Can a verified author be marked as similar to an unverified author?

[nschneid]

A case of this has come up in #7470 [preview branch links]:

https://preview.aclanthology.org/manual-author-corrections-2026-02-24/people/andrei-c-coman/ vs.
https://preview.aclanthology.org/manual-author-corrections-2026-02-24/people/andrei-coman/unverified/

Andrei C. Coman has not published as Andrei Coman—should I add it as a name variant nevertheless, or is there another way to link the two people pages as similar names but distinct people? @mbollmann

[mbollmann]

Adding a name variant means wrong information will appear on andrei-c-coman's page.

Adding an unverified ID to the similar list in people.yaml is possible, but hacky — the unverified ID might go away and then we'll get build errors. (Though technically, this can already happen with verified IDs, and there's no mechanism to check for this at the moment AFAIR. The boring answer is that this system is probably not ideal at the moment.)

[nschneid]

OK. Will list in people.yaml for now. I think there's a conceptual issue in the database design, which is that similarity at its core is really about names and not people. Not a big deal though.

[mbollmann]

Yes, and similarities due to identical names sans an initial seem like they could be automatically detected as well.