TV

The Venture Bros.: first...

2008-07-22T04:00:43.0012Z

of all. I love this show.

Number Eight: Nice

2008-07-20T12:05:32.0012Z

She is really nice actress!!

Shameless Episode 1.3: Description refusing to stick here too.

2008-07-08T00:48:35.0006Z

I cannot successfully edit the article either, but seems to be just this episode topic...Created a bug report, but it will be a little while to fix this as it will be of a lower priority for the next week or so.

Shameless Episode 1.3: Description refusing to stick here too.

2008-07-07T22:36:57.0000Z

Oh; and it's only TV Episodes I've noticed this problem on.

Shameless Episode 1.3: Description refusing to stick here too.

2008-07-07T22:36:15.0001Z

Firefox 2.0.0.15 on OS X 10.4.11.

TV Episode: Dubbers

2008-07-07T22:27:21.0013Z

Use the "special performance type" column in the "Performances" property on TV Episode. You should be able to select "Voice" for these types of performances.

Shameless Episode 1.3: Description refusing to stick here too.

2008-07-07T22:25:28.0044Z

Sounds like you may have found a bug. Can you tell us what browser and OS you're using?

TV Episode: Dubbers

2008-07-06T04:31:18.0013Z

How should I model a specific person who voices a specific other person in a specific TV episode? e.g. Kent Frick voicing Chairman Kaga in the Iron Chef blue crab battle?

Shameless Episode 1.3: Description refusing to stick here too.

2008-07-05T20:25:48.0012Z

"The first episode of the first season of Channel 4 drama Shameless. Kev accidentally proposes to Veronica, and although he soon admits he's still legally married to Roxy, they decide to go ahead with a fake ceremony anyway in order to claim a small inheritance from Veronica's father."

Shameless Episode 1.2: My description is refusing to stick!

2008-07-05T20:20:09.0012Z

I've tried at least three times to add a description to this topic, but it isn't showing up. Pasted here in case it needs to be re-added...

"The first episode of the first season of Channel 4 drama Shameless. Frank makes an unexpected trip to France, and is rescued by Steve, Kev, and Veronica; he then moves in with Sheila following a row with Fiona."

TV: TV filming location

2008-07-02T18:39:23.0012Z

I think we should have a type, "TV filming location", for things like "Survivor: Vanuatu" which was filmed in Vanuatu. Thoughts?

Pierce Brosnan: This is the actor

2008-07-02T07:45:14.0012Z

The tracks are on the soundtrack to Evelyn, a movie in which he appeared. I suppose it’s possible a different musician with the same name was on the soundtrack, but it seems unlikely.

Aliza Vellani: A Future Bond Girl...?

2008-07-02T02:41:29.0005Z

Aliza Vellani is the 15 year-old, Canadian television actor, who currently plays the role of Layla Siddiqui in the very popular TV sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie. Born in Vancouver to Ismaili immigrants from East Africa, Miss Vellani is a high school student who has trained extensively in both acting and dancing, including with the Vancouver drama school Tarlington Training. Playing the part of Layla in Little Mosque is her first professional role.

Miss Vellani is an excellent actor, with beauty and intelligence which may already exceed her skill as a performer. Not for long though, in my opinion, due to the obvious potential she displays during her ever growing parts, in the very popular hit TV series. Her naturally exotic appearance, well groomed hair and the skills being polished on the set of Little Mosque all but guarantee her a prosperous career in the motion picture industry.

I expect that she'll be invited, if not begged to play parts in upcoming Hollywood projects, as well as more Canadian endeavors. I hope she doesn't begin to feel trapped in a conservative stereotype that tempts her to cheapen herself by appearing, scantily clad, on shows which would exploit her already blooming sex appeal. It's hard to maintain admiration for women who do this. It's probably just as hard for women in that industry to turn down offers to expose themselves.

I've been unable to find much information regarding Aliza, and even less in the way of images. I look forward to further links and commentary from others who've become fond of this future star. There is plenty of information on and imagery of Sitara Hewitt, the actress who plays one of the main characters on Little Mosque, and has already succumbed to the temptation to expose herself... But there's very little on Aliza Vellani. I'd like to invite others to offer thoughts and opinions.

TV: Suggested changes to TV character

2008-06-19T19:16:52.0012Z

tough one... my inclination would be to lead with the regular appearances, however, so it looks good to me.

