@bradley_kent 

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Mon, Jul 5, 2021
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Although it varies from day to day, I have usually worked on IMDb from 10 or 11 in the morning to two or three the next morning, with breaks here and there, seven days a week.  On some days, this can amount to several thousand contributions, especially when deleting keywords that are incorrectly listed for episodes of a tv series when those same keywords already exist at the series level.  (This is very tedious, mechanical work, but needs to be done, and I am willing to do it.  Others should try it.) On some days, especially those days with other commitments and responsibilities, I have been known to submit less that 100.  This is all changing now.

On some days, this can amount to several thousand contributions, especially when deleting keywords that are incorrectly listed for episodes of a tv series when those same keywords already exist at the series level.

Are you sure this is an "incorrect" practice? It sounds more like duplication to me, but not necessarily incorrect. 

For example, are you saying you favor removing the word "zombie" from a TV episode just because the same keyword is also in the overall series title?

If that's what you are saying, I believe your approach is incorrect.

Let's say I want to search for all TV episodes with zombies and decapitations involved in the plot. To find those episodes, I should be able to search for the combined keywords "zombie" and "decapitation" in the same episode.

That would normally have turned up episodes like "30 Days Without an Accident," an episode of The Walking Dead.

But the list of keywords for that episode currently omits the keyword "zombie."  And the search for the combined "zombie" and "decapitation" therefore fails to return that episode. 

If I understand what you are doing correctly, I think it is not only unnecessary, but actually counterproductive. Why delete the word "zombie" from an episode of The Walking Dead? That makes absolutely no sense to me.

I believe the real keyword problem with series versus episodes is the converse: keywords that inappropriately appear in the series title, when they do not apply to every (or even most) episodes. An example will be a series title with keywords describing what a character is wearing in a particular episode. Those instances should absolutely be deleted.

As a matter of fact, it sure looks like the keyword "zombie" does not appear in any episodes of The Walking Dead. 

Is that the result of your work, @bradley_kent? 

If so, why are you doing this?

Don't you realize that this interferes with the ability to conduct proper searches for TV episodes?

The IMDb Guideline is very clear:

Episode-specific keywords submitted to the TV series page - Keywords submitted to the TV series page should be relevant to and describe the entire series. Keywords that are specific to a particular episode should be added to that episode only.

By the way, I've done very little work on the keywords for The Walking Dead.  Your concern should be directed to IMDb.

@bradley_kent 

Episode-specific keywords submitted to the TV series page - Keywords submitted to the TV series page should be relevant to and describe the entire series. Keywords that are specific to a particular episode should be added to that episode only.

Yes, that is very clear. It does not say that keywords relevant to a specific episode should not be posted on that episode, just because the keyword also happens to be relevant (and posted) for the entire series. The final word in that quote ("only") means as opposed to other episodes. And the overall gist of the quote is to forbid adding keywords to series if they don't apply to the series as a whole.

If you are deleting keywords from specific episodes just because the same keyword is also relevant to the series as a whole, then you are "doing it wrong" (to borrow a phrase from Mr. Mom).

@bradley_kent 

I just realized that you haven't actually answered my question. You seem to be saying that a keyword should not appear on an episode title, if the same keyword also happens to appear on a series. Is that indeed what you are saying?

If so, are you also saying that the IMDb guidelines actually support your interpretation? I would honestly really like to hear and understand how you are construing the guidelines in this way (if this is indeed what you are saying).

By the way, I don't really have a "dog in this fight." My main focus on keywords involves films, not TV series. As for The Walking Dead, it is one of the few shows I actually watch, but I just checked my contribution history and I have never before tried to add the keyword "zombie" to an episode, so I don't have any evidence that that keyword has been added and then deleted.

But since I have great respect for you and your work with keywords, I do wish to spare you from devoting countless hours to an unnecessary and even counterproductive practice, especially if you think that practice is consistent with or somehow supported by the guidelines.

To summarize, there is nothing inherently wrong with a keyword appearing in both a series title and an episode title as part of that series. In fact, that type of duplication should in fact be occurring, and is totally proper.

My personal primary interest in editing keywords is to facilitate searches on IMDb. I like being able to discover films through various keyword-related searches, and also to look for patterns in keywords across different titles. So whenever I see a keyword editing practice that curtails or interferes with these searches, I will speak up about it.

@bradley_kent​ 

An Advanced Title Search doesn't find the episodes for a series-level keyword.

Example:

The keyword y2k has 48 total results, including series 6Teen.

But an Advanced Title Search restricted to TV episodes does not find the episodes from series 6Teen.

A novice to IMDb search would need to understand that. Duplicating the keyword at the episode level might help. 

@bderoes​ That is exactly the right point to make.

And I will add something very important to me and other users: keyword-combination searches (multiple keywords together in the same search).

Adding relevant keywords at both the series and episode level is not only consistent with the guidelines, but in fact necessary to fully enable keyword-combination searches.

