Moviepedia

Recently, we've done several changes to help out this wiki, from deleting empty pages, improving the navigation, adding a rules page, as well as merging film infoboxes.

You can check out the latest overhauls that we have done on this wiki so far, as well as upcoming updates in our announcement post here.

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Moviepedia
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March 4 update:

This was started on time, but I found that there's over 5000 pages and each one has to be individually protected. The first 200 pages have the three month expiration. They will be editable again in June. For the rest, I am setting them to the June 30 so that no matter how long this takes, they will unlock at the same time.



Moviepedia is out of focus. A lot of work is being done on the wrong parts of the wiki.

Too many people are spending their time only working on Home media and Supplement pages. They're completely ignoring the movies, actors and people who make the movies because apparently to them, it's more important for everyone to know that there are warnings from the FBI about copyright, that what people say in commentaries might not be the view of the movie studio and which company put the DVD or Blu-ray disc together.

It is gotten bad enough that Home media pages are being created when a page for the movie doesn't even exist. They're skipping right past the movie. I have deleted about 300 of these pages just this month. I don't know how many hundreds or thousands more there are like this.

No one is putting reasons in the Edit Summary as to where they got this information. The kind of information that would explain why a studio might release four different versions of the same VHS tape in one year. The kind of information that would prove what they are saying is true about when something was released.


The neglect can be seen in the page for The Absent-Minded Professor. It's been around for a decade and has been edited 14 times. During its entire history, it has only had one sentence in it. No details about the plot, characters, actors or anything else. All other edits have been to the categories.

Meanwhile, the Home media page was created manually and not through a link because there's no infobox on the page. In less than two years, it was edited almost twice as much. People took the time to add pictures of the ten covers for the home media releases, and then there's 84 pictures about "Not for rental", FBI warnings, Home exhibition only warnings, etc. But still nothing about the movie itself.


There's also problems with pages for a movie being created right before or right after a Home media page is created. Sometimes there's barely more in there than for The Absent-Minded Professor. What it tells me is the page for the movie is being created just as an excuse to create the home media page. That's the wrong reason for creating it.


I talked about this last July in the Moviepedia… Assemble blog. Only one person responded, so the problems shown above are still going on.

This time, we're going to do it differently.

From today through the end of February, I want people to start focusing on the movies themselves. What happens in them, what actors are involved, what other people wrote, directed or composed music for them, and how the movies are made.

If you've been working on the home media pages, that tells me you've rented or own those discs, so there shouldn't be any reason why you can't actually watch the movie and start filling in the what and who for the movies. You should also have the ability to create galleries for movies. If you need something to take screenshots, get the VLC media player.


I'm going to give everyone until Monday, February 28, to shift what they're working on to the more important parts of movies. That's slightly more than a month from now.

And then on Tuesday, March 1st, I'm going to begin locking down Home media and Supplement pages for three months. Other pages like Credits and Transcripts will not be initially be locked down, but if I see people start flocking to them and continuing to avoid movie, actor and crew pages, I'll expand what's locked down.

If a home media or supplement page is created after March 1st, especially if no proof is given in the edit summary that as to where the information came from, it will also be deleted.


This may seem really sudden, but it's time to get this under control and get this wiki back in focus. The next 33 days give everyone time to shift what they're doing over to areas that will have a larger benefit and provide more useful information. After that, I'll start giving everyone a bit of a push in that direction.

In June, I will take a look to see if things have improved enough that I can relax things a little bit.

If anyone has objections to this, you can state them in the comments below, but please try to have a better reason than "I don't like it". Having ideas about how to get people to stop focusing on the less-important parts of the wiki is what we would need.

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