: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,
producers and characters should all be properly romanized if they arent in
roman script already.
To keep the database consistent, we have decided to use a mix of Hepburn and Wapuro 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.
It occasionally happens that official titles 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 should be properly
converted to normal English capitalization (as described on Wikipedia) before
being entered in the database.
This only applies to the main title of a visual novel entry, the 'Original
title' field and the title/name fields of other database entries (including
release entries) should use the official capitalization wherever possible.
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.
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,
release and character 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
illegal downloads, the URL part should be left out for such descriptions.