Official Titles or Proper Titles?

The question would be whether it's intentional or not.
If the network or producers used the diacritical marks in just one instance, in my book that would overrule the intern not having a clue how to type them ;)
I'm voting for keeping the title as it is, because in this instance it seems to match what's on the script:
https://twitter.com/ARROWwriters/status/971929322293403648 (was also retweeted by the CW Arrow account)

In general, titles obviously shouldn't be auto-corrected.
But sometimes the intended title just isn't widely used due to purely practical reasons - some characters are hard to type and if used in programming you'll just never know where they'll even render correctly. You don't really want peoples TV guides to read "Doppelg?nger".
Here and here are other examples where the networks didn't (or rather couldn't) use the correct titles for these reasons.

I would say we should always use proper punctuation.

JuanArango wrote:
I would say we should always use proper punctuation.

I guess that would be a bit too easy.
If writers get creative, they might very well name episodes like tħis or thæt or sømething ɛlse.
That should be respected - even if the networks can't or won't for whatever reasons.

markus wrote:
I guess that would be a bit too easy.
If writers get creative, they might very well name episodes like tħis or thæt or sømething ɛlse.
That should be respected - even if the networks can't or won't for whatever reasons.

Of course, if a word is intentionally misspelled, we should not correct it.

We should just follow the list of allowed sources from the policy, and use the title they provide without changing anything ourselves.

Is there an episode title on-screen? Use that, as-is.

Is there an episode title in a press release? Use that, as-is.

Are there multiple press releases out there with both "Doppelganger" and "Doppelgänger" as title? In that case we can assume that ones listing "Doppelganger" do so because of technical limitations and we can use the "Doppelgänger" instead.

Not chipping in on this specific episode, just mentioning that there are multiple examples of novels/movies/episodes/games etc that are intentionally spelled as "doppelganger" instead of the original German spelling with "ä".

For some examples, check this page (about half of the items uses an "a" instead): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppelganger_(disambiguation)

I see this more as a limitation of the font/style sheet/ typesetting not to use special characters. I don't see it as "wrong" if they are used any more than it's "right" if they don't. (Personally I have no idea how y'all make those special characters, so you'll never see them in my posts for example. LOL)

It's like with the Northern last names. Umlauts are just replaced with the non-altered characters in the international press. Most of the search engines do not distinguish diaereses from their non-altered equivalents, so search for doppelgänger will return the same results as doppelganger.

david wrote:
We should just follow the list of allowed sources from the policy, and use the title they provide without changing anything ourselves.

Is there an episode title on-screen? Use that, as-is.

Is there an episode title in a press release? Use that, as-is.

Are there multiple press releases out there with both "Doppelganger" and "Doppelgänger" as title? In that case we can assume that ones listing "Doppelganger" do so because of technical limitations and we can use the "Doppelgänger" instead.

No on-screen episode title. Although maybe the title card that goes out with the satellite feed says.

The episode title is in multiple press releases. The ones that I've seen use the non-diacritic.But I don't claim to have seen every press release, either. :)

The only "source" saying otherwise so far is the cited script. Unfortunately, I don't think the script is an official source (maybe #5). If it was put out on the show tweet, then maybe #5.

http://www.tvmaze.com/faq/15/episodes

But if 1-4 say one thing, and 5 says another, which has priority? Markus, for instance, states that if there's just one case (of #5), then it should have priority and be respected. Juan essentially says the same thing. So we might want to change the order listing of priorities if that's the case. Not because it's "right" or "wrong", but just if we're saying that #5 should have priority... let's make sure we say we're giving it priority.

Wasn't/isn't there someone who goes through and applies "proper" capitalization to titles? As far as I've been able to tell, they seem to be doing it just to follow the proper rules of capitalization, even if the source material(s) indicates otherwise.

This instance seems similar to that. The writer may indeed have done it one way and the network changed it... but the writer is basically source #5 while the network tends to be 1-4. If we want to give higher priority to what the writer intended, the order should be different than what TVMaze has.

