:TITLE:Editing guidelines :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.
For English (or other foreign) words in a non-roman script, the original word should be used as long as it is the intended effect. If those words are in a non-roman script, a suitable romanisation technique should be used.

:SUB:Capitalization

It occasionally happens that official titles or names are either entirely in uppercase or lowercase characters. If there is no real reason for this choice of capitalization (e.g. it's not an acronym), these titles and names should be properly converted to normal English capitalization (as described on Wikipedia) before being entered in the database.
This only applies to the romanized titles and the main title of a visual novel entry, the 'Original title' field of producer and release entries should still use the official capitalization.

: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 a required "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 description, 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 From External Sources

It is possible to add a description or notes to visual novel, producer and release entries in the database. While original descriptions are preferred, using descriptions from external resources is allowed, provided the source is properly credited. The preferred form to credit external resources is by adding the following template to the bottom of the description:
[From [url=URL]title or author[/url]]
This would result in, for example, '[From Wikipedia]' for descriptions taken from Wikipedia. If the description is not literally taken from the source but has some modifications, the 'From' should be replaced with something similar, indicating that it's modified, e.g. 'Edited from', 'Based on'.
As it is not allowed to provide links to websites providing or promoting illigal downloads, the URL part should be left out for such descriptions.