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# Internet Movie Database/Talk

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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. --LDC

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.

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Last edited July 13, 2001 11:56 am (diff)
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