Baka-Tsuki talk:Categories revamp project
Genre Suggestion
How about target audience? Shounen/Shoujo/Seinen/Josei.
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Also, while AFAIK we currently don't list any 18+ light novels (although there was one such story in SAO, it turned out to be a 3rd party doujin that SAO'author put on his website), they certainly exist, and unless there is some policy against them, there's a chance that one becomes popular enough to be translated... SinsI (talk) 08:24, 4 February 2014 (CST)
Yeah, what about the genres like : Adult, Doujinshi, Gender Bender, Hentai, Josei, Shotacon, Shoujo Ai, Shounen Ai, Yaoi, Yuri ??? I don't have a clue if we host such LN, but those are quite used in manga... (My reference being Baka-update, I just compared the genres they distinguish with the ones listed here.) I know for sure there was once a polemic, because someone wanted to start a Yaoi LN translation, but Teh_Ping said she (if I remember well) should go and do it somewhere else than here. So, it depends on the fact : will we or do we have such material ? At least we could add the Doujinshi, Adult and Josei genres, I think... Excepted for the adult one, there aren't really any prejudice against those and Doujinshi aren't always ecchi or "worse". Lery (talk) 15:16, 4 February 2014 (CST)
- There's a clause in TLG/Oni's rules that generally say pornographic or whatever content is generally not allowed... "UNLESS such material is deemed necessary solely by the merit of preserving the integrity of such work(a)" (SECTION D). But the agreement seems to imply that moderators should at least try to moderate any material that is blatantly suspected to be inappropriate. In either case, this needs to be formally defined in the rules before we start hosting hentai-light-novels (if those even exist?) Cloudii (talk) 21:05, 4 February 2014 (CST)
- I think it is a standard disclaimer to comply with electronic information laws. Usually it is not pornography but "unrestricted access to pornography" that is considered "inappropriate content" - so if you have a standard "you confirm that you are of (whatever age is required in your country) to read it" confirmation page before displaying any adult content, it is not actually inappropriate in most countries. If we do add a "adult/mature/18+" Genre, we might have to add such functionality as well... And such light novels certainly exist - you might be surprised if you look up works from the late author of Zero No Tsukaima and Strike Witches that he wrote under (pen?) name 山口昇一. SinsI (talk) 10:00, 6 February 2014 (CST)
- Actually such functionality are already in use in the wiki, especially because of the 16.5 SAO scandal (since it has been translated in a few other languages and need to remove it never showed in other language than English). There is a "spoiler" functionality built-in the wiki anyway. ;) Lery (talk) 16:29, 12 February 2014 (CST)
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I added :
- Adventure
- Historical
- Mecha
- School Life
Devenk83 (talk) 10:14, 4 February 2014 (CST)
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I added a number of ones including Slice of Life and target audience. I actually used some manga sites as references, and pretty much all sites in the manga world use about the same categories. I know you guys were talking about restricting the categories so that people shouldn't make new ones in the future, so it's safer to err on being broader than not. For example, I don't think we have many sports light novels, but it's a major category nonetheless, and you can't deny the possibly we'll get a sports light novel in the future. Cloudii (talk) 11:40, 4 February 2014 (CST)
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Do we really need a target audience genre ? Light novels' main target are young men and women, so all of them are either Seinen or Josei, and you can see it with their manga adaptation who are mainly published in seinen magazine. Devenk83 (talk) 13:36, 4 February 2014 (CST)
- There's a big split between shouen and seinen. According to how mangaupdates has BT projects classified, we have 50 shounen, 23 seinen, 4 shoujo, no josei.... IDK if people use those categories though. But that's how external groups have categorized the series we host. Cloudii (talk) 21:05, 4 February 2014 (CST)
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A lot of them are Shounen - Accel World, Baka Testo, High School DxD - anything that uses nosebleeds instead of erections. SinsI (talk) 14:18, 4 February 2014 (CST)
Genre suggestion - Kira's
- Action
- Comedy
- Drama
- Ecchi
- Fantasy
- Mature
- Mystery
- Romance (As in the main theme is romance)
- Sci-Fi
- Shoujo/Josei
- Slice of Life
- Supernatural
Explanation for why others should be removed:
- Adventure: Can be included in Fantasy normally.
- Harem: I don't think this is needed; Comedy-Romance or Drama-Romance should be enough. Plus, it's included in 80% of all romance titles on BT, so yeah...
- Horror: Can be included in "Mature".
- Historical: lol
- Lolicon: lol
- Martial Arts: -->Action.
- Mecha: -->Sci-fi
- Psychological: I don't have any example of one in head...
- School Life: -->SOL
- Shounen/Seinen: Not useful at all, since almost every project here falls in one category or another.
- Sports: lol
- Tragedy: -->Drama
Mystes (Talk) 16:25, 5 February 2014 (CST)
> Horror Can be included in "Mature".
Shouldn't be included in "mature", because these two categories don't necessarily go hand in hand - you can have Horror for children, and you can have Mature titles that are not of the Horror variety (i.e. dealing with serious philosophical/moral issues)
> Shounen/Seinen: Not useful at all, since almost every project here falls in one category or another.
Very useful, since some might hate the immatureness and tropes of Shounen, but like Seinen very much...
Sports/Mecha/Historical/Martial Arts more belong to the "Tags" SinsI (talk) 18:09, 5 February 2014 (CST)
>Adventure: Can be included in Fantasy normally.
No, it can't. Non-Fantasy Adventure story exists too.
> Horror Can be included in "Mature".
I agree with SinsI opinion.
> Historical: lol
Light novel with historical inspiration exists... Like Oda Nobuna no Yabou
>Psychological: I don't have any example of one in head...
The World God Only Knows can serves as an exemple.
>Shounen/Seinen: Not useful at all, since almost every project here falls in one category or another.
Yes, I agree with you.
>Sports: lol
Even if I don't like sport, you shouldn't post this type of comment, it's insulting (and for the others too). Sport should be considered as a category like Fantasy and the others, but... Do we have sport light novel ? I don't even know if it exists...
Devenk83 (talk) 09:19, 7 February 2014 (CST)
- Shoujo/shounen/jousei/seinen is a category determined by which magasine a manga is published in. I feel we shouldn't abuse that for genre names.
- "Lolicon" ... seriously ? No. Just no. Let's stay above that.
- DarkoNeko talk 13:57, 7 February 2014 (CST)
Well, actually there are so much LN which would fall in this "Lolicon" category, that it wouldn't be of any use, indeed... @Devenk : well, you may want to put "Taishō Yakyū Musume" and a few other like "Ro-Kyu-Bu!" in the sport category, I guess. :/ Lery (talk) 16:42, 12 February 2014 (CST)
Separating project/light novel categorizations
From what I can see, some of the categories that are being used are irrelevant to one of the two (projects/light novels). If the objective of this is to categorize the projects in a better way, maybe creating a light novel page separate from the translation project pages each light novel would be a better idea. The light novel page would serve mainly as a buffer, this page will contain a title, an image, links to the languages the light novel has been translated to, and maybe other general miscellaneous information regarding the light novel.
This way only the light novel page has to be added to all the categories that pertain only to the actual light novel (i.e. publisher, genres, etc.), and the individual translation project pages and be added to their own categories (i.e. language, project status, etc.). Then you can even categorize the categories so that some are used only for projects and some are only for light novels.
The cons of this method, obviously is that you guys will have to make a new page for each light novel and redo the categorization of each of them. Also this will take up more space (data wise) since there is an extra page for each light novel. I usually don't contribute to the site but it was an interesting topic. In the end this is only a suggestion from a lurker so if you guys don't like this, I guess you can just ignore this?
- Hi,
- I've been pondering the very same idea, but the drawback is having to force everyone through an intermediary page, whereas the english version, which attract most of our reader, is currently on direct access. Wonder how we could go around that. If you or anyone reading that has an idea...
- Don't worry about the space thing, it's just text :)
- DarkoNeko talk 08:10, 7 February 2014 (CST)
- Hi DarkoNeko,
- Regarding direct access, is it possible to do something similar to the "Full Text" (the pages showing the entire volume) pages? Those pages seem to reference each of the individually translated chapters rather than copy and pasting all the text from each of those pages on to a single one. So following that concept, is it possible for the light novel page to have the links to the alternate languages, an image, misc info, etc. to be referenced at the beginning of each of the translation project pages? This would allow for the sidebar to still have direct access to the English translation project page, and each translation project page will have links to each of the languages (including a link to itself).
- The cons of this is that it would be a little more difficult to set up new translation project pages (i.e. requiring the knowledge to do the above). Also the actual light novel page would probably never see the light of day unless someone specifically searches for it (which might make the categorization not as useful).
- Zeigfarr (talk) 14:44, 7 February 2014 (CST) <- the lurker who started this topic
Oi DarkoNeko. The only way to do that would be to somehow link the sidebar links to that new select language thingy that's added on the top of the site. So that if English is selected as the language, then the links direct to the link's project's english version; if french is selected, then the link directs to the link's project's french version; etc etc. But that would involve a high level of coding, certainly faaaar beyond template coding. First you'd need to find out what parameter is passed to the system from that select language thingy and whether that parameter can be accessed (ie: it's not private or protected; see encapsulation in computer languages). After knowing that and figuring out how to access it, you'd have to incorporate it into the links using if then else statements. Seriously, it'll be a lot of work, making the sidebar wiki-text much more complicated, unless you program it in inside the backend somehow.
No, some ALF members are opposed to it, as they don't want to change the wiki's language each time they must go see the English version or the Alternative Language version of a chapter.
Devenk83 (talk) 09:03, 7 February 2014 (CST)
- While I generally see what you mean, you seems to have the coding side all wrong :
- I never intended on using the ULS.
- The ULS relies on JQuery, so the addition would have been in javascript, we wouldn't have needed to alter Mediawiki's code (which is a big no).
