post #3235547 and its commentary history got me thinking about this.

The first person who had a go at translating the commentary moved part of the commentary from the Body field (just as it was in the source Tweet) up into the Title field. And when I noticed this, I decided to revert it (and touch-up other parts of the translation too; though I'm only referring to the "When You're By Yourself" part in this thread).

Personally, I think the previous version with part of the body moved into the title is more readable for users, and sensible since that part of the Tweet's text was probably intended to function as a title anyway. But, I decided to revert it to preserve the original commentary as much as possible, and to be consistent with how we deal with most other (or just about all...?) artist commentaries on the site.

So, do we have any concencus on this? I'm not really for or against either (that is, the "preserve the original commentary as much as possible" route, or the "move things around if it makes sense" route), but it'd be nice to have a formalized policy on this matter.

The only reason we don't "use" titles for twitter commentaries is that twitter only has a generic part of the post dedicated to the text. If it's clear that part of the commentary was meant by the artist to be the title, there's nothing wrong with moving some of it to the correct field in order to present it better to our users.

Although I've actually done the opposite, and moved the title out of the title and into the body. The reason is, is that DText styling is only available in the body, and sometimes I want to add italics, bold, or other accouterments. Just for reference, you can replicate the workings of the title by using header #3, ex: h3.Title text. See Help:Dtext for more information.

no. the original commentary should be preserved as it is, not punched up or editorialized for an imagined audience. uploaders, taggers, and the like are third parties, not representatives of the artists themselves. for this reason we also preserve typos and other mistakes, and it would be equally wrong to remove those unless the artist asked for it to be done.

Rampardos said:

no. the original commentary should be preserved as it is, not punched up or editorialized for an imagined audience. uploaders, taggers, and the like are third parties, not representatives of the artists themselves. for this reason we also preserve typos and other mistakes, and it would be equally wrong to remove those unless the artist asked for it to be done.

Nobody's talking about editing the commentary's contents. The issue here is in cases where the artist obviously meant to have a part of the commentary as title, but due to twitter's limitations there cannot be a distinction.

reinterpreting their intentions is editing the contents. the benefit is marginal and it comes at a cost to fundamentally changing how commentary is approached. the limitations of a medium define it as much as anything else, and if an artist truly intends for something to stand out, there are ways other than using slightly larger bold text. if they don't use those then that is also choice made by the artist.

Rampardos said:

reinterpreting their intentions is editing the contents. the benefit is marginal and it comes at a cost to fundamentally changing how commentary is approached. the limitations of a medium define it as much as anything else, and if an artist truly intends for something to stand out, there are ways other than using slightly larger bold text. if they don't use those then that is also choice made by the artist.

There is categorically nothing wrong with changing commentary; if an artist puts an extensive list of URLS to their Patreon, Twitter, website, dad's memorial page, the GoFundMe for their pet mouse's operation, it's incumbent on the uploader the snip those out and include the actual commentary; making such changes is fine. Similarly the placement of the title, in the title field or commentary is another liberty we can take.

Sure, we shouldn't write something they did not write, or correct typos as a general matter, but even then there are cases where a correction may be warranted (followed with a comment explaining what was changed). There just should not be a hard-and-fast rule about this, the judgement and good faith of builders should be able to handle this type of thing.

chinatsu said:

There is categorically nothing wrong with changing commentary; if an artist puts an extensive list of URLS to their Patreon, Twitter, website, dad's memorial page, the GoFundMe for their pet mouse's operation, it's incumbent on the uploader the snip those out and include the actual commentary; making such changes is fine.

I'm very wary of this suggestion. If an artist is linking where to buy the work pictured, the information should be as visible as possible for users that are really interested in supporting the artist.

EB said:

I'm very wary of this suggestion. If an artist is linking where to buy the work pictured, the information should be as visible as possible for users that are really interested in supporting the artist.

I think he's referring to those artists that like to put their patreon links and plethora of other sites in

BIG BOLD LETTERS

under every post, which causes the whole commentary to look annoying and in-your-face. There's plenty of such cases from deviantart and tumblr.

nonamethanks said:

I think he's referring to those artists that like to put their patreon links and pletora of other sites in

BIG BOLD LETTERS

under every post, which causes the whole commentary to look annoying and in-your-face. There's plenty of such cases from deviantart and tumblr.

There could be some sort of Read More option to hide the unnecessary links at first.

EB said:

I'm very wary of this suggestion. If an artist is linking where to buy the work pictured, the information should be as visible as possible for users that are really interested in supporting the artist.

Would you say that the commentary in post #3206038 should all be included? I would trim that commentary just to the line pertaining to their commentary and cut the rest. If someone likes a picture enough to want to buy it, I am more than sure they would look for their page and find a store link from there.

Typically commentary with a promotion isn't so extra as above. Something along the lines of "[description of their art] and please subscribe to my patreon this month an exclusive sketch of this! [link to their Patreon]," or whatever, I don't mind including. But not boilerplate links to all their accounts, not "[Annoying Dog Emote]" with a link to a third-party smiley, and not and various other site-specific styling that doesn't render within Danbooru commentary. This is why I'm saying it should be up to the uploader. You'll know when something is relevant and worth including, and when it's excessive and buries the commentary.

Another example of editorial liberty would be selecting an emoji where a site-specific one does not render on Danbooru, for instance post #3238142. Here when I copied the commentary the emoji was rendered as :D since Facebook showed it as an image instead of a character, so I selected a comparable character. There are other small fixes to commentary that have to be made. The commentary just doesn't render things the same as other sites and the screen space is much smaller.

忍猫 said:

There could be some sort of Read More option to hide the unnecessary links at first.

This seems like a complicated technical solution to what in my opinion isn't even an issue. It would be better to just remove excess information where it exists. If it may be important, the uploader should include it in a comment.

忍猫 said:

There could be some sort of Read More option to hide the unnecessary links at first.

You mean like the [expand] tag?

I’m with chinatsu, though, in that boilerplate links shouldn’t be/don’t have to be included. All those are generally already available via the artist entry.

On the topic of editing comments: I’ve done that before to split batch comments of Pixiv galleries across the relevant posts. For example, if an artist posts two unrelated images and the comment field contains a comment for each image, I have put the individual image comments under their respective posts.

chinatsu said:

Would you say that the commentary in post #3206038 should all be included? I would trim that commentary just to the line pertaining to their commentary and cut the rest. If someone likes a picture enough to want to buy it, I am more than sure they would look for their page and find a store link from there.

Typically commentary with a promotion isn't so extra as above. Something along the lines of "[description of their art] and please subscribe to my patreon this month an exclusive sketch of this! [link to their Patreon]," or whatever, I don't mind including. But not boilerplate links to all their accounts, not "[Annoying Dog Emote]" with a link to a third-party smiley, and not and various other site-specific styling that doesn't render within Danbooru commentary. This is why I'm saying it should be up to the uploader. You'll know when something is relevant and worth including, and when it's excessive and buries the commentary.

I get the argument of not including stuff like that. If the artist wiki is done correctly, then the links to all those accounts should be in it. In that case, I would still include the Patreon announcement, though. I just feel we should err on the side of including anything that might be relevant.

kittey said:

On the topic of editing comments: I’ve done that before to split batch comments of Pixiv galleries across the relevant posts. For example, if an artist posts two unrelated images and the comment field contains a comment for each image, I have put the individual image comments under their respective posts.

Yeah, I do that too. I would agree copying the whole commentary into every post is overkill in that situation.