What is missing on shows - what needs to be added

gmpugs wrote:
Honestly, there's one show I've come across where quite a few guest/recurring stars are credited as the main cast. Was it like that at TVRage? Honestly, I don't know, it could have been.

There were situations like that at TVRage, yes. Hopefully less since I took over back in early 2015 as primary US programming moderator. :) But I'm sure some got through. And unless I stumbled across them (which I did), or someone tried to correct them, or told me about them, I wouldn't have know about any prior to that.

And if there's a way for TVMaze to avoid that, I'm glad to hear it. But my question would be how are they going to avoid having what ThomasNL says he wasn't a fan of at TVRage.

ThomasNL wrote:
2. I personally have never been fan of TVrage. It was just an overkill of information, many options did not work anymore or a complete show was a total mess as they added main cast to many episodes as guest stars. You can't deny that!

I know one problem is that some shows had what many consider main cast in the opening credits. There was always a dispute whether they should be under regular guest cast, starring guests, or just main cast. The issue rests in how shows credit the cast outside of the opening title sequence. I know The Walking Dead was a pain to figure out. In the first season, it was just guest starring, but then in the second season they changed it to Also Starring. It still seemed to be a non-issue until Season 3 when some names were still in the credits despite not appearing. It got worse with the fourth season when they had more and bookended the regular guests and appear to be in no order. I worked off the credits only, so how am I to figure it out when there's nothing to distinguish the main cast and guest cast? At least Battlestar Galactica had the courtesy of making it clear, as it listed the names off before going into what was clearly labelled the guest stars. It's something that is no one's fault but whoever sorts it out on the show and I don't see it being something that has an easy and simply solution in constructing the framework of a guide. That's why I liked TVRage's system of assigned editors because at least there could be a single person sussing it out for a given show so casual contributors didn't have to bugger with it and could just move on.

Gadfly wrote:
There were situations like that at TVRage, yes. Hopefully less since I took over back in early 2015 as primary US programming moderator. :) But I'm sure some got through. And unless I stumbled across them (which I did), or someone tried to correct them, or told me about them, I wouldn't have know about any prior to that.
And if there's a way for TVMaze to avoid that, I'm glad to hear it. But my question would be how are they going to avoid having what ThomasNL says he wasn't a fan of at TVRage.

It is basically pretty hard to determine whether it is main or guest with some shows in my opinion and even contributors are becoming confused by this and might be wrong with information. I usually check some shows per day if I see if they are correct with main cast/guest cast, but I admit this is time consuming. I think by allowing contributors to add main cast too like it is now will reduce errors too.

There are some shows where it is difficult if not impossible. UK shows sometimes don't have opening credits. American animated shows, ditto.

But TVRage let contributors add main cast, too, and we had the problem you describe. So I don't believe it's going to reduce those kinds of errors. As you note, the best way to do it is have a staff member manually check it. But proportionate to the number of shows and entries, we didn't have any more staff at TVRage to do such things than you folks do here. Probably less. :(

I hate to wax ironic, but this topic is kinda... ironic. :) So far, the TVRage data problems that staff here have described, are because of TVRage's equivalent of open editing. Some of the same problems are here, and you have an open editing. The way we tried to deal with the problems of accuracy (and were making some headway, IMO) was to have less open editing.

I'm also curious what is meant by "overkill."

For instance, TVMaze has character guides. TVRage had them, too, and practically no one used them. So a system that automatically creates a character guide for every single character you add seems like overkill to me.

TVMaze has gallery and recap sections. But no quote section. I likes me galleries and recaps :) , and appreciate that TVMaze has them. But I also understood that quotes were where it was at as far as casual visitors were concerned. People would rather glance at a quote or cultural reference than read a full recap, or do an extra click to see pretty photos of the episode that they just watched.

Part of it is the concept of... real estate, for lack of a better term. If it ain't on the main episode page, it doesn't exist as far as most readers are concerned. So you try to put the stuff you think people really want to see on the main episode page. But if people want to see a lot of stuff... well, you put a lot of stuff on the main episode page. Thus, overkill.

So I'll cop to the fact that TVRage put a lot of info on main episode pages, and that it was overkill. :) But the alternative is to hide stuff that people wanted so that they can't find it.

ThomasNL wrote:
1. That stupid box (if that's what you want to call it) has been very useful for me. I am able to add cast now much faster instead of clicking all the time. You might not agree with me as you have barely contributed yet (I don't mind you for it), but if you start to contribute a lot, you'd know it is a very helpful ''stupid'' box and I am pretty sure many of us agree with me about that.
2. I personally have never been fan of TVrage. It was just an overkill of information, many options did not work anymore or a complete show was a total mess as they added main cast to many episodes as guest stars. You can't deny that! Although I must say that the system automatically detects the characters of that person in that specific show when you are about to add guest cast was a very nice option or to add crew to all episodes he/she was attending to in just one page.
3. Providing as much information as you can doesn't mean you are the best site out there. It is a personal opinion, but I'd rather prefer a nice organized lay-out rather than an abundance of information mixed between each other.
4. What's wrong with our system? All you do is requesting us to create a show and we create them for you. You ''as contributor or Member'' are able to add seasons, episodes, cast or crew to that specific show, although we usually use a bulk upload tool to upload all episodes, so it would be quicker and easier for you to add information, even tvrage was checking whether it was a real show after you added one, so there's basically no difference and in my experience I have waited days for it to be accepted by simply verifying if it was a real show giving all official links.

1. Are we talking about the same thing first ? Cause we might not at all.

When you're on the add page, there is this box which you need to check once asking if you want to return and add more. That's the box I'm talking about. Is there another one ?

Gadfly or anyone else can correct me if i forgot a step, but when you added someone on tvrage (same on tv.com i just changed something over there) it was like this :

click on edit (or add), you get to a page with a search bar, you entered the full name, and click on searching and select the right one (you have an autocomplete which is really faster, i love that), then if it was a new entry for the show (main cast /guest), the space would be blank, you'd enter the name of the character name and you could add bunch of other stuff, if it was someone already in the database, you could add an attribute (like credited under another name for example) and a rank so that the actors were listed in the credit order on display on the show. If it was a new entry in the database the form was the same except it asked to add loads of data about that person that you might want to enter, i never did, so it was pretty fast. And if it was an actor who had already appeared, the form would be already filled with all the different names entered and an empty one in case it was not the same character. On long formula shows, that happens a lot. On supernatural, the co-starrinf come back and back for diffferent characters for example.

You had an extra line explaining why you submitted which believe me is a necessity (we don't have it on our site and it's a problem) and that was it. You clicked on submit and if it was someone already in the database, you'd be back to the same page to add someone and it was a new entry, there was a link to go back to the add page. That's it. That's 3 steps less than the form i used when i added to 800 words (and i just checked there is no page where we see what happens when we submit (approval, rejection and when) so i don't remember exactly when i did two/3 days ago ?)

I don't mind the box. I don't see its utility. It's a box you must check. Why not get rid of it, and when someone has added something, the page just loads again to add new stuff. That's what is on most user based websites. I'm not saying anything else.

You just added an extra step/page ? Again, i'm just pointing out that your system adds several steps that are time consuming. You want to make contributing to the site as fast and straightforward as possible. And i listed at least 3 steps that could be rethought if possible in a way that would make it faster for everyone. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying you are replacing another site on the fly, not really ready for the onslaught of information you might get (i might totally be off base), and making something more straight forward is in your contributors' interests, but also in yours (i'm thinking more in yours than ours, seriously because i'm thinking as the administrator of a user based site like yours and i have a slight idea of what is pushed with the new season and the absence of tvrage).

I heavily contribute to tvrage/tv.com/imdb/wikipedia, so i kinda know when something takes too long.... and that is one thing that waste time, that I don't see the necessity of. I know you only have to check it once, so it's minor detail. I just say "why even have it".

Like I said from my perspective, your add form as of when I added to 800 words (two days ago? ) is time consuming.

2. Never seen that on tvrage and like Gadly I contributed a lot (not on his level though, cause i'm at the head of a similar site so i did what i can at my level without interfering with my own stuff. i would for example enter my stuff on our site and then readd them on tvrage if empty)

I did see the reverse. Like any user based contributing system, you're at the mercy of incorrect info. I've seen a lot of guests added as main cast in tvrage that i had to delete. I even was told that since i was deleting them i should add them as guest, which i couldn't as i was not watching the shows, i checked new shows and make sure the credits are correct for main cast (add or delete people who were referenced at some point by media). And apparently, people are seeing the same thing here, guest added to main cast. It's normal because it's user based. And that's ok, people will correct a bad entry when they see it... I remembered for example having to add Rossiff sutherland as guest on Reign (not watching it but i had them on dvr) while he was listed as main cast... and that was a very common occurrence.

Yeah walking Dead is (and probably will always will be) a huge problem in that regards. Andrew West appeared for 3 episodes and was considered by the production as Regular Cast. Choosing who is what on that show is a nightmare. I remember asking the editor of the show on tvrage about how he dealt with someone at one point because it's a real problem.

3. We'll disagree. I'm going with what Gadlfy has posted in every single reply he made on this topic.

4. It's fine, it's your choice. As an outsider, I see you are being submerged with requests.

Practicality would suggest to just create the form to let people create a show that is missing and you'll just have to approve or reject and that would be faster, it's more of a question of efficiency and being fast and unload some of the load (sorry for the pun) on people willing to take it. But if you want to be hands on, that's fine. Whether the decision to shut down tvrage at the beginning of the US regular season was done on purpose for some reason to put everyone at a disavantage, put you at a disavantage (if they knew of your existence) is something i consider a lot. And what they did was really a douchy move. Who shuts down a website whose existence was based on its contributors without even saying something ?

Never waited more than 3/4 hours even as of the week before it was taken down for contributions to be processed. So that is not my experience. Some times, my contributions would be processed before i was even finished adding. See, different experience. It's like we're not talking about the same site at all. I am not saying there weren't problems but on contribution side/shows sides, etc, it was working fine.

And yes, i haven't contributed much here, cause 1. was waiting on tvrage to be back (and i am at the head of a database so my time is very limited) 2 as i have said it is not user friendly yet. If you want to hold it against me so that my opinion matters less, Ok. but maybe take into account 12 years of contributing experience (i'm being conservative). I was a tvtome user, then a tv.com and then tvrage user and i contributed to imdb (or used to cause i'm not that masochist) and i'm head of your french equivalent that looks horrendous and from the 80s :p and i helped shape what our site is and i know what decision were wrong (even mines) and what we miss..

I had a question about main cast, but i'd need to add again and considering how i ruffled your feathers, i'm not sure it would productive for anyone. I'd be wasting your time.

Not correlated with above. Tvtome had a great option, I have no idea how they did it. Best guess could be a check box (or radio button), but not sure. On soaps, the problem is main cast. They had a code that made only the currect cast appear on the main page of a show. There is no site right now which has it. That would beat by far the rank system (the ass backward thingy that gadfly mentioned elsewhere and he's right about it, made no sense to start at 100 instead of 1). A system that would not impact past seasons of course. And that probably would be the main problem.

