Undefined aka titles

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your post.

I've removed the duplicate title now, this should update shortly.

If this has occurred a few times, are you able to provide a few additional example submission references for me to dig into? 

Cheers,

Joel 

Hi, Joel and Peter:

Perhaps I can help a bit here (otherwise, I'm sorry... ). If I'm not mistaken, every alternate title with no country/region defined AND that is not tagged as (original title) needs to be deleted rather than corrected (as shown in the screenshot above).

First, a few numbers... From title.akas.tsv Apr 2019:

ALTERNATE TITLES: 3,766,128
         With a defined country/region: 3,313,625 (88.0%)
                    Original titles: 17
                    Unspecified: 2,177
                    Not original titles: 3,311,431
         Without a defined country/region: 452,503 (12.0%)
                    Original titles: 395,768
                    Unspecified: 12
                    Not original titles: 56,723

Original titles (or unspecified) aren't available in the akas update form, so actually there are 3,368,154 editable alternate titles, of which 56,723 (1.7%) are locked in the sense that can't be modified (only removed). The interesting question is, how many of those "non-original non-localized aka titles" have a correspondent verbatim "non-original localized aka title"?

Current answer is: 4,665 TITLES
[e.g. Das Mädel vom Ballet (1918) ► The Ballet Girl (1918) (undefined) & The Ballet Girl (1918) (USA)]
Maybe these titles should be scrutinized one by one and remove the unneeded entries...

Although we can't say for sure that all these locked titles have appeared because of the mechanism discovered by Peter, I think I can narrow down the list of titles to better investigate this issue because fortunately I had a copy of title.akas.tsv 31 Jan 2019. Comparing both tsv archives, 160 of those 4,665 aka titles (with the aforementioned conditions) have appeared in the last 9 weeks.

Here's the list:

• tt0002544: The Gardener
• tt0012701: A Small Town Hero
• tt0023450: Where Are the Dreams of Youth?
• tt0025611: A Woman of the World
• tt0026146: Ocean Breakers
• tt0026772: Tarzan and the Lost Goddess
• tt0028151: On the Sunny Side
• tt0028420: The Circus
• tt0030938: The Four Companions
• tt0035309: Tulip Time
• tt0048157: Helen Keller in Her Story
• tt0058886: Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy
• tt0063510: African Safari
• tt0063762: Shotgun
• tt0064660: Love Circle
• tt0065671: Uncle Vanya
• tt0068457: The Night Andy Came Home
• tt0069867: Charlie and His Two Chicks
• tt0071120: Evil in the Swamp
• tt0080422: Dental Hygiene
• tt0082431: Mindwarp: An Infinity of Terror
• tt0086149: Farewell
• tt0088267: An Eternal Combat
• tt0089294: Lifeline Express
• tt0092447: Boys Will Be Boys
• tt0095417: Virgin Machine
• tt0096032: Heart to Hearts
• tt0096876: A Woman Obsessed
• tt0098640: Crack in the Mirror
• tt0099636: Gate II
• tt0100115: Martha und ich
• tt0100566: Runaway Heart
• tt0101758: Nightmare
• tt0104081: Too Much Heart
• tt0104749: Far from Brazil
• tt0105536: Tartuffe
• tt0105948: Bay Cove
• tt0107000: Gensen-Kan Inn
• tt0107865: The Postmistress
• tt0109994: The Rabbit Hunt
• tt0111027: Ru mo
• tt0111341: Satan's Tango
• tt0111450: Tokarev
• tt0113999: North's War
• tt0114440: Siao Yu
• tt0115243: Lexx: The Dark Zone
• tt0117416: When the Stars Meet the Sea
• tt0121095: Devil Sorcery
• tt0121180: The Big Road
• tt0125279: Frozen
• tt0146971: Guyver: Out of Control
• tt0151687: My Native Place
• tt0160648: Paulo and His Brother
• tt0162011: Forget It, Nothing Happened
• tt0162362: Theo and His Friends
• tt0168937: A Flower Girl
• tt0185541: The New South Hand Blows, North Kick Blows
• tt0186536: Duel of the Deep
• tt0220390: Deutschland - Endstation Ost
• tt0256143: Last Ghost Standing
• tt0279160: Baap Bete
• tt0297441: Troublesome Night 11
• tt0311939: Yin yang lu 12: Mei rong shi
• tt0322816: Jalsarayudu
• tt0328570: Yin yang lu 15: Ke si hun lai
• tt0402438: The Great Music Caper
• tt0486064: Antique
• tt0858470: Seisai
• tt1267160: Cape No. 7
• tt1368989: Prometheus Triumphant: A Fugue in the Key of Flesh
• tt1407126: Xenius
• tt1891731: 69 - Praça da Luz
• tt1920996: The Star Maker
• tt2125480: Rokdim B'Yaffo
• tt2157045: Doom Box
• tt2162663: Gwangju neun buleunda
• tt2317744: My Friend Bernard
• tt2610240: In the Heart
• tt2616016: Lejos del mundo
• tt3004338: Crickets
• tt3140724: Hacker's Game Redux
• tt3286728: Neo Magazin Royale
• tt3376596: Love in Time
• tt3417422: Visuals
• tt3420118: Chunhyangjeon
• tt3456464: Hello Babies
• tt3473874: Killriculum Vitae
• tt3553126: Interlude City
• tt3586098: Expedición Gloriosa
• tt3660094: The Nerd's Confession
• tt3721840: Marie Brand und die letzte Kommune
• tt3741486: Neanderthal Brawl
• tt3743042: Lake Bodom
• tt4328186: East West
• tt4336672: Annihilation
• tt4457020: Jeremy
• tt4682804: Pale Blue Dot
• tt4707274: The Mongolian Conspiracy
• tt4819032: Joan the Pope
• tt4824256: Blackbear
• tt4876334: Midori: The Camellia Girl
• tt4955938: For Your Own Safety
• tt5450628: Naruto Shippûden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4
• tt5521090: Kirby: Planet Robobot
• tt5834760: Behind the Glass
• tt5923026: Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
• tt5954462: Lumière! L'aventure commence
• tt6032878: Deadly Devotion
• tt6048664: Caribe Mix
• tt6055504: Handjur
• tt6146586: John Wick 3
• tt6215910: Sister in Law
• tt6273996: Wednesday Blues
• tt6342440: Funan, le peuple nouveau
• tt6464490: La Montre
• tt6488870: East of Sweden
• tt6541110: Ballad from Tibet
• tt6638398: Her Forgotten Daughter
• tt6688022: Shotgun
• tt6740608: My Daughter's Kidnapping
• tt6864078: C4 ◄◄◄◄◄◄◄◄◄◄◄◄◄ Here's Peter's
  
