The Internet Movie Database (IMDb), owned by Amazon.com, is an online database of information about movie stars, film, Television program, commercials, and video games. ==Overview== The IMDb has an extensive amount of information on works, including basic details such as actors and film director, plot summaries and reviews, as well as more esoteric information such as trivia, continuity errors and other goofs, soundtrack listings, aspect ratio (image), and alternate versions. Actors, directors, writers and other crew members have their own database entries, listing the movies and programs they worked on, and often also featuring biographies. The expanded database found at [http://akas.imdb.com/ akas.imdb.com] can be used to find movies from the title under which they were released in many different languages and countries. The IMDb also reaches beyond being a database for movies and video games by offering daily movie and TV news and running special features at various movie events such as the Academy Award. IMDb also has an active message board community, there are message boards for each database entry, which can be found at the bottom of the relevant page, and there are a variety of general discussion boards on various topics. It has also expanded to provide the sister site IMDbPro, offering additional information to business professionals, such as contact details for people in the movie business, movie event calendars, and more. IMDbPro is not specifically designed for use by the general public, and its content is not free. Any person with an e-mail account and a web browser that accepts HTTP cookie can set up an account with IMDb, then submit information and cast votes to rate various titles. For automated queries, most of the database can be downloaded as (data compression) binary and text files files and the information can be extracted using the tools provided (typically using a command line interface). [http://imdb.com/interfaces IMDb interfaces] ==History== In 1989 Col Needham and others were participating in the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies, discussing movies and exchanging information. They produced FAQ lists on actors, actresses and film director credits and biographical information on movie makers who had passed away. In late 1990, they had FAQs on almost 10,000 movies and television series. On October 17 1990 in film, Needham posted a collection of UNIX shell script which could be used to search the 4 FAQ lists; thus, IMDb was born. At that time however, it was known as the rec.arts.movies movie database. By 1993 in film, the database had been expanded to include trivia, biographies and plot, and a centralised e-mail interface for querying the database had been created. Later in the year, it moved onto to the World Wide Web (a network in its infancy back then). The database resided on the servers of the computer science department of Cardiff University in Wales. Rob Hartill was the original web interface author. In 1994 in film, the e-mail interface was extended to accept the submission of information, meaning that people no longer had to e-mail the specific list maintainer with their updates. Over the years, the database was run on a network of mirror (computing) across the world with donated bandwidth. In 1995, it became obvious to Col Needham and the rest of the volunteers that the project had become too large to continue to maintain through donations and in their spare time. The decision was made to become a commercial venture and in 1996, IMDb was incorporated in the United Kingdom, becoming the Internet Movie Database Ltd. The shareholders were the people maintaining the database and revenue was generated through advertising, licensing and partnerships. This state of affairs continued until 1998. The database was growing every day, and it was again reaching a critical point; revenues were being spent on equipment, and shareholders were finding it difficult to reconcile the fact that for all their hard work they themselves were getting very little income. Offers had been made by major businesses to purchase the database, however, the shareholders were unwilling to sell if it could not be guaranteed that the information would be accessible to the internet community for free. It was at this point that Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com appeared. A deal was made, allowing the IMDb to have the ability to pay the shareholders proper salaries for their work, while Amazon.com would be able use the IMDb as a resource in their business of selling DVDs and videotapes. IMDb continues to expand its functionality. In 2002, it added a subscription service known as IMDbPro aimed at entertainment professionals. It provides a variety of services including film_production and box office details, as well as a company directory. Subscriptions are priced at $12.95 per month, or $99.95 per year (price on 5 April 2005). ==Top 250== One popular feature of the IMDb is the [http://www.imdb.com/top_250_films Top 250], a listing of the top 250 feature-length films of all-time as voted by the registered users of the website. Only theatrical releases are considered for determination; short subjects, documentaries, miniseries, and made-for-TV movies are ineligible. Users are given the option of rating a movie from "1" (lowest) to "10" (highest). The numbers are then filtered through a mathematical formula (found at the bottom of the list) to produce an overall weighted ranking. To safeguard against "vote stuffing" and other attempts to subjectify the data, the database employs data filters and a minimum quota of votes (currently 1250) in an attempt to give a "true bayesian probability." Also, only votes from "regular voters" are counted; for reasons of fairness, the criteria for a member account meeting such criteria is a deliberate secret. The listing is notable for being comprehensive and sometimes startling. Consistently represented on the listing are old movies (e.g., ''Nosferatu'' (1922 in film)) and new movies (e.g., ''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'' (2004 in film)), popular movies (e.g., ''The Fellowship of the Ring (movie)'' with more than 150,000 votes) and little seen movies (e.g., ''Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans'' with approximately 2,600 votes), and movies from a cross-section of genres (e.g., film noir—''Double Indemnity''; comedy—''Some Like It Hot''; romance—''Casablanca (movie)''; fantasy—''The Princess Bride''; science fiction—''Blade Runner''; musical—''Singin' in the Rain (movie)''; western—''The Good, the Bad and the Ugly''; animated—''Shrek''; anime—''Spirited Away''; etc.). The listing also carries surprising movies which were not necessarily widely popular hits but which have developed broad followings among more devoted movie fans (e.g., ''The Shawshank Redemption'', ''Donnie Darko'' and ''Memento''). ''The Godfather'' and ''The Shawshank Redemption'' are consistently the top two movies on the list, and the only movies with ratings of 9.0 or higher on the list. How successful these criteria are in producing an unbiased list is debatable. For instance, newly released movies commonly find their initial ratings artificially inflated by fans who are more likely to see a movie first and develop a love-at-first-sight impression of it, which is contrary to the commonly held belief that a truly great movie should hold up to repeat viewings. It is not unusual, therefore, to find a movie placed among the Top 250 shortly after its release, even as high as the Top 100, only to fall from the list as more people see the movie and fans see the movie repeated times. Another common criticism has been that it is merely a popularity contest and does not therefore reflect any objective knowledge about the history or art of movies. In practice, however, many of the movies atop critical yearly and historical best picture lists appear high on the Top 250 as well (for example: the vast majority of the American Film Institute's "AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies" are also on the IMDb list, many placing very highly; there are four movies in common on the lists' Top Tens), raising the question of whether the opinions of the film criticism and movie-goers are all that different after all. The IMDb also has a [http://www.imdb.com/bottom_100_films Bottom 100] feature which is assembled in roughly the same way (there is a 625 vote minimum, rather than 1250). ==Copyright issues== All volunteers who contribute content to the database retain copyright to their contributions but grant full rights to copy, modify, and sublicense the content to IMDb. IMDb in turn does not allow others to use movie summaries or actor biographies without written permission. Using filtering software to avoid the display of advertisements from the site is also explicitly forbidden. Only small subsets of filmographies are allowed to be quoted, and only on non-commercial websites. The latter restrictions on the use of data may be unenforceable, as the Supreme Court of the United States in ''Feist v. Rural'' ruled that collections of facts are not protected by copyright. ==Caveat emptor== The ability of the software to filter content is limited; to a certain extent, staff members gauge the validity of contributed data based on the past reliability of the contributor. Submission policies have been restricted over the years, and approval of new titles to be added has become more cautious, but some listings of unreleased titles and unauthenticated data, particularly in bit roles, persist in the existing database. == See also == *Movies that have been considered the greatest ever ==External links== * [http://www.imdb.com/ The Internet Movie Database]—including a [http://us.imdb.com/Copyright copyright statement], [http://us.imdb.com/terms/ license terms], and [http://www.imdb.com/database_statistics database statistics] * [http://www.imdb.co.uk/ IMDb's UK mirror] * [http://www.imdb.com/boards/ IMDb general message boards] * [http://www.imdbpro.com/ IMDb Pro] * [http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/37/features-finke.php "Do You IMDb?"] August 2004 article from ''LA Weekly'' * [http://www.blogsnow.com/curimdb.html Blogs recently linking to IMDb entries], from a frequently-updated personal website similar to [http://blogdex.net/ Blogdex] from MIT Media Lab Movie websites Amazon.com Online databases
