My Movies Wiki

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Page Revision: 2009/03/12 11:58


Introduction

Thank you for considering contributing to the My Movies WebService. When contributing information to the database, it is important to follow the guidelines here as well as the specific details in the contribution guide, to ensure the high quality of data on the WebService for all users.

You should consider contributing titles to the WebService when a title does not exist on the WebService, and you should consider improving and contributing a title profile downloaded from the WebService when it's data is incorrect or insufficient. If the data is incorrect, we also ask that you use the "Report Incorrect Data" function to report it to our moderators, which allows us to quickly stop users contributing incorrect data.

When contributing a title, there are three minimum requirements of data, these are a title type (DVD, HD-DVD or Blu-Ray), a UPC or EAN barcode, and a country. It is very important that these elements of the data are correct when contributing the first time, as you cannot change these later on, and because incorrect contributions of this data may prevent other users from contributing the correct titles.

The most important thing is that you may not contribute information that is copyrighted by other sources, meaning that you may not contribute information that was downloaded from other data sources. When contributing data, the source for this data should come from the DVD, HD-DVD or Blu-ray itself, meaning that a title description should be the one you read on the back of the DVD, and not informations from other sources, or personal reviews of the title. The only exception to this rule is factual data, such as production year, genres, cast & crew and other data considered facts. You may also use the "IMDB" button in the program to import these factual data from IMDB.

If you do not follow the specified rules in the contribution guide, you will be sent a warning by e-mail, and if you ignore this warning your account may be closed, which will prevent usage of the program in general - it is therefore very important to always use an e-mail address that you check frequently.

Important Before Contributing

Before you contribute a title to the WebService, there are different things that you need to check:

  • When contributing a new title, make sure that the title does not already exist on the WebService, by searching for it's barcode in the "Add Titles" dialog. If the title already exists on the WebService, you can reconnect your title to it by using the "Change Data Source" option from the title menu.

  • Make sure that the source of the data you contribute is from the DVD, HD-DVD or Blu-ray cover itself; do not contribute movie descriptions from other sources than the back of the DVD cover, and do not contribute movie reviews in the description field. Generally, a title sold in Sweden, will in almost all situations contain Swedish text on the back cover of the DVD, and it is therefore only allowed to contribute a Swedish text description - in short, the language of the contributed data must match the DVD cover.

  • When contributing a title with a cover, the barcode on the back of the cover must match the barcode of the title, otherwise the cover does not match the title. In some situations where titles are sold as part of box sets they do not contain a barcode, and if that is the case it is alright to contribute a cover scan without a barcode.

  • Make sure that you are not contributing data that is copyrighed by other sources. Copyrighted data is data such as movie descriptions, tagline's, actor or crew biographies, or generally all data that cannot be considered facts about the title. Generally it is not recommended to contribute data that originates from other sources - respect copyright!

Unique Titles

The same title may only be located on the WebService once for each country. This does not mean that the same movie may not be located more than once, as there can be several DVD, HD-DVD or Blu-ray releases for the movie - each release may have an entry on the WebService.

Titles should at all times only be contributed with "Country" as the country the title was sold in. If your title is an import, the country should be where the title was originally sold, meaning that if you purchased a Region 1 title from USA in United Kingdom, the title should be added with USA as country specification.

The same barcode is often used in several countries, which means that a barcode cannot be referred to as unique, however the same barcode is only used once in each country, which means that the WebService will reject creations of titles where the same barcode and country already exists on the WebService for another title.

Report Incorrect Data

With a user maintained database, incorrect data will occur. If you see a title that holds incorrect data that does not meet the requirements in the contribution guide, you can either:

Update the title profile with the correct data, and contribute this to the WebService. This is the preferred method, as you can often easily fix the problem yourself. It is always a good idea to also report the problem to database maintainers too by using the "Report Incorrect Data" button in the interface, but describe if you have fixed the problem, and how. This way database maintainers have the option to check whether or not the contributing user(s) have made other contributions with similar problems.

Report the title to the database maintainers by using the "Report Incorrect Data" button in the interface. Be sure to write a good description about the problem, so that the database maintainers have a chance to correct the issue.

Contribution Points

When you contribute to the WebService, you gain contribution points based on how complete the data you contribute is. The contribution points will be used to create contribution high score lists, and there are periods of time where there may be contribution competitions where you can win prizes based on your position on the high score lists. Later on, we may also be introduce program features that are exclusive to users with a high position on the high score list.

The contribution points can be gained both when contributing DVD titles, and when contributing actor or crew person profiles. The points are based on a complete percentage - each title or person profile on the WebService has a complete percentage from 0-100%, where points are rewarded based on this complete percentage, a fully complete title profile is worth 30 points, while a fully complete person profile is worth 10 points. If you only complete a profile to a specific percentage, you gain this percentage value of the 30 or 10 points.

This means that if you contribute a new 80% complete title profile, you are rewarded 24 points, which is 80% of the maximum 30 points, if you improve an existing profile that was 80% complete before you contributed your additions, so that with your contribution the title is 90% complete, you are rewarded 3 points, which is 90%-80% (10%) of 30 points.

As a bonus, the user who completes a title to 100% gains an additional 12 points, so that a 100% complete title profile is actually worth 42 points. It is not required that you have contributed the full profile yourself - if you contribute the last 10% to an 90% complete profile, you also gain these extra 12 points as a bonus!

On the top of your edit page in the Collection Management program, you always have a full overview on what's missing to complete the title profile to 100%. When adding a title, you can see how complete each profile is based on the % icon in the result list - the icon goes from full red through orange and yellow to full green when a profile is fully complete:

The following lists shows how the complete percentage is calculated.

Title Profile (30 points), Notice 12 points extra bonus to complete a profile to 100%:

  • Country 1%
  • Barcode 1%
  • Type 1%
  • LocalTitle 1%
  • OriginalTitle 1%
  • ProductionYear 2%
  • ReleaseDate 2%
  • RunningTime 2%
  • Description 15%
  • ParentalRating 5%
  • FrontCover 10%
  • BackCover 10%
  • Genres (min. 1) 5%
  • Discs 5%
  • Disc ID's 10%
  • Actors 1-5 2%
  • Actors 5-10 2%
  • Actors 10-> 2%
  • Director/Crew 2%
  • Aspect Ratio 2%
  • Video Format 2%
  • Audio Tracks 5%
  • Subtitles 5%
  • Studios 2%
  • Extra Features 5%

Actor/Crew Person Profile (10 points):

Photo 25% Biography 75%

Notice that if you contribute incorrect information the gained points may be removed from your account, and you will receive a warning. If you ignore this warning, your account may be closed.