I truly hope you can salvage as much as possible of the tvrage db or get it entirely even though you won't be able to use everything since you don't have the same interests (quotes, songs, cultural references i think are missing). It will be great news if or when you do.

Oh, another question for future, can you /how do you quote separately ? I mean, it would be an easier read for everyone to be able to quote parts of stuff and answer and then quote again and answer.

I don't mind the box. I don't see its utility. It's a box you must check. Why not get rid of it, and when someone has added something, the page just loads again to add new stuff. That's what is on most user based websites. I'm not saying anything else.

You just added an extra step/page ? Again, i'm just pointing out that your system adds several steps that are time consuming. You want to make contributing to the site as fast and straightforward as possible. And i listed at least 3 steps that could be rethought if possible in a way that would make it faster for everyone. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying you are replacing another site on the fly, not really ready for the onslaught of information you might get (i might totally be off base), and making something more straight forward is in your contributors' interests, but also in yours (i'm thinking more in yours than ours, seriously because i'm thinking as the administrator of a user based site like yours and i have a slight idea of what is pushed with the new season and the absence of tvrage).
I heavily contribute to tvrage/tv.com/imdb/wikipedia, so i kinda know when something takes too long.... and that is one thing that waste time, that I don't see the necessity of. I know you only have to check it once, so it's minor detail. I just say "why even have it".
Like I said from my perspective, your add form as of when I added to 800 words (two days ago? ) is time consuming.

2. Never seen that on tvrage and like Gadly I contributed a lot (not on his level though, cause i'm at the head of a similar site so i did what i can at my level without interfering with my own stuff. i would for example enter my stuff on our site and then readd them on tvrage if empty)
I did see the reverse. Like any user based contributing system, you're at the mercy of incorrect info. I've seen a lot of guests added as main cast in tvrage that i had to delete. I even was told that since i was deleting them i should add them as guest, which i couldn't as i was not watching the shows, i checked new shows and make sure the credits are correct for main cast (add or delete people who were referenced at some point by media). And apparently, people are seeing the same thing here, guest added to main cast. It's normal because it's user based. And that's ok, people will correct a bad entry when they see it... I remembered for example having to add Rossiff sutherland as guest on Reign (not watching it but i had them on dvr) while he was listed as main cast... and that was a very common occurrence.

Yeah walking Dead is (and probably will always will be) a huge problem in that regards. Andrew West appeared for 3 episodes and was considered by the production as Regular Cast. Choosing who is what on that show is a nightmare. I remember asking the editor of the show on tvrage about how he dealt with someone at one point because it's a real problem.

3. We'll disagree. I'm going with what Gadlfy has posted in every single reply he made on this topic.

4. It's fine, it's your choice. As an outsider, I see you are being submerged with requests.
Practicality would suggest to just create the form to let people create a show that is missing and you'll just have to approve or reject and that would be faster, it's more of a question of efficiency and being fast and unload some of the load (sorry for the pun) on people willing to take it. But if you want to be hands on, that's fine. Whether the decision to shut down tvrage at the beginning of the US regular season was done on purpose for some reason to put everyone at a disavantage, put you at a disavantage (if they knew of your existence) is something i consider a lot. And what they did was really a douchy move. Who shuts down a website whose existence was based on its contributors without even saying something ?

Never waited more than 3/4 hours even as of the week before it was taken down for contributions to be processed. So that is not my experience. Some times, my contributions would be processed before i was even finished adding. See, different experience. It's like we're not talking about the same site at all. I am not saying there weren't problems but on contribution side/shows sides, etc, it was working fine.

And yes, i haven't contributed much here, cause 1. was waiting on tvrage to be back (and i am at the head of a database so my time is very limited) 2 as i have said it is not user friendly yet. If you want to hold it against me so that my opinion matters less, Ok. but maybe take into account 12 years of contributing experience (i'm being conservative). I was a tvtome user, then a tv.com and then tvrage user and i contributed to imdb (or used to cause i'm not that masochist) and i'm head of your french equivalent that looks horrendous and from the 80s :p and i helped shape what our site is and i know what decision were wrong (even mines) and what we miss..

I had a question about main cast, but i'd need to add again and considering how i ruffled your feathers, i'm not sure it would productive for anyone. I'd be wasting your time.
Not correlated with above. Tvtome had a great option, I have no idea how they did it. Best guess could be a check box (or radio button), but not sure. On soaps, the problem is main cast. They had a code that made only the currect cast appear on the main page of a show. There is no site right now which has it. That would beat by far the rank system (the ass backward thingy that gadfly mentioned elsewhere and he's right about it, made no sense to start at 100 instead of 1). A system that would not impact past seasons of course. And that probably would be the main problem.

I truly hope you can salvage as much as possible of the tvrage db or get it entirely even though you won't be able to use everything since you don't have the same interests (quotes, songs, cultural references i think are missing). It will be great news if or when you do.


Oh, another question for future, can you /how do you quote separately ? I mean, it would be an easier read for everyone to be able to quote parts of stuff and answer and then quote again and answer.

I basically just added and deleted some stuff of your quote, but I agree that our quoting system might be improved in a better system and I didn't blame you for not editing though as we all are here for different purposes or have reasons for not contributing and I knew you were one of the bigger editors on TVrage as I have seen your name on several occasions and sure you and gadfly did a tremendous job over there.

1. and yes, I was talking about that return option of adding more cast. I know TVrage had an excellent form for that and I definitely agree with you on that, but we asked David already to look into this matter to auto-detect a character for that specific actor/actress in that specific series/shows/soaps etc. and automatically being send to that page again might be a nice feature indeed, but for now we have to deal with that specific return option.

