I watch a lot of off beat movies and like to do the occasional review for one of the small forums I’m on. A lot of the stuff isn’t especially obscure inasmuch as I get it off of cable, but I’ve found a couple instances where there was no entry on IMDB, which I thought was odd, so I use wiki.
Normally I use IMDB but that’s really out of a sense of conformity since I assume that’s what everybody does. I don’t have a preference. I just want to give anyone reading my post a quick way to get more information if they’re interested.
I don’t go the the movies often, and when I want to know about a movie, I would prefer to have as complete a plot summary as I can get. Yes, that means I DO want spoilers.
I find that I’m more likely to be able to get a complete rundown on the plot from wikipedia than from imdb.
> In the words of Darkman, you gotta be shittin’ me. Setting aside vague
> handwaving about notability, which mostly invoked to keep every two-bit
> software creator from inserting a page for himself, WP is absolutely loaded with
> trivial topics.
You’re defining “minor topics” very loosely. I think that there are vast numbers of minor things that Wikipedia doesn’t discuss at all. Look, for instance, at the Wikipedia and IMDb entries for Casablanca:
The IMDb lists three times as many actors in this film as Wikipedia does, and that’s despite the fact that this is one of the most thorough of Wikipedia’s entries on a movie. The IMDb lists every single person who worked on the film crew. Wikipedia lists the director, the producers, the writers, and the cinematographer. The difference is much clearer with modern films with huge crews that get almost no mention in Wikipedia but are completely catalogued in the IMDb. The IMDb lists a number of foreign language titles for the film, which Wikipedia doesn’t (and there are other movies where IMDb lists much more foreign language titles). The IMDb lists the day the film opened in many different countries (and the day of some re-releases), while Wikipedia only lists the premiere and the general release date in the U.S. The IMDb lists which sound stages on the Warner Brothers lot the filming was done in and all the other locations, while Wikipedia only mentions that it was shot in the Warner Brothers lot and some other locations. The IMDB lists dozens of movies with obvious references to Casablanca, while Wikipedia only lists a few. Wikipedia only gives a few quotations from reviews, while the IMDb gives links to a couple hundred of them. The IMDb gives many more quotations from the film.
One of us is confusing topics with entries. I don’t care to refer to items within an entry as “topics” whether it’s a technically correct term or not.
Certainly most WP entries stop short of the content that might be found in a more specialized reference, although I note that physical and chem entries tend to include the most microscopic points while a fairly arbitrary line is maintained in cultural entries.
I disagree. For essentially every topic that I know a lot about, I could sit down and greatly expand the Wikipedia entry with a couple of hours or at most a long day of work. Such information would be useless to most people, just as the names of the extras, the minor crew members, the exact shooting locations, the foreign language titles, the general release date and the date of the showings at the film festivals where it appeared, every interesting quotation from the film, large numbers of reviews that the film got, the weekly gross in the U.S. (and sometimes other countries), and the technical specifications of the film stock and cameras aren’t useful to most people, but they are there on IMDb just in case anyone ever has to look them up.