- DarkoNeko talk 13:43, 7 February 2014 (CST)
Separating the project and English language page is the worst option.
- Website design rule 1: Less clicks the better. Especially for pages that are more popular (I'm not looking down on alternative languages, just telling it how it is).
- Webiste design rule 2: Less size the better.
If the opposition to using the select language is too strong, then I suggest you look into using subcategories to solve this problem. letting the Language be the parent-category and Genres being the subcategories or vice versa. That's all I'm going to say.
- Please sign your messages with ~~~~ else we don't know who wrote what. DarkoNeko talk 13:41, 7 February 2014 (CST)
Project Status Terminology
To get this discussion going, too: IMO, it'd be best to name projects, which still have regularly contributions "active projects". Why? Because a series that has still more volumes to come is already called "on-going". "Active", however, is pretty clear in its meaning. Consequently the opposite to those projects would be "inactive projects". Then, of course, "completed projects" and maybe "licensed projects" for the stuff, that got licensed by U.S. companies. Though "licensed" might imply that Baka-Tsuki did license something. So the last term isn't very satisfying. Suggestions in that regard are highly welcomed. -cautr (talk) 06:41, 7 February 2014 (CST)
- Project Media Type { Light Novel, Visual Novel, Original Light Novel }
- Language of Translation { English, French, etc }
- Project Approval Status { Pending, Teaser, Approved, Abandoned (Licensed) }
- Project Activity Status { Active, Inactive, Complete } -----> it'd be amazing if this activity tracking could be assisted with a bot
- Author -----> IMO, I don't think any is ever going to search through these categories, so I think they're kind of useless....... but if you really want them(?)
- Publisher -----> IMO, I don't think any is ever going to search through these categories, so I think they're kind of useless....... but if you really want them(?)
Every Project Page should have a exactly one tag for each one of these above superclasses (exactly 6 tags total).
The following tags are useful, but they're optional and each project page could get more than one tag from each category:
- External Contributors { Nanodesu, Heretic, etc } ---> (imo: hosted tag should be replaced with these categories)
- Genre { You get it <3 }
In other words, every project would have a minimum of 6 tags, but there could easily be more. --Cloudii (talk) 00:06, 8 February 2014 (CST)
Using Category Intersections to simplify categories
Currently, we have a category called Light Novel (English), and twenty variations of this for every alternative light novel language. Rather have having these 21+ redundant categories, it is more logical to place project pages in their primary categories, and take intersections of these categories.
For example, if all light novel projects of all languages were listed in Category:Light novel, and all English projects were listed in Category:English, taking the intersection of these two categories is effectively the same as getting: Light Novel (English). This is an easy way to cut down on the number categories. Please see this link as the proof of concept. --Cloudii (talk) 14:06, 7 February 2014 (CST)
Security
This may have been discussed somewhere that I haven't seen, but is there going to be any way to restrict access to placing pages into certain categories? The fact that only admins can modify the side-bar seems to be central aspect of the current sidebar management system. But wouldn't linking the sidebar to categories allow anyone to add or remove pages from the sidebar? I don't think that would be a problem most of the time (we don't have too many vandals around), but it's a large change from the current system. Of course, the pro is that Oni and/or Darkoneko wouldn't need to be bugged every time a project has met the full project standards. --Cthaeh (talk) 20:37, 7 February 2014 (CST)
- The sidebar won't contain a list of novel's anymore. It will just be a direct link to the category page. I'm not sure if you understood that, but that's the plan. Cloudii (talk) 20:50, 7 February 2014 (CST)
- I guess I was imagining that the light novel category would be somehow transcluded into the sidebar to produce something visually similar to the current sidebar (with the addition of few more links to the other types of categories). I did understand that it would be based on categories and there would no longer be a list written out directly on the page. So my main point/question is what you elaborated on below. --Cthaeh (talk) 21:00, 7 February 2014 (CST)
This also ties into Help:New Project Startup Guidelines. Currently, BT Projects are "approved" when Oni/DarkoNeko adds a project to the sidebar. On the other hand, there's nothing stopping someone from adding a half-translated teaser to Category:Light Novel (English) (which by the way, is an awfully vague way of describing the category, since DarkoNeko apparently wants to exclude teasers and abandoned projects from that category. Most contributors would just assume its a category for all English LN and add their teasers to that category anyways... which will probably be an issue). Anyways, in this new system, how are we we going to regulate project approval if there's no need for Oni/DarkoNeko anymore? Any there any proposed rules we can come up with that will prevent BT from becoming a completely unregulated body? Cloudii (talk) 20:50, 7 February 2014 (CST)
Miscellaneous
I support most of the opinions in the other sections regarding reducing the number of categories within genres and leaving it focused on a few broad, mainstream genre descriptions. For the overall project, it seems like there are a lot of categories. The ones I see as most useful are genres, language, and maybe project status (and of course default sorting by name). Just my general opinion, --Cthaeh (talk) 20:37, 7 February 2014 (CST)
