Why don't IMDb staff members have on-the-house access to all content on Amazon Video?

It is a shame when there is no reason for there to be a dispute, Col Needham.

One more thing: The volume of contributions to be processed per day is no excuse for some of them to not eventually be processed. In cases where verification is needed, why is it a problem for the IMDb staff to take time with it? I know that most contributors' greatest concerns are of seeing to it that updates go live quickly, but not everything is a hurry. On the other hand, it does not take multiple months to "verify" something that is archived on Amazon Video. The content there is almost common knowledge.

First, please see https://contribute.imdb.com/charter 

No contributions are ever unprocessed.  Our current SLA (which we have been meeting or exceeding consistently for months) is that 95% of all contributions are processed within 24 hours of submission, seven days per week.  We have a team spread throughout the world, working shifted work day patterns, and we are about to add more people (and more time zones) to further improve the coverage as the volumes continue to grow.  At the same time,  we are moving more sections from silver to platinum as described on https://contribute.imdb.com/times#prioritization so that the oldest unprocessed items more consistently stay within five days (in only a trivially small number of individual contributions do we exceed this already).

The confusion here may be the difference between the words "processed" and "approved" -- some contributions are rejected for a variety of reasons, including for breaching policy, for being outright sabotage or because insufficient evidence was provided with the submission so we were unable to verify it.  We suspect that you are referring to the latter case here -- they are processed yet not approved.  We are trying to be more transparent on this with the launch of "Track my contribution" (see original announcement at https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/new-contribution-feature-launch-track-my-title) which is still expanding to cover more data types, albeit slower than we would have preferred (mostly because we have been focused on a major technology migration to make everything run faster which is a different customer benefit with a larger impact). However, there is already an easy way to see if any item has been processed and rejected -- look at the contribution ID in your history at https://contribute.imdb.com/updates/history/ and if it predates the corresponding "Oldest Item" column(s) on https://contribute.imdb.com/times then it has been rejected.  Note that if you use the old reference view version of IMDb then that itself can lag a further 3 days behind, which is why we strongly advise against its use. 

Contributions do not pile up unprocessed at all, sorry. If you think you are waiting months for something to be processed,  then this is simply not the case -- a more likely explanation is that the original submission has been rejected due to insufficient evidence within 24 hours, and then at some (much longer) point later, someone else (including you) resubmits it and it passes the verification then instead.

We hope this helps. 

That is a good point, as there doesn't appear to be a concrete way to tell whether a contribution, other than for images and trivia items, is unprocessed or unapproved. We still have no way of knowing what the criteria are for claims or articles of information that would require verification. As near as I can tell, sometimes verification is needed for something to be approved, and sometimes it is not. Supposedly some submissions are "disputed", but by whom? Is it that IMDb staff members have some kind of internal record upon which rely for disputing submissions? There doesn't seem to be a way to know what will or will not be disputed ahead of time.