2. You can't expect us to be clean of those issues as you said it yourself. Of course we are busy by redoing those errors once spotted, but it is very time consuming and there are other things to do too as you probably know :).

4. Basically you are doing the same with us. You fill in a field with details requesting us to approve or reject it, however we can deliver it to you in blank or we could deliver it with more information by bulk upload. You either could request it by writing a note over there if you'd prefer to have it blank, so you could add everything by yourself.

I know TVmaze isn't perfect and we have our major differences between tvrage and our idea is of course not entirely the same as it is with tvrage, otherwise we would just be another copycat like there are some out there, but we do welcome suggestions that are useful to us and liked by the majority. Yes, I know you are not entirely fan of that voting system, but out of my experience some of these updates have been added already by David and Jan.

I have send a msg to david about that option to make current cast only appear on the main page as coding is like reading hieroglyphs to me.

Just remind you that TVmaze is just a year old and there's still plenty of room for improvements.

Thanks Thomas for sending that suggestion to David. That would be wonderful for soaps and old running shows like Grey's Anatomy for example.

You know, i was looking through that forum to see if a suggestion I wanted to make had been made and realized that gadfly asked for the additions of crew that i listed in my first message before he asked and they were added after he did, maybe i listed too much ? But those were the essentials. Maybe not the casting according to countries, you decide if you want or not. We didn't at first and I realized after a while it was a problem not to say which country/city etc. So we're actually becoming even more specific. I'm even seeing now on shows airing in the US but filmed in Canada for example : US Casting, but Casting without the mention of Canada, Ties that Bind for example has that specifity and it irks me because of course we don't have US Casting, we have Canada Casting but not the other way around.

Since i know you need to create ID for the crew positions and their ordering as well, i understand the problem. The ones I listed in my first message, some have been added since then, others probably aren't yet.

About 2. I wasn't saying anything bad about tvmaze, i just stated what we were all saying, it's user based, there is no way to avoid mistakes and noone is going to fault any site for it. Pointing the same issues on tvrage makes no sense cause you will have the same here as gadfly pointed it out. Overall, tvrage was and is for all my editors, more accurate than imdb for example and heavy contributors from tvrage will say the same thing. Doesn't mean it's 100% accurate, it just means, we knew who the editors were and we knew their info was correct. Whether it was Gadfly or the other heavy lifters. I know some shows on imdb are completed by the crew of those shows, so that make those shows page very accurate (Doctor Blake mysteries is an example, because they actually pointed it out after each episode aired on ABC1 in Australia). The fact most of the great contributors are coming here means you will be as accurate as tvrage was. It's a great thing.

"I didn't blame you for not editing though as we all are here for different purposes or have reasons for not contributing and I knew you were one of the bigger editors on TVrage as I have seen your name on several occasions and sure you and gadfly did a tremendous job over there." You didn't, but someone did to undermine my suggestions. Because of the quoting system, it is very difficult to answer loads of people at the same time. It wasn't addressed to you at all. I apologize for not specifying, i should have.

And thanks again for sending that suggestion !

--------

As gadfly said, people don't look into sub-pages, generally unless they need that info and that pretty much is people who complete guides. The more you'll put on the main show page/episode page, the more attention you get. If people don't see much info, then they'll try to find it somewhere else. And my bet is : imdb, tv.com or wikipedia as wiki has shows specific wikis which are so specific that they are sometimes even better than what even the overkill of tvrage had. He's right too about the characters' guides on tvrage, noone used them, i don't even know if they do in imdb and they exist. It's a specificity of the wikis that work for wiki, but not for general sites, i think, it's my opinion, i might be wrong.

But what songs are in an episodes, what cultural reference are made, what goof you spotted, that's stuff fans adore. Ratings.... Those may not be what you (the group that founded tvmaze) thought of important originally because you pretty much wanted a better API, i think (not an attack, a question) and thus didn't think of those things for shows. Stuff like how many episodes per season, if a show is cancelled/ended, returning, on the bubble etc... Those are stuff people always search for.

My question would be... are people using the TVMaze character guides? To add anything more than a vague sentence or two at best?

IMDB has them. TVRage had them. They don't (and didn't) get much use. Creating a character guide for every single character who is added to TVMaze seems like a huge undertaking, and a use of resources that proportionately have very little reward.

And in some cases, it's kind of... silly. I've been working on Twilight Zone the last couple of weekends. Are character guides for these one-shot characters who are tossed up on screen and disappear after 23 minutes of any use to anyone? So now there are character pages for Harmonica Man and Orderly. Sure, there are photos there because... hey, why not? I put them there because I already had the images for the actors from the DVD, so why not take the extra five seconds to add them to the character as well?

I understand it's an all-or-nothing system. But maybe a system where people created the character guides they wanted. And then you could see how popular it is.

*shrug* I just find this whole aspect interesting, because a) it shows a misconception about TVRage--in this case, that TVRage didn't have character guides when it did; and b) that "overkill" is relative. TVMaze already has thousands more character guides than TVRage ever did, because TVMaze creates them automatically. And the vast majority aren't seeing any use after the first automatic creation step.

Tonks wrote:
And my bet is : imdb, tv.com or wikipedia as wiki has shows specific wikis which are so specific that they are sometimes even better than what even the overkill of tvrage had. He's right too about the characters' guides on tvrage, noone used them, i don't even know if they do in imdb and they exist. It's a specificity of the wikis that work for wiki, but not for general sites, i think, it's my opinion, i might be wrong.

