The imdb should be overhauled, and here's why and how.

In my opinion, Imdb is the vastest and most complicated canyon of information there is on the internet, moreso than even wikipedia. What began with the intention of being an online Halliwell's or Maltin's has transformed into something way more complex - with 7 million people listed, and an ever-growing barrage of films, often amateur projects put up by eager amateurs to get their work seen only to be barricaded under by more and more similar types, I find that while it definitely needs to be there, that as a researcher, and one with autism, I find it has hindered my brain as much as helped. I can't help thinking of the hundreds, nay thousands of names that i have come across, not of familiar  directors and character actors but people who work in the bottom barrel of the service, in the amateur films and regional shorts that may get local "festival" play but will never break any kind of notability, and yet I am haunted by them. I've ferretted away great online pamphlets of these actors and their  unseen, often unreleased films that I will probably post on here, though written on an often slow, brain-dead laptop, they are full of accidental spelling errors. I often find myself dreaming of actors with names like Mabel Maultsby or Jack Brosseit (star of several local Arizonan productions in the 90s) or Steven Aronson (a Telemundo bit-part actor) or Floridian short semi-starlet and Twitter user par excellence/Camilla Belle/Olivia Cooke-alike Anastasia Mirabelle (whose few connections to the mainstream is she was in a short with the girl from Jaime Murray horror the Nanny), and then constantly googling actors' names, and then find myself on nonsensical info-trails that I can only replenish via writing them down, often in search of a contact to the more familiar world, which in more recent years, has often been surprisingly by public Facebook and finding such filmmaker is a friend of a  friend of an online friend (usually Michael Haberfelner or Asylum starlet Jaime Bernadette).

The problem I have with the imdb is that it is too big and it is too loose. What began as a relatively neat, ordered section of films and TV shows has been bombarded by hundreds of thousands of amateur and semi-amateur shorts, webseries and videos usually from regional semi-industries in the US. A lot of these projects have no genre or in some cases country listed, making them impossible to search for and the listings sloppy.

I think that the imdb needs to be overhauled, and in   particular on these amateur productions. Create subsections within the imdb, maybe even sub-sites for amateur films and student films and fan films that can be ticked off. Maybe even give webseries their own caption - have divisors between network television, local television, cable, streaming, web, youtube/vimeo...

Also, no film should have their country of origin left unlisted. It should be made utterly compulsory, because as an autistic, almost but not quite obsessive-compulsive, it really grinds my gears.

Also, I think the form of the imdb lists of pages of 100 films each could also be made into something more along the lines of wikipedia, so one doesn't have to scroll across pages and pages to find an obscure Florida-shot horror film that hasn'teven got a release.

And here's the other problem. There are a ton of films on the imdb that have no release date that are impossible to search for, even though when one enters imdbpro, their date comes up as (????). In this age of lockdown, I think films will ???? as a release date should be at least searchable by that criteria.

The trouble is since the boards being removed, Imdb feels impersonal, it feels like the tool of a bureaucratic corporation, and yes I know, Amazon, but it should be something like the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It shouldn't just be full of amateur filmmakers adding their own listing for films nobody can even watch. Create something else for them, something that perhaps would actually make their films more easily findable. Imdb should feel like an encyclopaedia.

The irony is this is mainly an American phenomena. Yes, there are amateur films from all over the world. However, although film and TV production has ballooned everywhere since the early 00s and particularly in the last 10-11 years, particularly in the good USA does it seem like Nero fiddles while Rome burns. Look at how many film festivals, or should I say "film festivals" there are. There are hundreds of thousands of shorts made in America since 2010-11. No distributor of short films can look through all of them. Imdb should be made with film distributors and programmers in mind, who can easily scroll through country.

So, this is my suggestion - make it compulsory for American films not only to have a country of origin, but a state - or states if they are made across one or two. Filming locations are all well and good, but filming locations aren't a compulsory listing, the same way country  origin are. Maybe, make them both compulsory options for every listing.

Also, films should have a compulsory genre. You still have shorts where the genre is short, and films where there are no genres listed at all. As I said, it feels sloppy and it feels amateur as these productions probably are. Sometimes, it feels like a hacker has been let through and forced to enter their own garden show in as a gag.

Also, I see a number of ads are listed as short films or even TV series in case of the PG Tips ads.

I was writing in to Sight and Sound in 2016 about this glut, and though since 2019, it has actually decreased slower and slower, presumably people have realised it's a full market, the market is too crammed, in America alone, and that's only the films imdb has listed as American. There's plenty of American shorts that don't have their countries listed.

You may be wondering why I am so passionate, well one day, film will be dead, and we'll be left with all these half-listings and wondering whatever they were for.

If you had an amateur  and regional section, it would be a showcase for those filmmakers and actors, rather than lumbered in with everyone else. Think of it like regional sports or community theatre.

The imdb is supposed to be an archive, but in a lot of recent instances, it's not a good one.

Yes, there are mistakes with actors being mistaken as one another, but on the whole from 1920 to 2000, it’s a good archive, but onward it gets messy. I believe that when the people who make films start contributing, well that’s when things get sloppy. Because only they know about their films.

My article seeks to find why imdb is structured the way it is, are there any plans to improve it, and to find out how controlled it is.