Inkipedia talk:Ink Pump

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Album pages' tracklist tables formatting

On pages covering the Japan-only releases Splatune 3 and Ordertune we list both the English and Japanese song titles and artist names per each track, accompanied by romanization of the Japanese titles. To a user who is able to read both English and Japanese, these tables essentially cover each song and artist listing twice (or even thrice) within the same row, when listing such just once in English should suffice per how we generally handle localization-exclusive material across the wiki. The current format renders the related tables unnecessarily bulky horizontally, as they are essentially chock-full of alternate localization information that is better suited to the appropriate individual song/band pages' names in other languages sections. Each music track should have a dedicated page (or subsection within a page), where the track's Japanese title (and subsequent romanization) should be listed exclusively in that page's names in other languages section.

Compare these two options (based on the current Splatune 3 table layout):

Current album layout preview
Track no. English song title Japanese song title Romanization English artist name Japanese artist name Nintendo artist name 1 Opening - C-Side Ryo Nagamatsu 2 Clickbait (Splash Sessions Demo) Clickbait (Rehearsal Studio Jam) 25 "Salmon Run Success Jingle No. 1" サーモンラン 成功ジングル その1 Sāmon Ran Seikō Jinguru Sono 1 Grizzco クマサン商会 Ryo Nagamatsu

Alternative album layout preview
Track no. Song title In-universe artist name Nintendo artist name 1 Opening C-Side Ryo Nagamatsu 2 Clickbait (Splash Sessions Demo) 25 Salmon Run Success Jingle No. 1 Grizzco

I'm of the opinion reformatting all the tables to the alternative layout listed above will make the tables more readable and manageable. My understanding is the Japanese titles and artist names are currently noted in this way to aid users who own the merchandise but may not understand Japanese in figuring out which song is which. However per the recently-added translation policy, we overall prefer English nomeclature on the wiki, using unofficial translations when necessary. Currently unofficial translations are for the most part listed in these tables as elaborations upon/explanations of the Japanese titles, as if to supplement the Japanese track listings being the "main" information, when the Japanese titles should be generally reserved for dedicated names in other languages sections. Yoshifan52 (talk) 07:58, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

I think this is generally a good idea, though the one case where this might cause issues is in the bit of time when a newly-released album is out and translations are not yet available for all songs. This is a short enough timespan where it's probably not too important, but a workflow like we currently have for Ordertune, where anyone can transcribe the track listings and then later on, people who are proficient in Japanese can add romanizations and translations, would not be as clear with that. Obviously a translator could still cross-reference with the track number with an external album listing, but I think that's enough of a barrier that it might make it less appealing to do so. So either we could use the old layout (or at least a version with the original Japanese titles) until all the translations are finished, or we could also just have the Japanese titles stand in until they are translated and replaced. Though that would make double-checking the translations of more minor songs that don't have full titles a bit more of a pain, and this solution would also mean that the Japanese titles of those minor songs presumably have no place at all on the wiki?

So I think with that in mind what I would probably like best would be the alternative layout with an additional column for the Japanese title. It would make early editing of these tables easier, it would allow double-checking the translations later on, and it would still preserve the original Japanese names for the songs that don't get their own page. UnderFlorence (talk) 08:16, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

AFAIK, there are songs exclusive to the album, that would need Japanese titles anyway. For Ordertune the song "バンカラ三中校歌" is exclusive. I'm not proficient in Japanese (I'm a Chinese speaker, BTW), but I can roughly translate that as "Splatlands 3rd Middle School Anthem". Maybe someone can correct my translation anyway. Explorer09 (talk) 08:41, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't think that exclusive songs are really a different case from songs that don't have an official English translation. "Salmon Run Success Jingle No. 1"/"サーモンラン 成功ジングル その1" is in the exact same boat as "バンカラ三中校歌" in that it's 1) a title that only exists in Japanese and 2) likely will not get its own page with a translation box due to being comparatively unimportant (unless it turns out to be a variation of an existing track). However, I do agree that in both of those cases, we should have a place for the original Japanese titles. UnderFlorence (talk) 11:43, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

@Yoshifan52 and @UnderFlorence, I would suggest this layout for a Splatune song entry:

