Visible edit history

Emperor, this is a great idea! I planned to submit a similar idea. However, you have articulated the case better than I would have.

A major strength of Wikipedia is that edit histories are public. This allows readers, editors and administrators the ability to verify and validate the content of an article.

I have had concerns over the years about the credibility of cast and crew lists for films and other media. I’ve observed a number cases of what appears to be capricious changes.

The IMDb has already set precedence for edit histories for FAQs and Parents Guide for titles. An example of these is those for The Shawshank Redemption (1994).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111161/faq
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111161/p...

Although a full Wikipedia-like delta history is probably not practical, including the history of changes would be. There is the additional complication that many updates not only affect title pages, but also name pages.

Thinking about it, from their comments, it appears staff might already have the ability to see the edit history, so it might just be a matter of letting logged in users see it too.

Although a full Wikipedia-like delta history is probably not practical, including the history of changes would be.

Yes a complete system to see the changes won't be needed, especially as IMDB deals with additions to individual database fields, so we don't need to see the exact differences, it is easy enough to show the name of the field and what data was added, that'd be enough for the issues here.

It may also be that IMDB don't want vast quantities of submissions data blocking up their servers, so they could purge data that is, say 2 years old (perhaps keeping the initial submission record for reference purposes), as this would be enough for a check for dickery, but they probably already have a system for this (I haven't checked if they keep all the submissions I've sent in).

You could also provide a link to someone's submissions from their profile, which would be a good way to demonstrate everyone's good work even if they never trouble the Top 250 contributors charts (I clearly have a dog in that fight ;) ).

It appears that IMDb has not deleted any of my paltry 117 submissions.

As a point of reference, IMDb has retained one of my submissions from 2004-07-04 13:05:36. For your amusement:
http://www.imdb.com/updates/update?lo...

Thanks for that, I was meaning to check mine (although I think your first contribution was earlier than mine, so this is more useful anyway) but that does demonstrate that the information is all there, so the only change would be to make it visible to logged in users so they can check the edit history.

It just occurred to me that if IMDb were to make the update history of pages available, they would have to be careful not to include personal information, such as birth certificates, that could potentially be used for identity theft.