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DVDpedia has fields for Director, Producer, Staring, Writer, etc. It also has a Credits tab where a person's name and their role in the movie can be entered.

Is it considered best practice to enter information in both places, e.g., the name of the director in the Director field and an entry in the Credit's tab for the role of Director and his/her name? Why is the same information stored in two different places? This goes against data normalization principals.

What are the advantages of entering the data in the fields as opposed entering it into the Credits tab? Most of my titles' information is not downloadable so I have to manually enter all information. So I'd like to know if all of the additional typing will produce some advantage.

The credits tab is for additional information that is not present in regular fields. So the director would not go into the credits. As you can already search and get the director information from the other field and it's normalized, as you mention, allowing to change the scope on an internal search by clicking on the magnifying glass to just search the director. This and smart collections are the advantages of having specific fields for attributes. Users who want to keep the more extensive data such as key grip or electrician that would all go into the credits with their role.

Only gray area is cast. Some duplicate the main actors from starring into the credits to be able to add their role, this is the default. But a few users only add the extra actors into credits and leave the main actors in starring.