Track no.	Song title	In-universe artist name	Nintendo artist name
(Disc 1)
09	Unconscience Monologue	Marina イイダ
11	"Secret of the Order world"(unofficial title) 秩序世界の秘密 (Chitsujo sekai no himitsu)	N/A
(Disc 3)
02	Suffer No Fools 蛮殻 MC BATTLE ～The King of Tentacular～	Off the Hook VS Fire & Ice テンタクルズ vs 空帆＆楓火

This keeps the Japanese titles and artist names for reference purpose, but the Romanization column is mostly redundant when the songs have articles in Inkipedia already. If we do need romanizations for any purpose, they can be put into 3rd line in each song title cell. How do you guys think? Explorer09 (talk) 12:39, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

In response to all of the above: I hadn't considered this special before-release scenario for Ordertune (and potentially future such cases); I agree it's best to keep the listings of Japanese track titles and artists in some form for now. Once the album releases and we can better inspect the contents, then we can start making pages with the unofficially translated titles, replacing the Japanese listings. If implemented, we should add a notice/note to the tracklist section explaining this.

I'm a fan of your demonstration here Explorer09, I think we should work with this. The title formatting should be cleaned up a bit (no parenthesis around romanization text, no "unofficial title" superscript) but other than that, I think this would be good to go. We should probably not list the Nintendo artist name column until the album releases, as we don't have that information until we can see it in the discs themselves.

I also think we should list "N/A" in instances where no in-universe artist is given (this has been removed from the Ordertune tables). When those cells are blank it looks like we are missing the information, as if waiting for others to add it, when in this case there is no information to add; the songs have no listed artists.

If agreed upon further I'd be happy to fix the tables up ASAP. Yoshifan52 (talk) 22:25, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Adding on to this: While listing the Japanese names along the English names may seem redundant at first glance, I'd prefer to have them here rather than relegate them purely to the song wiki pages, both because all Splatoon albums are Japanese only, and because having them here is more convenient than having to click through another page just to know which title is which on the physical album. However, I do agree that trimming the current layout style is necessary, and Explorer09's suggestion is something I am completely up for.

About removing the "N/A"'s: I did so simply because they weren't there on the Splatune 3 album page, and wanted them to be consistent. Seeing it now, I'll concede that the "N/A"'s looked better, and am fine with them being added back (as long as we also add them to the other album pages). Lumenid (talk) 00:36, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I vote for keeping the Japanese song names too. It's useful for people who physically own the album and verify the tracklist right away (and minimize ediorial errors).

As for the table formatting. I was actually inspired by the formatting of TV episodes such as this list. There can be minor changes on the quotes or parentheses or other styling. Overall it reduces the number of table columns and makes the reading easier on mobile browser.

As for "N/A", what would Musicbrainz do when it comes to this case? I was referencing Musicbrainz way for special artist when it can convey slightly more info than N/A. Explorer09 (talk) 02:41, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I pretty much agree with what you're saying. The N/A thing I'm unsure about and I can see arguments for either case, so I'll stay neutral on that.

To add onto what @Lumenid has been saying, there also are a good chunk of songs that don't have pages (and probably will not get their own pages in the foreseeable future, if stuff like the cutscene themes from Splat3 are any indication), and for those the album page is the only place the original name could even go. But that's of course still covered under the current suggestion, so I'm happy to go with that. UnderFlorence (talk) 08:27, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

I do think we should keep all song translations in title case but if that goes against the standards of style here then please disregard this. Otherwise, wholeheartedly agree with Explorer09's suggestion with "N/A"s. ArgentuTA164 (talk) 00:18, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

I agree with title case for English song titles, unless an official translation confirms another type of case. This is because title case is the standard in the English language for proper nouns, including titles of songs, books, movies, et cetera. Heddy (talk) 15:58, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

I agree with the proposed layout "Alternative album layout preview". Japanese should be in Names in other languages tables only. Of course, as some mentioned, Japanese could be used as a placeholder if we don't have a translation, but otherwise I really do agree with an all-English format. Heddy (talk) 15:53, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

The issue to the all-English tracklist is that, it's not easy to verify the track names right away as these Splatune albums are Japanese only, and very unlikely to have an official English release. If there has been an official English tracklist, we could use that right way, or else, the English-only list would be more prone to errors. Explorer09 (talk) 19:13, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

While I generally agree that Japanese text should be relegated to Names in other languages, a good chunk of any album's tracks are going to not have a unique article with a corresponding NioL section - and those tracks especially tend to be the ones that don't have officially localized names. This would lead to a case where for some songs, the only official name that exists for them is not listed anywhere on the Wiki, which is not a great outcome imo. But I also wouldn't want to give every single song a bespoke article just so it can have a NioL tab. So I think treating that column in the table as a mini-NioL would make a lot of sense.

