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"Fairy Invasion" No Longer Relevant

Actually, it was never relevant to begin with, since Ten Desires had already been released for an entire year before the aesthetic changes were made. But now it's been almost four months since the release of the demo for Hopeless Masquerade. Shouldn't the frontpage have a design that is up-to-date with what is new? And if that's not very feasible, wouldn't a conservative, generic layout be better in that regard? --Zehnfragezeichen (talk) 00:11, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

If you're here to reopen the Fairies issue from earlier, then please refrain from such. If you're going to propose new designs then go ahead. Momiji (talk) 01:08, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
I am superficially aware of the apparent drama regarding the fairies. And I don't really care to learn any details about it. I don't care who drew them, and if it was you who drew them then I hope you don't take offense to my opinions. The fact of the matter is that they were old-hat when they were added, and they cause a bit of oddities at certain window sizes. There's some other incongruities that are present, mostly with the divs. I'll try playing around with some options to find something that will mesh nicely. --Zehnfragezeichen (talk) 01:21, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
No worries. Feel free to experiment, in the sandboxes and your userspace. Momiji (talk) 01:35, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
Wait, I did not know they were to promote Ten Desires? I thought they were there just to have some fanbase-neutral characters on the front page? Code Slasher (talk) 04:59, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
You'd be correct. Momiji (talk) 21:49, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
There's also this page, which goes on the user pages. (I know the debate is over, but everyone who supports the fairies should add that to their userpage. I really hope we can populate the wiki with plenty of fairies.) Ibaraki Ibuki (talk) 00:55, 31 March 2013 (UTC)
Everyones' user pages are being redirected to Momiji's user page. Er... was this intended? TiamatRoar (talk) 03:01, 1 April 2013 (UTC)
Yes, just for April 1st. No harm was meant to be done. Ibaraki Ibuki (talk) 04:54, 2 April 2013 (UTC)
This seems like a cool idea actually! I think a new batch of characters with the full release of Hopeless Masquerade would be neat, perhaps with whatever new character is unveiled for the game, assuming there will be one. There's also the Forbidden Scrollery characters, Kosuzu + Human Mamizou. Can't wait for C84! OverCoat (talk) 01:12, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

New fighter

Now that Hopeless Masquerade is out, the first sentence of the front page should be updated to read "...with four fighting game spinoffs co-produced with Twilight Frontier." SuddenFrost (talk) 04:16, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Fixed! Thank you. Mamizou (talk) 04:23, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
Actually, it might be better to scale that back to "three". Hisoutensoku is simply an expansion, after all. Despatche (talk) 14:56, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
Well, it is an expansion, but it doesn't actually require SWR to be playable - it can act as independent game. • DennouNeko–[ 16:28, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
It also has its own official number (12.3). Code Slasher (talk) 03:58, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
I'm sorry, but treating 12.3 as a separate game is like treating a full version as a separate game from its trial, especially if you want to bring the (extremely limited) standalone portion into it. Despatche (talk) 12:59, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
Please don't compare this to trial version. Trial and a full version share exactly same title, and trial is more or less the same game without full functionality. In case of SWR and Hisoutensoku you get two separate games, where the latter just gains extra functionality when they are combined. • DennouNeko–[ 13:52, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
Congratulations, you've explained my point exactly. Despatche (talk) 17:00, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
You seem to agree with what I wrote, so you also agree that those are two separate games. Unless you didn't read it carefully enough. The Hisoutensoku just happens to be able to interface with SWR, but it's a separate game. If you still disagree, mauve wanted to invite you for a nice little talk on IRC to explain few things.
• DennouNeko–[ 18:22, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Server Hardware Fun

So Linode has been doing a bunch of hardware upgrades to their datacenters, along with free RAM increases. So we queued up the site last night for migration to the new server hardware. Things were working okay until earlier today when stuff started falling apart. Turns out we got migrated onto a server that probably had bad hardware. So Linode moved everything to a different server and we spent most of the day today piecing the software stack back together.

