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Site Feedback / Re: Rejected edits and site advancement
« on: November 09, 2023, 11:00:57 am »...The games themselves provide their actual names, so let's use what's on the cover or spine instead of using GameFAQs and Wikipedia as references.
We've moved past this issue as a community. It becomes more of a problem for items in Non-English languages where many members aren't versed in such as Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, which is why we've used GameFAQs as our common name source.
First, I strongly disagree that this process isn't very intricate or complicated. In my opinion it is VERY complicated, and no matter which option is used, we're going to create a list of exceptions because neither system covers every single game title out there with perfect accuracy. We just have to accept that it's an intricate process and try to select the option that causes the least amount of confusion.
Second, we've had our current naming guidelines in place for almost 5 years now, which has been plenty of time for it to be tested. Our style guide has exactly four common name exceptions since July of this year, and they essentially boil down to
- Franchises that are not consistently named over GameFaqs
- Franchises that are not correctly translated because of course GameFaqs is an English site and folks have limited skills with that kind of stuff
There are also our own special rules for games that take priority (like hyphens, multiple games), which applies to both systems regardless
To me, that's a way better track record than relying on a long list of exceptions and a detailed instruction post for all of the 30+ franchises listed in your post (and there are certainly more). I simply cannot buy that a cover-based naming system would be less complicated than GameFaqs (or even equally complicated), and I already made a long ass post back in the day of all the examples of franchises where the cover isn't clear and people's "common sense" led them to picking different names and as such they were being changed all the time.
Third, I disagree that the "obvious title conventions" with symbols, etc. are obvious. They all require additional rules. As mentioned, I was putting the @ in Idolmaster because I thought that's what it was before we had a rule for it at the time. People just don't think the same way about this kind of thing and that's totally to be expected.
Games with stylized titles will have their names on the database in standard title case, while the stylized title would in turn be included in the alt-name field, when appropriate, of course.
You'll also have to define what you mean, because I personally don't know what stylization is appropriate to retain or not. These are blanket examples of common naming conventions with required of rules and exceptions to these rules of what elements we keep from the box and what we ignore. Just goes on and on.
- Symbols
- Colons
- Whether we add colons when the color/font of the title text changes
- Subtitles, when do we add them or leave them off?
- Words on the box that are not a part of the title
- Placement of letters and numbers
- Capitalization of words
- Spacing of words
- Games with other games or companies listed on the box
- Possessives
- Logos (like the James Bond gun)
- Prioritization of titles on the box vs. on the spine vs. on the back
- Exceptions that are their own beast altogether like the .hack games
I feel like this is the exact same argument that we had two years ago, where the complaint was "The games themselves provide their actual names, so let's use what's on the cover or spine" to which I gave examples where that doesn't work, then the argument was changed to "use the name on the cover, but detail all the specifics of what's not allowed when using a cover as the source for naming an entry" to which I argued that this is a very complicated process and that relying on common sense just doesn't work in practice. Again, why would we rely on users to follow all of this when they can just go to GameFaqs and it will mostly provide them with the correct title?
There were two games I was deciding between and I thought why not both 
Looking forward to it! Have fun everyone!