Edit: Also, unlike with a NioL section, with the Japanese names completely absent, there wouldn't be a way for someone to double-check the translation without consulting external sources, which also feels suboptimal to me. UnderFlorence (talk) 19:20, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

In a scenario like Ordertune's, we wouldn't remove the Japanese titles in favor of unofficially translated ones until pages have been created for all the relevant tracks. All album tracks should have corresponding articles or sections (the album-exclusive Inkopolis Memorial Mixtape comes to mind). In cases where articles have not yet been made, the Japanese titles should be listed temporarily.

Overall I'm also in favor of prioritizing the English track names, even if they're unofficial. We could potentially have a separate tracklist table listing just the Japanese names, but I'm not sure how useful that would ultimately be... an ordered tracklist containing exclusively English names should be plenty useful to a potential CD owner who can't read the Japanese titles consulting the wiki, as they could go off of the track numbers to see which song is which. Yoshifan52 (talk) 05:40, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

Just to mention I made a draft template to help people discuss about the ideas. User:Explorer09/Splatoon album track entry Explorer09 (talk) 11:38, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

This looks great! I think we should go with this once we have agreed on how to handle the Japanese titles. Yoshifan52 (talk) 22:43, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

Agreed that it looks good! My main 2 points here are

1) Is it intended that the template appends double quotes around the name as opposed to two single quotes (which are used for italics)?

2) I'm not sure how much use the Japanese artist name is. Are there any artists that don't have pages? I think it's best to handle it like we're planning to handle the names, where it only exists if the artist doesn't have a page with NioL (though I'm not sure if there are any).

As for your discussion points:

1) No preference here, but I think the current one works fine.

2) Are there any albums in other languages? I'm not sure to which extent it's worth future-proofing - since we don't even have an English album release, I have my doubts about other languages.

3) "Album tracklist" or something as the name, maybe? UnderFlorence (talk) 10:16, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

1) Yes. English writing style tend to use quotation marks rather than italics for citing track titles.

2) There are songs that have multiple artists credited, such as "すりみ連合×シオカラーズ" (Deep Cut × Squid Sisters) or "シオカラーズ feat. RANOMAT" (Squid Sisters feat. Ian BGM). In those cases the formatting of the artist names could be important, so I would advise against leaving out the Japanese artist names. (Artist names exactly the same in English and Japanese should be the only exception.) Explorer09 (talk) 10:30, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

1) While this might be true in general, it does not track with Inkipedia's style, see here. (Thank you to StarAdamStar for just having posted this on the Discord for entirely unrelated reasons :p)

2) Hmm, I can see your point, but I don't see it as the same level of "preserving the original" as song names without a distinct article, given that the individual parts of the names are still listed with their own NioL. The cross and feat. are still there as they are in Japanese, after all. UnderFlorence (talk) 11:36, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I think using Japanese names only in cases where an article with NioL does not yet exist is a good solution to this. UnderFlorence (talk) 09:28, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Discussion here has somewhat stalled without a clear consensus being reached, I'd like to revitalize the discussion and hopefully receive more feedback from others. The specifics of styling have been figured out, it's mostly a matter of agreeing upon how to handle track listings. The two options being soft-voted on here are:

1. Keep Japanese titles in the tables alongside English ones – agreed upon by Explorer09 and UnderFlorence.
2. Remove Japanese titles from the tables if an equivalent song article has been made with that title sorted into a proper NioL section – agreed upon by Heddy and myself.

We effectively have a tie for votes. There are two main arguments clashing here:

1. It is easier to quickly see the equivalent 1:1 Japanese title on the table while browsing the album page, rather than having to open individual song page links and scroll to the NioL section. This would be relevant to owners of the CDs checking the page seeking the information at-a-glance.
2. A recently installed wiki policy states we must prioritize English nomenclature whenever possible. As use of unofficial English translations are allowed in this case, and would be included in the table should either option be agreed upon, it is simpler to list one name, not two. Japanese titles would stay listed until moved to dedicated a NioL section.