TV: Suggested changes to TV character

2008-06-19T17:09:03.0012Z

Good idea. Take a look now. It looks to me like it's only defaulting to the first property, which is now "Programs in which character appeared as a regular" (or something like that). Is this the best property, or would "Episodes appeared in" be better? I mention this because only some characters will have data for the "Programs" property, while all characters could have data for Episodes.

TV: Suggested changes to TV character

2008-06-19T16:16:31.0012Z

What would you guys say to moving actor and series up ahead of year of 1st and final appearance? The filter page defaults to the first 3 properties and these make for much more interesting filter criteria.

Writer: Types of writers

2008-06-17T00:53:17.0007Z

I guess a "genres written" property on the Author type could be useful for some users but is maybe more appropriate on a less general author type. For example, do scholarly articles have a genre other than scholarly article? If not, why do all users entering data into the Author type need to consider "genres written" add possibly add redundant/inconsistent data? Similar to subject, it seems to me like this information would be best pulled from written work or a special case co-type of written work rather than the author.

Writer: Types of writers

2008-06-16T23:50:49.0007Z

I think that regardless of whether there's a property on "author" for "genres" (I'm tending to agree that "subjects" is going to be less useful), people may still fill in "profession" with values like "spy fiction writer", and they should be allowed to do so (not that anybody could prevent them if they wanted to). So the question for me is not "should a 'genres' property on the Author type replace this use of the 'profession' property", which I think is what the original post suggests, but "is a 'genres' property on the Author type useful in and of itself?"

Writer: Types of writers

2008-06-16T18:57:45.0007Z

IMO "Spy fiction writer" depends on the definition employed by the user. Why should that defintion be set by a schema, unless a particular user or group of users has a specific need? In that case, a spy_fiction_writer schema sounds appropriate to me.

I agree about the two properties: subject and genre. One is about content the other is about style.

"Subjects written about" should probably be pulled from the written works, not the writer.

Writer: Types of writers

2008-06-16T18:41:14.0007Z

This sounds like two properties to me -- one for subject, and one for genre. I.e., John le Carre doesn't particularly write about spy fiction (he has, but only in short subjects) so much as he writes in the genre of spy fiction. Someone who's published books about, say, Cold War thrillers or the James Bond franchise, however, could be said to write about spy fiction. The question I have is: how valuable is this proposed property? It would be something of a denormalization of the genre/subject properties of the author's written works. I.e., there would be two ways to get a list of "spy fiction writers" -- from the proposed "genres" property on the Author type, and from the "genre" property on every work the author has written (and probably from the professions property as well, since somebody apparently thinks that's a useful way to describe this information as well). All of these would probably generate different results.

But then, I could see an argument that someone who's only written one spy novel, but a bunch of novels in other genres, wouldn't necessarily be considered a "spy fiction writer", any more than someone might consider Margaret Atwood to be a children's author, even though she's published at least one children's book.

Just throwing a bunch of thoughts out there, and seeing if anything sticks....

Writer: Types of writers

2008-06-15T06:30:46.0007Z

agree

TV Program: TV Program: add 'tagline'?

2008-05-17T01:14:21.0026Z

Seems a lot of tv programs from the past decade or so have taglines (similar to Film's longstanding taglines).

Examples I found from IMDb trolling:

Nip/Tuck:

The deeply superficial series returns.

Beauty is a curse on the world.

Make me beautiful.

Truth is only skin deep

A disturbingly perfect new drama.

Beauty isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Tell me what you don't like about yourself...?

Change what you can. Hide what you can't.

Six Feet Under:

Every Day Above Ground Is A Good One.

Life is wasted on the living.

How's Death?

Your whole life is leading up to this...

Everything. Everyone. Everywhere. Ends.

Moonlight: Moonlight episode list

2008-05-06T19:42:20.0007Z

Igor - we sync with wikipedia data on a regular basis, so you don't need to create Freebase topics for articles in WP -- they will get here soon if they are not already here. For example, the first episode, "No Such Thing as Vampires" is already in Freebase, and "Out of the Past" will be added the next time we load WP data.

Everything is a topic in Freebase - a TV program, a season, an episode. If it's not there, just create one and add the appropriate type which brings appropriate properties to fill out. Because Freebase data is structured, you can easily run queries to create lists that organize data by anyway: you can ask for all episodes in a show, all episodes in a season, episodes with a particular actor or director, etc. The flexibility eliminates the need for static lists.