Beyond character guides, I don't think IMDB has wikis. I don't know about tv.com. wikipedia, of course, has wiki entries. :)

I think you always have to walk a fine line between going too Wiki. By which I mean those sites that do show-specific wikis, where each character, and each concept has its own page. Star Trek's Memory Alpha is a good example. The other side of the line is a bare-bones approach.

I find TVMaze's approach... a bit confusing, Some stuff is very wiki, with character guides and galleries. But then there are no quotes, or cultural references, or season guides, or internal continuity. I'm biased :) , but I think TVRage did the best job of walking that line. We had enough information that it could be Wiki-like if you wanted to go that route, and if you wanted to be an editor and go into that kind of detail, there were the tools for it. You could do character guides and season guides and quotes and episode references (continuity callbacks to previous episodes). But you didn't have to. Was a lot of that frontloaded on the main episode page? Yes, for the reasons cited above. It was only overkill if someone put the work in. And if someone put the work in, we wanted visitors to see it, not for it to hide behind a solitary link somewhere on the page.

Speaking of editorships, again, I'm biased, but I'm a fan of them. Open-ended is great, but then... why put a lot of work into something if people can come along along and rewrite and/or delete it? Editorships are... well a reward and a guarantee. Even the open-ended Wikipedia has them, although I believe more for broad categories of material rather than each page having a different specific editor.

Why should I put an hour into writing a recap, if someone can come along and delete half of it in a matter of seconds? I don't know why anyone would delete material someone put time and effort into creating, but I've seen it happen on other sites. And I don't know why idiots get on the Internet in the first place. ;)

I think some people just don't like to read large amounts of material. Rather than think, "Hey, I could skip that rather than delete some other person's work," they think, "Everyone thinks like I do, and magical fairies create the material instantly, so no big loss if I delete it."

To put it another way, myself and others were drawn to TVRage and stuck with it because it gave us the tools we needed to do what we wanted with TV show data on the Internet. Or if it didn't have the tools, the site creator was willing to add them. It might have been overkill... but it was overkill that we wanted. And it wasn't overkill that... ummm, killed TVRage.

The problem with open-endedness, as I believe Wikipedia eventually found out, is that if anyone can add anything, what gets added isn't always accurate, and sometimes it's intentionally or unintentionally destructive. That leads to before- or after-the-fact moderation. And then editors help with your moderation burdens. That's how TVRage evolved.

I admire TVMaze's approach, that the site is open-edit and everyone will work together and no one will change or delete everyone's work, and everything will be submitted the way it should be. Unfortunately, my experience with wikis and TVRage tells me that eventually someone will come along and won't share that attitude. And then they'll ruin a bunch of work, some people will depart in disgust and anger (whether the original data can be restored or not), and TVMaze will change to become closer to TVRage and less open-edit. I'd rather skip the departure stage. :)

TVRage wasn't what it was because that was necessarily what the creators wanted. It's was because that's the way the Internet and shared Wiki projects seem to work. Ditto for Wikipedia. It started out much like TVMaze, but as the population of contributors grew, eventually the people behind the scenes changed it.

Gadfly wrote:
My question would be... are people using the TVMaze character guides? To add anything more than a vague sentence or two at best?
IMDB has them. TVRage had them. They don't (and didn't) get much use. Creating a character guide for every single character who is added to TVMaze seems like a huge undertaking, and a use of resources that proportionately have very little reward.
And in some cases, it's kind of... silly. I've been working on Twilight Zone the last couple of weekends. Are character guides for these one-shot characters who are tossed up on screen and disappear after 23 minutes of any use to anyone? So now there are character pages for Harmonica Man and Orderly. Sure, there are photos there because... hey, why not? I put them there because I already had the images for the actors from the DVD, so why not take the extra five seconds to add them to the character as well?
I understand it's an all-or-nothing system. But maybe a system where people created the character guides they wanted. And then you could see how popular it is.
*shrug* I just find this whole aspect interesting, because a) it shows a misconception about TVRage--in this case, that TVRage didn't have character guides when it did; and b) that "overkill" is relative. TVMaze already has thousands more character guides than TVRage ever did, because TVMaze creates them automatically. And the vast majority aren't seeing any use after the first automatic creation step.

From my point of view character guides are a nice addition to main cast and recurring guest cast, for "Nurse #3" or "Medic #5" I find them rather useless :)

I can tell you that we are getting many visitors on character pages, much more than we ever had anticipated, but as said above, mostly on recurring guest stars or main cast.

cheers
Juan

Gadfly wrote:
Beyond character guides, I don't think IMDB has wikis. I don't know about tv.com. wikipedia, of course, has wiki entries. :)
I think you always have to walk a fine line between going too Wiki. By which I mean those sites that do show-specific wikis, where each character, and each concept has its own page. Star Trek's Memory Alpha is a good example. The other side of the line is a bare-bones approach.
I find TVMaze's approach... a bit confusing, Some stuff is very wiki, with character guides and galleries. But then there are no quotes, or cultural references, or season guides, or internal continuity. I'm biased :) , but I think TVRage did the best job of walking that line. We had enough information that it could be Wiki-like if you wanted to go that route, and if you wanted to be an editor and go into that kind of detail, there were the tools for it. You could do character guides and season guides and quotes and episode references (continuity callbacks to previous episodes). But you didn't have to. Was a lot of that frontloaded on the main episode page? Yes, for the reasons cited above. It was only overkill if someone put the work in. And if someone put the work in, we wanted visitors to see it, not for it to hide behind a solitary link somewhere on the page.

