Posted by: rick.ca
« on: July 14, 2009, 11:26:02 pm »Quote
First of all Rick, thanks for being crazy active on the forum. It's like you're everywhere at once... please don't get a life Grin
You're welcome. One of these days I may succumb to the pressure to get a life, but now I'm driven by the need for the perfect database to keep track of all the movies I don't have time to watch.
A problem shared by IMDb, TheTVDb and TV.com is the information is user-contributed. This means they will have information other sources don't, but it won't be consistent and much of it will be of poor quality. For example, the Battlestar Galactica information you found on TV.com may have all been contributed by one or a few conscientious fans. The same quality and consistency won't be there for other series. Yes, this seems to support your argument for multiple sources, but there's there's also the problem of standards varying between sites. Episode cast information is a good example. There doesn't seem to be any standard for distinguishing stars, guest stars and recurring roles. Even on TV.com, this may be provided for one episode and not the next.
My point is, I think these issues need to be sorted out before a script can be written. Otherwise, anyone capable of writing such a script knows they're going to put a lot of effort into something that won't work for most people most of the time. Another possibility is we narrow the need to a very specific piece of information we want from a particular site. A script with a narrow scope might be much easier to write.
