Has any thought been given for a set style guide for the site? Looking through various program and actor descriptions, some have the program title in the description in bold type, others have it in quote marks, some don't have anything special highlighting the program title. Actors are similar in that some have the name in bold type, others have nothing.
Just wondering ...
i prefer Chicago Manual of Style myself... :)
And yes, I also would like to see consistent styling.
I totally agree with you that it should be consistent. I'm not fan of having quote marks or bold type of names myself. I think it should contain nothing of this :)
I agree too :)
Gadfly wrote:
i prefer Chicago Manual of Style myself... :)
And yes, I also would like to see consistent styling.
OK, I'll bite. What is the "Chicago Manual of Style"
I would prefer the British style over American, but that's me :)
at the very least, a combination of bold, italics, and quotation marks seems redundant.
Thomas wrote:
I would prefer the British style over American, but that's me :)
What standards guide would you prefer? Guardian, Oxford, something else?
The reason I suggest the Chicago Style Guide is that it's the style Wikipedia uses at least for their main pages. Which means that it's a set of guidelines most people are familiar with. What they use for the various international/country variants, I'm not sure.
Doctor Who Wikipedia's entry, for instance, appears to use the U.S. title format for the British series, and its spinoffs and references.
My personal preference would be to edit/write summaries in such a way that no title is necessary. We already have the title at the top of the page, right? and probably in the show image.
Looking at the four shows listed on the main page, Zombie House Flipping, Black Sails, The Quick and the Curious, and Mythbusters... all four images have the show title in it. The Zombie House Flipping image is nothing but the title. Then you go to its home page, and the title is on the page. And the title is on the show image on the page. It's up at the top in tiny letters. And then... it's in the summary for no real reason (and in bold/italics/quotations, as if one of those wasn't enough).
If you edited out the first four words of the summary, it would read exactly the same. Unless someone thinks that the visitors won't otherwise know the show is Zombie House Flipping from the 2-3 listings of the title on the page?
Gadfly wrote:
My personal preference would be to edit/write summaries in such a way that no title is necessary. We already have the title at the top of the page, right? and probably in the show image.
Looking at the four shows listed on the main page, Zombie House Flipping, Black Sails, The Quick and the Curious, and Mythbusters... all four images have the show title in it. The Zombie House Flipping image is nothing but the title. Then you go to its home page, and the title is on the page. And the title is on the show image on the page. It's up at the top in tiny letters. And then... it's in the summary for no real reason (and in bold/italics/quotations, as if one of those wasn't enough).
If you edited out the first four words of the summary, it would read exactly the same. Unless someone thinks that the visitors won't otherwise know the show is Zombie House Flipping from the 2-3 listings of the title on the page?
I think this is a very good start if you're writing the show summary.
Write the summary, so that the show title doesn't need te be included again.
But than again, you still have some words (names of actors, important places, ...) that are italic/bold/quotations.
I'd suggest program titles in italics, actor names shouldn't be highlighted in any way. I do understand using the program title in the first line of a program description, so that isn't as big of a deal. As for the American/British/Australian English question, that's more difficult. My gut reaction is the program descriptions should use whatever version of English is native to the program, but we already have confusion from folks not realizing a program is an import, so that may be fraught; and may be less of an issue over other asthetic concerns.
I'm not sure how many users we have now, and how many of those users are also contributers, but as the site gets more popular we're going to need some sort of write up to guide people on how to edit so it's consistent. I doubt any of this is an issue from an API standpoint, but web users are a different story.
The style you're describing is U.S./Chicago Manual of Style. :)
I don't mind the titles in summaries per se, especially since most of them are cut-n-paste. Although sometimes they're press releases rather than summaries. The two are not the same.
But then when the titles are in italics, bold, and quotation marks, it's really distracting. At that point it, feels like someone is yelling at me. Especially when it's the first thing I see more often than not. I'm getting to the page probably because of a search by show name, or clicking on a link for the show name from an actor page. Which means I already know the show name: I don't need someone "yelling" it at me when I get there. :)
I agree it would be nice to have a guide as to how showguides should look instead of now where there are many different styles. Personally i tend to put showtitles in italics and bold (but i can live with loosing the bold if that's the preference), what i do absolutely hate is when quotation marks are used, it just looks so wrong to me. Also i prefer not to have any actor names in a showsummary, some shows have a tendency to put them in brackets and again it just looks wrong and annoying to my eyes.
My impression is that actor names aren't allowed in show or episode summaries. They seem to be removed from the episode summaries when I get to them, after someone or something has imported them. So I assume that there's some automatic function on the import that looks for parens and removes them, as well as anything between them. Because the official summaries originally do have the actor names in them. (I'm looking at you, CW)
Since show summaries are typically pasted in by the user, not so much there.
Gadfly wrote:
My impression is that actor names aren't allowed in show or episode summaries. They seem to be removed from the episode summaries when I get to them, after someone or something has imported them. So I assume that there's some automatic function on the import that looks for parens and removes them, as well as anything between them. Because the official summaries originally do have the actor names in them. (I'm looking at you, CW)
Since show summaries are typically pasted in by the user, not so much there.
We delete them manually Gad :), often during Futon importer.
So then they shouldn't be in show summaries either, right?That seemed to be MTQueenie's issue, although I haven't seen it that much myself. But I tend to stick to my 10-15 shows a week.
I wouldn't say it's a huge issue but I do from time to time come across a summary with names in, so if they're gonna make a styleguide it just seems a good idea to put that in it aswell
Gadfly wrote:
So then they shouldn't be in show summaries either, right?That seemed to be MTQueenie's issue, although I haven't seen it that much myself. But I tend to stick to my 10-15 shows a week.
Well what's the point in having them in summaries once they are listed in the guest/main cast? We usuallt delete them once spotted
It sounds like everyone here agrees that there's no point in having them djsplayed. (correct me if I'm wrong, anyone!)
The question, as is often the case, is a) is it okay to delete them if we see them, and b) should people be told not to include them when they submit summaries, making a) mostly redundant?
Either someone(s) is including them, does, or they're not taking the time to remove them when they put them in. Which just makes more work for the rest of us.
