I explicitly excluded those objects from this run.

Great.

I knew this thing was going to be a bit polemic so I am trying to split into smaller problems and stages that we can all agree to.

Well, complex, at least. I fully support your approach!

Hopefully every step will reduce the number of objects that need repairs. And believe me, it's not the same to have to fix 250000 objects than to fix 25000. Somehow the latter seems a bit more feasible (from a "let's deal with this" attitude).

Certainly.

So, can we agree to proceed with our suggestion as stated below? ** Change references by names to references by nic handle where these are unique (there are not already more than two persons with the same referenced name). **

I agree.

For the cases where the ambiguity is already there: we'll look at them, try to categorize them

Sounds interesting. I really like the approach taken by Poul-Henning with his IP address page. Maybe we can come up with a similar list, e.g. categorized by object type, and within the object type by LIR, TLD, AS-#, Maintainer...

and maybe identify another subset which can be handled by drawing information from some other source. We'll get back to you with our suggestion (and we take the two you mention as input). Any input is most welcome.

Wilfried.