Any and all feedback on the matter is appreciated. Yoshifan52 (talk) 23:19, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

I vote for 2. Olivia (talk) 06:30, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

While I am considered "already voted" here, I'm a little confused about what option 2 means here. In particular, when should we remove the Japanese title from track listing in case option 2 wins? When an official English title of the music is available, or when the English article of that music (with NioL section) is created, even though the English title is unofficial at the time? I would be more comfortable if it's the former, but you didn't seem to distinguish the two cases. Explorer09 (talk) 11:53, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Apologies that my message wasn't clear enough; Japanese titles would stay on the table until a page is made, then the Japanese name is moved to that page's NioL section. If a page has not been made, or the page is made but NioL isn't set up properly, the Japanese name will stay on the table.

Creation of page titles with unofficially translated names is completely allowed per the policy I linked. If the problem you have with this topic is the unofficial English page names, that is a matter of disagreeing with policy rather than with what I'm suggesting; do note a community vote took place to install that policy very recently. The best place to discuss such would be the policy talk page, not here. Prior to the policy discussion, vote and installation, we indeed used Japanese titles for certain song page names. Yoshifan52 (talk) 19:56, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

My clarification here. I do not oppose anything about unofficial English titles in pages. What I wished to see is a clear indicator that the English title is unofficial, so that people who have the album can still refer to their Japanese title when needed. Anyway, I still favor option 1. Because option 1 is "stupid". Once a Japanese title is included in the tracklist, editors don't need to tell when the Japanese title needs to be removed. Despite duplicating the information in NioL, the tracklist would be overall "simpler" to maintain (my "simple" word here does not refer to conciseness, but uniformity that Japanese track titles are listed all at once, or none at all). Explorer09 (talk) 20:42, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

I should note that my "informal vote" for 1 was largely inspired by wanting the Japanese names somewhere on the Wiki. If we go with 2 where we keep Japanese if no page (or at least no page with NioL) has been made, I'm completely fine with otherwise removing the Japanese names from the album pages.

As such, I'll throw my vote in for 2. UnderFlorence (talk) 12:32, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

I would prefer 1 (albeit by a relatively small margin) for the reasons described; it more authentically reflects the tracklist of releases that so far have been Japan-exclusive, but are also somewhat popular imports by international fans. Driftin Soul [Talk!] 15:36, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

I vote for Option 1, having the Japanese titles regardless of the existence of a proper NioL is incredibly useful for international users who have imported the albums. ArgentuTA164 (talk) 18:40, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

I personally vote for option 1. Simply put, the albums are Japan-exclusive, and I feel like that requires different treatment compared to most other topics; in this case, keeping the Japanese track names for those who import. Lumenid (talk) 19:21, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

I also agree with the option that keeps the Japanese names, it's more accurate since the albums are only released in Japanese, and the idea of only keeping some of the Japanese names in the tables based on what can be found on other pages is needlessly inconsistent. There's also cases like Got It! and You Got Them! (Salmon Run) 1 where the same track has varying names between albums, so listing the names actually used in the album for each track is significantly more clear and helpful than just relying on other pages' names in other languages sections. Hewer (talk · contributions) 14:32, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Oh yeah, thanks for mentioning that! The point about different names between albums is enough to fully move me to 1. UnderFlorence (talk) 15:44, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for all the additional responses everyone! We now have more votes (with added arguments) towards keeping the Japanese names intact so we should go with that. Explorer09's template looks like it will get the job done very neatly.

I was planning to "close" this informal vote then immediately tidy up the tables a day or two after the last vote was cast, but I've gotten sick and should keep editing to a minimum. If anyone else would like to tidy up the tables feel free to, alternatively I'll handle them as soon as I'm able to. Just wanted to leave an update here as it has been about a week since the last vote was cast. Yoshifan52 (talk) 08:03, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

A few things we should consider before implementing the template (and pinging @Explorer09 here since they made the template):

I already mentioned that Inkipedia policy italicizes song names rather than putting them in quotation marks. We also need to make a choice on if SFX "tracks" also get italicized or not, which determines whether italicization should be baked into the template or set manually only for songs, but not SFX. According to the template page, the names are also not final. I think "artist alt" is one that could be made clearer. "artist irl" is clearer but maybe reads a little weirdly? Also, how do we handle cases where the Japanese name is identical to the English one? Do we put the name twice, or do we just omit the "Japanese: Name" part entirely?

