[Citation needed] on IMDb casting rumors
In the past two days, we’ve received somewhere between 15 and 10,000 news tips that IMDb has been updated (spoilers at links!) with the casting for the character who’s topped our list of uncast characters in Season 5. It’s a big deal! Or at least, it would be if IMDB was a trustworthy source by itself. It’s not.
We’ve spoken to HBO PR, and unsurprisingly they don’t know where the change came from, and don’t recommend trusting IMDB alone….regardless of what Vanity Fair may think. So we’re not reporting this.
Read on for why:
The process for adding credits to IMDb is the opposite of foolproof. A user–any user–submits a change to the page. The submission goes into IMDb’s processes, then gets added or not at some point. It’s not a transparent process, and it’s also notoriously unreliable. (We’ve submitted Sean Bean as Patchface for this episode too–let’s see what happens!) There’s no space for Wikipedia-style citations, let alone the passive-aggressive [citation needed] that this news so desperately requires. Check out this general Wikipedia page for some choice descriptions of the unreliability of IMDb cast pages for future projects.
“The IMDb tends to be weak, or the least more open for abuse or misattribution when discussing… films which have not yet been released to the general public”
What’s more, pranksters have been torturing Game of Thrones fans with this particular reveal for nearly a year now. It’s certainly amusing when Lena Headey does it, yes. But we’ve also seen fake posters used to advertise the Game of Thrones IMAX, photos of fake decapitated heads tossed around Twitter. As of right now, we have no reason to believe this rumor is anything but another hoax. (Please stop sending us news tips about it unless there’s another source.)
The two great white whales of Game of Thrones fandom are this and The Winds of Winter release date, so it’s no surprise that anything that looks like news on those subjects travels around the Internet like wildfire. But that doesn’t make the “news” true, no matter how much we might want that information.
Spoiler Alert!
Please take care to tag spoilers in your comments by wrapping them with <spoiler></spoiler>. Spoilers in comments are hidden by a gray overlay. To reveal, simply hover or tap on the text!