Quoting TheMadMartian:

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Quoting Parsec:

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What does this mean to me? Simply I'll just enter what info I know of and not worry about the rest. Will I ever submit things like crew lists? Doubt it - couldn't be bothered with the complexity.

In my opinion, if you don't bother with the contribution discussions, the crew section is one of the easiest areas to contribute:  If the screen credit matches one of the credits in the chart, enter it.  If not, or you are unsure, don't.  Quite simple.  It's when you try to get a consensus in these forums that it becomes complex.

Which is exactly my point, and I think Kathy's. If a contribution discussion starts it gets too complex.

I agree. When I bought DVD Profiler almost a year ago I made a change to one of my movies and was asked to contribute, so I did. I checked the rules and was repelled by the blocks of seemingly complex text - it was quite intimidating. I'm a perfectionist and a law abiding citizen and I really didn't want to break anything. I did however man up and start contributing after some months. I have a disorder similar to ADD so I have a hard time reading the rules. There is definitely some language and formatting potential, I think simply adding spacing between the lines would make it far easier to read.

Perhaps there should be a search function? The rules are very neatly split up into different categories, but it also makes them a little more confusing to navigate in my opinion. I often end up going to Google and doing a site:invelos.com search.

All that being said, I don't think I'd ever start contributing if it wasn't for the forums. All my questions were answered quickly and detailed, and I am ever so thankful!

Oddly enough, writing 'simple' rules is also complex.

If I may reminisce about the earlier days of developing the rules, one assertion constantly put forth was that "the rules have to be simpler".  Basically, it had to be understandable by an 8 year old, roughly (ie: newspaper's 3rd grade reading level target), and many attempts to provide any level of detail were rejected.

Going back to your heart attack example: yes, it's an incredibly simple description, with no attempts at any fine detail (whereas the myocardial infarction definition is overloaded with technical jargon).  However, how do you know if a bit of chest pain is actually a heart attack, or is just a cramped muscle?  People are quick to lump anything vaguely resembling the given problem in the same bucket, and not providing the framework to understand the intent and meaning of the chosen words leaves you with a lot of 'extra' bits in your bucket that don't belong there.

So you need to be able to say, "this -is- a heart attack" and "that is -not- a heart attack", in some fashion.  That requires a certain degree of detail, and a little bit of understanding.  It should never require technical jargon, nor any sort of advanced understanding of the industry (though some can help), but determining how much information is truly necessary is actually not a trivial problem.