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Words begining with Internet_Movie_Database:
Internet_Movie_Database
Internet_Movie_Database
Internet Movie Database
The Internet Movie Database (IMDb), owned by Amazon.com, is an online database of information about movie stars, film, Television program, commercials, and video games. ==Overview== The IMDb has an extensive amount of information on works, including basic details such as actors and film director, plot summaries and reviews, as well as more esoteric information such as trivia, continuity errors and other goofs, soundtrack listings, aspect ratio (image), and alternate versions. Actors, directors, writers and other crew members have their own database entries, listing the movies and programs they worked on, and often also featuring biographies. The expanded database found at [http://akas.imdb.com/ akas.imdb.com] can be used to find movies from the title under which they were released in many different languages and countries. The IMDb also reaches beyond being a database for movies and video games by offering daily movie and TV news and running special features at various movie events such as the Academy Award. IMDb also has an active message board community, there are message boards for each database entry, which can be found at the bottom of the relevant page, and there are a variety of general discussion boards on various topics. It has also expanded to provide the sister site IMDbPro, offering additional information to business professionals, such as contact details for people in the movie business, movie event calendars, and more. IMDbPro is not specifically designed for use by the general public, and its content is not free. Any person with an e-mail account and a web browser that accepts HTTP cookie can set up an account with IMDb, then submit information and cast votes to rate various titles. For automated queries, most of the database can be downloaded as (data compression) binary and text files files and the information can be extracted using the tools provided (typically using a command line interface). [http://imdb.com/interfaces IMDb interfaces] ==History== In 1989 Col Needham and others were participating in the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies, discussing movies and exchanging information. They produced FAQ lists on actors, actresses and film director credits and biographical information on movie makers who had passed away. In late 1990, they had FAQs on almost 10,000 movies and television series. On October 17 1990 in film, Needham posted a collection of UNIX shell script which could be used to search the 4 FAQ lists; thus, IMDb was born. At that time however, it was known as the rec.arts.movies movie database. By 1993 in film, the database had been expanded to include trivia, biographies and plot, and a centralised e-mail interface for querying the database had been created. Later in the year, it moved onto to the World Wide Web (a network in its infancy back then). The database resided on the servers of the computer science department of Cardiff University in Wales. Rob Hartill was the original web interface author. In 1994 in film, the e-mail interface was extended to accept the submission of information, meaning that people no longer had to e-mail the specific list maintainer with their updates. Over the years, the database was run on a network of mirror (computing) across the world with donated bandwidth. In 1995, it became obvious to Col Needham and the rest of the volunteers that the project had become too large to continue to maintain through donations and in their spare time. The decision was made to become a commercial venture and in 1996, IMDb was incorporated in the United Kingdom, becoming the Internet Movie Database Ltd. The shareholders were the people maintaining the database and revenue was generated through advertising, licensing and partnerships. This state of affairs continued until 1998. The database was growing every day, and it was again reaching a critical point; revenues were being spent on equipment, and shareholders were finding it difficult to reconcile the fact that for all their hard work they themselves were getting very little income. Offers had been made by major businesses to purchase the database, however, the shareholders were unwilling to sell if it could not be guaranteed that the information would be accessible to the internet community for free. It was at this point that Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com