Adding "artist commentary" to uploads

MB295 said:

Forgive me if I'm being presumptuous, but you make it sound like everyone can read the artist's commentary, and simply choose not to upload it out of laziness.

This is from help:artist commentary. With a guideline such as this, how can we determine if something we can't read is relevant and significant?

I'm pretty sure this guideline, and the language barrier, are the reasons why many people don't upload the commentary. At least, that's why I don't do so.

I think we should be following this guideline in the first place as far as uploading commentaries. It makes no sense to upload commentary that amounts to nothing. It just takes up unnecessary space on the page.

I think you're reading too much in between the lines. It's not about if you can read the commentary, it's about preserving it anyway -- even if it isn't translated (yet). Quite honestly, most uploaders can't read the commentary. Only a few can. In the case that an artist deletes his work, that commentary is gone forever. Whatever it would offer in potential context or interest would be lost.

And I think that guideline is bound to be changed anyway given the discussion here. The problem with such a guideline for commentary is that uploaders more often than not skip uploading it because it's not worth it to them if they can't understand it (even with Google Translate), regardless of if or when it will get translated in the future. If we automate that process, sure there will be a lot more Japanese text saved onto the server, but text is easy to save. This is an imageboard -- whether it takes up space on the page or takes up too much space on the database should be a relatively trivial problem to solve. A lot more space is taken up by the images already kept on record.

So I wholeheartedly disagree with you. I think commentary, even if potentially insignificant to some users, is useful as a whole.

EDIT: Did a run-on without catching myself.

Mikaeri said:

I think you're reading too much in between the lines. It's not about if you can read the commentary, it's about preserving it anyway -- even if it isn't translated (yet). Quite honestly, most uploaders can't read the commentary. Only a few can. In the case that an artist deletes his work, that commentary is gone forever. Whatever it would offer in potential context or interest would be lost.

And I think that guideline is bound to be changed anyway given the discussion here. The problem with such a guideline for commentary is that if you don't understand what its saying (even if you put it through the google translate wringer) is that uploaders more often than not skip uploading it because it's not worth it to them if they can't understand it, regardless of if or when it will get translated in the future. If we automate that process, sure there will be a lot more Japanese text saved onto the server, but text is easy to save. This is an imageboard -- whether it takes up space on the page or takes up too much space on the database should be a relatively trivial problem to solve. A lot more space is taken up by the images already kept on record.

So I wholeheartedly disagree with you. I think commentary, even if potentially insignificant to some users, is useful as a whole.

I see. I do have the tendency to read too much into things.

While I respect the idea that all commentary is important, I came across one image where the commentary was literally just "JunkoJunkoJunko" over and over (it was in Japanese, but I recognized the hiragana to figure out that much). In such cases, is it really necessary to have the commentary added? I can't see how that would be useful to anyone, you know?

Though I suppose such cases will most likely be very rare, so it probably doesn't matter too much... but it's still something that concerns me.

MB295 said:

I see. I do have the tendency to read too much into things.

While I respect the idea that all commentary is important, I came across one image where the commentary was literally just "JunkoJunkoJunko" over and over (it was in Japanese, but I recognized the hiragana to figure out that much). In such cases, is it really necessary to have the commentary added? I can't see how that would be useful to anyone, you know?

Though I suppose such cases will most likely be very rare, so it probably doesn't matter too much... but it's still something that concerns me.

I'd say so. Even if it's just a repetition of words, that's still what the artist intended to list as the caption so there could be some significance to it. One of my own uploads just has Kiyohime repeating "yurusanai" 56 times: post #2557008. There are cases where even repetitions might add artistic significance.

I know it can be a little bit disconcerting to start to have untranslated commentary everywhere especially if you don't understand it (or if you do it's kind of useless) but I think as a whole it's better Danbooru has it than not. We're one of the few imageboards that do actually preserve commentary on a somewhat consistent basis, and there are quite a few commentaries that greatly enhance the meaning of a picture (e.g. post #2552071 and post #2552028).

evazion said:

Yes, but now that I'm thinking about it I'd rather make it so that commentary is always included instead of being optional. It's just easier to always include it than to leave it to uploaders to decide whether it's "worth it" or not.

How would that work for "galleries" on Pixiv, though? Would it apply the same commentary to every image? Some of those tend to be collections of Twitter posts, where you have to look there for the commentary that is relevant to the particular image (post #2568825, for instance, where it was helpful in identifying the character).

