Thread:Luxartisan/@comment-27869316-20190412152224/@comment-27869316-20190415054934

Hey guys,

Page names: I’m glad to see we seem to have reached a majority agreement so far on the page names, and I can see that Angelle has already begun the reverting process back to the original spelling which I’ll assist with. Re: the TYM title, the tokubetsuban prefix is on all ads/posters etc. for the Japanese release, hence we agree we should keep it as part of the article, but since the English DVD release has dropped it I agree the article title should simply be “Free! –Take Your Marks-“. Apparently funimation translated tokubetsuban as simply “the movie” but the only place they’ve included that in the title is on the spine of the dvd so let’s just leave sans tokubetsuban.

Song names: Regarding the song titles I still feel that romaji would be the more correct presentation here as, again, there are no official English titles for these songs and some of them can be up for interpretation as to what their English fan title is. In general, because of this most fandoms (including this one) just refer to songs by their romaji titles because it's something everyone can agree on. This is how Wikipedia itself presents Japanese songs as well as most other Wiki’s in my experience. Usually the desired format is to have a romaji title, a redirect so that if someone does type in the English title they’re directed to the correct article, and then the first line of the article intro is “Romaji title (Kanji title English title)”. For example, “Ao no Kanata (アオノカナタ Blue Distance/The Blue Beyond)” (usually there's only on english title but we'd have to come to a concensus for some of those with multiple interpretations).

Episode names: As for episodes being listed in English as you mentioned Angelle, we list those in English because DVD releases give us official titles (which I’ll be updating for season 1 as it finally got released in my country and I believe we’re still using potentially incorrect fan titles). Dive to the future’s episode titles may change in the future too as currently there’s no DVD for that and we’re using crunchyroll’s titles because the fandom generally considers that to be an official source that everyone agrees upon (though whether it actually IS an official source I'm not 100% on). By comparison, there’s no equivalent for the song titles where everyone universally agrees upon a translation as some people may translate things more literally while say may take artist license to try and convey the general meaning/feel better.

Character names: I’m unsure how you logically can be ok with using macrons for seiyū but not on the character pages? Take the Shōta Nakagawa page for example (which I’ve now fully restored by the way), the macron in this case is important because half of the fandom uses Shouta while the other half uses Shota, so which one would we settle on? Like the romaji song titles, macrons are the most common usage by both Wikipedia and most Wiki’s in these ambiguous cases and most users who are anime fans are aware of what these macrons represent, therefore we don’t have to sacrifice any ease for users to prioritise authenticity because most users are going to understand the meaning anyway.

Grammar poll: For the grammar poll I was thinking of saying this if that’s ok with everyone – “In order to standardise how the Free! Wiki is presented we wish to decide upon one set grammar style for all articles to conform to. Which style are you most comfortable reading and writing with?” and then the two poll options are American Grammar & English Grammar.

But as usual, we won't move forward with any changes or create the poll until we've all weighed in; I truly don't want my word to be considered the final authority on these matters. If it comes down to us being evenly divided on any of these issues I'm unsure how we should proceed because I wouldn't want my opinion to be prioritised here and cause any ill feelings just because I'm the bureaucrat.

-Fox