Editing & Tools

@Bigheart711 said:

There may be a lot of different stuff to add for the formats depending on the type of show, so it will need some time before we (including @finaldasa ) would have to come up with those episode formats. Also, sorry for the late answer. I must've missed that one. :(

Yeah I'm sure we could figure some stuff out. Maybe we could have a brainstorming thread (kind of like this one) on Screened some time.

As for "Plot Synopsis", should they just be quotes from the official release? If that's the case and there's no official synopsis found for the episode, should the editors write it in their own words?

Weird, I hadn't even thought of that. Of course they can be user-written, I just think it would be nice to include an official synopsis if it's available. So, yeah, exactly what you said. I made a quick edit to the first post.

@takashichea: Put it under miscellaneous. That way even if there are no differences between the manga and anime, the chapters will still be listed.

@FoxxFireArt said:

I like to begin the page with the name of the story arc. I add (Filler) in case the episode is non-canon events.

That works fine for long-running shows that have multiple arcs, but I'm trying to make a template that will work for every show in the wiki and make everything match and look smart. I also think having the episode name on the page twice (at the top of the page and then directly under the first header) looks silly, and a H3 title directly under a H2 title looks bad so I want to avoid that. That's why I put the Japanese episode name with the themes and arc and stuff instead.

I've actually been putting Opening & Ending Themes together instead of putting Ending Theme after the synopsis. There's really no reason for separating them.

I think I'm the one who started that trend, I was just putting stuff in chronological order. But yeah, I agree they should be together.

I don't see a reason to have a preview of next week when these pages are previews in themselves. If people want a preview for the next episode, they go to the next episode page.

That's not what that is, it's to write about what happens during the preview. Lots of shows have characters talking over the top while preview clips play in the background, look at the example in the template to see what I mean. If an episode just shows a preview with nothing interesting happening over the top, then yeah, no reason to write about it.

One of the reasons I've put the Japanese episode name, themes, arc and so on under "Miscellaneous" is because that stuff is usually in an info box to the right in most anime wikis. I think it's better to keep it all together in one section instead of having it spread over the page. Plus if the episode pages ever get info boxes it will be easier to move that info over without having to mess with the rest of the page.

@Daniel_Newton: Alright so I've been biting my tongue about copy/pasting short synopses from other sources. But I came across something recently which makes me want to speak up on this topic.

Whether synopses are official or not, or from distributors, some of them are just written poorly. Sometimes there are grammatical errors, most of them are too short to give a realistic description of what happens in the episode, or sometimes they are worded so that emphasis is shifted in such a way that is not representative of the episode.

I came across this short synopsis of episode 12 of Mysterious Girlfriend X (via Crunchyroll.com):

Tsubaki can’t forget seeing Ueno naked; every time he sees her he wants to hug her. A hug without permission causes Ueno to unleash her panty scissors, but this time she made a mistake

Now, I haven't watched episode 12 or 11 yet, but Ueno does not carry around panty scissors. So either some really crazy and unexpected twist happens in eps 11 and 12, or whoever wrote this was almost asleep while writing it.

With that said, I think if someone is really stuck and doesn't know what to write, these "official" synopses can be used as starting points for thinking about what to write for the wiki. But this should rarely be the case assuming the person writing for the wiki actually watched the episode. This website has always encouraged original writing content on the wiki, and I don't think we should stop and make the exception for short synopses.

@AURON570: I should point out that official episode synopses have always been allowed, just never really promoted. It's basically the same rule as on Comic Vine, they use official short descriptions for comic book issues.

That said, I've noticed a few little grammar hiccups and spelling mistakes from Crunchyroll before, usually it's just an incorrect spelling or a missing comma or something, I haven't seen them get a name completely wrong before. Looking at it, I can see how someone might mix the names "Urabe" and "Ueno" up. There's nothing wrong with fixing the synopsis when there's a genuine mistake. I think it's easy enough to fix little errors in most cases.

They are optional though, we can obviously write our own synopsis instead if the official ones are really bad. The idea behind the short synopsis at the top of each episode is to serve as the "describe this page is 50 words" field you have at the top of most other pages. Screened actually has it on episode pages but we don't, our episode pages are kind of missing a bunch of stuff really.

So uuuuh, yeah. If the ones for Mysterious Girlfriend X are particularly bad, feel free to write better ones, but I'd recommend going over all the episodes. They should be consistent. As long as each anime is consistent either using official synopses on it's pages or using user-written ones then that's fine. I particularly like FUNimation's synopses, especially for stuff like Dragon Ball Z and Fairy Tail.

@Daniel_Newton: Alright cool, thanks for clearing that up.