Author Topic: Suggestion for IMDB People plugin  (Read 7584 times)

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Offline AimHere

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Suggestion for IMDB People plugin
« on: February 28, 2010, 09:12:09 pm »
Hi,

I have a suggestion for the IMDB People plugin.

In my database, there are many actors and actresses who appear on IMDB multiple times, either because of AKAs that were given separate entries in IMDB's records, or because someone thought the movies made by a given person were made by two or more different people with the same name (but they actually are the same person). So, for these people, my URL field contains two or more IMDB URLs, separated by spaces or newlines.

Trouble is, when I run the IMDB People plugin to import the data, IMDB only recognizes (and imports from) the first IMDB URL it finds in the URL field. All others are ignored. So if I want to refresh the data from ALL the URLs, I have to laboriously cut-and-paste to move each one to first in the URL list, run the plugin, cut-and-paste the next one, etc. This gets to be a major pain for people who are always coming out with new movies!

Could the IMDB plugin be modified to look for, and import from, ALL IMDB URLs that may be present in the URL field? To avoid confusion, I think it should be set up to import only the filmographies (and possibly awards) from multiple IMDB URLs; all other fields ought to be taken from the first URL listed (which would normally be the "primary" record for that person). [Optionally, it could import the other fields from subsequent URLs if and only if the first URL has no data for that field.]

Thanks,
Aimhere

Offline rick.ca

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Re: Suggestion for IMDB People plugin
« Reply #1 on: February 28, 2010, 10:39:50 pm »
Would it not be more productive to report such errors to IMDb? I'd rather maintain duplicate records (to match the duplicate URL's) until the source is fixed. Maybe what we need is the ability of the plugin to remove or flag records for which URL's no longer exist (because it was recognized to be a duplicate and deleted). I'm not sure what it does now. I'm also not sure what Optimize Movies does, but I assume it does not recognize a record to be a duplicate if its URL is different.

Offline AimHere

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Re: Suggestion for IMDB People plugin
« Reply #2 on: March 01, 2010, 08:39:32 pm »
Would it not be more productive to report such errors to IMDb?

Of course, I do report errors to IMDB whenever I have the time (and mind you, their reporting process takes some time to fill out the update forms). But submitting an update is no guarantee that it will be accepted. And until/unless they agree that two separate actor/actress records really ARE the same person, I'm still left with multiple URLs for one performer in MY database.

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I'd rather maintain duplicate records (to match the duplicate URL's) until the source is fixed.

I'd rather not.  ::) One person, one record, even if that person requires multiple URLs.

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Maybe what we need is the ability of the plugin to remove or flag records for which URL's no longer exist (because it was recognized to be a duplicate and deleted). I'm not sure what it does now. 

Good idea.

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I'm also not sure what Optimize Movies does, but I assume it does not recognize a record to be a duplicate if its URL is different.

Your guess is as good as mine.  ;D

Aimhere