I might receive some flak for this...  
Quoting Kathy:

Quote:
...
LINKING:
- The ability to identity every Cast/Crew member.
- Capitalization of names.
- Names with accents.
- Names which contains letters/accents etc. which invelos does not recognize.

BIRTH YEARS:
- May be solved if a linking system is implemented.
- Invalid BYs corrupting the database - should be stopped on invelos' end before this occurs.
- BYs can be added/removed without adding to thread.

This is a key point to rethink rules as they are now. But to be a bit pedantic: it is crucial to identify every cast/crew member uniquely across profiles and localities. Current rules are unhelpful in the following regards:
* inconsistent program design vs. contribution rules. DVDp is clearly designed to provide linking across profiles; some features are only there, for instance, if you double click an actor's name and can find pictures of him/her via Google. Yet the contribution rules as they are now are not helpfull to achieve a decent and complete cross linking (see below). Now the argument of some that they don't care about linking may be their personal preference, but it strikes me as awkward that I seldomly see that carried through to recommending Invelos to simplify DVDp dramatically. IOW, we should rethink linking and consistent rules that are actually supporting linking.
* disregarding accented spellings. Now English is a language that uses very few if any accents, so I can understand where Invelos as a USA company came from, but the rules to disregard accented spellings have produced more havoc ion any proper linking than any other rule. The locality depended rule on how to decapitalise an all caps name is in part conflicting with the first one. IMHO opinion this needs a rethink.
* disrespecting other cultures naming conventions. The rules leave much of it at present undefined or open for interpretation. One contributing group interpretes first/middle/last name as 1st/2nd/3rd word of any name, others respect where names come from, like family name and given names. There are multiple threads on how Asian names should be handled. Heated exchanges have been on this part in the past, so any rethinking that could defuse these issues would be welcome.
* DVDp as a program is unfortunately in part a dinosaur because as far as we know Invelos still hasn't made it fully Unicode compliant. It severly limits the program to move forward on true names (like in Asian language caracters) which could be associated with a common unique identifier (GUID or whatever), much like commonly latin-spelled name in credits (think CLT), deviant names of the same character (David vs. Dave, married vs. unmarried, etc., specific locality abbarations etc). My hunch is Invelos will certainly not move forward as the non-accented English is a handicap here, so it needs a substantiated advice on what will work. This includes advice on romanisation rules on names not in the Latin alfabet, like Russian Cyrillic, Greek, Japanese (the ô's vs. the o's...), etc.

Quote:
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CREW CHART:
...- For example: Some people insist that contribution must exactly match the chart. "Directors" would not be allowed because the chart only list "Director" or "Directed By".
- Or, how do we deal with older films whose credits do not match the chart.

STANDARDIZATION:
- Copy Overview exactly but than Rating Details need to follow capitalization rules.

I am baffled by those that state that some texts with errors are more sacred than even the pope wouldn't probably consider of biblical texts. So we should accept accented words in overviews but not in cast/crew names? DVDp is there to help us catalogue a release and make it easy to do some looking up; if we could bring in more consistency to prevent overzealous behaviour, great.

Quote:

COMMON SENSE:
- I often see this issue raised when a consensus is not reached. How do we deal with these issues when they inevitably arise?
...?

Well, that'll be always the case, there is always something new. I see this initiative as an effort to remove the most frequent addressed issues of the last years, but I'm not so naive to assume we can solve everything. We need to contain the scope to workable limits.

Heading for a bunker now 

This is a great discussion (@Kathy - good, quick work on that list). Usually Forum activity dies down over the weekends, so I will take that time to try and consolidate / summarize all the good work into a "White Paper" that can be submitted to Invelos. I will prepare it in PDF format for team review, and after it settles down, it can be offered to Invelos as a consolidated statement of requirements from the point of view of Contributors. Any objections to that idea? I think I am a fairly decent writer, but if there is a professional technical writer on-board, I would certainly defer to that person if they want to do it instead.

I agree something needs to be done to make a more correct online db, but just what is correct, that seems to be the first problem. I imagine everybody that owns and uses the profiler have their own idea of just what the online db should contain. Some people seems to forget that this is a DVD db, and not a studio, cast, crew, film or TV series db. Even the most quoted encyclopedia has been know to have an error or two. I bought it back 2000 just to keep track of my dvds. But I do occasionally like to check just what entries I have with a certain actor, etc.

Tell me just how and who selects which dvd gets included in this pie-in-the-sky db. I notice a number of people commenting in this forum string have limited number of dvds.