I wasn't trying to say we should prioritize anything or change the order, what I'm suggesting is that for using diacritics (and just for those) any 1 out of 5 might do.
That's because not using them is mostly not a deliberate change but due to technical limitations, laziness or well-intentioned simplification .

Data shown on-screen during the episode's announcement, intro, or credits

Might not have them due to font limitations, if they're using a fancy one made for the show.

Data in a press release or press kit

If whoever writes this is even able to and bothers to type the character, the company font might still fall short.

Data on the show's official website

Should have them, unless they have to type the thing and get lazy or just copy the press release.

Data in TV guides/TV listings/EPG's for the show's country

I guess no one will dare to enter weird-looking unicode characters into these systems.

Statements by show crew in articles / interviews

Only if written by themselves, and that's what we have here.

As the @ARROWwriters Twitter account releases one of these title cards for every episode, that should solve it for this show :)

markus wrote:
I wasn't trying to say we should prioritize anything or change the order, what I'm suggesting is that for using diacritics (and just for those) any 1 out of 5 might do.
That's because not using them is mostly not a deliberate change but due to technical limitations, laziness or well-intentioned simplification .

My understanding is that the order is the priority. So if we are to go with a different order... that would be a suggestion to go with a different order, wouldn't it?

In this case, if #1 says that the title is punctuated such-n-such, and #5 says a different way, folks are supposed to go with #1. Anything else seems to complicate matters, and I though the guidelines existed to simplify things.

Without seeing an example of the title cards you're talking about, I'm not sure if they're what I was talking about. I'm referring to the ones that typically precede a download feed from a satellite and are almost never seen onscreen during the broadcast although screwups occasionally occur at the local level. But the employee(s) at the station see them. As opposed to the ones on the first page of a script. Hope that clarifies things.

But if the writer says the title should be one thing, and the network says that it's another... which has priority? That's what I thought the TVMaze data policies addressed, and the answer was (I thought) that the network had priority. That's what TVMaze already does with things like air order vs. writer-intended order, doesn't it (i.e., Firefly).

If the titles are completely different, we should obviously go with the order in the data policy.
Unless, for example, there's a clear typo in the press release that gets corrected on the website.
But if it's just typography, it's not that easy. See various reasons above why non-ASCII characters might be omitted in different places.

I didn't mean the satellite feed titles, I was talking about the writers credits or whatever the are found here: https://twitter.com/ARROWwriters/media

I guess that's where I differ. It's only "not that easy" if you start doing interpretations and speculation. Sure, there may be various reasons why the non-ASCII characters were omitted. Just like there may be various reasons why the episodes weren't aired in the order they were produced. There are always reasons for the possible conflicts. That's what the policy is presumably intended to address.

Here's the Data Policies section. It says nothing about reasons.

http://www.tvmaze.com/faq/15/episodes

It gives an order, and says that's the order that should be used. It's pretty easy. :)

*shrug* Based on david's statement above ("We should just follow the list of allowed sources from the policy, and use the title they provide without changing anything ourselves."), I'm changing the title per the data policy. That's consistent with other "writer intent vs. network release" policies TVMaze has. If the TVMaze policy changes, then the title should be changed accordingly. If folks don't like the policy, convince senior staff to change it.

If folks think that other titles should be changed, that's up to them. I'm not familiar with Hannibal, X-Files, etc.

Gadfly wrote:
I'm changing the title per the data policy.

Fair enough, I have no strong feelings about this show.

If folks think that other titles should be changed, that's up to them. I'm not familiar with Hannibal, X-Files, etc.

I seriously hope this doesn't encourage anyone to randomly strip all special characters from titles now.

markus

I seriously hope this doesn't encourage anyone to randomly strip all special characters from titles now.

I do not think this will happen :)

markus wrote:
Fair enough, I have no strong feelings about this show.

I seriously hope this doesn't encourage anyone to randomly strip all special characters from titles now.

I'd think that would depend on if the official TVMaze policy says what the title is. With or without special characters. In this case, according to the policy and david's statement above confirming, it doesn't get the special character.

Nobody should be changing any titles randomly. I doubt it will encourage anyone to do so, any more than the previous approach encouraged contributors to randomly insert special characters.