Anyway, so we now have twice the RAM and CPU cores than we did before. Thanks Oba^W Linode. Sorry about the downtime today. Momiji (talk) 05:00, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for the fixing!! The site seems super fast now compared to before, totally worth it. OverCoat (talk) 08:25, 17 April 2013 (UTC)
Well indeed. Much easier to browse between the pages! Good job! ☢ Quwanti 10:55, 17 April 2013 (UTC)
I hope this will improve things when editing large sections of an article, too. Code Slasher (talk) 18:56, 17 April 2013 (UTC)
The loading times for the massive SC lists have dramatically improved, which is always welcome. Hopefully there won't be any more 500-type errors. Nevermind. - Kiefmaster99 (talk) 20:17, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Update: I am still finding problems on editing sections, even for something as small as this section. Has anyone else noticed this behavior? Edit: I think Kiefmaster99 has. Code Slasher (talk) 18:21, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Manual of Style

I've been going through a bunch of names today, formatting all of them to conform to a common Manual of Style for consistency. Namely Wikipedia's. Since there are differences in opinion though, I suppose now's the time to clear up exactly how we should do things. To my knowledge, this Wiki does not have a well-defined Manual of Style. Therefore, I propose that we default to Wikipedia's Manual of Style for the sake of simplicity and similarity. Any thoughts? - Kiefmaster99 (talk) 23:28, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

No objections. I think one important rule in this, is "Use "sentence case", not "title case"; that is, the initial letter of a title is capitalized (except in rare cases, such as eBay), but otherwise, capital letters are used only where they would be used in a normal sentence (Funding of UNESCO projects, not Funding of UNESCO Projects).". We tend to capitalize every single word in a page's title, or most headers, which I think is rather annoying and unnecessary. ☢ Quwanti 00:17, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
That depends on where the rule is being applied. "Title case" will be applied to proper nouns, such as the names of people, spell cards, and song names. The title case rule does not affect article titles nor section headings. The title case rule would have to be clarified. Wikipedia uses sentence case for their articles and section headings, wheras that rule is not consistently followed here. We could switch to Wikipedia in that case, though it would lead to rather sweeping changes across the wiki. Alternately we could have exceptions to the rule. - Kiefmaster99 (talk) 00:27, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
For now, I just want to affirm the following:
1. All proper nouns will be in title case. In particular, song names and spell card names.
1a. Use Wikipedia's MOS. In particular, capitalize prepositions with at least five letters, and if involved with a phrasal verb (e.g. Cross-Up). Treat each word in a hyphenated term as if it were an individual word. (e.g. Suppression "Super-Ego")
1b. Keep trailing Japanese honorifics and such sentence case. (e.g. Impossible Request "Seamless Ceiling of Kinkaku-ji"; the last 'word' so to speak is "Kinkaku-ji").
This is so I can at least get rid of inconsistency among spell card names and song titles which seem to adhere to multiple rules at the same time. - Kiefmaster99 (talk) 04:10, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
You really bugged me with that hyphen thing. Do you really think that hyphenated words such as "ink-black" and "love-coloured" should have both words capitalized? If I remember correctly, there was a slight edit war a long time ago over "Love-coloured Master Spark". At the very least, you don't capitalize adjectives that are essential to the whole word's meaning ("black" in "ink-black"). Would you capitalize "important" in "non-important"? Code Slasher (talk) 04:21, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
Here's the problem. The list before was following multiple rules at the same time. While we had stuff like "Love-coloured" and "Ink-black", we also had "Super-ego" and "Anti-Youkai" (modifier + noun), "Roc-killing" and "Paparazzi-Repelling" (noun + verb into an adjective), and for your example, "Love-coloured" and "Non-Directional" (adjective). This was before I made sweeping changes across the lists. There was simply no common standard being followed, and the majority seemed to obey the 'capitalize both' rule anyhow.
In the end, it depends on what Manual of Style we want to follow. Gregg's handles it differently than Chicago's does. Whether "Love-coloured" becomes capitalized or not depends entirely on that. If I had to type "non-important" as a title on Wikipedia, yes, I would have to use "Non-Important". Since I can't see why any one MOS is any better than the others as it's on the point of being arbitrary, it makes most sense to simply default to Wikipedia's (which we use for most other things) unless there are good reasons to follow the other ones. - Kiefmaster99 (talk) 04:45, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Translation Style Guide

