Pool name standardization

Like the title says.

Copyright

The copyright qualifier is mostly standardized, i.e. "COPYRIGHTNAME - POOLTITLE".

There are a couple questions regarding what name to use for the copyright.

1. Should it be the full name, i.e. tag name, or can it be a shorter name, i.e. an alias?

2. Should parent copyrights be used instead of child copyrights?

Ex. "Idolmaster" or "Idolmaster Cinderella Girls"

3. What about pools with two or more copyrights?

Artist

The artist qualifier is split between 2 formats.

• A. POOLTITLE (ARTIST) (has 401 pages)
• B. POOLTITLE [ARTIST] (has 12 pages)

1. Which of the above formats should be used?

2. Should the full artist name be used including qualifier, or should a shortened form be used?

Ex: "Hammer" or "Hammer (sunset_beach)"

Thoughts

For copyright #1, using a shortened alias would be preferable, e.g. "Watashi Ga Motenai No Wa Dou Kangaetemo Omaera Ga Warui!" is a mouthful compared to "Watamote".

For copyright #2, using the parent tag would be preferable as all like series could be more easily grouped together.

I'm not quite sure what to do for copyright #3. Though I have used and seen "Various" for the copyright in some cases.

For artist #1, it'd be easier and less edits to switch all of the B's to A's than the other way around.

For artist #2, using the shorter form would look nicer for the pool title, but the full form would offer better deconfliction.

Thoughts?

My overall preference is for unambiguity and consistency with the base tags.

For copyrights, I'm for the full name. We use full names for tags even when they're absurdly long. If the length is a problem for pools, then it's equally a problem for tags. So I would argue the tag itself should be shortened if the length is that much of a problem.

For parent vs child copyrights, I'd say use the child copyright if the title is something like Idolmaster Cinderella Girls, which is still included when searching just Idolmaster.

For multiple copyrights, I'd say use this format for two copyrights: "Touhou & Kantai Collection - Title (Artist)" and this for more than two: "Touhou & Various - Title (Artist)". I'm not sure about the ordering though. Should it be "Touhou & Kancolle" or "Kancolle & Touhou"?

For artist qualifiers, "Title (Artist (qualifier))" is more common than "Title [Artist (qualifier)]" so best to stick with it. I'd prefer full qualifiers, again for consistency with the base tag.

Another thing I want to bring up: pools with non-plaintext titles. We have over 1000 such pools now, mostly pools with untranslated titles, but also some using random symbols and punctuation (☆, ♥, ⑨, ～, 『』, so on) or accented characters (Pokémon).

I would really prefer it if pool names were required to be plaintext, the same way tags are. Yes, often uploaders don't know how to translate a comic's name. But artist names have that same problem and we cope with it, because the alternative of people going around creating unromanized artist tags would be worse. That's the situation we have now with pool names. We have a huge number of old pools with untranslated titles, and I don't think anyone ever goes back to translate them.

That would be very doable in my opinion. Google Translate is great at Romanizing text. Howto:Romanize is another good resource.

For example, a pool that I found in the pool listing...

空母寮の風紀が乱れています！？

...was Romanized to...

Kūbo ryō no fūki ga midarete imasu!?

...by Google Translate.

For the plaintext Romaji, where ū->uu and ō->ou it therefore becomes "Kuubo ryou no uuki ga midarete imasu!?".

Easy peasy...

And we may need capitalization like "Kuubo Ryou no Fuuki ga Midarete Imasu!?".

I'm not sure we should capitalize ryou as well since 空母寮 itself is a single compound. Another option is Kuubo-ryou.

evazion said:

Another thing I want to bring up: pools with non-plaintext titles. We have over 1000 such pools now, mostly pools with untranslated titles, but also some using random symbols and punctuation (☆, ♥, ⑨, ～, 『』, so on) or accented characters (Pokémon).

I would really prefer it if pool names were required to be plaintext, the same way tags are. Yes, often uploaders don't know how to translate a comic's name. But artist names have that same problem and we cope with it, because the alternative of people going around creating unromanized artist tags would be worse. That's the situation we have now with pool names. We have a huge number of old pools with untranslated titles, and I don't think anyone ever goes back to translate them.

Well, are untranslated titles actually breaking anything? We cope with transliterating artist tags because they should be in ASCII like the rest of the tags. We don't actually need such requirement for pools, because id is always an alternative, and much more often used one at that.

Transliterating titles is a hasty decision, don't do that. Due to amount of homophones, transliterated sentences can (and will) become ambiguous, not to mention killing the jokes which are sometimes based on homophones - pool #10859 would be Tokonatsu no Fubuki to name just one. The original work might be gone from artists' page by the time someone translates it, meaning original title can be lost forever if it wasn't embedded in the work itself. Also, transliterated Japanese would be even harder to comprehend to those who don't know the language very well, myself included.

Type-kun said:

Transliterating titles is a hasty decision, don't do that. Due to amount of homophones, transliterated sentences can (and will) become ambiguous, not to mention killing the jokes which are sometimes based on homophones - pool #10859 would be Tokonatsu no Fubuki to name just one. The original work might be gone from artists' page by the time someone translates it, meaning original title can be lost forever if it wasn't embedded in the work itself. Also, transliterated Japanese would be even harder to comprehend to those who don't know the language very well, myself included.

How about adding the original title to the pool description? It's something that I always do at least, even after I've translated a pool title. Once it gets into the description, it will never go away as descriptions are now versioned.

Type-kun said:

Well, are untranslated titles actually breaking anything? We cope with transliterating artist tags because they should be in ASCII like the rest of the tags. We don't actually need such requirement for pools, because id is always an alternative, and much more often used one at that.

They have much the same problems untranslated tags have: difficult to type, difficult to search, difficult to distinguish when you're looking at a bunch of "Touhou - <moonspeak> - (artist)" pools in the /pools index.

You can use the id for things like tag editing or saved searches, where you already know the pool you want to use. But searching is still a problem. If you search /pools for "Admiral" intending to find admiral (kantai collection) pools, you'll miss the pools that use 提督. Likewise for other things like Pokémon vs Pokemon, Lucky☆Star vs Lucky Star, 例大祭 vs Reitaisai, etc.

Just wanted to bring up this topic again as I'm going through the pool names.

I've been thinking of a delimiter for more than one copyright or artist, and the one I'd like to propose is / , i.e. a space followed by a forward slash followed by a space. I've seen ampersands used as well, but there are literally hundreds of copyrights and over a dozen artists that have & , i.e. a space followed by an ampersand by a space. Meanwhile, there is only one tag that uses the forward slash scheme.

In addition to the above, should there be some kind of limit of artists/copyrights before the keyword "Various" is used instead. My personal vote would be for two.

I agree with standardizing on " / " as the delimiter and on using "Various" for more than two copyrights/artists.