I've created a Season topic for you, and added the Moonlight pilot episode. The next step is to create a topic for each episode not in WP. (If there would be a second season -- too bad insiders think this show may be canceled -- you'd create a new topic for it.) Post back if you have any questions.

Moonlight: Moonlight episode list

2008-05-06T16:51:17.0007Z

The best way to add episodes for Moonlight is to create a separate topic for each one (if they don't exist already) using the "tv episode" type, and connect them to Moonlight via the property "episodes". If you want, you can also create topics for seasons of Moonlight, and link the episodes to the seasons, as well.

Moonlight: Moonlight episode list

2008-05-06T06:38:44.0016Z

Hi there,

I've started this topic, because I've been watching Moonlight yesterday. Before I started, I actually had to look something up, because I wasn't sure about what the last episode was that I watched. There are different ways to look up this kind of information, but I use most of the time Wikipedia and sometimes IMDb.

Here is an example for the episode list on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Moonlight_episodes

I'm not sure about the assembly of freebase articles, but there is no good way to start such an episode list in the main Moonlight article. Should I start a new article for an episode list? Maybe one article for each episode? Is there a way to consolidate those articles?

Firefly: Split into TV show and Fictional Universe

2008-04-27T08:18:26.0012Z

The fictional universe "firefly" is not the same as the tv program

Trey Parker: Use of the alias field

2008-04-25T21:58:47.0007Z

This shouldn’t happen again. Thanks for noticing it.

Trey Parker: Use of the alias field

2008-04-25T06:01:48.0007Z

When MusicBrainz tells that X is also known as Y, we don’t necessarily know that Y is a fictional character played by X, as opposed to just a stage name.

It’s definitely a bug that the bot is re-adding aliases previously deleted, though. Sorry about that, and thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Trey Parker: Use of the alias field

2008-04-25T01:27:43.0000Z

It looks like your MusicBrainz bot is still adding improper aliases. Will this be fixed?

Trey Parker: Use of the alias field

2008-04-16T20:48:53.0007Z

You are correct - names of the characters that an actor portrays should not be aliases of that person. This is an artifact of some psuedonym refactoring that was done on musical tracks. In general, if you see another topic like this, feel free to delete the pseudonyms.

Thanks for pointing this out.

TV Actor: Voice Acting?

2008-04-16T20:43:39.0000Z

Voice actors are tv actors - in their tv performances, you can specify that they are the voice for a character.

There is a distinction between tv and film actor, but they are similar in the sense that for both the tv and film performance, you can specify a special performance type of voice.

Trey Parker: Use of the alias field

2008-04-16T18:56:40.0005Z

Should aliases really be used to include roles played by an actor? It seems very inappropriate to me.

TV Actor: Voice Acting?

2008-04-16T18:53:26.0012Z

Does TV Actor include voice acting for animated series? Or should there be a separate type for that? Voice Actor appears to be a separate profession from TV Actor. Also, should there be a distinction between voice acting for TV vs film?

TV Program: Regular performances, but which episodes?

2008-04-14T19:56:47.0007Z

The next question is (having capitulated to adding seasons to the regular acting performance), do we still need the "to" and "from" dates? Arguably, no, since the seasons should tell us that. But sometimes we only have that data (e.g., from wikipedia infobox loades).

TV Program: Regular performances, but which episodes?

2008-04-14T18:51:10.0007Z

Right, but if you use the Performance for a regular actor, the data gets quite dense very quickly. It seemed like Performances was for additional actors beyond the regulars. There’s also an important distinction; sometimes a frequent guest star becomes a regular character, and sometimes a regular character returns for a guest appearance.

In fact, here’s a crazy idea… What if the Regular Performance CVT had additional disambiguators for seasons and episodes?

TV Program: Regular performances, but which episodes?

2008-04-14T18:22:07.0007Z

Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, crism? TV episode has properties "performances" and "personal appearances" which are for all people who appear on the episode, regular, guest, or otherwise.

TV Season: Season credits?

2008-04-14T18:16:22.0007Z

Oddly enough, we used to do this, but people complained about the complexity! It would be easy enough to put back in though, if people want it.

TV Regular Performance: Regular performances, but which episodes?