• tt7077928: Matwetwe
• tt7081574: Cold Tango
• tt7128094: A Sonolenta
• tt7197558: Carlo & Malik
• tt7293302: Say the Word
• tt7319496: Out Stealing Horses
• tt7530986: Lady J
• tt7557686: A Wedding to Die For
• tt7654880: T'exagères!
• tt7660822: Call of the Congo
• tt7834022: A Focus to Kill
• tt7906260: Tooth Fairy
• tt7913394: Norm of the North 2
• tt7954000: Seduced by My Neighbor
• tt8028526: Boonie Bears: The Big Shrink
• tt8063174: Immortals
• tt8110330: Dil Bechara
• tt8192948: Kids
• tt8370368: 30
• tt8430898: Avec Thelma
• tt8489132: Fall Back
• tt8517780: Si no te hubiese conocido
• tt8546386: Big Mouth
• tt8639740: Club der roten Bänder - Der Film
• tt8703552: The Love Circus
• tt8784388: Mommy Group Murder
• tt8890080: Black Heart
• tt8951086: House of Hummingbird
• tt8976218: Prison on Fire: Preacher
• tt8976252: Prison on Fire: Life Sentence
• tt8997034: Little Germans
• tt9135722: You Shine in the Moonlit Night
• tt9176254: Band Vaaje
• tt9256788: Let's Spend the Night Together
• tt9351942: Neons
• tt9408490: Lai dian kuang xiang
• tt9476490: The Last Hangover
• tt9648078: The Relative Worlds
• tt9679080: Curbed

I could publish the complete listing of 4,665 titles if required.

Cheers!

Thanks ljdoncel, the problem here is more how we are handling the delete requests which cause problems in our systems, but can still be applied internally if handled correctly.

Regards,
Will

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Almost impossible to delete AKAs with "undefined" attributes.

After a title merge, AKAs from the old title are often added to the kept title with "undefined" info for Country/Language and Attribute. This looks confusing and the information is often duplicate of correctly added AKAs. These undefined AKAs are impossible to edit; trying gives the message: "Sorry, it's not possible to correct this item directly. You will have to delete it and add a new item instead." However, deleting them is hardly ever accepted by the data editors.

For example, I have tried many times to delete the two incorrect undefined AKAs at Pokémon Red with varying levels of detail in the explanation. The most recent rejection for Contribution #190329-002145-835000 gives the standard meaningless response of "We were unable to approve this contribution. We did not capture a specific reason during processing."

Why is it so difficult to do this? And shouldn't they just be added correctly (or not at all if they're duplicate) in the first place?

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the report, I've now taken a look and done a clean-up on that title. Apologies for your poor experience and lack of clear guidance on the reason. Our technical teams are aware of the issue, though we do have an internal workaround if handled correctly. I will update this thread once this is resolved.