Is there a standardized guide to what we want translations to look like? A lot of the translations on Touhouwiki are so literal that you can tell that they were originally written in Japanese and could probably backtranslate them literally word for word. Conversely, other translations attempt to convey the meaning in text that actually looks like it was written by an English speaker, and make liberal changes to what was actually said. Is there a guide or style manual I'm missing, or have people just been winging it? AbyssNova (talk) 20:06, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

To my knowledge, there isn't exactly any translation guideline on how literal/liberal to make the translations. It was kind of assumed that it would be up to the individual discretion of editors who think they know what they're doing (so yes, the latter). In the past, the different style of translators, plus limited coordination, led to inconsistencies in names and such. Recently, one editor did join and heavily increased the literalness of the translations. On the other hand, I know there are some translators who have voiced their opinion on not wanting to go too far off into the deep end (see here). Still, it's a wiki, so it's not very surprising to see stuff being done differently.
Our translations should be translated in so far as it is possible to make our text sound natural, with some liberties if necessary. On the other hand, the nature of Touhou itself, with many references to Japanese elements, not to mention ZUN's wordplay, acts as a counterweight.
It is possible to establish a more solid guideline here for translators in the future. Some input would be nice. - Kiefmaster99 (talk) 23:31, 1 June 2013 (UTC)
I think it would help to establish some benchmark examples to help guide translators into favouring literalness or liberalness in certain scenarios. I have selected some names which I believe test the boundary between them:
火水木金土符「賢者の石」
Fire Water Wood Metal Earth Sign "Philosopher's Stone" (as opposed to Five Elements; association with the days of the week)
「百万鬼夜行」
"Night Parade of One Million Demons" (as opposed to "Pandemonium")
波符「赤眼催眠(マインドシェイカー)」
Wave Sign "Red-Eyed Hypnosis (Mind Shaker)" (as opposed to "Mind Shaker")
水符「夏のペットボトルロケット」
Water Sign "Summer Water Bottle Rocket" (as opposed to PET Bottle)
鬼符「怪力乱神」
Oni Sign "Anomalies, Strength, Disorder, and Spirits" (as opposed to "Supernatural Phenomena")
傘符「一本足ピッチャー返し」
Umbrella Sign "One-Legged Return Hit" (as opposed to Pitcher)
鱗符「逆鱗の荒波」
Scale Sign "Raging Waves of the Reversed Scale" (as opposed to Imperial Wrath)
牙符「月下の犬歯」
Fang Sign "Canine Teeth Under the Moon" (as opposed to 'in the Moonlight')
八百万の代弁者
Advocate of the Eight Million (as opposed to "Advocate for the Divine Multitude")
九天の滝
Waterfall of Nine Heavens (as opposed to "Waterfall of the Heavens")
First, by no means do the current translations suggest they are 'right'. Nor are they completely representative of everything Touhou (my knowledge of scripts are lacking compared to spell cards). But for some of the translations, it depends on how important it is to convey the literalness. For example, in Nitori's case, ペットボトル (PET Bottle) is an uncommon kind-of-techical term found in some manuals on how to make a 2L water bottle rocket, so water bottle is favoured. On the other hand, 逆鱗 (Reversed Scale), while part of a saying, is interpreted literally to fit in with Scale Sign. - Kiefmaster99 (talk) 15:28, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
Not to be a nitpicking whiner (which I am) but as for the example's you've listed -
怪力乱神 is a phrase that means "supernatural phenomena" and a kanji-by-kanji translation confuses more than it illuminates.
I think it's more important to convey the intended meaning "imperial wrath" than retain ZUN's little pun. Puns break when you translate them. Retaining them is usually more trouble than its worth.
Whenever the "eight million" are referred to, I think either it should simply be translated "eight million gods" or a TL note added (even thought that would get old fast) as the phrase alone loses all of its meaning when translated into English unless the reader happens to be familiar with Shinto (which would not be surprising for a Touhou Project fan, but still).
The purpose of translation is to convey the meaning of what is being said. It shouldn't require additional expertise on the part of the reader to interpret it. I would suggest that communication of meaning be the highest priority, with literalism and naturalism both taking a back seat. At times this may require retention of tone. During the Sack of Mayohiga, "let's go loot stuff" conveys Reimu's attitude better than "I must find lightweight familiar everyday necessities" despite the fact that the literal meaning has been butchered. If there's some sort of notable wordplay involved I suggest it simply be stuffed into a TL note and called a day. AbyssNova (talk) 18:45, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
Actually, on second thought here, the example I used doesn't illustrate the point I was trying to make at all, since it would seem to prize naturalism over communication. Something like, "let's go find some of that silverware" would probably be a better balance. Eeh, what a mess. 19:03, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