Speaking of editorships, again, I'm biased, but I'm a fan of them. Open-ended is great, but then... why put a lot of work into something if people can come along along and rewrite and/or delete it? Editorships are... well a reward and a guarantee. Even the open-ended Wikipedia has them, although I believe more for broad categories of material rather than each page having a different specific editor.
Why should I put an hour into writing a recap, if someone can come along and delete half of it in a matter of seconds? I don't know why anyone would delete material someone put time and effort into creating, but I've seen it happen on other sites. And I don't know why idiots get on the Internet in the first place. ;)
I think some people just don't like to read large amounts of material. Rather than think, "Hey, I could skip that rather than delete some other person's work," they think, "Everyone thinks like I do, and magical fairies create the material instantly, so no big loss if I delete it."
To put it another way, myself and others were drawn to TVRage and stuck with it because it gave us the tools we needed to do what we wanted with TV show data on the Internet. Or if it didn't have the tools, the site creator was willing to add them. It might have been overkill... but it was overkill that we wanted. And it wasn't overkill that... ummm, killed TVRage.

The problem with open-endedness, as I believe Wikipedia eventually found out, is that if anyone can add anything, what gets added isn't always accurate, and sometimes it's intentionally or unintentionally destructive. That leads to before- or after-the-fact moderation. And then editors help with your moderation burdens. That's how TVRage evolved.
I admire TVMaze's approach, that the site is open-edit and everyone will work together and no one will change or delete everyone's work, and everything will be submitted the way it should be. Unfortunately, my experience with wikis and TVRage tells me that eventually someone will come along and won't share that attitude. And then they'll ruin a bunch of work, some people will depart in disgust and anger (whether the original data can be restored or not), and TVMaze will change to become closer to TVRage and less open-edit. I'd rather skip the departure stage. :)

TVRage wasn't what it was because that was necessarily what the creators wanted. It's was because that's the way the Internet and shared Wiki projects seem to work. Ditto for Wikipedia. It started out much like TVMaze, but as the population of contributors grew, eventually the people behind the scenes changed it.

I can see where you are coming from, you were an amazing editor of many guides on tvrage and of course you wanted to have "your data" secured and not deleted by some bloke who thinks it is fun to troll around :)

But we believe our system is superior to the system that tvrage had, we believe with the promotional steps a contributor gets that we can figure out if he means well and enters good data.
We do not think that someone who has made over 800 good edits, suddenly becomes malicious and destroys a guide.

The major disadvantage of tvrage's system for me was, sometimes you needed to wait ages till your contributions got approved, this is very annoying if you just updated a show that just aired, when your updates went thru, almost the next ep had aired :)

Also, many editors were defunct on tvrage, then it was almost impossible to get your data updated in time.

Of course if we experience a vast growth of malicious intent, we might overthink our completely open-edit approach.

About the music guides and cultural references I am not sure how important those are to visitors, so far around here no one has asked for those kind of things, which gives me the opinion that there is not much need for them, but I have no knowledge how popular those were on tvrage. They were entered by editors alot, but were they also visited alot ?

This has become a nice discussion tho, also Tonks has changed his attitude, which I did not like at first :)

cheers
Juan

This is becoming a very lengthy (but interesting) thread and I haven't had time to carefully read through all of it yet. But I'd like to quickly touch on a few points:

The "character guide" feature serves as the basis for a lot of functionality. It makes it possible to track each character as an entity, rather than just a piece of text. It makes it possible to see how often a character has appeared in a show, and in which exact episodes. It makes it possible to track that the same character has been played by different actors throughout the years. It makes it possible to add an image and biography to each character. Sure, for some characters like "nurse #4" all of this is pretty useless, but in those cases we just won't use it. :)

We don't support quotes or cultural references yet. Not because we don't want them, but because we figured in our early days hardly anyone would take the time to add them; and we didn't want to add sections that would be empty almost everywhere. Definitely open to adding those in the near future though, if there is enough demand.

If I can tell you a little secret: we do have - basic - season guides. Here's one that has been filled in: http://www.tvmaze.com/shows/82/game-of-thrones/sea.... It's hard to get to though (from the episode list you can click on one of the seasons, then use the breadcrumbs to navigate to the season index). This is currently quite intentional: only a very small part of the season guides on TVmaze currently have any value (at least a picture and a description), so we don't want to expose it too much. Of course this is a major catch-22, because who's going to contribute anything to it if they aren't aware of it? These are complicated UI matters, which I'm sure will continually evolve for many years to come.

The same thing kinda goes for the editing: I'm sure the current system is not yet the final destination for us. I'm a huge proponent of making the open editing work, because the lower we can keep the barrier to editing, the more useful information we'll receive. I think an "editor system" where only a single person can make changes to an entire guide is extremely off-putting to anyone else wishing to contribute information. But I do understand that there might eventually be parts of a guide that have been determined "as good as it can get" that should be immutable to any ordinary user visiting the site. Perhaps for those parts an editor system, an approval system, a draft system should be added. We just don't know yet what will work best, and I'd rather carefully figure it out as we go than blindly copy an existing approach that people are familiar with.

Please don't be afraid that your work can be "destroyed" though. Every single edit is logged, with all the details that were inputted, so whatever happens next it can still be revived.

As of last January when I took over at TVRage on the moderation end of things, the only shows that took more than about... 16 hours to turnaround were editor shows. which you note. I'd like to say that we fired inactive editors, but when we did that, we also got negative feedback.

And the vast majority of subs, at least on the US side, were processed within hours if not minutes. I understand that non-US subs took longer, but then there was that language barrier thing.

The way to get around that would be to take a sterner approach. And for contributors to understand that volunteers are entirely that.

