Wikipedia talk:Citing IMDb

The "Inappropriate uses" section reads: 1. Any potentially contentious material about living persons (BLPs). Could you please clarify whether using IMDb to support a BLP date of birth is okay or inappropriate? Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources#IMDb doesn't mention DOB, either. I've also read WP:BLPPRIMARY.

Context: I added a "citation needed" tag to a draft and the draft creator provided a link to IMDb and referred me to IMDb Biographical data guidelines which claims that some sort of proof (official document, social media link or LinkedIn link) is necessary.

Many thanks, Esowteric + Talk + Breadcrumbs 11:49, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

IMDB is WP:SELFPUB. I find it good for looking up stats about an actor, such as what films they've been in and how many appearances in a TV show and if they had a named role. But information in articles shouldn't be cited directly to IMDB. It should be cited to other sources.

But anyway, to answer your question, no, I think using a self-published source such as IMDB to cite a birthdate is definitely against WP:BLPDOB. BLP tells us it is better to omit things like birthdates and middle names if they are not common knowledge, for privacy reasons. And the way to judge whether it's common knowledge is if it's been published in reliable sources. And IMDB is not reliable because it's self-published. Hope this helps. –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:54, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

IMDb is 100% not acceptable for bio info (for WP:BLP) – that is long-standing policy. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 02:01, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Is there consensus on bio info for dead people? I'm asking because the inclusion of Patsy Doris Dittemore on the article Gosport, Indiana has IMDB as its only source. Rorb lalorb (talk) 23:09, 30 May 2025 (UTC)

Thanks lot, guys. For additional context: I saw that this particular reality TV personality's date of birth is all over the place in Google searches, but not in reliable sources. Esowteric + Talk + Breadcrumbs 06:22, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Is the media genre (drama, comedy, action, etc.) reasonable to reference directly from IMDB? Or perhaps only "objective" genres can be explicitly allowed per https://help.imdb.com/article/contribution/titles/genres/GZDRMS6R742JRGAG OceanLoop (talk) 22:50, 21 August 2025 (UTC)

Fine, IMDB is not a reliable source. So someone tell us what is! Without any guidance this negative guideline is not helpful. For an alleged cast member, should I find a movie review in a reputable publication, link to the movie studio's web site for the film (which tends to decay), find an article in an industry trade paper like Variety, or what?! This came up in Talk four years ago and there are some inconclusive suggestions there. I added Wikipedia:WikiProject Film/Resources to the project page's "See Also", but its resources don't include onefor the basic "Who's in the cast?"; the Academy Collection search is awful and the documents on DropBox seem to require signup. One recommendation is I should watch the movie and use {{Cite AV media}} to claim the information is in its closing credits, but be realistic, people are just going to go by what IMDB says and use that template to claim it's in the film. -- Skierpage (talk) 22:48, 17 December 2025 (UTC)

I deleted "#Newsgroup reviews, which are archived Usenet postings" from the list of "inappropriate uses", because IMDb no longer carries newsgroup reviews, and they haven't done so for a few years now. In fact, as far as I can tell, IMDb dropped newsgroup reviews sometime in 2013. -- Metropolitan90 (talk) 04:01, 10 January 2026 (UTC)