On Administrivia and Wiki Policy

This is a continuation of a topic from Ask The Tropers. It's probably best to quickly read the posts there to see what this thread is about, but to summarize:

• The topic began from the question: For foreign works (e.g. anime and manga), do you use the original names of the characters in pages, or do you use the names given by the work's official English translation?
• The answer to that question was an unwritten rule: "Translated names always take precedence over the original, with exceptions handled on a case-by-case basis."
• However, this is an unwritten rule. I suggested adding it to somewhere within the Administrivia index so that users would have a point of reference.
• However, Septimus Heap countered that Administrivia is already ridiculously long. "I am iffy on writing another policy page on this as every extra policy pages means (and gives the impression of) more bureaucracy."
• In turn, war877 made this suggestion: "I would like to submit the notion that in order to reduce the appearance of bureaucracy, the administrivia pages should be reorganized. All of the more obscure stuff should be consolidated into a giant faq style document. The Tvtropes Manual of Style."
• I created a small test page at Sandbox.Manual Of Style to see what that might look like.

So, from this, a couple questions arise:

1. What should be done about minor unwritten style rules that occasionally come up? Should they stay unwritten? Should each have a page on Administrivia? Should they be merged into existing guidelines pages?

2. Is there value in revamping the Administrivia index? It's currently a very long list of articles, each that only talk about a single subject. A possible alternative is merging all of the minor, small pages into a large TV Tropes Manual of Style page, as well as shortening the articles that are longer than necessary (for example, something like Examples Are Not Recent can easily be shortened into a paragraph or two).

What are people's thoughts?

edited 21st Mar '16 2:39:51 PM by Unknownlight

My first thought is that, if we do create a manual of style page, the magic of FAQ documents is that they are organized by question, so that people can simply search for the question they have on their minds, which is really fast.

My second thought is that while anchor points are one design strategy for jumping from question to answer, the questions could all be folderized, with the name of the folder being the question and the answer being the contents.

My third thought is that some of the style pages are actually several related questions grouped together. So they would need to be split.

edited 21st Mar '16 2:50:33 PM by war877

I've been overhauling the Dragon Ball pages - going through trope by trope and checking for Trope Misuse, examples listed under the wrong Work, spelling, grammer, present tense, context explained properly, etc. - and so far, what I've done is use translated English names for my own entries while leaving other entries with whichever name they had when they were created.

So I would like to see a policy on this, because if I should be changing all Japanese names to English, I need to know that. I was under the impression that the unwritten rule was that whoever adds the trope first decides.

My thought process behind making them anchor points was as to not break existing links, and well as being able to easily link to a section. For example, currently you type ThreeDayRule to link to Three Day Rule. If we ended up making a manual of style page, that link would be changed to a redirect to Administrivia/ManualOfStyle#ThreeDayRule.

With that said, I agree that changing these titles to FAQ-style questions would work a lot better, so this might not be much of a concern.

edited 21st Mar '16 3:36:12 PM by Unknownlight

My fourth thought. There are probably a number of additional unwritten rules. If anyone remembers one, they should probably be listed somewhere, like here, so that they may be reviewed in anticipation of a potential new page to put them on.

I would like to see what main / administrivia would look like under the new design. Is it safe to recreate the sandbox page?

I'm pretty sure it's okay to do whatever you want on sandbox pages, so I think the only reason it's locked is because cut pages used to be locked automatically. Make it at Sandbox.New Administrivia.

I experimented with much more than cutting the style guide out. I folderized a bit, and moved some stuff to more appropriate sections, and added some descriptions. Consequently, to avoid annoying anyone too much, I put it in my sandbox instead.

That is fantastic. That page is genuinely the best argument so far of why we should revamp Administrivia.

Here's an interesting MOS question: Should we follow The Other Wiki's MOS:TM rule for trademarked names?

Wikipedia's page, for reference.

No, I don't think so. We already break a lot of their guidelines anyway. Compare:

TV Tropes: Bakuman。, Black★Rock Shooter, ef - a fairy tale of the two., The iDOLM@STER.

Wikipedia: Bakuman, Black Rock Shooter, Ef: A Fairy Tale of the Two., The Idolmaster.

edited 21st Mar '16 6:51:10 PM by Unknownlight

The fact we don't currently follow has nothing to do with the proposal of whether we should follow it.

The main impetus for my proposal is [PROTOTYPE], which looks like a syntax fail at first glance.

Oh, sorry, I misunderstood your original post.