Regards,
Will

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Unable to get an update approved, whch was requested by imdb.com system.

Previously this movie had 2 alternative titles, which "Country/Language" field blank. When I tried to udpate the "language" field, I get a message:

Sorry, it's not possible to correct this item directly.
You will have to delete it and add a new item instead. [do it]

When I try to do that => imdb staff accepted the update (e.g., entering the same 2 titles, this time with the "Country/Language" field completed), but while the "new entries" got approved, removing the same 2 entries (with "Country/Language" field missign) got rejected. Why? The instructions themselves said to remove and "re-add" these two entries. So I'm confused.

Thanks.

ID #190414-025849-430000 (rejected 1st time)
ID #190414-183617-749000 (rejected 2nd time)

ps. here are the screenshots:

Thsi is frustrating. How many times are IMDb staff going to reject such submissions?

For this movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3182620/ (referenced above) after being rejected twice before:

ID #190414-025849-430000 (rejected 1st time)
ID #190414-183617-749000 (rejected 2nd time)

I just got rejectd again, for the 3rd time, with reason given "Other. We were unable to approve this contribution.We did not capture a specific reason during processing."

ID #190504-004543-256000 (rejected 3rd time)

@Will could you please take a look at the submission and help approve #190504-004543-256000  ?


Thanks!

@Will Has there been any progress on this? Requests on this still keep getting rejected :/ Thanks in advance for any update

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled delete undefined country AKAs.

So many titles have an AKA with an "unidentified" country (and no attribute). These invalid AKAs cannot be deleted by a contributor. You've acknowledged over many years that this is an error, an artifact from an old system or something, and that they need to be deleted, yet here we are again and again complaining and nothing changes, no fixes, no removals.

Why not write a BOT that scans system-wide and in two steps: 1) deletes all occurrences of AKAs with no country set, for which AKA title already exists with the country code set, 2) for all other occurrences of AKAs with no country set, where the AKA title is not duplicated, scan the page for the country of origin and change the country of the invalid AKA to it.

Doing this manually by each contributor is obviously a waste of time since it never works. You have an editing anomaly. If you try to set the country on such an AKA you get an error that this can't be done. Why the heck not? Instead, it tells you, delete the invalid AKA, and create a new one with the country (this is kind of "duh" since it is *impossible* for a contributor to create an AKA without setting the country, only your broken system can (and does obviously) do that).

So you choose deletion of the bogus AKA and create a new correct one. Problem is, while the new AKA is created fine, the deletion of the invalid AKA without a country is always REJECTED by your editors! So the problem never gets fixed. I've tried resubmitting the deletion request with many different explanations including quoting the error messages that tell you it can't be changed and you MUST delete it, but every request is still denied. This appears to be a problem with training and informing your editors of this long-standing problem.

{Copied from merged thread}

Here's one. Can anyone delete this manually for me?

200316-054134-314000
200316-055258-005000
200316-224218-714000
200317-084152-038000

{Copied from merged thread. Note to moderators: When you merge a thread and block the original from new replies, please merge the whole thing not just the original post, so we all don't have to copy and repost all our replies in the new thread.}

Here are a couple more:

200319-223531-430000 That one's pretty simple: the AKA is already listed with a country, so this one is a duplicate with the country undefined.

200319-224749-147000 This one has two: one that's a duplicate (with undefined country) of an AKA that has the country defined. The other was one I tried to set the country and it said I had to delete and add – so I did that and the add was accepted immediately but not the delete. Now it's just another duplicate undefined that needs to be deleted.

Why merge a new thread into one last responded to 11 months ago? After that, piznajko posted some new problems, and got no response even after his repeated query 7 months ago. Warren, this thread is obviously dead, so why merge? Seems like an attempt to shove us off into oblivion where nobody will see us. The purpose of posting a NEW thread is to start up the conversation again, since the previous one has gone unanswered long ago.

This is especially noted with this particular topic, since the technical problem is one that has been going on for many many years and has never been fixed.

Here's another try of the 2 Undefined AKAs under one title that both need to be deleted. This is the same as 200319-224749-147000 in my previous post:

200320-034628-460000.

@piznajko: I tried submitting the same AKA delete request on Bitter Harvest tt3182620 that you did a while ago: to delete "Devil's Harvest" (undefined country) for the reason "country code undefined. manual correction not allowed. delete and will re-add."

My submission number 200320-030731-063000.

I noticed that the same AKA title was already listed but with a valid country (USA) and an attribute (working title), so the entry to be deleted is just an incomplete duplicate.

It was rejected as usual but for a very strange reason:

"Reason: Duplicate
We were unable to approve this contribution.
The item you have submitted is exactly the same as a submission that you have already entered, which is still pending review by our staff."

I only submitted this once. Maybe whoever or whatever declined it was confused in that the AKA itself was a duplicate, not my submission...