Editing Policy

david wrote:
As the users frequenting this forum know all too well, TV shows are no simple matter! It's somewhat overdue, but I can finally announce that we managed to write down a very detailed description of the policies we want you to follow regarding the data on TVmaze.

Discussion on your Episode policy:

In some cases, there might be multiple sources that conflict with each other. When that happens, they should be considered in the following order: Data shown on-screen during the episode's announcement, intro, or credits

Question: Are you sure you even want this to be on the list period let alone 1st? Just any old Tom, Dick or Mary can claim they saw such in such on screen but why should we take their word on whatever it is regardless if they are always known as a truthful person. I know I would never except anyone’s say so even yourself over anything I can find in writing on any website, newspaper or magazine because real solid proof can then be provided without question.

I do not know if you read a post I submitted in a thread about 3 months ago in the forum or not? I will try to shorten it way up from the very long drawn out story it really is. Over at Rage a member kept changing information on a show and I kept changing it back. I reported them after the 3rd change in less than a week. They were sent a PM by a high ranking STAFF member and they sent me a PM response stating the member claimed he saw it on the TV screen so we have to take their word for it. I had never dealt with that member before so I could not understand why he had lied to a Staff member. I watched the show in question the next time it was on even though I don’t like those kind of shows and I proved him wrong. I sent a PM to the Staff member and told him I watched the show in question and he had lied to you. Now it’s my word against his so he watched the show the following week and saw that yes the member had lied and corrected all of the episodes he had ever worked on for the show in question!

There is a lot more to this story but I’m end it here by saying I have no clue what he was up to but he was a very dishonest person with some kind of an agenda we could never figure out?

Next item

Season - However, some shows like daily soaps or daily talk shows don't have any notion of season numbers. In such a case, the premiere year of the episode should be used as season number. For example, the season number for an episode that aired on June 1st, 2015 should simply be "2015". This also goes for shows that only air once a year, such as award shows: each episode should be placed in its own separate season.

You can’t really be serious here on this point 1 season for every year a show airs 1 episode mostly Awards shows. Some award shows and pageants have aired on TV for over 50 years so do you really want to have over 50 seasons for 1 show that airs only 1 show a year, that is so much waste of space.

I believe it should remain the way Juan, Thomas & I have been doing it since you gave us permission to add these shows to the site without any instructions on how to best do it. Every show gets 1 Season and 1 season only. Each year is a separate episode here is my example

Season 1

Episode 1 - 1950

Episode 2 - 1951

Episode 3 - 1952

Episode 67 - 2016

Etc.

I have not finished reading this yet I need to go to bed but I will read it all in time.

Thanks for the feedback so far!

I'm pretty sure I want on-screen information to be the most important official source, trumping anything else. I do understand that such information is a lot harder to verify than official sites/press releases that anyone can access.

But there's a pretty easy solution, as demonstrated in a thread about The Librarians a couple of days ago: someone claimed that the episode titles on screen were different from the ones in the press releases, and simply uploaded a screencap to the episode gallery to back it up: http://www.tvmaze.com/images/68340/and-the-drowned...

This way, anyone can verify the claim now and in the future. So if a conflict ever arises between someone quoting on-screen information and someone else, we'll just require them to submit proof like this.

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There's a reason behind the idea of adding each episode from a yearly award show in a separate season.

First, since such award shows don't have any official seasons, doing so would be consistent with the rest of the shows.

Second, there's some data that we can only track on the season level, and not on the episode level. For example, the network that season aired on. If an award show moves between networks throughout the years, having a separate season per event would allow us to track this, while having them all in a single season wouldn't.

david wrote:
Thanks for the feedback so far!
I'm pretty sure I want on-screen information to be the most important official source, trumping anything else. I do understand that such information is a lot harder to verify than official sites/press releases that anyone can access.
But there's a pretty easy solution, as demonstrated in a thread about The Librarians a couple of days ago: someone claimed that the episode titles on screen were different from the ones in the press releases, and simply uploaded a screencap to the episode gallery to back it up: http://www.tvmaze.com/images/68340/and-the-drowned...
This way, anyone can verify the claim now and in the future. So if a conflict ever arises between someone quoting on-screen information and someone else, we'll just require them to submit proof like this.
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There's a reason behind the idea of adding each episode from a yearly award show in a separate season.
First, since such award shows don't have any official seasons, doing so would be consistent with the rest of the shows.
Second, there's some data that we can only track on the season level, and not on the episode level. For example, the network that season aired on. If an award show moves between networks throughout the years, having a separate season per event would allow us to track this, while having them all in a single season wouldn't.

First off maybe just maybe about 50% of TV shows in the world (all countries) ever appear on line so most would NOT be available for proof backup so we are back to taking someone's word that they saw it do you really want to accept someone's word if no proof is available? How many members that are not 100% truthful will say "I saw it with my own eyes but it is not anywhere on the internet so I can't prove it you will just have to take my word on it"?

Secondly how in the world can you track when a show airs on different Networks that does not seem currently possible the way the site is set up at this time? If that were the case would you not have a way to indicate a different Network on the individual episodes themselves? If this option were to ever come to fuition that would solve a ton of Sports Talk Show problems that we currently have you that i am sure you are not aware of?

The ESPN Networks constantly move their shows from one of their networks to another daily and sometimes multiple times each day. Therefore we/I have to either ignore all of the networks that are not the main one it airs on the most of put in all NEW only episode showings no matter what Network they air on.

Eample: College Football Live (New Episode airings only)

I can only hope this will appear here the way I am copy and pasting it here as a list going down with spacing otherwise the Forum will redo it and it will be a mixed up jumbled mess that will be hard to read as I reported before the forum does it's own thing why?

Thu 11/5

7:00pm-7:30pm

ESPNU

Fri 11/6

2:00pm-2:30pm

ESPN

4:00pm-4:30pm

ESPNews

It appears to me at first to be close to what I copied but not exact. However after i click on Update it becomes a real mess!

It would be better if I include the url here so you can see for yourself hjow it appears at zap2it.com and how I copy and pasted it here. To see the mess the forum created bringing it over and also to see what i mean about multiple showings on multiple networks and how it is a BIG problem and almost all of their shows are like this one? - http://tvlistings.zap2it.com/tv/college-football-l...

Why does the Forum not take things copied and pasted exactly as they originally appear and can this please be fixed?

If a show is available on DVD/Bluray, you can use those to take a screengrab and upload it to us. I think for 90% of the shows out there, proof could be provided if neccessary.

Let's just deal with this on a case-by-case basis if we ever have to. If two people disagree about a conflict and one of them refers to on-screen data but can't provide proof, maybe we won't consider their argument valid. We'll see :)

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We can't track network information on the episode level. If each episode of a show premieres on a different network we simply can't handle that, as the policy states. But we can track network information on a season level, which could be useful for the yearly (award) shows.

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Only limited markup is allowed in forum posts. So if you paste content from a different website that's in a layout, it might appear fine at first sight, but will be stripped after saving the post. We hope to improve this in the future, currently we're limited by the text editor we use.

Looks like you're missing a "specials" policy. Many British shows have specials around Dec25 or perhaps for comic relief. In addition, sometimes pilots are considered similarly to "specials".

TheTVDB seems to manage "specials" by having a separate demarcation on the same level as seasons/series. Episode numbers for these "specials" are given the s00 prefix. In addition, there's predefined field(s) to place the "specials" in order. The field(s) are "airs before <episode XX>" or "airs after <episode YY>".

Until TVMaze has a policy/facility for "specials" there will be a big gap in data accuracy compared to TheTVDB.

Season - However, some shows like daily soaps or daily talk shows don't have any notion of season numbers. In such a case, the premiere year of the episode should be used as season number. For example, the season number for an episode that aired on June 1st, 2015 should simply be "2015". This also goes for shows that only air once a year, such as award shows: each episode should be placed in its own separate season.

I agree there's a distinct use case for non-season shows. Another good example is (often) publicly-funded magazine current affairs programs which run almost year-round. I think Panorama (BBC), Four Corners (AuBC) and so on, fit into this classification.

TheTVDB handles this well with seasons simply replaced by years, resulting in easily parsed sYYYY marking. The suggestion of Juan, Thomas etc are seem to be episode, year which *appears* or *seems* a bit backwards or strange to me. That is, unless I'm missing something in my reading of the quoted text above.

I think TheTVDB approach is the way to go. Off the top of my head I can't see any issues with it, although it seems they've allowed for both season numbers and 'season' years, like here: Foreign Correspondent (AuBC).which is perhaps a bit weird. However I've done my fair share of editing these non-season shows on the TVDB and their approach appears to work.

an0n1m0us wrote:
Looks like you're missing a "specials" policy. Many British shows have specials around Dec25 or perhaps for comic relief. In addition, sometimes pilots are considered similarly to "specials".
TheTVDB seems to manage "specials" by having a separate demarcation on the same level as seasons/series. Episode numbers for these "specials" are given the s00 prefix. In addition, there's predefined field(s) to place the "specials" in order. The field(s) are "airs before <episode XX>" or "airs after <episode YY>".
Until TVMaze has a policy/facility for "specials" there will be a big gap in data accuracy compared to TheTVDB.

Let's continue the discussion about special handling here: http://www.tvmaze.com/threads/865/doctor-who-chris... :)

Specials are definitely supported though, check the rest of the policy. They are added to a specific season and don't have an episode number. There is no "airs before/after XX" here, but specials are ordered simply based on their airdate.

an0n1m0us wrote:
TheTVDB handles this well with seasons simply replaced by years, resulting in easily parsed sYYYY marking. The suggestion of Juan, Thomas etc are seem to be episode, year which *appears* or *seems* a bit backwards or strange to me. That is, unless I'm missing something in my reading of the quoted text above.
I think TheTVDB approach is the way to go. Off the top of my head I can't see any issues with it, although it seems they've allowed for both season numbers and 'season' years, like here: Foreign Correspondent (AuBC).which is perhaps a bit weird. However I've done my fair share of editing these non-season shows on the TVDB and their approach appears to work.

I'm not sure what you mean exactly. What's the difference between our and tvdb's approach you are talking about?

david wrote:
I'm not sure what you mean exactly. What's the difference between our and tvdb's approach you are talking about?

Fair question. To be honest I'm just assuming TVMaze doesn't support specials yet. I've only been aware of TVMaze for about 72 hours. Went a bit berserk jumping in all enthusiastically straight away :)

But yeah, I've seen series that should have specials that don't. Maybe I was just half asleep as well :) Apologies for the noise where only signal is needed!

https://www.tvmaze.com/shows/843/in-treatment
https://www.metacritic.com/feature/tv-renew-cancel-scorecard
2/16: HBO confirmed that In Treatment will not return for another season.

https://www.tvmaze.com/shows/54382/promised-land

https://www.metacritic.com/feature/tv-renew-cancel-scorecard

2/15: Promised Land (ABC) effectively canceled after airing just four episodes. The remaining unaired S1 episodes will stream on Hulu beginning March 1st.

@lysak859 Please use https://www.tvmaze.com/threads/2677/edit-requests