I got an idea why don't you people check your own db collection, get its profiles up to the rules and contribute them to if online db correction is noted.

But just how many program owners contribute to the online db, read, or comment in this forum. Let alone read the contribution rules. Probably the number is in the single digits, I bet. The names I notice are not necessarily the same that comment and contribute to the online db. And some that do both have errors in their contributions just as indeed I have.

I have about 9,000 profiles with updates available and every once in awhile I decide to do something about it. But by the time check a few of them, I get discourage because they have some many omissions and errors, I give up. One problem is in the delineation of the lock facility. If I see something that needs to be corrected it might wipe out something I know to be correct. I have keep a write pad to note this and it gets very tedious.

First of all there needs to be a consistency of the labeling and content of items in the default profile in both the help and contribution rules files. The contribution rules should be in outline format, so people could refer to them by number. Film and TV series rules need greater separation.

I know just how hard it is to write a proper set of specs. The first time I was offered the task I refused and it would have been a bump in my career from an organizational standpoint not the task. The next time I had no choice as I had to write the spec on how to write the specs for the group I managed. Fortunately we had two pros, an English man and woman, to check my effort. The paper they returned had so many blue edit marks it would have twice weighed as much I as that I had submitted. And they were totally correct on each and  every item noted.

Lol, srethims. Sounds familiar, the first draft of the rules was far more detailed and explanatory and well over 50 pages. It was decided to try and get it down to about 25, what happens when you do that...ambiguities creep in.

Quoting CharlieM:

Quote:
Maybe instead of discs, we profile the "Movie", (to our standard) then people can pull the cast/crew genre, etc for any given disc profile, then adjust the profile for the release.  This way, the cast crew would have a solid basis (Gold Profile for Movies)

Or the other issue we have with CLT  (Original Movie Titles), is there a way to, within this system, help alleviate that problem.

Just throwing Ideas.

Thanks. That's where things start, and we go from there.

You know, we do have the "Locks" feature in the online.  If a group of people who own a certain release could agree that the fields in question associated with that release were correct, they could then submit locks on those fields.  I think the Criterion release of Brazil has a lot of these. 

This wouldn't necessarily work for modern films cast & crew (what with the ever-needing-correction that is common names of current actors, this isn't so much a problem for old films - having found Gabby Hayes common name, it ain't gonna change at this point), but it could solve the rest of the fields. 

---

The other problem is fixing the linking via non-birthyear cast/crew.  We all have these in our local and I think we all have different ways of dealing with it locally (or simply ignoring it).  For example in my local I have two dog actors named Buddy, one with a birthyear (1988, starred in Air Bud) and one without (played the dog in a Charlie Chase short "Mighty Like a Moose").  I give my non-birthyear actors fictional birth years starting with 10000.  So I can tell that these are obviously fictional years and (again, obviously) don't submit them.

If we could get a consensus (and subsequent rule change) on some way to utilize some form of fictional birth year for those cast/crew whose BYs cannot be found or who share the same year with a same name person, be it my way or another way, I think we would be able to better fix the linking issues. 

Of course, a system that utilized unique IDs for each person would fix this problem too, but this is the only way I see to fix it with the tools we currently have.

Quoting mediadogg:

Quote:
@Srehtims,
There are some interesting nuggets of truth in your dissertation. I want to read it a few more times. You are absolutely correct if you are saying that any solution should be good enough to attract the owner of 9,000 DVDs to participate in the database more fully. So, I take your views seriously, and appreciate the passion that you must have, for you to take the time to write it.

That almost 9,000 having updates available out of  almost 19,000 profiles.

While I applaud any effort to improve the quality of the online database, and am willing to help in any way I can, I'm convinced that the only way to *really* knock things into shape is a complete overhaul of the program which uses one set of cast and crew per film, rather than per DVD. Of course, the system would need to allow for an occasional deviation, but generally, that's what we need.

And essentially, that's what this proposal boils down to as well: to create a "master" profile, which can then be copied to each and every other profile for the same film. The principle is the same, but rather than the system being changed to propagate such data automatically, here all subsequent profiles would still need to be updated manually, and every change to such a "master" profile (such as a shifted common name, or the addition of a newly found - and needed - birth year) would again need to be propagated through all other profiles for the same film.

So ideally, the "one set of cast and crew per film, rather than per DVD" approach needs to be inplemented by Invelos, instead of us trying to create some kind of workaround that can never work as good.