appeared. A deal was made, allowing the IMDb to have the ability to pay the shareholders proper salaries for their work, while Amazon.com would be able use the IMDb as a resource in their business of selling DVDs and videotapes. IMDb continues to expand its functionality. In 2002, it added a subscription service known as IMDbPro aimed at entertainment professionals. It provides a variety of services including film_production and box office details, as well as a company directory. Subscriptions are priced at $12.95 per month, or $99.95 per year (price on 5 April 2005). ==Top 250== One popular feature of the IMDb is the [http://www.imdb.com/top_250_films Top 250], a listing of the top 250 feature-length films of all-time as voted by the registered users of the website. Only theatrical releases are considered for determination; short subjects, documentaries, miniseries, and made-for-TV movies are ineligible. Users are given the option of rating a movie from "1" (lowest) to "10" (highest). The numbers are then filtered through a mathematical formula (found at the bottom of the list) to produce an overall weighted ranking. To safeguard against "vote stuffing" and other attempts to subjectify the data, the database employs data filters and a minimum quota of votes (currently 1250) in an attempt to give a "true bayesian probability." Also, only votes from "regular voters" are counted; for reasons of fairness, the criteria for a member account meeting such criteria is a deliberate secret. The listing is notable for being comprehensive and sometimes startling. Consistently represented on the listing are old movies (e.g., ''Nosferatu'' (1922 in film)) and new movies (e.g., ''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'' (2004 in film)), popular movies (e.g., ''The Fellowship of the Ring (movie)'' with more than 150,000 votes) and little seen movies (e.g., ''Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans'' with approximately 2,600 votes), and movies from a cross-section of genres (e.g., film noir—''Double Indemnity''; comedy—''Some Like It Hot''; romance—''Casablanca (movie)''; fantasy—''The Princess Bride''; science fiction—''Blade Runner''; musical—''Singin' in the Rain (movie)''; western—''The Good, the Bad and the Ugly''; animated—''Shrek''; anime—''Spirited Away''; etc.). The listing also carries surprising movies which were not necessarily widely popular hits but which have developed broad followings among more devoted movie fans (e.g., ''The Shawshank Redemption'', ''Donnie Darko'' and ''Memento''). ''The Godfather'' and ''The Shawshank Redemption'' are consistently the top two movies on the list, and the only movies with ratings of 9.0 or higher on the list. How successful these criteria are in producing an unbiased list is debatable. For instance, newly released movies commonly find their initial ratings artificially inflated by fans who are more likely to see a movie first and develop a love-at-first-sight impression of it, which is contrary to the commonly held belief that a truly great movie should hold up to repeat viewings. It is not unusual, therefore, to find a movie placed among the Top 250 shortly after its release, even as high as the Top 100, only to fall from the list as more people see the movie and fans see the movie repeated times. Another common criticism has been that it is merely a popularity contest and does not therefore reflect any objective knowledge about the history or art of movies. In practice, however, many of the movies atop critical yearly and historical best picture lists appear high on the Top 250 as well (for example: the vast majority of the American Film Institute's "AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies" are also on the IMDb list, many placing very highly; there are four movies in common on the lists' Top Tens), raising the question of whether the opinions of the film criticism and movie-goers are all that different after all. The IMDb also has a [http://www.imdb.com/bottom_100_films Bottom 100] feature which is assembled in roughly the same way (there is a 625 vote minimum, rather than 1250). ==Copyright issues== All volunteers who contribute content to the database retain copyright to their contributions but grant full rights to copy, modify, and sublicense the content to IMDb. IMDb in turn does not allow others to use movie summaries or actor biographies without written permission. Using filtering software to avoid the display of advertisements from the site is also explicitly forbidden. Only small subsets of filmographies are allowed to be quoted, and only on non-commercial websites. The latter restrictions on the use of data may be unenforceable, as the Supreme Court of the United States in ''Feist v. Rural'' ruled that collections of facts are not protected by copyright. ==Caveat emptor== The ability of the software to filter content is limited; to a certain extent, staff members gauge the validity of contributed data