I kid you not:

How?

If they are using bots to screen profile updates, then anything mentioning IMDb should be automatically and immediately flagged to be assessed by humans who know the rules.

Well, it's possible that it was elevated to manual screening, but the screener just made a mistake.

Quoting Wigram:

Quote:
Was it a new profile? In my experience, provided the upc from the back cover and the profile id match, anything goes in the first approval. The rational is that the community hawks will correct it in later submissions.

I doubt that. You don't normally check the contribution notes when you download a profile. At least not unless something really stands out, like lots of uncredited cast. So the problem wouldn't be noted until someone contributes an update, which may take a long time (if ever). And in the meantime people could copy the incorrect cast and crew into other profiles. I find it hard to believe that Ken would have approved such an "anything goes" procedure.

I sometimes wonder if the ability to clone profiles to generate new profiles is more trouble than it's worth. If the first profile for a film is poor (which is quite frequently true, especially for older profiles), then the problems get duplicated again and again each time it's used and not checked - and I can understand why someone wouldn't check, as the source profile has already been approved, which gives a false sense of security.  If individuals haven't been connected to many films, it really messes up the Common Name process too.

I'm just finishing an update to a profile for a film that was originally populated by a clone from an existing profile, yet nearly all the crew and cast (and there're a lot) are wrong.  Most of the cast errors are with roles that don't match the onscreen credits or were just randomly missing; whilst the roles for crew are even more bizarre, such as a load of people listed as producers who aren't actually credited on-screen for anything, but on IMDb are credited as associate producers.  I think quite a few of the Common Names are probably wrong for many people as a result of the cloning too; all those accented letters!

I'd probably have been better starting from scratch using the awesome Cast & Crew Edit to get me to a decent starting point.  I all but gave up cloning profiles for new profiles when I realised how common this sort of thing is; it's just easier/quicker to do them from scratch, unless you can find an existing profile created/updated by someone you feel will have done an accurate job.

Okay, I've had my little bedtime rant now. 

I don't see them using bots. I do believe though that they have it set up so that a profile with no votes casts will get approved automatically. I have been seeing users submitting IMDb as their reference and have been voting them down.

I have also had a contribution declined becauce I mentioned IMDb as an invalid source. Since then I always use the less specific term ”a third party database” just to avoid this. Obviously not a new profile, though.