My favorite example is the keyword "zombie" and the series The Walking Dead (discussed earlier in this thread). If relevant keywords were not allowed at both the series and the episode level, then we wouldn't be allowed to add the keyword "zombie" in both places for The Walking Dead, even though zombies appear in every episode. And withholding the keyword "zombie" at the episode level would completely short-circuit keyword-combination searches, so that individual episodes will not be picked up in searches, for example, if you want to search for "zombie" in conjunction with other keywords like "decapitation" and "person on fire." Here is that search, by the way, and the results include 4 episodes of The Walking Dead, specifically because the keyword "zombie" appears on each episode: 

https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=decapitation%2Cperson-on-fire%2Czombie&ref_=kw_ref_typ&sort=moviemeter,asc&mode=detail&page=1

When adding keywords, the most important thing is the relevance of keywords. They can be added wherever they are relevant, even if that means they end up duplicated between the series level and some episodes (or even all episodes if they are relevant to all episodes).

It is my genuine hope that this will eventually sink in for Mr. Kent. I fear that he has wasted a lot of time deleting tens of thousands of keywords from episodes where they are relevant.

@bderoes​ BTW, interesting that you should mention the keyword "y2k." Just yesterday I was noticing that keyword and I made some slight editing adjustments to similar keywords like "y2k-bug," "millennium-bug," and a few other synonyms that I have now manually merged into those more popular ones.

@bderoes​ No.  It would just compound the problem by adding millions and millions of unnecessary, duplicated keywords.  Is EVERY episode of "I Love Lucy" to have "redheaded-woman" as a keyword; EVERY episode of "Bewitched" to have "witch" as a keyword; EVERY episode of "Perry Mason" to have "lawyer" as a keyword; etc.,etc, etc.  This is just plain insane!

Re "The Walking Dead," since a vampire appears in EVERY episode, it should only be a keyword at the series level.  If a keyword exists at the series level, one should logically be able to ASSUME and ACKNOWLEDGE that it exists in each episode.  

It's called incremental, reasonable, logical thinking.  Is that so difficult?

@bradley_kent​ 

The problem is not human logic, but what the software does _not_ do: it doesn't attribute the series-level keywords to episodes during an Advanced Title Search. I provided a specific example to prove that it doesn't. 

@bderoes​ Good luck trying to get an answer to your point. I have been explaining this to Mr. Kent for over a year, to no avail.

I honestly believe he does not understand how keyword searches actually work and is not willing to care to learn, because the alternative is to believe that he does understand and is just trolling everyone. 

@bderoes​ 

I'd say a technical solution to that problem would be preferable to adding the same keywords to all episodes, which is not simple to do or likely to happen anyway.

@bradley_kent​ Sigh. Do you still not understand how to search for multiple keywords in combination with each other, and how such searches pick up keywords on shows differently at the series level versus the episode level? I have been trying to explain that to you for more than a year now, but honestly it feels like talking to a brick wall. Not once have you ever indicated you understand the point. 

I'm not sure that I Love Lucy and the keyword "redheaded-woman" is a very good example for you to raise. The original I Love Lucy series was in black and white, so unless every single episode included a plot point about Lucy point a redhead, it probably would not make much sense to add that keyword either at the series level or to every single episode:

Of course, people watching on TV at home couldn’t tell if Ball was a redhead or not thanks to black-and-white TVs.

https://outsider.com/entertainment/i-love-lucy-star-lucille-ball-wasnt-a-natural-born-redhead/

But let's say someone wants to add the keyword "redheaded-woman" to every episode of the subsequent The Lucy Show, which aired in color. If someone wants to do so, by all means they should go ahead. That would be the only way to pick up the keyword "redheaded-woman" on those episodes in searches that combine that keyword with other keywords. 

BTW, there are no vampires on The Walking Dead. 

@bderoes​ I agree.

@Peter_pbn​ I assume you know about the "cheat" method of adding a keyword to all episodes of a series? It's actually relatively easy to do once you figure it out.

Listing a keyword on all episodes of a long-running show does also make it harder to find other episodes with the keyword in a simple search, since one may have to sift through pages of episodes from one show.

To Mr. Self-Annointed Keyword Expert:  (Said, with all the cynicism I can muster.) "Thank You for understanding what I think and do better than I, myself, actually think and do."  (Talk about presumptuousness!) You are the reason why I have recently curtailed commenting on this board, which I plan to now do, again.  It must be a heavy burden to always be right.

And, yes, I made a mistake in saying "vampire" rather than "zombie" regarding The Walking Dead.  I have never seen the show, and never plan to.

@Peter_pbn​

Listing a keyword on all episodes of a long-running show does also make it harder to find other episodes with the keyword in a simple search, since one may have to sift through pages of episodes from one show.

@Peter_pbn​ True. I have thought about that too. It's all about striking a balance. I wouldn't do it for all relevant keywords, just for super important ones, like "zombie" on The Walking Dead.

And there are workarounds for filtering out a specific show that you want to exclude from a search, but they are not intuitive.

