"Trivial" Commentary

Let's talk about this clause in the help:artist commentary wiki:

Note that adding commentary does no harm, whether it is useful or not. Commentary can easily be removed if determined to not be of much worth. Leaving out commentary risks it being lost in the future. The commentaries of works with bad id or bad twitter id for example, if not included during the upload process, cannot be found after.

This is kind of open to speculation as to what commentary can be removed without disagreement from other users. After all, there are a handful of users that will add commentary that may at times seem completely trivial and unnecessary.

Why I bring this up now is because it was brought up on this post, where two separate users added in the work title: one where it wasn't present to begin with, and another after a user removed it. PM'ing the user who removed it resulted in this exchange:

So this is really a proposal to elaborate on the stance where commentary belongs or doesn't belong.

I believe that that no matter how trivial the amount that commentary adds to the picture, it should be added anyway. It's less confusing for many other users in this regard. Besides, if we really needed, then there's always a way we can organize more detailed and insightful commentary through pools and the like. Relegating it to the likes of just "artist's mood/jokes/intention" is just plain narrow-minded in my opinion. Even commentary that spells out the character's name is useful, such as in the case of Twitter where you can't always tell for certain who the character is without the tip.

I guess adding the commentary does not cause any harm. If it's trivial, then it would probably "pollute" the commentary request tag and not the commentary tag. And even if not, it is still good to have it.

I agree, I think commentary should always be included, no matter how trivial someone may think it is. Not everyone agrees on what is trivial, as that post proves. Deleting trivial commentary would be like going around deleting translation notes that you view as "unimportant" to keep the translated tag clean.

If the problem is just the commentary tag being polluted, then the tag could be redefined to only be used for significant commentary (whatever that might mean). We don't have to delete the commentary itself to keep a tag clean. The order:artcomm metatag and the artist commentaries search page would still let you find all posts having any sort of commentary.

I still add the translated tag when only translating something as simple as sound effects or name tags.

The same should apply to commentary. Also, if you think it's trivial, its well within your right to remove it. If this ends up in an edit war, it can always be brought up to a moderator or on the forums.

I am strongly of the opinion that commentary that has almost nothing to do with the picture (like Kouji's boilerplate, which are literally Prev/Next buttons and Comiket annoucements) don't need to be included.

Would it be possible to have Danbooru “translate” trivial titles/comments automatically? We already have a wiki full of Japanese tags under “other names” that could be used to translate character names, for example. Then add a bunch of common titles such as “Untitled” and “Sketch”...

There's issue #2801: add an option to autotranslate commentaries with Google Translate.

Gollgagh said:

I am strongly of the opinion that commentary that has almost nothing to do with the picture (like Kouji's boilerplate, which are literally Prev/Next buttons and Comiket annoucements) don't need to be included.

Oh yeah, I forgot about those kinds. Well, yeah -- if if it's stuff like that then it's fine to skip. Maybe at the very least though, I think it's a good idea to include the title if the work is individually titled (rather than batched), unless they all follow a common naming scheme (and they're pooled).

I'm not sure what the best way to make significant commentary easily searchable is (or exactly where we would define the line for such a thing), but the thought I've had is something like a simple_commentary tag. Currently, the only tag or pool I'm aware of that is specifically for notable commentaries is pool #4603, Detailed Backstories, which is only appropriate for a small subset of notable commentaries. I could see value in being able to distinguish between, e.g. post #2641271 ("Shoebill-chan - Cute") and post #2683387 (the commentary continues the comic). If simple_commentary were available as a checkbox in the "Add artist commentary" dialog, it should be easy to use going forward; gardening older posts would be a much bigger task, but the same would apply if we changed the definition of commentary itself.

As for why simple_commentary, I think it's more neutral than something like trivial_commentary or (from the other end) notable_commentary / significant_commentary.

If we were to make such a tag, the big question is where the cutoff would be. Clearly, just the character and/or series name would be simple_commentary, but we'd need discussion of where to draw the line.

I don't really care that much but I hope there won't be a rule where commentary is mandatory.