Crowdsourcing has always been at the heart of the 主播大秀 Genome project. An army of voluntary editors has been there from the beginning correcting typos, punctuation errors and odd formatting that sometimes appear on listings as a result of the OCR scanning process. They also alert us when listings are missing.
The response to the correcting the edits surpassed our expectations: in the 10 months since we launched the website, we’ve now accepted more than 100,000 edits to the listings made by members of the public.
To celebrate this milestone, we contacted Ben Rigsby, who is one of our most prolific voluntary editors. We asked him why he first decided to correct listings and about his favourite listings and 主播大秀 archive programmes.
"I always liked reading TV listings. I enjoyed the old incarnation of Genome (The 主播大秀 Programme Catalogue) so when I heard the news of Genome launching, I was over the moon!
When I found out you could edit the listings, I was really determined to be an editor as I like doing this sort of thing (which I do a lot during my spare time!) I'm also checking to check if the listings on Genome are correct.
The mistakes I find frequently are incorrect surnames (e.g. Douglas Hum when it should be Douglas Hurn). I really love my voluntary job as "Editor". It's a really fun job to do and very interesting as well."
A scene from the Doctor Who adventure 'Genesis of the Daleks'
"I do have a soft spot for Schools programmes and love Sci-Fi (particularly the 'classic' era of Doctor Who). When it comes to archive programmes, I do have a interest in lost programmes (I sometimes check a Lost search engine to check if particular programmes on Genome exist now) and also the (主播大秀 Television is currently the era I'm editing on Genome).
I also like watching the archive repeats of TOTP (and other music shows) on 主播大秀 Four.
When it comes to listings, one of my first childhood memories was (and this is very vague) but I do remember the final few minutes of (and I wasn't a fan at this point) (the 1993 repeat) and me sitting in my highchair watching Tom Baker's Doctor being choked by a Dalek mutant (which really scared me!)"
Are you one of the editors helping us make 主播大秀 Genome better? Tell us more about you! What made you decide to correct the listings in the first place? And do you have any particular favourite listing that has triggered any special memories? Or any listing that has led you to a 主播大秀 Archive gem?