When I'm watching a movie or TV show and can't for the life of me identify a familiar face onscreen, I immediately look it up on IMDb.com. What a relief to so easily learn not only the actor's name, but also the roles I saw him previously, and maybe even his age. I never really thought about where all that information came from, though. I just assumed it was added by a studio or mechanically scraped from somewhere else—where? Who knows!—on the web. So when Stephen Lurie told me about a group of largely anonymous contributors who are responsible for so many of the updates on IMDb, I was intrigued. These are otherwise regular people who have volunteered sometimes years of their lives to watch movies, research film professionals, and collectively make tens of millions of edits to the database. Some are motivated by a love of cinema, others by a completionist impulse or the desire to see their country's entertainment industry appropriately represented. And their work is never done. It's a weird little miracle of the internet, and the kind of collaborative information-gathering project that makes me thankful the web exists, and hopeful for its future. —Caitlin Kelly | Features Editor |
[New post] Super Mario Bros. Movie runtime is 92 minutes
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