, a type of translation (e.g. A. KUROSAWA).

Which of the two is desired (transliteration or "translation") should depend on the language of the source (which we don't track in Zotero records at the moment), and on the conventions adopted by the style.

Also I want to reiterate Frank's point. Having a "person" entity could help with multi-lingual citations but it doesn't address the issue of dealing with multiple representations of author's name, title, etc. for an individual item. Sometimes discussed as "multiple field values" or similar phraseology.

Although now it occurs to me an alternative would be to keep the single field value per item and multiply the items, i.e. for a Japanese publication there might be the following items, each with at least the basics of author, title, publisher, date: (1) as published; (2) phonetic Japanese; (3) romaji (phonetic in roman characters); (4) translation (as many as languages being cited in).

The key requirement would be the ability to define relationships between these items properly. Along with presenting them elegantly in the UI and being able to "walk the tree" when generating citations. Maybe this idea has been discussed but I don't recall thinking about it that way myself.

(A very small follow-on note: the multilingual support in citeproc-js is a processor extension. Styles that make use of multilingual support will validate against the CSL 1.0 schema, but the multilingual behavior is not covered by the specification.)

Either way, when it comes to translator saving I'm not sure there's going to be a good solution—as a rule we don't interrupt the save process with user prompts, even if it means some clean-up is required later.

Why exactly is this position taken "as a rule"? I would definitely prefer to be prompted to confirm or modify information rather than have to search back through my library to figure out which author name is different.

Good thinking, but I'd be reluctant to do this in the CSL processor. The error rate would be unpredictable, since it would depend on the distribution of given names among the authors being cited (which we can't predict or control). The failures would also become harder to detect. I know that the current situation can be annoying, when names expand unexpectedly. But at least that means that errors are calling attention to themselves, so they can be remedied.

(Edit: I neglected to mention that this would go against the CSL specification, which is a threshold sticking point. Amending the spec would require the agreement of the CSL list members, and that would be difficult to obtain for the reasons above.)

Would anyone be willing to comment on a problem I've had, and can't seem to find enough information about in Zotero's Help, Forums, Documentation, etc?
In my groups, I want to be able to find articles by Author. If I sort the Creator column, this only sorts by first name, but I want to find anything associated with a particular author.
If I do an Advanced Search, the articles aren't found. I have tried this several times with different authors and different articles. Occasionally one comes up the way I'd expect, but hardly ever. Sometimes a first name works but the last name does not.

But don't for this issue, since you already have a thread open:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/15123/

I would also like the feature that gregor describes