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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.
What would be the legal status of mirroring most of the tv.com content to the new wiki? Considering that the content on tvtome.com was submitted by people from all over the world, could a former tvtome editor place his own text (now part of tv.com) on the wiki? Or can we just outright copy everything over and get a major headstart, the info on tv.com comes (mostly) from tv network's websites/public communication.
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?
The TV IV stems from a forum on Something Awful so with all that goon power behind it I'm sure it will snowball shortly in to a quite concise database.
The cookery forum offshoot, GBS Food is doing wonderfully since it's conception!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
TV Tome didn't always have thousands of programs, hopefully tviv will start catching up quickly. This is a bit like what happened with CDDB and FreeDB. Sure CDDB was a much better source for a while, but FreeDB quickly caught on and is new a perfectly viable source of CD information.
And since both sites are free, your comment about getting what you pay for makes no sense whatsoever.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
TV.com is free to use, and you can edit most of the information as if it was a wiki. It's the advertising and interface that sucks...
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
The MythVideo plugin for MythTV has an integrated search of IMDB to look up information on movies. It'd be great if TV IV could provide easy to parse episode guide information for third party apps like MythVideo.
I'm wondering if we're going to get coverage of non-US TV shows (TV Tome used to do so and tv.com doesn't seem to [or if it does, it's barely any])? For example, on the home page of the Wiki it says "Catch every episode of the longest-running sci-fi show on television on Sci-Fi". Nope, we're not talking about Doctor Who (which is the world record holder), but apparently Stargate SG-1!
I used TVTome to regularly is was downright painfull when TV.com bought them out. Things that used to take three or four clicks were taking thirty clicks. Especially annoying is that their listings are alphabetic and paginated. So if you eant to find say, "lost" you have to page through a ton of pages to find it. Not to mention the cooler TVTome consent is gone - Bloopers and highlights.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Seriously, could they have at least considered dual-licensing with the GFDL, so text could be borrowed from Wikipedia and vice-versa? This is a seriously counter-productive move considering that Wikipedia already has a wealth of information on television shows (see their pages on South Park for an excellent example).
The Terms and Conditions states that you grant CNET Networks a licence to use your information any way they see fit, but the licence is nonexclusive. Therefore, the users who contributed the information at TVTome (or TV.com) could add that information to the TVIV Wiki too. However, proving who was the copyright holder of a paragraph, which was originally written by one person, then modified by, say three others, would probably make this too complicated to work on a large scale.
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
If your just looking for episode listings and the episode names, http://www.epguides.com/ is pretty good. No flash ads or anything. It also links straight to the TV.com page when you click on the episode link. So that option is still available.
Rock is Dead! Long live Paper and Scissors!!
TV.com is going to fall, they don't provide proper functionality. I miss my great list new shows on tonight. Without that function (which wikis do a sorry job at automatically creating) I don't see any sight holding my interest.
TV.com has a what's on tonight thing, but it doesn't tell what is new and what's just on.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
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.
"TV.com is free to use, and you can edit most of the information as if it was a wiki."
Not entirely true. All editing has to be approved by moderators who seem to reject everything. I've submitted numerous things to correct articles that are poorly written and/or just plain wrong, and they've all been rejected.
TVIV might be a good short term solution, but I'm assuming that eventually the IMDB will redesign their television programming layout and as a result make TVIV obsolete. Most of the info is already in their database (episode lists, writers & directors of individual episodes, airdates, etc.), they just have to implement it in a more accessible way, for example give each individual episode it's own page so that they can be summarized, reviewed, rated, etc. -- something more akin to the old tvtome design. I don't know for a fact that they're going to redesign it, but they already have an IMDB TV section among their links so I have to believe that this is probably on their radar.
There is a forum called "The TV IV" on the Something Awful forums. (It's "IV" as in "intravenous", i.e. getting our TV "fix".) This is where the idea to create this was born. We initially were thinking of a site to store info on the shows we like, but then we decided that if we invited others, we might be able to build something really good.
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.
If I want to know about Desperate Housewives, I'll go to Get Desperate. For Lost, I visit Lost Media; for Family Guy, the Family Guy Files, and for CSI, CSI Files. I even still visit Crashdown, a Roswell fan site, even though that show was cancelled YEARS ago. Most of these sites are updated several times a day -- TV.com can never compete against that.
What I would really like would be an index to the best show-specific fan sites on the internet, for every single show that's out there. TV.com should just switch to that!
Well.. people have written bots to put pages on wikipedia (one for all the cities in america etc.)
Why shouldn't you be able to do something like that on tviv?
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.
No, the Mozilla Browser is now the Mozilla browser, and Firefox is now Firefox (and not Firebird or Phoenix). Meanwhile, Internet Explorer is "The Internet". I hope this clears things up for you.