Also, if someone wasn't handling subs in a timely manner, there was the option to challenge them to become editor. Or heck, just contact a staff member and file a complaint. Yes, that would have put the burden on the new editor. But if someone wasn't willing to challenge the current editor, and wasn't willing to do the work themselves, there wasn't much we could do. We did "fire" inactive editors if we got complaints

No complaint was ever filed with me that I ignored. Maybe it was posted on the forums and I didn't see it. But the forums were a big and admittedly unwieldy place.

So my question, Juan, would be: if subs weren't being processed in a timely manner, what did you do to help resolve the situation?

-----

I'm not trying to ascribe malicious intent to anyone. Someone who thinks, "Hey, these recaps are too long, I'll just delete half" aren't being malicious as I understand the term. What does the system do to keep that data from being deleted (whether it can be recovered or not) when someone comes in, gets a "good reputation", and then finds recaps and comes to that conclusion? Or always had it, but didn't notice the recaps until after they reached the "this person is safe" stage?

I agree that someone who makes 800 good edits won't make malicious edits. I don't think 99.9% of contributors will make malicious edits. But there are already disagreements about what constitute "valid" edits and sources. That's where moderation came in at TVRage and Wikipedia. We had long-time contributors who still had disagreements and got into edit wars on TVRage. Not because they were malicious or inexperienced. But because two equally experienced well-intentioned people still disagree.

*shrug* I've already seen some of my material erroneously changed. I've seen erroneously material added. Most of my material, I don't go back and review, so how would I know? I submit too much material to go back and check everything regularly. There's no point in me complaining or reporting every little incident because staff's concern seems to be that the person making the change was "malicious." How do I prove they were malicious?

To sum up my concern on open-endedness: Paypal secures my data. IMDB secures my data. TVRage secured my data. So far, I've seen nothing to assure that my data at TVMaze is secure, and some changes that make me worry that it's not. This is no reflection on you folks, other than the understanding that... well, you can't be everywhere and can't catch everything. You keep hitting malicious edits, but there's a lot more than that involved.

david wrote:
The same thing kinda goes for the editing: I'm sure the current system is not yet the final destination for us. I'm a huge proponent of making the open editing work, because the lower we can keep the barrier to editing, the more useful information we'll receive. I think an "editor system" where only a single person can make changes to an entire guide is extremely off-putting to anyone else wishing to contribute information. But I do understand that there might eventually be parts of a guide that have been determined "as good as it can get" that should be immutable to any ordinary user visiting the site. Perhaps for those parts an editor system, an approval system, a draft system should be added. We just don't know yet what will work best, and I'd rather carefully figure it out as we go than blindly copy an existing approach that people are familiar with.
Please don't be afraid that your work can be "destroyed" though. Every single edit is logged, with all the details that were inputted, so whatever happens next it can still be revived.

As a point of information, an editor system where only a single person can make changes was never the system at TVRage. There might be some sites out there where it works that way, but I've never seen them.

The editor system at TVRage was that the editor showed enough knowledge of the show that they were made responsible for handling the changes made by all contributors and keeping the show up to date if it was current. If they didn't do that, and staff was notified, they got dumped.

As far as my work being destroyed but recoverable, great. Except... how is it determined that it was destroyed? I've got to go back and check it. Regularly. If I submit one recap, that's doable. Annoying, but doable. If I submit 10 recaps and galleries and original summaries a week (which is what happens during the "busy season" in the US), it becomes unworkable.

To borrow a phrase, "A fool can throw a stone into a pond that 100 wise men can not get out." :)

I hate to toot TVRage's horn too much. :) But there, we knew when someone attempted to destroy data because we checked submissions. And it happened not because people were being malicious but just because they thought the data wasn't necessary. We didn't have to revive the data, because we knew if someone was attempting to destroy it and didn't let it through.

The primary bottlenecks were having enough people to moderate, and having editors who didn't do their job but nobody telling us they weren't doing their job. I understand there's only three of you and open-edit may be the only viable option at this time. But when TVRage was more open-edit, we had more deletions (even if they could be recovered, if someone told us), and more edit wars.

david wrote:
But I do understand that there might eventually be parts of a guide that have been determined "as good as it can get" that should be immutable to any ordinary user visiting the site. Perhaps for those parts an editor system, an approval system, a draft system should be added. We just don't know yet what will work best, and I'd rather carefully figure it out as we go than blindly copy an existing approach that people are familiar with.

That's good to hear. I'd agree that anything should be considered carefully. But on the other hand, I'd hope you keep in mind... those existing approaches came about not because people are familiar with them, but because they've evolved and developed over the years into what they are. It's not like this is Year 1 of the Internet and TV databases. The trend IMO is away from open-ended, starting with Wikipedia. Which used to be the paragon of open-ended systems.

I also think that some of the arguments and complaints against TVRage that I've seen are kinda... "blind." Like when you said, "I think an "editor system" where only a single person can make changes to an entire guide is extremely off-putting to anyone else wishing to contribute information." Nobody is suggesting that that I'm aware of, and it was never the case at TVRage. It makes me kind of nervous when I hear something like that because it's not something that anyone is asking for.

I see all your points gadfly, but I think on one major thing we have a totally different opinion on.
For me tvrage started good but then grew into a complete disaster, for you it was a very good tv site for all its periods of existing.
Editor wise you and some others did a perfect job till the very end, but everything "above" the editorship... the management that was in charge, it was obvious it will all fall into pieces.

And I believe in the good of people and I do not like to predict that worse things will happen and get worked out over it, so I think open-editorship is the way to go.
I think it is much more work to keep an eye on 100 editors if they still do what they are suppose to do than to keep an eye on a trusted contributor starting malicious actions on a major level.
My view on things might be influenced that I do not believe in gods, religion, hierarchy and all that kind of stuff. I believe in freedom of choice without many regulations.

