gromit82's profile
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276.1K Points

Sunday, April 22nd, 2018 1:36 AM

19

Displaying the number of credits by job category

A person's credits are displayed in order of the number of credits in each job category (except that Thanks, Self, and Archive Footage credits are always displayed last).

However, the number of credits is not displayed in a manner which is useful to users. See the following from Tom Hanks' page, for example:



Note that Hanks is shown with Producer (54 credits) first, then Actor (87 credits), Soundtrack (15 credits), Writer (7 credits), and Director (8 credits). Hence, it's not apparent to users why his jobs are in this order.

The explanation is that episodes count separately. So Hanks really has about 188 Producer credits by this count, about 159 Actor credits, 18 Soundtrack credits, 11 Writer credits, and 8 Director credits. (I say "about" in case I lost count somewhere.)

So I would like to suggest that IMDb, instead of saying "Producer (54 credits)", should say "Producer (188 credits)", and so on, to indicate the actual number of credits being counted by IMDb for each category, not the number of titles where a TV series counts as only 1 credit even though IMDb is counting the number of episodes behind the scenes.

The same principle holds true for job categories like the Sound Department where a person can have more than one job on the same title which is counted separately by IMDb.

If it's not possible to display "Producer (188 credits)", maybe the "(54 credits)" should be dropped, since that number doesn't reflect the number being counted for IMDb purposes.

The issue of the number of credits a person has per job category, and the order in which the job categories are listed on IMDb, comes up a lot. It might make things easier on the regular contributors here if one of the above solutions were adopted.

190 Messages

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7.2K Points

7 years ago

Good point. How about something like Producer (54 title credits) (188 total credits) with both values on the same line? If you really wanted to go wild you could have the ability to sort them either way.

Champion

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5K Messages

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118.3K Points

7 years ago

Earlier today I was wondering why, on Chuck Jones' page it displayed Animation Department above Director, but your explanation nails it: he has 519 episodes of The Electric Company as 'animator.'


And apparently the job type sort is also aggregated first for those of us who check the Name Page preference "Display credits separately for Movie and TV."

I would HATE to lose the total for the category, especially since the entries are not numbered in this display.

Numbering the entries would be nice, with oldest as 1st, so that when I open Director: Short, I can see where "Sheep Ahoy" falls in his filmo (not just chronologically, but how many shorts had he directed before/after). I've actually bookmarked a filmo search (where I can paste in the current person's id) JUST to get that bit of information without so very many steps: unfortunately Release Date is not one of the shortcuts in Explore More, and I almost always want ascending not descending, and only Film and Actor filters are on my bookmark.

2 Messages

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110 Points

5 years ago

Agree! 

1K Messages

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29.9K Points

5 years ago

What if the jobs were ordered by the numbers that already appear? That may be better than changing the number to reflect individual episodes of a series. Tom Hanks' acting credits should be on top anyway. In all our minds, he's an actor before he's a producer.

1K Messages

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29.9K Points

Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought Gromit's main issue was that the credit order looks wrong because of the numbers.
Note that Hanks is shown with Producer (54 credits) first, then Actor (87 credits), Soundtrack (15 credits), Writer (7 credits), and Director (8 credits). Hence, it's not apparent to users why his jobs are in this order.
Why not keep the number of producer credits as 54 in the display, the actor credits as 87, etc.? These numbers count a series as one credit, which is a good idea.

The only trouble is that the display numbers count a series as one credit, while the order treats each individual episode as a credit. Why not match the order to the numbers, rather than the numbers to the order?

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7.4K Messages

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276.1K Points

J.: To me, it doesn't matter that much whether IMDb decides to match the order to the numbers, or the numbers to the order, that is, counting or not counting a series as one credit, or at least I don't have a strong opinion about that.

But whichever they choose, the numbers that are being used to determine the order of the job categories should be clearly shown on a person's name page.