See, that's the kind of thing we should settle once and for all.

Pro-western:
-it allows us to stick with the established standard of going with what IMDb has.
-it allows some consistency with Asian actors who use western names, like Jet Li.

Pro-Asian:
-Some exceptions already made due to fame, like Chow Yun-Fat. IMDb has him as Yun-Fat Chow, but come on.

It looks pretty good. I went and finished the page for Rolling Thunder (only took me 27 months!) going with 600px for the screencaps and I like the look.

I would like to standardize the western style for Asian names.

- If we're going to IMDB for media titles, then it makes sense to extend that to actor names as well, and IMDB goes western style.

- Some Asians have western names, so it'd be weird having two standards. (Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Jay Chou, etc)

- As the rules mention, we're an American site, where the American release date and American release title comes first, and all pages must be in English. Well, in the US, the surname goes on the end, with very few exceptions. (Chow Yun Fat and Yao Ming are the only two I can think of.) Everybody else, Byung-Hun Lee (look at the GI Joe: Retaliation poster), Ken Watanabe, Ichiro Suzuki, the Chinese lady in the neighboring cubicle, every Chinese person I ever grew up with in the US, uses the western style.

Are there any objections?

How should we do ranks? Another user brought this up the other day, and I noticed it more while going though the Green Berets page. For example, Jim Hutton is credited on IMDB as "Sgt. Peterson," yet in his photo he's a SP5. Muldoon and Doc McGee are also listed as just Sergeants, yet their stripes say otherwise. Should actual insignia override the IMDB credit?

Well, Petersen begins the film as a Spec-5, but eventually gets promoted to SGT when the Duke wants him for his A-Team.

However, Doc and Muldoon are MSGTs and SFCs respectifuly, so they should be listed as such.

I think we should use service specific abbreviations for each rank as we can.

I've been doing that with my pages, but I don't know if people would agree to make it the site standard.

I think it would a nice touch, but perhaps we could standardize with one of the style guides the media uses. let me go dig out an old journalism text book.

It wouldn't be branch specific, but it would be standardized for all the American services atleast.

Maybe Nyles could shed some light on the CF abbreviation systems, as well.

The problem I've run into is that sometimes a soldier or marine is simply referred to as "Lieutenant <name>," and you can't see his bar, or if it's black and white and you can't tell what color it is.

And that is when, in my opinion, a generic "Lt." works well in the caption.

Heck, with the exception of a really, really good friend of mine, addressed any Lieutenant as anything other than Lieutenant, or in the case of my old platoon leader "ell-tee" or occassionally, especially if it was just us in the Humvee, "Mike"

As in "HOLY CRAP MIKE, I think we just got hit by an IED!"

"Commander" falls into that as well, but you don't see it as much as the Lieutenant thing.