IMDb Contributors Blog

If you’ve a hankering to submit some data but don’t have a specific project in mind, we could really use some help in filling in the holes in our TV episode data.

We’ve a list in the Contributors Zone which shows TV series with missing stuff (plots, cast, crew, episode titles, etc, etc). So if you happen to be a fan and have any of those series on DVD, that’s where to find out what’s missing.

If you’re a keen plot submitter (or would like to be), try this list of popular titles with no plot information. We need plot outlines (two lines to give a flavour of the episode – the sort of thing you’d see in a TV listings magazine), plot summaries (a paragraph giving a more detailed idea of the plot but with no spoilers – the sort of thing you might want to read if you couldn’t make up your mind whether to watch), and plot synopses (ideally a complete scene-by-scene description of everything that happens).

We’ve not quite decided yet whether to post your comments here but for now we’re keeping this blog as a one-way thing and all ongoing discussions/comments/hearty praise/brickbats should go to the Contributors Help message board. For other information about the site or your account, try the Help pages.

We’re about to make a behind-the-scenes change to the way we store titles which, to be honest, most users won’t notice but which will affect some submitters.

For years we’ve followed the standard practice of moving articles (the, a, an, etc) to the end of titles when we store them in the database. So, for instance, The Godfather (1972) has been stored as Godfather, The (1972) since… well, since forever. We even used to display it like that, although astute users will have spotted that we now swap the articles back into place for display (but only for titles in English). The advantage of all this article swapping is that it makes it easier to sort titles alphabetically but the disadvantages, especially when dealing with non-English titles, are many and varied.

The time has come, we’ve decided, to bite the bullet and store titles as written.

Little will change on the site because we display English language titles “naturally” anyway but it will make a difference in some places:

• submissions - if you refer to a title in a submission (including submitting a new title) you will now need to enter it in its “natural” form rather than swapping the article. For the majority of submitters this should be more intuitive and more straightforward.
• display - Non-English titles will display properly, so that, for instance, Buono, il brutto, il cattivo., Il (1966) will become  Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo. (1966) and Boot – The Making of, Das (1981) will be stored and displayed as Das Boot – The Making of (1981) just as nature intended.
• “browse” pages – we don’t sort titles alphabetically in many places, but where we do (the various Browse pages or MyMovies, for instance) The Godfather (1972) will now be sorted under T and Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo. (1966) under I.
• ftp files – if you download our list files from the ftp server you need to be aware that the sort order of the titles will change in case this affects the way you use them.

The change will affect around 10% of the 1.3 million titles in the database and we’re hoping to make the swap during the day on Tuesday 7 April so that they’ll be visible on the site when the new version is published on Wednesday 8 April.

A little while ago we made a slight policy change in the Spouse section of our name pages. Previously we only recorded details of “marriage” in the commonly understood, old fashioned sense, but we are now accepting all legally recognized partnerships (marriages, civil partnerships, domestic unions, etc – the exact terms vary by jurisdiction). The submission guide has been updated to reflect this change but the gist is: if it’s legal, we’ll record it; if it’s not formally recognized by the local authorities, we’ll take it as a biographical trivia item.

I’d intended to post a “hello and welcome to the new blog” a little while ago but events overtook me and we had to get the news out about the change in cast order. But here we are now. Hello.

We’re still deciding exactly how we want to use the blog (and we may never properly decide – I have a feeling it’ll just sort of evolve as we post stuff), but we’re hoping it will be a useful way of passing on news from the data team.

This week there’s encouraging stuff from the biographies manager who’s especially pleased to be receiving quite a bit of stuff about various actors’ theatre work which fits nicely into the “other works” section on the bio pages (take a look at Kevin Spacey, for instance). On the downside, he also says he’s been getting quite a few dates of birth without a country, (particularly noticeable, he says, when it’s the USA) and asks you not to forget to include the country with the place of birth.

I’ve not heard from any other list managers, so I’m assuming they’re either blissfully content or so busy that they haven’t got time to talk to the likes of me.

Cheerio for now