I don't see any reason to change from current config. It makes it easy to include commentary if user wants to (when using bookmarklet, at least), and just as easy to opt out by not ticking the checkbox. What we DO need is a way to easily pull commentary from the source when the post is already uploaded. I've made an issue about that some time ago, it waits for its time.

Re: when to post or not to post, just use your best judgement. Commentary saying "Reimu" under the drawing of, well, Hakurei Reimu, wouldn't carry much meaning, so there's no need to include it. On the other hand, there's no harm done if it is included. Sometimes, though, commentary is entirely unrelated to the picture. If you can't read the language at all, and there are no cues in the text (like clearly visible dialogue), then googletrans will usually provide a good enough machine translation to see if it's anything about the picture, or just the artist talking about their next convention or being sleepy.

Regarding the initial topic question - Provence, your suggestion would essentially force translators to go out of their way to the source page, to check if there is a commentary at all, then to immediately translate it, and copy/paste both original and translated into the commentary fields, which seems way too suboptimal to say the least. I fail to see the problem.

Type-kun said:

I don't see any reason to change from current config. It makes it easy to include commentary if user wants to (when using bookmarklet, at least), and just as easy to opt out by not ticking the checkbox. What we DO need is a way to easily pull commentary from the source when the post is already uploaded. I've made an issue about that some time ago, it waits for its time.

Re: when to post or not to post, just use your best judgement. Commentary saying "Reimu" under the drawing of, well, Hakurei Reimu, wouldn't carry much meaning, so there's no need to include it. On the other hand, there's no harm done if it is included. Sometimes, though, commentary is entirely unrelated to the picture. If you can't read the language at all, and there are no cues in the text (like clearly visible dialogue), then googletrans will usually provide a good enough machine translation to see if it's anything about the picture, or just the artist talking about their next convention or being sleepy.

Regarding the initial topic question - Provence, your suggestion would essentially force translators to go out of their way to the source page, to check if there is a commentary at all, then to immediately translate it, and copy/paste both original and translated into the commentary fields, which seems way too suboptimal to say the least. I fail to see the problem.

I think you are misunderstanding this.
I've never added a commentary, because most of the time I simply don't understand what they are saying and I can't determine if it is relevant :3.

Type-kun said:

It makes it easy to include commentary if user wants to (when using bookmarklet, at least), and just as easy to opt out by not ticking the checkbox.

You underestimate how lazy people are. Compare the upload reports ([1], [2]) versus the commentary reports and you can see that only a small number of people regularly include commentary with their uploads. Most people skip it more often than not. And some people pretty much never include it.

It's not really a question of "use your best judgment to decide whether it's worth including". Some uploaders simply don't care. It's not required, so they don't do it and never will. It's not very fair for readers to miss out on something just because the uploader wasn't interested in it themselves. And if it is just the artist rambling about unrelated stuff, what does it matter? No problem, just scroll past it then.

All I'm saying is take out the "Include commentary" checkbox and add the title/commentary and commentary request tag automatically. That way uploaders don't have to think about commentaries and decide whether they're important or not, it just happens automatically.

evazion said:

You underestimate how lazy people are. Compare the upload reports ([1], [2]) versus the commentary reports and you can see that only a small number of people regularly include commentary with their uploads. Most people skip it more often than not. And some people pretty much never include it.

It's not really a question of "use your best judgment to decide whether it's worth including". Some uploaders simply don't care. It's not required, so they don't do it and never will. It's not very fair for readers to miss out on something just because the uploader wasn't interested in it themselves. And if it is just the artist rambling about unrelated stuff, what does it matter? No problem, just scroll past it then.

All I'm saying is take out the "Include commentary" checkbox and add the title/commentary and commentary request tag automatically. That way uploaders don't have to think about commentaries and decide whether they're important or not, it just happens automatically.

You also have to look at how it would fill the request tags. If for every upload you are adding the commentary, then there will be a huge amount of uploads that don't have the commentary. If something really is worth being added, then a Translator should do that. Most time, commentaries are not even necessary.
Just compare the most active user with the commentaries:
user:Sacriven commentary and user:Sacriven commentary:request. There are two pages with the check translation tag.
Only 33 pages do have a translation and I count 20 images per page which makes a bit over 600 translated commentaries.
I think that speaks a clear language that most often the commentary is not really required and translators are just passing over them.
So to call people lazy is just offending and insulting.
Better call the Translators lazy for not offering something to the readers, because it is not fair.

