Multiple First Names for a Contact - implementing AKA (also known as)
OK,
I believe Eileen's &quot;Deduper&quot; extension is just about the answer I needed - I haven't completely grokked the user interface, but I'm confident that those of us who really want to successfully deal with nick names and AKAs will find the answer here.
https://civicrm.org/extensions/deduper
https://civicrm.org/blog/eileen/deduper-extension-release-14
Deduper extension release 1.4
Release 1.4 of the deduper extension is now released. This contains a number of additional resolvers that the Wikimedia Foundations uses to enable more duplicate contacts to be merged without manual intervention.
CiviCRM provides a UI and a script for merging contacts individually or in batches. In addition the deduper provides it’s own UI. In all these place a ‘safe’ merge will attempt to merge 2 contacts and refuse to merge them if they are in conflict. The resolvers attempt to resolve the conflict to [sic] (so?) the merge can be completed. New resolvers include (laundry list of resolvers follows..)
The diacritics resolver - chooses José over Jose
......
Nick name resolver - saves and uses known nicknames.
.......
Going further, Eileen's blog post provides an interface for defining, editing and extending the nick name rules, e.g. I can indicate that Ted is a nick name for Edward, etc.
Take a look at this post and you will see the screenshots for how this works..
https://civicrm.org/blog/eileen/leveraging-search-kit-deduper
(Having posted all this, I need to say I haven't completely figured out how it all works, but I'm confident that Eileen's solution will take most of the pain out of nick names and since I believe a number of people are following this, I wanted to get the word out for those who weren't aware of Deduper extension and the search kit ehnancements)