Why use omdb instead of an other movie database?
Most other projects are commercial. This means you work for free for a company and this company makes money with your work. If the company is broke, everything is gone, and if it decides to hide the website behind a paywall, you have to pay to get the content you added there yourself.
But my favorite movie website is completely free!
Take a closer look at their terms and condiditions. Mostly you get only the right to use the content (YOUR content) for private and non-commercial use, while the company itself uses it commercially and can also sell it. Some sites even demand an exclusive right to use the content you gave them for free. This means you can be prosecuted if you put your own movie article or actor’s biography onto your own blog after you added it to the company’s website.
Can’t this also happen with omdb?
No, the content you add to omdb is put under a free Creative Commons license, like it is at Wikipedia. This can’t be revoked and omdb can’t change it to a commercial license.
Why then not just use Wikipedia?
Have you ever read a Wikipedia article about a movie “too far”? There are often spoilers without any warning. At omdb you can simply put an exclamation mark in front of a paragraph with a spoiler and it will become invisible unless a user clicks on it. Also Wikipedia is not a relational database: It does not have a fixed format and if you want to add an actor to a movie, you have to add the actor to the movie’s page and the movie to the actor’s filmography. Plus, you can’t vote for movies, put them on your watchlist, and so on.
Where can I start to contribute?
If you have created an account, just look at the pages of your favorite movies/actors/directors to see if there is any content you can add. If you have watched a movie or an episode where a description at omdb is missing, simply write at least a short abstract in one or two sentences for the beginning. This is usually the easiest if the memory is fresh. This way omdb has become ever larger and more comprehensive since its start in 2007.
To get started, see also the editing hints. If you have questions, feel free to post at our forum.