@Peter_pbn​ 

Here are some good examples of "fail" keywords that have been added to every episode of a series. Some of these can and should be corrected by IMDb staff, others are beyond repair.

family-with-three-child (823 titles)

young-adults (9267 titles)

suspension-of-civil-liberties (19878 titles)

@bradley_kent​ I haven't been presumptuous. I have politely tried to explain to you how keyword combination searches work, but your comments in response demonstrate that you don't understand my point. You did it again in this thread:

If a keyword exists at the series level, one should logically be able to ASSUME and ACKNOWLEDGE that it exists in each episode.  

It is pretty hard to "assume" or "acknowledge" something about a title that is never picked up in a search in the first place (in a multi-keyword combination search). 

I never claimed to always be right. I have made mistakes many times on this board, have acknowledged that many times, and have tried to repair any damage done. I have seen you do the same, but sometimes the next day it's like the conversation never happened (as if you have truly forgotten) and you're back to repeating the same incorrect points and chastising others on this board. I try hard to overlook that, because I see the good in you as well (and there is a lot of good in you). I do sometimes wish you would soften your approach in the way you talk about me, others, and even staff on this board, but only you have the power to do that. 

Please know that when I said you didn't understand or won't acknowledge my point about keyword combination searches, I am not attacking you as a person. There are no hard feelings on my part and I would much rather work alongside you on keyword issues. I hope you stick around.

For anyone following along with this thread, I figured I should explain the point about keyword-combination searches one last time, in detail.

Take an example where you want to search for three keywords: keywords A, B, and C, all listed together on the same titles.

If all three keywords are relevant to a particular TV episode, then those keywords should be listed on that episode, because any search for those three keywords in combination will only pick up titles where all three keywords are listed. 

If a relevant keyword is only listed at the series level and not the episode level, the relevant episodes won't be picked up in these types of searches.

Now, let's say we happen to know that keyword A is listed at the series level for a particular show. We could try eliminating keyword A from our search (just searching for keywords B and C together), but that would completely throw off the search results so that we're retrieving many more titles than we really want (because the search no longer includes the desired keyword A, which casts the net a lot wider). But if we add keyword A back into the search, we won't pick up the aforementioned episodes if they don't have keyword A.

And this is just for the series we might happen to be aware of that list a keyword at a series level. If we don't know about that, or if it is too cumbersome to figure that out via different searches, it quickly becomes unmanageable or even impossible. 

By analogy to demographics, if you wanted to search and compile a list of all men between the ages of 30 and 40 in the state of Connecticut, you should be able to do such a search of all people meeting those three factors. Let's say that many of the men who meet those three demographic stats are arbitrarily not listed as living in Connecticut on the basis that their parents are also living in Connecticut. You could still capture those men on your list by doing a search of all men between the ages of 30 and 40 in the entire United States of America, then you could do a search to list all persons in Connecticut, and then try to remember on an ad hoc basis which persons are on both lists. You might be aware of or remember some of the people, but there is no way you would get all of them. 

But with keyword combination searches, multiple keywords (and the resulting titles) can show up together at the click of a button. 

As @bderoes has pointed out, "[d]uplicating the keyword at the episode level might help." I understand @bderoes' suggestion to mean duplicating the keyword during the search function. If that suggestion were implemented, it would go a long way toward solving the problem, and there would no longer be any need to enter a keyword on every single episode in a series even where it is relevant to every single episode. I support this suggestion, although I think the search results should somehow differentiate between whether a particular title is picking up a keyword from the series level or from the episode level. I say that because sometimes people legitimately add a keyword at the series level where it applies to 85% or 95% of the episodes in a series, even if not 100%. Differentiating in searches between keywords picked up at the series level versus the episode level would help address that practice, so that the results are not skewed by series-level keywords that do not apply to 5% of the episodes in a series. (I do realize that the guidelines tell us to only use keywords at the series level when they "describe the "entire series," but the fact is that people do add keywords at the series level to describe persons, places, or things that occur in 90% of the episodes of a series, and personally I am okay with that.)

@bradley_kent​ 

Would you mind if this subthread was moved out of this thread and into a new post?

@Peter_pbn​ Sounds like we may not be hearing from Mr. Kent for a while. 

I tried to figure out what I said to cause him to "curtail" (his word) his postings on this forum. Apparently it was this response I wrote on his tenth or twelfth rant about the new "accepted" subgenre keywords (which he truly believes are ruining IMDb). I don't believe anything I said to him was inappropriate, but I am open to feedback on that.

In his subsequent response to me, he later edited his response and added the final two sentences, which I had never seen until now:

I would much rather hear from [staff] than you, and kindly request that you not respond to any of my further postings.  I will return the favor, in kind.

Although I am of course biased because this involves me, my conclusion is that Mr. Kent does not like being corrected or even disagreed with, especially on topics that he feels strongly about. It is a shame, because he has often made very valuable contributions to the community. In recent months, though, his focus narrowed to just a couple topics (primarily the subgenre keywords), and his rhetoric became increasingly judgmental and caustic, especially toward IMDb staff. That does not exactly help his cause. I am reminded of the old adage that "you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."