If it really is not working out, then we will change it, you can be assured of that.

I can also understand that you and some other long time editors of tvrage are very used to how things were done on tvrage, it is not easy to adjust all of a sudden into a different system, but I think a good start would be to have some faith in us, we are always trying to listen to suggestions and trying to improve things over here, but as I said in a previous post, if we become like tvrage, we have terribly failed.

Everyone that wants to help here is very much welcome, especially such good editors like you :)
Maybe just lighten up a bit more and do not expect the worst to happen.

cheers
Juan

david wrote:
The "character guide" feature serves as the basis for a lot of functionality. It makes it possible to track each character as an entity, rather than just a piece of text. It makes it possible to see how often a character has appeared in a show, and in which exact episodes. It makes it possible to track that the same character has been played by different actors throughout the years. It makes it possible to add an image and biography to each character. Sure, for some characters like "nurse #4" all of this is pretty useless, but in those cases we just won't use it. :)
We don't support quotes or cultural references yet. Not because we don't want them, but because we figured in our early days hardly anyone would take the time to add them; and we didn't want to add sections that would be empty almost everywhere. Definitely open to adding those in the near future though, if there is enough demand.

On character guides, TVRage was able to do the same things without creating a web page for every one of the hundred thousand characters. That's what I mean by "overkill" :). Whether you use it or not, the web page exists.There's for all intents and purposes, an infinite number of TV characters. Unless you have an infinite amount of storage space, I'd think an infinite number of character web pages would drag on your system eventually, no matter how small they each are.

I can't tell you how many visits we had to the TVRage quote section because it was part of the main episode page. There was no separate "quote section." We could have moved quotes off to its own separate section to more effectively track visits... but moving it off to a separate page would have reduced the number of visits. On the moderation side, we didn't have a lot of quote submissions to non-editor shows. But that was the kind of thing that people interested enough in the show to become editors submitted. Whenever I read editor shows, there were lots of contributions.

Perhaps the way to determine the popularity of quotes as a feature would be to put it up on the Pending Features voting list? I don't see it there, and the description says it is, "A list of all suggested features ready for adoption, sorted by their popularity." Me and Tonks have suggested the feature, it isn't there. Or are quotes just not ready for adoption?

JuanArango wrote:
I think it is much more work to keep an eye on 100 editors if they still do what they are suppose to do than to keep an eye on a trusted contributor starting malicious actions on a major level.
I can also understand that you and some other long time editors of tvrage are very used to how things were done on tvrage, it is not easy to adjust all of a sudden into a different system, but I think a good start would be to have some faith in us, we are always trying to listen to suggestions and trying to improve things over here, but as I said in a previous post, if we become like tvrage, we have terribly failed.
Maybe just lighten up a bit more and do not expect the worst to happen.
cheers
Juan

I suppose the question is, when did you leave? I can only speak for the 2-3 most recent years that I was there. I don't think the periods that we were there overlapped. But I disagree that if you do some of what TVRage did in the last 2-3 years, you will have terribly failed.

At TVRage, the editors were considered Trusted Contributors.

And again, you're using the term "malicious," which is not at all what I am trying to describe.

It's not merely a matter of what I expect to happen: it's what has already happened. I've already seen bad data entered, and good data changed to be bad.

For me, lightening up would be not contributing until I know my data is secure. That's as "light" as it gets. :) I would think that would be the concern of any long-term TVMaze contributor, so I don't believe I'm alone in my concerns. If you want to get dedicated contributors, you need to make sure their data is secure. I'm not going to quibble about quotes and cultural references and all. If you don't want them, you don't want them. No problem for me. But making sure the data I submit stays where it is is my number 1 priority. Not that it can be recovered if someone somehow notices that it's missing. But that it doesn't get dumped in the first place.

That's not something I take on faith, and it doesn't seem like something that right now you're interested in. I pick my database sites to secure my data the way I pick my banks: how secure they are. I don't have trouble adjusting to what you guys are doing when it comes to the entry of data, or what data you want. But if that data ain't secure... well, then we're not a good fit. Fair enough.

Gadfly wrote:
I suppose the question is, when did you leave? I can only speak for the 2-3 most recent years that I was there. I don't think the periods that we were there overlapped. But I disagree that if you do some of what TVRage did in the last 2-3 years, you will have terribly failed.
At TVRage, the editors were considered Trusted Contributors.
And again, you're using the term "malicious," which is not at all what I am trying to describe.
It's not merely a matter of what I expect to happen: it's what has already happened. I've already seen bad data entered, and good data changed to be bad.

For me, lightening up would be not contributing until I know my data is secure. That's as "light" as it gets. :)

Our time did overlap a bit :)

And if you have seen that some good data was replaced by bad, of course such things can and always will happen, for example a new user has 10 edits till we look at them, if he does crap, like changing English summaries into Korean ones, then we lost at most 10 good summaries.
Then we change those back, talk with that user and move on.

TVMaze is different compared to tvrage and it will never be like tvrage, longtime users of tvrage have to accept that and I hope they will see the benefit of it, that TVMaze is a much more user friendly site with a different approach on things. We are actually listening and interacting with the users here, tvrage ignored its users for years, that was one of the main reasons for me to quit everything there. It took weeks to get an answer on the forums (in case you were one of the lucky ones that got an answer at all), emails were not answered and so on....

And if in the end some people think the tvrage approach is the much better one and if they do not like how we do things here, this is not the end of the world, therefore there are other places to go on the internet and check those out. Maybe they are closer to what they want to see in a tv site.

I believe in the freedom of choice :)

cheers
Juan