(Last sentence is obviously meant to be sarcastic)

Provence said:

You also have to look at how it would fill the request tags. If for every upload you are adding the commentary, then there will be a huge amount of uploads that don't have the commentary. If something really is worth being added, then a Translator should do that. Most time, commentaries are not even necessary.
Just compare the most active user with the commentaries:
user:Sacriven commentary and user:Sacriven commentary:request. There are two pages with the check translation tag.
Only 33 pages do have a translation and I count 20 images per page which makes a bit over 600 translated commentaries.
I think that speaks a clear language that most often the commentary is not really required and translators are just passing over them.
So to call people lazy is just offending and insulting.

I feel the need to refute this. If something really is worth being added is not really the "responsibility" of the translator. They see what's interesting and they translate it. That's how my modus operandi was when I started translating commentary. And I'm sure it goes for others too.

Again, the fact of the matter is that for most uploaders it's really hard to tell if commentary is worth adding or not. Most of us can't even recognize the mixed kanji/kana of names of popular characters we know about because we can only recognize their romanized names. This isn't a judgment call of uploaders. We're (not you or I in particular) poor at making that call in the first place. So why not just add it anyway?

If we really need to, we could just rename all untranslated commentary with the commentary request tag as something like untranslated commentary then repopulate commentary request with things people actually want to see translated. Adding commentary is trivial and only requires one checkmark but most uploaders don't do it anyway because again, poor judgment call.

Also, he's not calling anyone lazy -- you shouldn't take this so personally. If you don't up commentary, it's not your fault or anyone's fault; it has never been policy to upload commentary where deemed necessary in the first place. The fact of the matter is that uploaders just don't choose to up it because when you don't understand something, you're more likely to believe there's nothing worth in it than if there is something. That's just how it is.

EDIT:

Better call the Translators lazy for not offering something to the readers, because it is not fair.

(Last sentence is obviously meant to be sarcastic)

Not sure what you're getting at here. I translate on a if-I-feel-like-it basis, which occurs more often than I make it sound like.

Just today a pixiv commentary was simply "girl" in both the title and commentary body (http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=60427268), and I chose to upload with no commentary. Is that really something that needs to be archived for the ages? I'm guessing not, nor is a commentary that amounts to the character's name or any number of variations of "doodle" or "sketch."

Any description in a foreign language amounting to a sentence or more I generally keep.

That generally should be the proper way of going about things -- I usually skip really useless captions too. Just that whenever there is longer and more potentially interesting commentary it isn't often added by most uploaders, which seems to be the main focus. Maybe there should be some character minimum in either the title or caption of the work to automatically add in commentary? That is, of course, if such an implementation does come to fruition.

EDIT: Mind derp.

I don't mean to be anal but did you mean minimum rather than limit? A cap would be very bad, but a minimum, say 10 characters, would be good.

Although very short commentaries can be nice to have too such as post #2471446. Okay not the best of examples but I've seen one-word commentaries that really complete a picture. I'll post examples if I find them.

Also there are artists like aekkarat_sumatchaya who give titles to their works and I like to add those too.

Mikaeri said:

I feel the need to refute this. If something really is worth being added is not really the "responsibility" of the translator. They see what's interesting and they translate it. That's how my modus operandi was when I started translating commentary. And I'm sure it goes for others too.

Again, the fact of the matter is that for most uploaders it's really hard to tell if commentary is worth adding or not. Most of us can't even recognize the mixed kanji/kana of names of popular characters we know about because we can only recognize their romanized names. This isn't a judgment call of uploaders. We're (not you or I in particular) poor at making that call in the first place. So why not just add it anyway?

If we really need to, we could just rename all untranslated commentary with the commentary request tag as something like untranslated commentary then repopulate commentary request with things people actually want to see translated. Adding commentary is trivial and only requires one checkmark but most uploaders don't do it anyway because again, poor judgment call.

Also, he's not calling anyone lazy -- you shouldn't take this so personally. If you don't up commentary, it's not your fault or anyone's fault; it has never been policy to upload commentary where deemed necessary in the first place. The fact of the matter is that uploaders just don't choose to up it because when you don't understand something, you're more likely to believe there's nothing worth in it than if there is something. That's just how it is.

EDIT:

Not sure what you're getting at here. I translate on a if-I-feel-like-it basis, which occurs more often than I make it sound like.

"You underestimate how lazy people are."

That is somewhat precise. It literally means that if someone doesn't put the commentary, then they are lazy.

Also: I don't think that it is the Translator's duty to give the commentary, I only say that they have a better judgment when a commentary should be added or not.
That said: Nobody has to give a commentary but if someone thinks that a commentary is useful for the post, then it should be added. And Translators have a better judgment, since most commentaries are in Japanese. That is all here from me.
That's why it is guideline: It is nice to have a commentary, translators are more suited to add it since they know that the commentary provides useful information, but it should not be mandatory.

sweetpeɐ said:

I don't mean to be anal but did you mean minimum rather than limit? A cap would be very bad, but a minimum, say 10 characters, would be good.

Although very short commentaries can be nice to have too such as post #2471446. Okay not the best of examples but I've seen one-word commentaries that really complete a picture. I'll post examples if I find them.

Also there are artists like aekkarat_sumatchaya who give titles to their works and I like to add those too.

Yeah, I accidentally a word, thanks for catching that.

And I'm with you there, there are some titles that just make a work. I think that's a good example. I think from my own uploads, post #2563016 really just captures the essence of it and the Japanese is only about 8 characters long.

Maybe for titles the limit could be shorter or just ignore common keywords like boy, girl, etc. Before that happens though I'd want to know if such an idea is feasible anyway.

Maybe the include commentary checkbox should just be checked by default 🤷

Mikaeri said:

Yeah, I accidentally a word, thanks for catching that.

And I'm with you there, there are some titles that just make a work. I think that's a good example. I think from my own uploads, post #2563016 really just captures the essence of it and the Japanese is only about 8 characters long.

Maybe for titles the limit could be shorter or just ignore common keywords like boy, girl, etc. Before that happens though I'd want to know if such an idea is feasible anyway.

I think the cases where commentary is warranted or not should always be left to meat, not bots personally. I see too many false positives with your suggested schemes at this. I think there are enough people who give a shit and would manually remove frivolous commentary where necessary.

Why didn't that idea come to me earlier. Maybe then these "lazy" uploaders would actually have to be proactive in not including useless commentary.

Provence said:

"You underestimate how lazy people are."

That is somewhat precise. It literally means that if someone doesn't put the commentary, then they are lazy.

No, it literally means what it means -- if you think people aren't upping commentary because they don't think it's useful, you're sorely mistaken and it is in fact a matter of laziness. It's not an insult to anyone in particular. Not to you, nor anyone else who uploads stuff. Being lazy isn't an insult. It's just a matter of the thought going into things.

Mikaeri said:

Why didn't that idea come to me earlier. Maybe then these "lazy" uploaders would actually have to be proactive in not including useless commentary.

No, it literally means what it means -- if you think people aren't upping commentary because they don't think it's useful, you're sorely mistaken and it is in fact a matter of laziness. It's not an insult to anyone in particular. Not to you, nor anyone else who uploads stuff. Being lazy isn't an insult. It's just a matter of the thought going into things.

See the edit above.
If I don't know if something is useful, then I can't think that they are useless or useful for the post.

That said: It wouldn't hurt if the commentary is added by default or if this isn't an option: Don't blame anyone for being lazy. One simply CAN'T know.
Or make everyone learn Japanese. That is an option, too ;).

sweetpeɐ said:

I think the cases where commentary is warranted or not should always be left to meat, not bots personally. I see too many false positives with your suggested schemes at this. I think there are enough people who give a shit and would manually remove frivolous commentary where necessary.

Yeah, you're on the money on that one. I just throw out whatever ideas I have, even if they're not really feasible just to see where things can go.

But it should be a human judgment call. I think the best solution is probably the simplest one, the one you suggested -- just toggle on include commentary by default. I assume most uploaders use the bookmarklet so it should appear anyway. If a commentary is really that useless then it can easily be removed by the original uploader or someone else.

Mikaeri said:
I assume most uploaders use the bookmarklet so it should appear anyway.

Well we should hope they would. Not using the bookmarklet is rarely ever warranted :) It causes most sample image issues

As for the actual matter at hand, I agree, except I would wish that the original commentary be kept even if the uploader or someone else removes it. Just for posterity's sake, as a fail-safe if a relevant commentary is deleted when it should not have been. Actually I just want it to be like recorded as an edit (have a strikethrough to show it being removed)