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A New Replacement for TV Tome
Randall311 writes to tell us about, what the creators hope will be, a new replacement for the old TV Tome website, the TV IV Wiki. The once popular TV Tome website was absorbed by CNET in April of this year and most of the content was added to their TV.com website. Many users dislike the new format with vast amounts of flash, obnoxious ads, and missing content. So, if you liked the old TV Tome website perhaps this will allow the community to rebuild what it has lost.
There are only 116 programs listed in the tviv database. Contrast this with 3500 programs in the TV Tome website.
The only appeal that this may have is that it is a wiki so users can update as they see fit. Unfortunately, most of the time, you get what you pay for.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
This seems as though it would be an absolute haven for trolls looking to provide "unsolicited" spoilers. Have the individuals responsible for the TV IV Wiki taken any precautions against this?
Do you like German cars?
It's a wiki. It's what you make it.
Here's a tip, don't register a .info name unless you also own the .com
Does the name even mean anything?
"TvTome" was at least catchy!
Every season since season 6 (maybe even season 5, but I'm not sure on that) has been the last season. It'll most likely be renewed, but until then, it's the "last season".
They don't have to look the same, but you are correct anyway, because most of the wikis popping up are just out of the box mediawiki installs. There's nothing stopping the guy from whipping up a new theme at a later stage.
Remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger of a sniper rifle.
The Wikipedia and a TV Wiki serve two different purposes. Wikipedia is for general purpose information with some degree of detail. The TV Wiki is for all the gory details as related specifically to television.
Using the first replier's example, in the Wikipedia, there is a lot of information about stuff like the cultural phenomenon of Star Trek, its history and background, etc.
In the TV Wiki, the entry is currently kind of skimpy and needs editing for now, but I would expect it to have detailed information about the series specifically as it relates to television, such as episode airdates, where and when it was on the schedule, the actors, production crew, writers, guest stars, set locations, and so on.
At least, that's what I would have in mind. I don't see the TV wiki as a "split" of Wikipedia; I see it as a separate special-purpose wiki. Some of the information will necessarily be the same, but it serves different purposes.
I'm one of the site admins, and I wouldn't say the license is set in stone. We would welcome any discussions like this that may improve the site.
For me the real question is what form of licensing they are using? Ive written some code that parses TV.com, IMDB and a few others to extract episode information and combined this with newzbin and a modified version of torrentocracy so that I have a MythTV based NZBTV channel (well several actually - drama, sci-fi , films etc) WITH episode information (it works quite nicely and will be even better when I integrate a search into it *grin*)
:(
Id LOVE to make the service and plugin available to others however most services attach nasty copyright resrictions to their content and episode guides so I couldnt embed the info in an RSS feed
So heres hoping TVIV has a nice OS/GNU license...
By 2000, tv viewing was down 27% in homes with a fucking DIAL-UP connection.
My dogs watch more TV than me.
I have watched a total of 2 hours of tv this summer (and that was a dvd). Better to get out of the house and visit friends and family, etc., than to waste time watching advertising and not-funny "comedies."
Heck, even slashdot is better than the average TV fare.
Overlooking the lack of content the site has Fancy Widget Syndrome. Apparently TV.com thinks people are far, far more interested in the average viewer rating for a show/season of that show/episode than anything else about it. The rating bars are all graphical and fucking huge! The also seem to think that everyone wants lots of fancy, flashy graphics and widgets on every page. All of this makes it difficult to get the information you actually came there for, unless you visit to look at flashy graphics and viewer ratings. You also can no longer pull up a complete episode listing on one page. At best you can get one season at a time per page. With all the fancy widgets/graphics/flash/crap on the pages now it takes a good 10 times as long just to view the entire episode listing of a series.
I gave the site a chance when the transition occurred but the number of things they did wrong far outnumbered they things they did right (not hard seeing as I haven't noticed anything they did right to be frank) and I refuse to go back to it. Frankly I wouldn't mind seeing the venture fail and cost CNet a lot of money in the process. CNet took the absolute best TV resource out there and utterly destroyed it.
Also as another person noted, TVTome had a nice light, unobtrusive interface with very few graphics. Pages loaded nice and quickly, you could view entire episode lists on one page, etc. All of that's long gone now and the new site suffers tremendously for it.
I think that William Shatner's classic "Saturday Night Live" skit is more of what you're looking for.
... Get a life! Would you, people? It's just a TV show! {points to geek with Spock ears} You! Have you even kissed a girl? {geek slowly lowers head} I didn't think so!"
:P
{Shatner at podium at a "Star Trek" convention}
"Before I continue I just want to say
Even at that, you're still a pompous coward for posting AC.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Let's take 24 for instance, that show started in 2001 (old enough for you?).
/does not know/! What;s more, I found that half the links in the Buffy articles linked to Charmed. WTF?
No. Find a review of Blake's 7 episode 3.
Now, tell me which episodes of Dr. Who have been lost in entirity, and also list which Hartnell episodes are only partly available.
Both of these things wre dead easy on TV tome and cannot be done on TV.com.
What if I want to check continuity between episodes of Thundercats? Show me that on tv.com.
Now, qyuickly! You will be timed: What was the significant event in Buffy season 6 episode 12?! Go go go! With tvtome I could have looked this up (given my broadband) in under 60 seconds. TV.com
I want my Cowboyneal
> Let's take 24 for instance, that show started in 2001 (old enough for you?).
*24* is your example of an "old" show? If you're a 10-year-old, sure that's an "old" show--but it's so "new" from an objective standpoint that it's still a TV current event and not TV history.
What was special about TV Tome is that it covered the shows of two decades ago as thoroughly as those of two seasons ago. You could ask yourself "Hmm, what was that early 90's show about a college campus, where the first episode had snow everywhere and one of the professors sleeping with a student?" And then you could find the answer [1993's one-season-wonder *Class of '96*] on TV Tome, with synopses of the episodes you remember and a forum where you might even run across someone with tapes to share.
It was a huge resource composed by TV lovers for TV lovers, and its loss is painful.
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson