How much of IMDb was user generated?

I would have to say a majority of them were unpaid volunteers. IMDb depended upon contributions from people all over the world, much like Wikipedia.

Now that the boards cease to exist, I'm sure those volunteers went elsewhere. I wouldn't lift a finger to help them improve that site after what they did.

Way back in the early days of the message boards, a poster who became a good friend was one of the top 20 contributors. He was an "approved" contributor, meaning his alterations and additions were made with little or no questioning from the admin. However, he was not paid. The only perk was getting his screen name "up in lights" as a major contributor.

There was a lot of competition from the army of contributors to be listed in the top 20. However, after a few years, he tired of it, and wound down his work on the database. Presumably a younger and more enthusiastic contributor took his place, hoping to see their name "up in lights" too.

At the same time I quickly learned that practically no information contributed by me was ever accepted by the admin. So, I simply gave gave up, and passed the information to him.

I think most of the trivia, movie connections, goofs, and memorable quotes were user submissions.

For years now, I have regularly submitted updates to IMDb. I mostly focused on keywords and plots. I think keywords are very important because they are the key to finding that long-forgotten film. You remember a knife and that the movie was in black and white. Well, that's enough to at least narrow down the selection to a thousand movies, but you have to have that keyword registered. You just never know what someone might remember from a film, so it's important to be thorough, and I was (within reason). About 95% of the "electronic music score" keyword entries are my doing.

I never made the top 250, but I did receive emails from Col Needham on New Year's Day thanking me for my contributions for a few years because I had registered enough to be noticed.

Since the message boards went down, I don't have the heart to continue my efforts. I'm not happy with them at the moment.

I know what you mean I have been consciously avoiding anything IMDb since the killed the boards and don't plan on going back there any time soon.

I have this theory... a whole load of the contributors were message-boards users, and the amount of stuff getting contributed by these users (trivia, etc.) is now going to take a sharp drop. So contributions will increasingly be written by professionals promoting movies for some company, and will be more and more fawningly uncritical, adding to the overall soullessness of the site.

My predictions have a habit of not coming true, by the way.

I think IMDb encapsulates the internet: built by enthusiasts, taken over by corporations.

Sorry that this has happened.  For someone like myself, that really only contributed through some ratings and message board use, this is one thing.  But for those like you, who contributed to the content that they have kept, if there wasn't some area within IMDb for those who really worked to build the site to continue to be a community, that's just wrong.

Me too. Now if I provide a link to a particular film in a post, I link to Wikipedia instead the IMDb.