2008-04-12T08:34:47.0012Z

I think it makes sense to have the regular performances property. However, there is no way to indicate in which episodes a regularly-credited actor appeared, and it is silly to mark them as a guest actor.

What if the regular appearance (and I have copied this comment from TV series) had an additional disambiguator pointing to the episodes in which the actor actually appeared?

TV Program: Regular performances, but which episodes?

2008-04-12T08:33:23.0012Z

What if the regular appearance (and I think I will copy this comment there) had an additional disambiguator pointing to the episodes in which the actor actually appeared?

TV Season: Season credits?

2008-04-12T07:48:59.0012Z

Currently, an actor can be a series regular or an episode actor, but there is no way to model season credits. Long-running shows, and even some shorter-lived ones, change their main cast each season, and it is interesting to model.

TV: TV Series "seasons" and other naming

2008-04-07T20:41:55.0007Z

Thanks -- that's a very interesting document. I like that they've modeled it as deeply as "episode versions". I doubt Freebase is likely to go that deep any time soon, but it's a useful concept in a lot of ways.

Superficially, it looks like the brand/series/episode model is very similar to our series/season/episode model, which is encouraging, and means that it should be fairly simple to create mappings between Freebase and applications using the Programmes Ontology.

TV: TV Series "seasons" and other naming

2008-04-03T21:59:15.0000Z

Only a year late... here's the BBC Programmes Ontology, built by Yves Raimond based on the BBC's internal data model:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/programmes/2008-02-28.shtml

You may also be interested in our programmes database, containing all programmes broadcast from about August 2007 onwards: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/

The idea is to release a machine-readable version of the /programmes site, marked up with the Programmes Ontology, some time soon.

TV Actor: IMDB link for TV actor?

2008-03-10T17:49:25.0007Z

Hi psych0fred,

This was also brought up in another discussion here. Hopefully with property borrowing, we can solve the problem you and duck1123 are describing.

TV episode performance: Bring back the Series display

2008-03-10T17:46:27.0007Z

I am in agreement with you - it is nice to know the episode/program information about a character that a tv actor played. However, entering the series information the type /tv/tv_guest_role would be a denormalizaton and would not link the series with the tv episode. It would require double data entry to populate the type /tv/tv_series_episode with the same information. A possible solution might be "property borrowing" - something that robert mentions in this discussion. This is something that we're trying to work on and hopefully we'll have support for it shortly.

TV episode performance: Bring back the Series display

2008-03-09T05:09:55.0012Z

With the new design of the site, it would be very helpful to have the series that the episode is associated with displayed on the actor's page.

TV Actor: IMDB link for TV actor?

2008-03-07T08:40:42.0000Z

I have a simple problem I can't figure out how to resolve. If an actor has a guest appearance on a TV show I can see it show up under the TV Actor schema but it doesn't correspond to the tv program/show that is also part of the schema. The example I am looking at is actor Tom Noonan who had a guest role in an episode of The X-Files called Paper Hearts. The episode title Paper Hearts shows up but it doesn't list what show it was from (unless you click on Paper Hearts). The way it's displayed in the scheme it appears that the TV show he starred in is also the TV show that he made a guest appearance on. Is it set up right? I figured you could see all of an actors appearances as part of their data set.

TV: Animated show?

2007-12-31T18:00:12.0007Z

The "other crew" property on "TV episode" is intended to be used for this sort of thing (i.e., any creative or production role that isn't addressed by any of the other properties).

TV: Animated show?

2007-12-29T20:35:52.0005Z

I don't know if this belongs in its own domain, belongs in Media Common, or if Animated shows are just part of TV, but it would be nice to be able to enter other roles, like "Animated by" to TV shows.. my favorite is the fact that No Doubt's original drummer, Eric Stefani, went on to be a Simpsons animator.... but there's no way to represent this in freebase right now. There are other examples of famous animators like Mel Blanc that would be nice to connect to their TV work. There are over 150 people designated as "Animators" according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animators

TV Season: Season Number

2007-12-13T00:20:43.0007Z

I added the property. Feel free to plug away at it!

TV Season: Season Number

2007-12-12T23:28:00.0000Z

That's not a bad idea. I think we had been thinking that this information could be caluculated based on the "from" and "to" dates on the season, but it's a lot easier to figure out the season numbers than it is the airdates of the first and last episodes.