Additionally, current Album pages make heavy use of colspan and rowspan in cases of repeating information. This is not possible with the proposed template (though the need for colspan is also completely gone with this one). The options that I see for that are:

1: Just have repeated information in separate cells, for the cases where the same artist is used in multiple rows consecutively. Since we don't have to use colspan anymore, this feels like it'll look alright, though might also look a bit cramped, we'll have to see.

2: Add a rowspan option for the artist jp/en and artist alt options to reimplement rowspan as it is currently used.

3: This one is the most involved, but feels like it could be worthwhile: turn the template into a module and automatically generate the rowspan cells (and omit the info on the further rows) if the same content is used in multiple consecutive rows. By making the choice of how repeated information is handled part of the module as opposed to part of the invocation, it would also allow for us to change our minds on this in the future pretty easily without needing to edit all those pages again.

I could try whipping up a module version in my userspace later today to see how it'd work out. UnderFlorence (talk) 11:55, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

As promised, here's the template using a module: User:UnderFlorence/Album listing

While this means that one would need to enter duplicate entries for bands for each row (at least the English name, the Japanese one isn't considered for this comparison), I think it will make it a lot easier to edit when one doesn't have to worry about rowspan messing things up and that stuff is all handled by the module.

Edit: I've ported disc 1 of Splatune 3 to the new format, which you can see in User:UnderFlorence/Splatune 3 if you're curious how it looks in action. UnderFlorence (talk) 18:12, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Sorry everyone, but I was too late to the discussion. (My phone broke and I spent a few days with my personal stuff before I can get online again.) So it seems that you guys have made the template - and it looks cool at a glance. I didn't test it thoroughly, however. Explorer09 (talk) 21:33, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

No worries, and thank you for the work you did with the general design of the template! I think it works really nicely, especially on mobile. UnderFlorence (talk) 10:57, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Okay. Some thoughts about the new template (Template:Album listing, @UnderFlorence):

1. I like the new approach of mapping Japanese artist names from English artist names. And it would surely reduces duplications in the wikitext of album pages. However, keep in mind that the list might be expanded over time, and for ease of maintenance, I recommend separating them into a data table (maybe name it as Module:Localized artist name/data) from the module code. My Module:Inline singer lyrics/data was done in a similar approach; you can use that as reference.
2. The above also means that there could be a Module:Localized artist name that does one thing: Getting localized artist name from the English artist name.
3. I don't like the sub-template Template:Track listing. I think if a template generates code that's only meant to be further parsed by another module, then it shouldn't be a template, but put the data "inline" as the module's argument. But I have an alternative, better idea.
4. I also wish the track numbers be explicitly written in the track listing, therefore this is the template call syntax in my vision:

Before

{{Template:Album listing | color = sitecolor-s3 | use colspan = true | {{Template:Track listing | title = ''[[Big Betrayal]]'' | title jp = 鉄槌ピシャゲルド | artist = [[Deep Cut]] | artist irl = [[Toshiyuki Sudo]] }} | {{Template:Track listing | title = ''[[Suffer No Fools]]'' | title jp = 蛮殻 MC BATTLE ～The King of Tentacular～ | artist = [[Off the Hook]] VS [[Fire & Ice]] | artist irl = Unspecified{{Note|[[Off the Hook]]'s music in ''Ordertune'' was composed by [[Toru Minegishi]] and/or [[Kairi Hamada]], while [[Deep Cut]]'s music was composed by [[Toshiyuki Sudo]].|name=Credits Off the Hook VS Fire & Ice}} }} | {{Template:Track listing | title = ''[[Anarchy Rainbow]] (Splatoween)'' | title jp = 蛮殻ミックスモダン（Splatoween） | artist = [[Deep Cut]] | artist irl = [[Toshiyuki Sudo]] }} }}

After

{{Template:Album listing | color = sitecolor-s3 | use colspan = true | title 1 = ''[[Big Betrayal]]'' | title jp 1 = 鉄槌ピシャゲルド | artist 1 = [[Deep Cut]] | artist irl 1 = [[Toshiyuki Sudo]] | title 2 = ''[[Suffer No Fools]]'' | title jp 2 = 蛮殻 MC BATTLE ～The King of Tentacular～ | artist 2 = [[Off the Hook]] VS [[Fire & Ice]] | artist irl 2 = Unspecified{{Note|[[Off the Hook]]'s music in ''Ordertune'' was composed by [[Toru Minegishi]] and/or [[Kairi Hamada]], while [[Deep Cut]]'s music was composed by [[Toshiyuki Sudo]].|name=Credits Off the Hook VS Fire & Ice}} | title 3 = ''[[Anarchy Rainbow]] (Splatoween)'' | title jp 3= 蛮殻ミックスモダン（Splatoween） | artist 3 = [[Deep Cut]] | artist irl 3 = [[Toshiyuki Sudo]] }}

That's all of the opinions I have right now.