Site development and discussion

I'm taking input on site development and design, please post/discuss anything in the talk page if you have any ideas. Thanks! Mamizou (talk) 17:16, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Character Battle

GameFAQS recently started another one of its character battles, and unlike in previous years, it only takes around 15,000 votes to win a match (or around 7,000 for 2nd place), so rallying could have a significant effect. Reimu, Marisa, and Cirno all made it into the bracket, and I was wondering if it would be possible to put up a link to the voting page on the wiki's main page during their matches. Matches are only 12 hours long, so the link wouldn't have to be up there for long. By the way, Reimu's match is in 4 days, and Marisa's would probably the easiest to affect because Reimu and Cirno have Final Fantasy 7 characters in their matches, while Marisa only has a Final Fantasy 9 character.

Link to the bracket: http://www.gamefaqs.com/features/cb9_bracket

Frontpage icons

I've always thought the icons for the games on the left were a bit lonely, and wondered what it would look like if everything else had its own icon as well. I threw together some icons and added them to a front page copy here: http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/User:Darkslime/FrontPageTest2

What does everyone think of actually implementing something like this? ― Darkslime 16:08, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Nice idea. The icons could use a bit of reworking but it looks nice already.--Wymar(⑨⑨) 16:29, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

References and notes sections

Question. At the moment, there seem to be three different competing standards for what to use in References and Notes sections at the bottom of pages. One is to use <references />, another is to use {{smallrefs}}, and the third is {{smallrefs|2}} (with two columns).

Wikipedia generally uses the small references with two columns - should we not do the same? In any case, we really should make it consistent across the wiki. ― Darkslime 13:20, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

I don't think most people care tbh, but I do support using one consistent format. Wikipedia's is fine by me. - Kiefmaster99 (talk) 17:45, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
I know most people probably don't care at all, but it's gotta be done. :) My current thinking is to have one format for "notes" (like on translation pages and such) and one format for "references". They can both be the same format though I guess. I say we just make them all {{smallrefs|2}}, so if there's no disagreement, I'll implement it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Darkslime (talkcontribs) 13:21, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
Changed my mind. Translation notes definitely need to be a single column. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Darkslime (talkcontribs) 14:47, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
Well, when you don't put any of those things at all, it says on the bottom of the page in big red letters "Cite error: <ref> tags exist, but no <references/> tag was found". I think that even if you try to use some other format, most editors unfamiliar will continue to use <references/> because of this message. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Flan27 (talkcontribs) 16:09, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
With any luck, those editors would be following guideline pages that specify one or the other, but I see your point. I still think it's worth standardizing, though. ― Darkslime 17:42, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Typo in article name

Really stupid, but eh. "Running in Linux and MacOS X" should be "Running in Linux and Mac OS X". I don't think Apple has ever used "MacOS", if it helps. It's also in the sidebar, not sure if those are linked to the main page? Despatche (talk) 06:03, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Good catch. I support this. Code Slasher (talk) 18:53, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Typo in the announcement at the top of the page. "Account registration is currently in disabled." > "Account registration is currently disabled." Someone with permissions to change is required. Thanks. LoliSauce (talk) 08:54, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Hopeless Masquerade spoilers expire today

As stated on Touhou Wiki:Project Characters, it's been six months since the full release of Hopeless Masquerade, which means all blacked-out spoilers regarding endings from HM (such as in character descriptions, etc) should now have their black-out spoiler tags removed. I'm posting this here just so that people are aware of it. ― Darkslime 13:51, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Initialisms and the titles

I don't really know where to put these kinds of things so I'm dumping it all here I guess.

