Open main menu

Wikipedia β

Citing the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) on Wikipedia raises questions with regard to adherence to Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources, as much of its database content is user contributed with minimal and unstated editorial oversight by IMDb staff. The following essay addresses the usage of IMDb as a reference source, where its weaknesses and strengths lie with regard to content and policy, and the consequent role that it can play in Wikipedia's articles.

Appropriate usesEdit

IMDb content which is acceptable to reference on Wikipedia include:

  1. The writing credits marked with "WGA" that are supplied directly by the Writers Guild of America (where applicable).
  2. The MPAA ratings reasons, where they appear, that are supplied directly by the Motion Picture Association of America.

Disputed usesEdit

IMDb content which is in dispute about whether it is appropriate to reference on Wikipedia:

  1. Released films only: Sections such as the cast list, character names, the crew lists, release dates, company credits, awards, soundtrack listing, filming locations, technical specs, alternate titles, running times, and rating certifications.

Inappropriate usesEdit

IMDb content inappropriate to reference on Wikipedia:

  1. Any potentially contentious material about living persons (BLPs).
  2. Cast lists, etc. for films and television programming that are still in development or production, and have yet to premiere.
  3. The user comments for each title (this includes user reviews and ratings), which are pure user-generated content.
  4. Sections written in wiki-style with minimal editorial control. Those would be the FAQs for particular titles (not the database FAQ), the parental guides, and the plot synopses (not to be confused with the plot outlines or plot summaries, which are subject to editorial control).
  5. Newsgroup reviews, which are archived Usenet postings.
  6. The trivia and goofs sections that are based on user submissions.
  7. The recommendations.

See alsoEdit
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_IMDb
en.m.wikipedia.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-51
23165
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:Q7I652W2VCUMXPI3MNZO4DEVJLV6IKXH
<urn:uuid:32fe6df3-48b9-40fd-a9e7-98f73c716027>
2017-12-17T06:26:50Z
208.80.154.224
text/html
sha1:AZYW6IXB6EN7HIH2UJEGXVIX25JVHMLY
<urn:uuid:26c1e763-9767-40f2-b3e8-8e3ead02197a>
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_IMDb
response
<urn:uuid:d522b327-cdc2-4160-a0ba-549574348bec>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-142-32-26.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-51
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for December 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf