:TITLE:Editing guidelines :INC:notfinished :INC:index :SUB:Romanization

The main audience of VNDB are the English speaking fans of visual novels. In creating the database, we assume the intended audience can't read or recognise anything not written in the roman script. Therefore, romanization is applied to many fields in the database: The main title of visual novels, releases and producers should all be properly romanized if they arent in roman script already.
To keep the database consistent, we have decided to use Hepburn romanization for all fields. This is also consistent with AniDBs romanization.

:SUB:Capitalization

Some Japanese producers use titles for their games that are already in the roman alphabet. However - as the disctinction in uppercase and lowercase characters does not exist in Japanese - these titles are often entirely in uppercase or lowercase. If there is no real reason for this choise of capitalization, these titles and names should be properly converted to normal English capitalization (as described on Wikipedia) for titles and names before being entered in the database.

:SUB:Name Order

In most English speaking countries, names are given in a "given name, family name" order. This is called "Western Order". In English, you call someone using their given name if you know them well, otherwise use their title and family name.
In Japanese (and some other languages too), names are given in "family name, given name" order. We call this "Japanese Order". In Japanese you can call someone using either name with an appropriate suffix.
To aid English speakers, some resources (e.g. wikipedia) use Japanese names in Western order. Here on vndb.org, we prefer to use the order that the original game used.
That is, if it was originally a Japanese game with Japanese character names, use Japanese order.
If the game is originally English, or a character has a completely foreign name (Mary Smith), use Western order.

:SUB:Edit Summaries

Every edit to any page has an optional "Edit summary" box.
This allows you to explain yourself on what your edit is about without cluttering the main page.
You can say why you've modified the categories, changed a link, or show where you obtained some information (so that other contributors can verify it).
Perhaps you want to add a visual novel to the database but are unable to find more information for it. If you say so here, another contributor is bound to finish it off.

:SUB:Descriptions

TODO: Something about quoting sources in descriptions here