Explorer09 (talk) 10:48, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

1 and 2 are definitely good ideas, yeah! I can look into getting them implemented soon.

As for 3 and 4, I do see what you're saying, and my solution is also kind of a workaround, but to me the explicit numbering for every argument just looks clunky, too. But then again it'd get rid of having to use a parser to get the args, so that's an upside.

Could you also elaborate on why you want the track number to be explicitly set? I suppose if one wants to cover the case of non-sequential track numbers in the future it'd be necessary, but I think automatically generating it currently helps with removing redundant information. But I guess if we're going with removing the Track listing template, then it'd be necessary to list the track number anyway.

At the end of the day I'm not fundamentally opposed to going with your way but I think I'd also appreciate other folks' input here. UnderFlorence (talk) 10:56, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

The reason for explicit track numbers is simple: The numbers are in the original source. And they free editors from relying on argument order in the template calls. It's maintainability in the long run. It's like how MediaWiki allows argument numbering in the template calls (like {{hlist|1=foo|3=baz|2=bar}}). Explorer09 (talk) 11:06, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Sure, in a normal template there might be many reasons to reorder arguments, but this is something that exists in a canonical order, and I cannot fathom why someone would use the album listing in a different order. In fact, if someone decided to list the songs in reverse order in the template I think that should be edited in wikicode to be the proper order bc it'll only make it all a pain to edit.

As for being in the original source, I'd make the argument that what's really being encoded is an order, and the numbers are just a way to delineate it. Song XYZ being number 23 is not a deliberately-chosen quality for it, it came about because they wanted it to come after 22 and before 24. (In fact, in a similar vein, the Japanese artist is content that's explicitly given in the original that we are generating implicitly via the module, just like the track number). UnderFlorence (talk) 15:18, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps I didn't explain it clear enough: When we (ordinary users) organize music, we might sort the tracks by different ways, such as by artist or by album track number, or sometimes we might use a preferred order from whatever playlist Nintendo Music or whatever music service provided to us. It isn't necessary for the track listing to be in the "track number" order that you might imagine. In fact I would suggest adding class="sortable" to the Splatoon album track listings so that readers can change the sort to what they want (don't worry, MediaWiki sorting can work with table with rowspans). As for wikitext, adding explicit track numbers can help too as I might take the text to an external code editor and perform search or sort there. Without the in-code numbering it would mean extra work. That's what I called "ease of maintenance".

Speaking of track numbering, did you know there are albums (in real world, not Splatoon) that would intentionally pad silence tracks so that a certain track (usually a bonus track) can appear under a certain number? I found two examples in MusicBrainz. For video game soundtrack one example I have is this: The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe soundtrack (track number 8). Explorer09 (talk) 18:16, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Sure but I guess I just don't see how users' habits for personally arranging albums would influence the behind-the-scenes layouting of a template in Wikicode. I do agree with making the table sortable, and personally I'd even throw in the idea of putting all the discs into one table then, so that one can sort things and all the Off the Hook songs are one after another (though that would also mean that trying to explicitly number things would be even more unwieldy, with it needing to go like "title disc 1 track 1" or whatever, so in that case I think I'd personally prefer just nesting templates from a wikicode perspective lol). One question with making it sortable would be how to handle the merged rows, then, too.

I suppose I do see the advantage to adding numbers explicitly, yeah. It's nice future-proofing in any case, though I think visually I would still prefer adding a (required?) arg for positioning to the nested template approach over personally over needing to supply it for every argument. UnderFlorence (talk) 18:22, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

While I'm okay with putting all discs' track listing into one large table, my proposal didn't consider that use case (my bad).

"Disc 1 track 2" can be indicated by 1_02 in the template argument. Not a big deal, technically.

