Undefined aka titles

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  • Updated 4 months ago
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Sometimes when a title is corrected the former title becomes an alternate title with an undefined country and attribute. When you try to correct one the form says to delete it and add a new item. However, the deletions are not being processed.

Example:
190331-165545-981000

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Peter, Champion

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Posted 4 months ago

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4 months ago
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Joel, Employee

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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 
2019-04-07T16:45:29+00:00
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Peter, Champion

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Some other deletions that were not done (entries with attributes had already been added):

#190321-195917-299000
#181209-150631-913000
#181107-082106-800000
#181005-194352-588000
2019-04-08T10:07:57+00:00
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Will, Official Rep

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Thanks Peter, I've fixed these for you now and taken further internal action to make sure you don't encounter this problem again.

Regards,
Will
2019-04-09T06:35:33+00:00
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Peter, Champion

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The first one I posted about (190331-165545-981000) is still there.
2019-04-09T08:28:32+00:00
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Will, Official Rep

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Apologies Peter, I thought that one had already been actioned, I've removed it now.

Regards,
Will
4 months ago
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ljdoncel, Champion

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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.
4 months ago
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ljdoncel, Champion

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Here's the list:
I could publish the complete listing of 4,665 titles if required.

Cheers!
4 months ago
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Will, Official Rep

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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
2019-04-08T10:27:07+00:00
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ljdoncel, Champion

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Thank you very much for the clarification, Will.
4 months ago
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Matt

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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?
2019-04-12T09:41:32+00:00
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Peter, Champion

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I also agree with the last question: Why add such incomplete entries in the first place?
2019-04-12T10:03:52+00:00
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Will, Official Rep

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The entries exist due to a number of reasons - title merges, internal edits, historical items, but still if you are submitting a delete on that item, they should be actioned nonetheless. 
4 months ago
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Will, Official Rep

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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
(Edited)
4 months ago
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piznajko

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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:






4 months ago
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piznajko

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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!

(Edited)
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