435 Messages
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7.2K Points
Correcting biographies that were written by the person in question
The grammar in this Mini Bio is, frankly, atrocious:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0037973/bio
In fact, that's the least of its problems; apart from the opening paragraph it's not even a biography, just a list of credits, presumably intended to act as a back-up resume.
I don't know enough about Mr Artus to presume to write a better biography, but I thought I could at least tidy it up a bit and correct some of the most egregious grammatical errors (random capital letters, curly brackets in place of commas, etc.), but this correction was declined. I queried this via the contact form and was told that the correction was declined because it had been written by the subject of the bio, so I gave up and deleted the correction from my Update History.
So, what is the policy on this? If a bio has been written by the person themselves, are they not open to correction, even if there's a glaring error? Even if the entire bio is clearly not fit for purpose?
I ask because I recently looked up Jonny Dixon after his appearance in last night's Doctor Who and discovered he has two biographies, both credited to Jonny himself. Not only are they both, again, nothing more than a summary of his acting credits (including newspaper reviews quoted in full), but they both refer to jobs from 2018 as things that he has "just finished filming", so they are also very outdated:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1584814/bio
mbmb
1.7K Messages
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22.9K Points
3 years ago
That's curious, first time hearing it. I think it might have to do with the fact that person in question having IMDbPro.
I changed a famous director's bio without an issue a few months ago which was written by the director herself. But she did not have IMDb Pro account when I did it.
I did that because I saw a tweet of her where she was complaining about IMDb not removing her mother's maiden name from her bio and because of that she went ahead and replaced her bio with full of false info and nonsense to get rid of it. She was right there admitting that on Twitter. So I showed that Twitter link and removed false corrections she made on her own bio and it was approved without a problem.
But the answer they gave you raises questions about this canned response they use: "In order to be as comprehensive and current as possible we cannot restrict updates for a specific person or title to a single source or reject further changes."
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Michelle
Employee
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17.2K Messages
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310.3K Points
3 years ago
Hi tom_wake & mbmb -
To clarify, we allow corrections to be submitted to all Bio's on the site, regardless if the Bio was submitted by the individual themselves or not. However, with that being said, when a Bio is submitted by the claimed page owner or one of their representatives, our preference is to maintain that Bio on the site, so we won't replace it with a new Bio and we will only consider minor updates made to that Bio, such as grammar/spelling corrections.
If you see a Bio listed on the site that requires updates due to being in violation of our guidelines or is heavily faulted with grammar/spelling issues, I encourage you to include a detailed explanation within the Explanation field of the submission form to provide our editors more context behind the requested Bio text changes.
I hope this helps!
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