based on the past reliability of the contributor. Submission policies have been restricted over the years, and approval of new titles to be added has become more cautious, but some listings of unreleased titles and unauthenticated data, particularly in bit roles, persist in the existing database. == See also == *Movies that have been considered the greatest ever ==External links== * [http://www.imdb.com/ The Internet Movie Database]—including a [http://us.imdb.com/Copyright copyright statement], [http://us.imdb.com/terms/ license terms], and [http://www.imdb.com/database_statistics database statistics] * [http://www.imdb.co.uk/ IMDb's UK mirror] * [http://www.imdb.com/boards/ IMDb general message boards] * [http://www.imdbpro.com/ IMDb Pro] * [http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/37/features-finke.php "Do You IMDb?"] August 2004 article from ''LA Weekly'' * [http://www.blogsnow.com/curimdb.html Blogs recently linking to IMDb entries], from a frequently-updated personal website similar to [http://blogdex.net/ Blogdex] from MIT Media Lab Movie websites Amazon.com Online databases
Internet Movie Database
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==Accessing IMDb content from Wikipedia== A blue link to a page on IMDb about a title (a movie or a tv series) or a person (actor, actress, etc.) can be made by means of two templates, and . Instructions about the use of these templates can be found on their respective talk pages. Note that, these templates should be used on the external links section. There is also another mean, by adding==Early discussion== What happened in the early days of IMDB? My understanding is that it was a collaborative effort on a :Usenet :newsgroup, but soon after the invention of http/www, it became a proprietary website. It's a great website, don't get me wrong, but I've always wondered how they made that transition and whether it was controversial at the time. I think the story might make a great cautionary tale about why a :free license is so important. :''As I understand it, the people (i think they are british) that had physically the website, and managed and organized the entries, where contacted by amazon.com, who was looking for a way to sell more movies. So they bought the site, and hired the former owners to mantain it.'' I also wonder whether or not the existence of IMDB (which is a great website, as I say) would undercut any possibility of my starting a similar but ''free'' effort, using similar software. Wiki software is unstructured for a good reason, but for some kinds of information (movie listings), a priori structure can be handled very easily. But the essential wiki nature (anyone can edit anything) might provide fertile soil for the growth of such an effort. ---- Alternatively, you might consider making custom changes to the Wiki software to support the encyclopedia effort, or make additional software to support Wiki. One obvious thing might be to write software to scan and Wikify free information like the CIA factbook so KQ doesn't have to type it all. Another might be to have "create page from template" pages at which a user could interact with forms and/or applets to create standard-format pages for things like movies, species, poker games :-) (with plenty of room for free-form text, of course). This latter can be done indepently of Wiki itself (for example, I could create a template on my own site that generated Wiki pages), but some extra software support might be handy (for example, being able to put non-visible comments into a Wiki page, or marking pages as editable only by such template scripts (this latter is already a feature of UseMod that Wikipedia doesn't use). I'll see if I can come up with a sample of what that might look like. --User:Lee Daniel Crocker ---- Actually I don't type the CIA info, but save the .html and cut and paste from notepad. But templates would certainly be handy for things with a fixed structure that people ''do'' have to type. ---- Wasn't the IMDB originally called the "Cardiff Movie Database"? --User:Robert Merkel ---- The servers that it ran on were at Cardiff University in Wales... here is the link to their own telling of the history of IMDb if anyone wants to see it http://us.imdb.com/Help/Oweek/history --mincus ---- I've seen several movie-related entries such as :Mel Brooks. It contains biographical information, which is good. It also contains an incomplete list of movies he wrote/produced/acted in. I don't think this is so good. I somehow doubt that Wikipedia will ever be able to compete with IMDB in this regard. IMDB will always have more up-to-date information (at least for anyone still alive) because it has a lot of users itself, and is considered ''the'' resource for looking up movie facts. I think perhaps instead of trying to list out movies or other statistics here, we just put in a link to IMDB. Now I'm not advocating we don't put in any movie info into Wikipedia. I'm certainly all for documenting