The initialisms need to go because they're not helpful or informative in the slightest. Again, do we really need to know that Super Mario Bros. is also known as Mario Bros. (not to be confused with the game or the characters), Mario (not to be confused with the series or the character), SMB (not to be confused with everything "SMB" stands for), and so on? No, the fact that there's tons of ambiguous detail with the Mario example doesn't really make a different; I'm just pulling this out into a principle and showing why it doesn't work.

We absolutely need to start using the main titles as the default, not the subtitles... anything else is simply misleading. There's no better proof than the common belief that there's some "Japanese title" and some "English title" for every game. There's only a main title and a subtitle; one happens to be written with kanji, while the other happens to be written with Latin and is generally made up of English words... which means nothing, except when talking about the merit of this style. Obviously, we need to make an exception for things like Double Spoiler and Yousei Daisensou, but fortunately ZUN did the work for us and just made those the main title; he clearly understands this problem too, and that's simply on the "Japanese" side of things.

I get the feeling these two are related; people use the subtitles because they're "English", because they can initialize those... "how do you initialize kanji" (it's actually very easy...)? It is imperative that this, a fairly serious English wiki on a Japanese series made by and for English-speaking fans (never mind the various other languages this project supports), respects what is right as far as what is physically possible, not as far as what is "comfortable"... you adhere to a flawed status quo, and it stays flawed forever. That's the problem Wikipedia has, and they don't seem to get that... I'm hoping you guys will understand this better, as you seem to take this stuff a bit more seriously (if not necessarily these two topics here).

...Aside from all of this, "the" needs to be respected; it is completely nonsensical to drop it or move it to the end "just because", as it defeats the whole point of even using the thing.

Bleh. Thanks for reading... maybe? Please. :( Despatche (talk) 03:03, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

"That's the problem Wikipedia has"? Despite whether it is a problem or not, we need to respect Wikipedia's methods. We are a wiki that has a style manual that is heavily derived from Wikipedia. Also, why in the world would an English translation fansite have the Japanese as the main title? That just makes it inconvenient for everybody.
On a non-"the" sorting style, it is imperative that "the" is not included at the beginning. One would have to sift through all of the titles with "the" in them if we sorted by "the" first.
... I don't know. Maybe I didn't even address the issue at hand. Your post was very hard to understand. Code Slasher (talk) 03:40, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
I might add a comment that we've been using Hepburn-style romanization for a long time here, so please don't suddenly change instances of ふ from fu to hu (among other kana of disagreement like し shi and ち chi). Shearscape (talk) 07:27, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
I am fine with the status quo. The article titles reflect the common name used in the English fanbase, and the beginning of the article uses the full proper name. There is no need to unnecessarily expand the article title to something longer than they already are. And even then, subtitles are essential to distinguish print works that share the same main title, such as the Touhou Sangetsusei series. Yousei Daisensou is unique in that the common name is not found in the actual title itself, but is derived rather from the in-game label Fairy Wars.
As for initialisms, I'm indifferent to whether they stay or go. - Kiefmaster99 (talk) 06:15, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Better organized spellcard pages

I would like to make a suggestion that I believe would help increase the readability and navigability of spellcard pages. I'd like to add in headers to differentiate between a boss's different spellcards. Not spellcards of different difficulties, but different spellcards that the boss uses throughout the fight. I don't know how to make a separate page for this sort of thing, but I put an example on my user page here: User:Flan27. Basically, by adding those headers everyone will easily be able to tell what part of a stage or fight a spellcard is used in. Even without it readers can guess what number of spellcard in a battle something is by looking at the difficulties and figuring it out themselves, but the headers will make the information readily available to them. I'm not sure about the exact wording that should go on the headers, but my point is that there should be some divider to make the pages easier to understand. I'd like to hear what other people think about this. Flan27 (talk) 00:59, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Nuke "Necrofantasia" into "Necrophantasia"

Since the official name was spelled out in English in one of ZUN's CDs, I was wondering if all instances of Necrofantasia should be renamed to Necrophantasia, to keep the naming as close to official as possible. Totlmstr (talk) 06:26, 8 March 2014 (UTC)