Quoting Pantheon:

Quote:
You seem to forget that my only desire with my opinion is to improve the database. Nothing I have suggested would be detrimental to the database.

If it discourages people from contributing, it does.

This is what I was basically getting at. By using such harsh terms... even in the general I truly see more people taking offense and saying forget about it then... if people (in general) is not happy with me (general) doing a single field... it isn't good enough... then forget it. Then I see people saying... hmmm... he has a point... maybe I will start on more fields even if I don't care about that particular field.

Like the saying... You catch more flies with honey then you do with vinegar.

Quoting Addicted2DVD:

Quote:
Like the saying... You catch more flies with honey then you do with vinegar.

I side with Bill McNeal from Newsradio (great show if you haven't seen it!)

Dave: Bill, have you ever heard the expression "It's easier to catch flies with honey instead of vinegar"?
Bill: Dave, have you ever heard the expression "Only a hillbilly sits around and tries to figure out the best way to catch flies"?

Quoting Addicted2DVD:

Quote:

As I have said other times something like this comes up. I personally am more then happy with any info people decide to contribute. I would never ask "If you are doing this field... why not this other field?" As far as I see it people have all the right in the world to submit as many... or as few fields as they please. All you feel like doing at this time is CoO? Great! Thank You!  Ohhhh! You did a full audit on this title? Great work! Thanks! 

Well said, Pete! 

Reaching back a few days to revisit the OP of this thread, I just reviewed the product information page for DVD Profiler.

The things that jump out at me as important to Invelos (based on the features they advertise for the program) are:
- The more contributions, the better. ("Just enter the UPC from the DVD case and DVD Profiler does the rest!")
- Disc ID's are valuable. ("Just enter the UPC from the DVD case and DVD Profiler does the rest!")
- The right title is important. ("Don't have the UPC yet? Add it by title using powerful search criteria.")
- Name linking is important. ("browse your collection by actor or director through a filmography customized to your collection.")

Quoting Dr Pavlov:

Quote:
Take particular note of the last one James.

("browse your collection by actor or director through a filmography customized to your collection.")

I repeat YOUR collection, NOT he central Online.

Skip

I think the implication is that the data is provided to you. It's not exactly a selling point to say that you can customize several hundred thousand names on your own. 

Quoting Dr Pavlov:

Quote:
It doesn't work, James, we all know that. It can work, even as ken designed it, but not with everybody off doing their own thing. We have to cooperate as a Team to get it to work, that means follow the Rules (everybody) and provide good solid documentation that we all can rely on, not juat guesses and assumptions.

James, I know what you are going to say, the Rules don't say so. That's right they don't but if you don't recognize that there is a large Community users that deserve better documentation than some want to provide then i don't know what to say. I have said before, I will not provide the kind of truly poor documentation that some provide, and i am not terribly appreciative of someone asking me to vote simply because they say so, I want to see your documentation, minimum CLT results. It is really disappointing to see...

Skip

I don't think that narrowing the eye of the needle by users demanding more documentation than Invelos asks for will somehow cause more users to contribute. In fact, I think the opposite occurs. That's counterproductive for Invelos' stated goals which come from the highlighted features of the program. We also have Ken's comments relative to the CLT where he drew a line and acknowledged that there would be users who want more documentation, but said that they should manage that in their local db.

Skip has been talking about how he knows database design and (in a private PM to me) that the rules can not be made simpler.

I don't think database design is any issue here. The quality of the field contents doesn't affect the database design as long as key values are kept intact.

And as to making the rules simpler, let me provide an example:

Overview

Simple rule: Copy the overview from the back cover
Desired: (see the text on overview in the current rules)

What would this mean? If the profile has no overview yet, one can enter just the text from the back cover. There doesn't have to be any special formatting. If a tag line happens to be entered in the process, that's ok.

Later someone else may come along and improve the data by removing the tag line. A second person could come along and correct some spelling or line break. A third person might add formatting.

As long as every contribution increases the quality it's ok. The initial data isn't wrong. It's just not quite as good as we would like. It does not violate any database design principles.

I realize that some people think that if it isn't perfect they would rather have nothing at all. Obviously I don't .

Now, someone may say "If the second person knows enough to remove the tag line, why doesn't he fix the rest of the overview"? Well, hopefully he would. But it would not be mandatory.

Contrary to what Skip thinks, this idea is not meant to corrupt the database or change the rules to suit my own preferences. I would in fact like to see every profile eventually meet the current standards. But I would be willing to accept initial data of lower quality if this means that we get more people to participate in contributing profiles.