significant works by anyone. Some movies and movie people have had a significant impact, either politically, or culturally or whatever, and Wikipedia is a good place to document such. What do y'all think? -- User:The_ansible ---- I almost think it is beside the point. We don't HAVE to replicate the IMDB because it is there. But we have no reason to not replicate in each and every case that is useful to us, and also whenever anyone has a yen to just add stuff for the fun of it. Once our user level is up, I think that it is inevitable that we will compete with the IMDB. My feeling about the Wikipedia so far is that if there isn't explcitly a reason to not do it on the Wikipedia, then someone will eventaully do it. The only worry I have is in maintaining the few strictures we have (NPOV for one). Provided we remain strong on the core '''don'ts''' it's my feeling that everything else will get filled in sooner or later.-User:trimalchio I simlpy don't understand this article about IMDB. Is simply doesn't contain any pieces of information. I wanted to know its history, the names of the founders, etc... it is a full disappointment. Try this link in case you want to know more: www.imdb.com/Help/Oweek/history/ == Accessing IMDb functionality from within wikicode == Shouldn't this section really be on the talk page to avoid self reference? --User:Phil Boswell | User talk:Phil Boswell 12:01, Oct 22, 2004 (UTC) Yes. Here it is: User:Fredrik | User talk:Fredrik 12:39, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC) :I have now moved this to a <div> at the top of the page. —User:Mulad User talk:Mulad 21:41, May 19, 2005 (UTC) ==Anti-Americanism on IMDB message boards / Koenig's Theory== Does anyone agree with me that the following passage is a pointless digression that doesn't belong in the article? User:The Singing Badger 03:11, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC) :''One theme of IMDb flame wars that comes up with surprising regularity is American foreign policy and culture, generally in a deriding tone. This theme can come up attached to movies that do warrant a discussion about a perceived pro- or anti-American tone, such as Les Triplettes de Belleville, but it seems just as often that it comes up without basis and regardless of what is being discussed. The regularity of this phenomenon led to the forming of Koenig's Theory, which states: No matter what the original subject of the conversation and regardless of what subject is being discussed, the probability of any and every discussion, debate or argument on the IMDb message boards becoming an argument about America (pros, cons, etc.) reaches one. (See Godwin's Law)'' ::Yes. The whole "Koenig's Theory" section seems strongly POV and unsupported. User:Elde 23:03, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC) ::I also think the "Koenig's Theory" section is a digression - and strongly POV. This is why - ::# IMDB isn't a catalogue of singularly American works, so why bring up America when an entire host of artworks in the database potentially witness to the subjectivity of media consumers about many other contries? ::# Why even of all of the myriad topics of discussion at IMDB message boards would we pick out conversations about America? ::# Even if IMDB was entirely about America, what place is there in an encyclopedia to catalogue vague proofs of Anti-American temperaments, when again, people disagree about all kinds of things in IMDB forums? ::# Since there is no reasonable context of singularly raising the question of America, and the seemingly arbitrarily injected attachment of the fact that some people hate America, some unseen agenda or "something to say" about America reeks right through the lines. ::I think the entire section labeled "Koenig's Theory" is out of place. ::--User:Mr alex hall 03:29, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC) ::: OK, let's remove it. User:The Singing Badger 13:43, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC) That's kinda true actually. The 'Kingdom of Heaven' board is swamped with flamers and trolls about religions, and hardly any movie discussions. Trolls, especially conservative ones, often make topics about that movie xxx is a pro/anti Bush film, and debates ensure. There are a lot of political extremists on the site due to the relaxed moderation systemimdb:ID . Just replace "ID" with the IMDb code (at the end of the URL) for a given title/person (eg. Frank Sinatra's is "nm0000069", and ''Ocean's Eleven'' is "tt0054135"). Example: :*imdb:nm0000069 is rendered as imdb:nm0000069 :*imdb:tt0054135 is rendered as imdb:tt0054135 :You can also make a piped link to use a text for the link: :*imdb:nm0000069 is rendered as imdb:nm0000069 :*imdb:tt0054135 is rendered as imdb:tt0054135 This method should only be used where in-article links are needed. For the external links, the use of the "imdb name" and "imdb title" templates is preferred.
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