Still, I would personally vote "No". I could try to pretend that I have a pragmatic reason for that ("Too much work for too little reward", "Shouldn't name works differently from how the creator intended it", etc.) but my actual reason is because I don't want NiGHTS into Dreams… to change to Wikipedia's capitalization.

edited 21st Mar '16 8:43:53 PM by Unknownlight

Sorry if I am stepping on some toes here. In order to create the most realistic administrivia with no style guide possible, I copy-pasted all the style guide pages into a quick mockup style guide that I also put in my sandbox. Anything that was too big or seemed too important to not mention on the main administrivia page I put back.

I noticed several things as a result:

1. Putting FAQ questions in the style guide in front of the folders is a no go. However, I did not test this with a table of contents. Maybe that would work.
2. All the administrivia pages are written like wiki articles. This is not good. These documents are policy documents, mandatory as opposed to recreational. So that as much of them gets read by as many editors as possible, they need to be written as laconic as practical.
3. There is something strange going on with the family friendly policy. Otherwise I would have put it in the style guide.

All the pages linked by the original Administrivia are now in either the new style guide or are linked by the test administrivia page.

edited 22nd Mar '16 12:24:33 AM by war877

Personally I am in favour of merging smaller topics under fewer headings in the current manual of style without having to click through to read each individual item.

Bump.

I feel like some of these may be good stuff to put on the page.

You should use italics for emphasis and bold for heavy emphasis.

Use brackets in quotes and not parenthesis.

Wait, what order are Japanese names supposed to go in? (Genuinely not sure, we need a consensus on that.)

In actual Japanese, names go family name first, given name second. Most English translations swap it to the Western style of given name first, but there are exceptions.

Some, like One Piece make a point of surname first across the board. Then there are some, like Rurouni Kenshin and Naruto, go surname first in the official English manga, while their anime go given name first.

edited 4th Apr '16 10:56:07 AM by sgamer82

I don't think we have a title formatting guide yet, some of which was discussed in this thread.

If the style guide is spun off from administrivia in some way, this should definitely go in.

With Japanese names, I find that Eastern order suggests the name is written in Japanese, while Western order suggests it's written in English, even if it's the exact same name. Sort of like, "Saotome Ranma learned the skills Kachū Tenshin Amaguriken and Hiryū Shōten Ha," but, "Ranma Saotome learned the skills Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire and Heaven Blast of the Dragon," if that makes sense.

With Chinese (and possibly other Asian) names, I find they're almost always written in Eastern order, and much more often used in full, whereas an English or Japanese name would only use given name or surname in the situation.

A minor update, since it's part of what sparked this thread in the first place, but an edit was made to Characters.One Piece Major Allies to replace the English names for characters to their Japanese names (Cat Viper/Nekomamushi and Dogstorm/Inuarashi). I've PM'd the troper who made the edits and directed them, among other places, to this thread since it's discussing this very issue in general terms.

Speaking of English names versus Japanese names, I think we should also clarify the "most recent translation wins" rule. I have some nagging concerns:

1. What about video games whose most recent or only exported release is actually an untranslated foreign version?
2. What about Licensed Games that were only fan-translated at best, but are based on anime dubbed under a Completely Different Title?
3. What about media whose most recent release was localized under different titles in the United States and in Europe?

In general, I think official localizations trump any fan translation. However, if there isn't an official translation then fan translations are acceptable due to common usage if nothing else.

This does have some potential issues when an official translation comes along using something different, though. At least as far as causing edit wars is concerned.

I'm not sure what to do if the game in a series is untranslated or fan translated, but there an official English series name. Hasn't Fire Emblem had that issue? How was it handled there, if so?

edited 13th Apr '16 8:18:37 AM by sgamer82

That doesn't actually answer any of my questions, but this still deserves a reply:

Not very well, in my opinion. The individual games don't have their own pages except for a few recent releases; most are divided up by setting instead: Fire Emblem Akaneia, Fire Emblem Jugdral, Fire Emblem Elibe, and so forth. It seems somewhat acceptable, but I don't recommend it because not naming the page after an actual work title it makes it harder to figure out how to link an example.

I'm not sure if I'm understanding what you're asking, then. Question 1 seems to be about when there is no official English title, which is covered by just using the title as-is, though I think a prominent fan translation may be usable. That could be a first-come first-serve deal.

Question 2 seems similar, but with the addition of possibly having (or later getting) an official English title, so the same answer can apply until an official English name comes along.

Question 3 I admit I neglected. I think the preference is American name, since the wiki/its servers are US based, but not sure if there's official policy in that one.

There is no national preference, as long as it's in English.

My first question specifically regards officially licensed international releases of old video games on digital download services, for which "localization" and "translation" are both misnomers. In at least one case, a different English title was used for another version which was actually translated back in the day.

The anime Licensed Games I alluded to in my second question are unlikely to even receive an untranslated official release of this kind; Fan Translations might either go with the dub's series title or try their best to literally translate the Japanese one.