Thursday, January 21st, 2021

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Incorrect, deceptive credit of plot authorship

I have no problem with people being able to edit or improve on others' submissions... but to then credit these submissions entirely to the one who edited them is absolutely unacceptable. I happen to know for a FACT that the plot summary currently credited to user ahmetkozan on the film Rec 2 was NOT that editor's work, as that user is responsible only for a small, but beneficial, tweak to that particular submission. Even if the edit history is viewable, it is not accessible without logging in. This is misleading and problematic.

There should be a way to list ALL the contributors responsible for a particular plot summary, even as a collapsed list.

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5 years ago

Hi great_another_account_i_need_to_keep_track_of -

 

Regarding Plot Bylines (authorship, as per our current Plot Summary policy:

 

If corrections (spelling, grammar, etc) are made to a Plot Summary,  the byline should NOT be changed. If a contributor disagrees and wants to substantively change it, they should instead be submitting a new plot summary with their own byline rather than edit the original and add their own name to it.

 

Regarding the Plot listed on "[Rec]²", I reviewed the byline change and was able to confirm that i was made by the original author (who had begun using a new name).

 

If you see any further Plot byline updates that violate our policies, please continue reporting them and our staff can investigate further.

 

Cheers!

 

 

 

 

@Michelle

Um, no. Not acceptable.

I wanted to keep this kind of anonymous, but I'll go ahead and say it here: I am the original writer of the item in question. I am the former LazyBastardGuy, now going by the handle ICantTell. I am NOT ahmetkozan, and I have the update ticket number to prove it:

130921-044343-910000

THAT is the original item I submitted. ahmetkozan did spruce it up, which I do appreciate, but now is credited as the sole author of that blurb. It's not that I take such pride in this piece of work that I want recognition for it, it's just that I happened to notice that someone who EDITED it was wrongly credited for having written the whole thing to begin with. This is purely an ethical problem. As further proof of what I myself orginally wrote (and was accepted), I'm including a screencap of the page from my account. It even still has my original name on it.

(edited)

This is why having more of a wiki structure like Wikipedia itself would be best for IMDb. The site clearly makes it too easy for people to wrongfully take credit for things they did not do. If this is truly a user-generated, collaborative, open effort, it must present itself as such. Every last edit on Wikipedia is credited to someone, somewhere, no matter what it was or whether that person ever edited again. Even vanished users, those who invoke what they call a "right to vanish" and have their accounts scrubbed by admins, still receive credit through a garbage username that no human being would ever use and that replaces the vanished user's original handle in the edit history of whichever page(s) they edited. Viewing edit histories never requires logging in either, even if a page is locked so only an admin can edit it.

As for how IMDb could be fooled into thinking I would have edited a plot summary of my own making under a different username, I'm simply at a loss. This shouldn't even be possible through the software. If it is, that is a serious oversight that IMDb needs to correct. An edit history with all contributors, including timestamps of who did what when, is essential to a collaborative project such as this one. I thought it even had such a feature, as I recall at least being able to list who had edited a particular item, and I do realize that IMDb is overhauling itself, but based on what Michelle just said, this isn't a problem concerning IMDb changing to new software. I admit I did see this incorrect attribution problem a very long time ago, but I did nothing as at the time I did not feel it would accomplish anything. But now I figure it could.

5 years ago

Wanted this to be the same comment, but whatever: