As I understand it, the current system allows for only one locality per profile.

But, in many cases, DVDs are released / packaged for several countries :
"Benelux" editions are for french and dutch speaking Belgium, Netherlands and Luxemburg : every data on the cover is written in french and in dutch, rating rules and logos are the same, etc.

Other releases bear as much as four languages (Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Finnish) and are released for thoses four countries.

I guess there are common releases for Germany and Austria as well

For all these releases, the habit in DVDP is to n-plicate the profiles, one for each country. While basically almost all info is exactly the same, independant profiles are added - and contributed to separately. This means, for example for the "scandinavian" release, four different threads of contributions, votes, reviews have to be carried out - while all the data is basically the same !

So, not only the data is n-plicated, but also the work of maintaining that data, and the risks of incoherences and mistakes as well.

My proposal is to allow for several localities per profile. Contributors of every concerned country would then work cooperatively, on the same profile, workload (and data load) would be greatly reduced.

On thoses releases, the "overview" is generally written in all languages : contributors speakers of thoses languages would take care of their part, producing in the end what is already on the DVD cover : the same overview in several languages.



Simplicity, unicity of complex data (crew and cast!), economy of efforts, it all looks well to me.

One small drawback : price, date of release, rating : these are things that can vary across countries, thing that should then be dependant of the locality. This means that the gui logic would have to be a tad more complex : changing locality would have an impact on these three fields, which would have to be stored separately.

[Profile] 1 -> n [locality, price, rating, release date]

Second drawback, bigger : existing data ! Migration, and update of local profiles, wouldn't be an easy task.

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But maybe this proposal might still be worth considering for the next major revamp of the db model ?

(edit for typoes)

Normalization of the database has been mentioned/discussed several times (hmm, maybe we should normalize that) over the years. It doesn't happen that often anymore, as most of us know the discussion by heart, so it's mainly something you will see when a new user with DB experience starts using the forum.

A few different approaches have been mentioned. Typically the solution suggested is to have the actual movie data (credits etc) only once, and then create DVD Profiles referring to it. This leads to the discussion on how to handle different versions of the same movie (naming conventions, overriding on DVD level, etc).

There has also been suggestions on being able to link DVD's / so you would still create for example a Swedish DVD, but then tell it that the credits are identical to the US release, the features identical to the Danish release etc. This would allow normalizing basically everything but it could be hard to make userfriendly enough.

I do not consider the name of the program relevant for he DB layout - the DB layout should match the data being collected no matter what the program is called.
Your arguments against duplicating DVD data are obviously valid, but they do apply just as well on the movie level.

For your idea about simply working with an external movie database, it's an excelent idea if it wasn't for one small tiny little detail.... I doubt a suitable database exist (and yes, we do know about IMDB - that is the problem - we know so much about IMDB that we know we do not want to use it).

I will tell you from what I have seen on the international scene, I wouldn't want to see a single cast?crew Profile per title. It is a good idea and very tempting. But there are simply too many users internationally who are not following the Rules, the Profiles are a wreck. I don't have a desire to all of the data thus polluted with such data. The only exceptions to this I have found by and large are R2 UK and Tim's work.

Skip

to @Skip:
So, in short, you say "foreigners (= non US) suck at doing things right, I dont want *them* to mess around with my precious own private data... only US, and all US, contribute correctly" ?

 

I may have misunderstood what you said, English is not my first language... Would you please make yourself clearer ?

Quoting skipnet50:

Quote:
I will tell you from what I have seen on the international scene, I wouldn't want to see a single cast?crew Profile per title.

Have you read my post? I wasn't talking of single cast&crew per title, but of single cast&crew per Disc-ID.  

I think EnryWiki's idea has merit

-Agrare

Quoting skipnet50:

Quote:
I will tell you from what I have seen on the international scene, I wouldn't want to see a single cast?crew Profile per title. It is a good idea and very tempting. But there are simply too many users internationally who are not following the Rules, the Profiles are a wreck. I don't have a desire to all of the data thus polluted with such data. The only exceptions to this I have found by and large are R2 UK and Tim's work.

Skip

I have no doubt the profiles for smaller localities are more messy than the profiles from the big localities. Which is an excelent reason to combine the movie details as this will ensure virtually every movie (there will be local exceptions obviously) have the benefit of belonging to a big locale.