Stats 8 May 2006
Rank : Commander in Chief Level : 53 Percentage : 95% (+3) Forum Posts : 915 (+15)I first came to this site with the express intention of helping to sort the show guide for The Bill. sierra_one had been doing a fabulous job with it over at TVTome, while I was maintaining my own, rather more comprehensive guide, at The Old Bill, in no small part by ensuring that every piece of data that was added to TVTome found its way onto my own database and website. It was sierra_one who told me about the new site, and I agreed to come over and help make it the most comprehensive guide to the show on the web.
Submissions Reviews Accepted : 22810 (+95) Shows : 1 Pending : 18 (+16) Episodes : 2 Denied : 120 People : 0 Total : 22948 Total : 3
Edited Guides Trusted User 143 Shows 3 Shows
Does anyone remember that most annoying TV.com innovation: the population of episodes with star data? What happened was that they ran a script that populated every episode migrated from TVTome with the show star details from the summary page at TVTome. This was annoying in three respects:
- (i) most editors had appended tags to character names at the summary level to indicate which years or seasons each actor appeared in;
- (ii) the programme assigned every show star to every episode of that show;
- (iii) the programme ignored those instances where editors such as myself had painstakingly assigned stars (with the correct character names) to each episode that they had appeared in.
The show stars issue was a huge one as far as The Bill was concerned, as some 1,974 episodes had 133 stars (later 127 stars and 6 co-stars) attached, meaning that each episode needed around 110 actors to be deselected or reclassified from co-star to show star, in addition to the usual tasks (missing episodes, synopses, guest stars, crew credits, mis-spelled character names, incorrect person IDs).
I was working nights and attending to TV.com during the quieter moments (basically the 12 hours between shift start and shift end) but, when I reached 1,000 contribution points I decided to stop, as sierra_one's points weren't increasing and I didn't want him to think I was trying to "steal" the editorship. I started work on the Doctor Who guide, which had a lot of missing cast information, and which had always struck me as being slanted to a U.S./Canadian readership. I soon acquired my first editorship, and found that correcting and investigating actor details led me to new shows, then to further actors, and I was quickly immersed in the TV.com game, contributing to an ever-widening range of show guides. sierra_one, meanwhile, had decided to abandon the site over the stars migration issue, and the failure of staff to respond to his post on the subject.
I started addressing the show star issue for The Bill again recently, after months dealing with other issues, and today, finally, that task is complete! Now I just need to add stars and guests to the balance of nearly 100 episodes created at TV.com.
In other news, I posted here months ago about a rogue contributor who was copying and pasting summaries from other sites, adding duplicate and unnecessary notes and deleting them, adding mis-spelled actors with mis-spelled character names and, finally, actually making episodes up. He disappeared from view for a while, but I found out that he had just moved on to try and spoil show guide under other editors. He returned with a vengeance last month, and scored a 100% rejection rate for badly copy-typing synopses from press releases, and adding characters to episodes that they do not appear in. Dealing with this one contributor, in terms of identifying the external sources of his errors, explaining why the submissions were rejected, and repeatedly providing advice on how he should go about making submissions in the future, would commonly occupy more than half of my entire day's on-line time. He has been quiet again over the past few days, but I discovered today that he has managed to acquire editorship of a show using the same techniques that had led him to a 50% rejection rate (95% for my shows). It's a pity that TV.com is unable to apply sanctions in such obvious cases of gaming, chronic illiteracy, and deliberate corruption of show guides, but at least he is leaving the rest of us alone, for now.