The reason I hate the sub-template is, currently, the "track listing" template can't work on its own, and yet it's on the main Template namespace rather than on a subpage. If the parent template "Album listing" is supposed to 'parse' the content of the track entry, then it might be better to have the entry in its own list format without being wrapped by a sub-template (think of this as a CSV). I can't say if this is the best format (take this with a grain of salt), but example:

|headings=Title,JP Title,Artist,Real Life Artist
|3_01=''[[Big Betrayal]]'',鉄槌ピシャゲルド,[[Deep Cut]],[[Toshiyuki Sudo]]

(I'm avoiding using | as a delimiter as it collides with too many wiki syntaxes.)

Explorer09 (talk) 19:24, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Specifying the headings feels like a really good improvement, yeah! Super robust, too, for any future use. I think your suggestion is a good idea for templating, though I feel like a comma is also something that has a good chance to be used "normally" in the future (as an in-game artist listing, or if we decide that irl artists should be separated with a comma rather than a br tag). I wonder if just straight-up escaping every single entry would make sense? So wrapping them all in double quotes or similar. I personally liked using vertical bars for separation since they're already used for separation, or for use in links (which are naturally escaped in curly braces), but if we don't wrap all that in another template, then we'd need to deal with them all coming in as unnamed parameters of course since the vertical bars would just separate the args... Alternatively we just make it clear that commas within the entries always need to be escaped, which would be a bit awkward but also seems manageable.

I'll need to experiment around a bit with how the sort functionality in a table works, but I assume it'd be a complete mess to deal with with merged cells. So the question would be if a clearer design or the option to sort would be more important.

Regardless, I think merging discs could be a good idea. Maybe just a merged row that delineates the disc number at the beginning of each disc? Also has the upside of making each table immediately aligned in landscape view, since they'll all be one table. UnderFlorence (talk) 04:57, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

I have thought of this a little bit, and perhaps the most future-proof separator would be <br>. The other possible choices are @ $ ^ \ ` (in the order of my personal suggestion). Many characters are out because they clash with HTML (& ; < > =) or wikitext ([ ] { } | #), and there are characters with high probabilities of being used in track titles (% / : " ', etc.), so a <br> might be the future proof way that I can think of.

I would say the disc number could be its own table column, just on the left of the track number. And use rowspan the to avoid repeating the disc number in every track entry. The table sorting in MediaWiki would break the rowspans and turn them into repeated table cells, but that's not our concern as the user would be in charge when they resort the table in their browser. Explorer09 (talk) 09:11, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Thing with br is that we do currently use it to separate multiple irl artists, but of course we can parse that with a comma or the like and output it as br still.

Also, if we're open to multi-character separators to begin with, the world can kind of be our oyster in that we can make up our own html-tag-like anyway.

That said, I feel like "comma as a separator and just using an escape if we want a comma in a track name" feels like the cleanest solution. Multi-character separators feel like they'd get unwieldy quickly if we want to have empty cells, and would be potentially harder for a human to parse from wikicode. UnderFlorence (talk) 14:33, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

I thought character escaping is difficult to get it done right, thus I avoided that in my proposal earlier. For example, if you escape the comma with \,, then you would need escape for backslashes as well (\\) and that would be leaning toothpick syndrome. However, if you are aiming for other escape mechanism, such as HTML character reference (, for an escaped comma and & for an ampersand), then the implementation might be easier. Just make sure we don't choose a delimiter that clashes with HTML or wikitext and we would be fine. Explorer09 (talk) 16:06, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

While true, I feel like backslashes are rare enough in song names and such that I doubt that leaning toothpick syndrome would actually be much of an issue here. Currently I don't believe that there's a single one of those, I don't think? And if we're talking about legibility, HTML character codes are not gonna be too intuitive for most editors either.

Alternatively, we could also just go back to basics and just use the pipe symbol and make it all into a bunch of unnamed parameters for the template, where we just need to make sure to supply empty parameters when there's no entry in a cell. UnderFlorence (talk) 17:34, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

I have seen you trying to denote the nesting levels of the pipe characters in the module code. They were supposed to be the job of the MediaWiki parser, not our (the module writer's) job.

Yes, when MediaWiki parses the template call syntax, it can recognize wikilink square brackets and prevent the pipe within from being treated as an argument separator. However that only works if the brackets are paired and "unescaped" (wikis can define Template:!( and Template:)! that escape the square brackets, allowing them to be used unpaired in a template argument). The actual parsing rule is complex and replicating those rules in a Lua module can risk making it unmaintainable or prone to bugs.

That's why I suggested another character, and not make things too complex. , as a separator and , as an escaped comma would be simple enough. Advantage: You don't need to write any code that handles the escaping at all! (, is standard HTML character reference; MediaWiki would handle it so you don't).

Explorer09 (talk) 18:28, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Sorry for the lack of reply, I've had a busy few days and also got sucked into the Nintendo Music stuff. As you might have seen from that, I took a bit of inspiration from some of your suggestions for the album tables, and would be up to start looking into refactoring/reworking the module based on your feedback. I do agree that a comma makes for a sensible separator, at the end of the day. UnderFlorence (talk) 22:43, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

Been a bit, but I got a new version of the module (as well as an application of it to Splatune) up on Module:Sandbox/UnderFlorence/Album listing now. There is a bit of weirdness now with the fact that the "... jp" suffixed "columns" are not actually columns that are displayed, but I think as-is is probably clear enough? I also implemented the merging of all the discs into one table in order to allow for proper sorting and because aesthetically, I prefer this over having multiple, misaligned tables.

Edit: Got all the albums ported to the new system now on that page. underFlorence (talk | contribs) 20:56, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

So about this...

Should we have more splatoon 3 demontration videos? Splatoon 4 could come out with the Nintendo switch 2 and we could not be ready. Kraken1 (talk) 18:24, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

I would be confident on our ability to tackle a new game given our swift response to Splatoon 3 and Side Order content. I would also not expect a Splatoon 4 for quite some time. That said, could you explain what you mean by demonstration videos? Does this entail showing off weapons being used or stage intros etc? Generally speaking we are trying to move away from the use of on-wiki video due to high load strain and limitations in serving video to viewers. It's also more of a gray area in fair use-ness. That said if there's something that necessitates video, I'd love to know what that might be. Trig - 18:57, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Like for instance dualies have a demonstration video showing how much range the weapon has dodge rolling subs and specials Kraken1 (talk) 19:34, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

And also like I said splatoon 4 could come out when we are least expecting Kraken1 (talk) 19:35, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure I see the relation between having Splatoon 3 demo videos and Splatoon 4 coming out? It's not like Splatoon 4 releasing will make everybody's copies of Splatoon 3 explode, anyway.

Also, aspects like range, qualities of the dodge roll, subs, and specials are all already listed in the respective weapon pages. Bear in mind that creating videos like the demonstration video for the Splat Dualies can take a lot of effort, and it contains information that is largely already on the wiki, even if it is a nice way of presenting it. UnderFlorence (talk) 21:09, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps, instead of making videos, we just make high quality gifs, like this one. (Okay, maybe not really high quality.) All you really have to do is use your capture card to record a video, and then convert it to a gif.

And everyone, we will never be ready for Splatoon 4, so let's just embrace that, and focus on the present. Nintendo's going to find a way to blow our minds and cause chaos on the wiki, but let's think about the now. PawnShop75 [Talk|Contribs] 23:11, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

ok I might need to be taught how to post them though Kraken1 (talk) 23:46, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Special:Upload PawnShop75 [Talk|Contribs] 23:55, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Hang ten cool teddy. Let's not add more videos/gifs unless we know it's something necessary for coverage. Ideally we minimize the use of gifs/mp4s as well, unless something prevents it. I don't think we should be uploading things like compilations of specials being used (and in mamy ways, shot distances) due to high servicing cost. If that's something people deem necessary, we could revive the Inkipedia YouTube channel for something like that. We already document most of the information so I'm hesitant to add videos on top of it. Trig - 01:36, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm of the opinion that we do indeed have a coverage gap here that needs handling, as we do already have weapon demonstration videos for Splatoon and Splatoon 2, but to my mind there are two ways to approach it:

1. We create new demonstration videos, likely through the same or similar avenues as with previous games to avoid undue strain on the site (i.e., doing it through the official Inkipedia YT channel). This fills the gap and increases our coverage, but is a considerable undertaking that would require a very small subset of editors to dedicate considerable time to.
2. We sand down the gap in coverage by removing the existing demonstration videos from all relevant pages and achieving consistency in this way. This reduces our overall coverage, but would be considerably easier. Additionally, as mentioned in the discussion above, some of our editors see these videos as little more than window dressing; a feature that is pleasant, but ultimately redundant, and lacking in unique info our text coverage does not already provide.

I would be interested to hear the opinions of more editors. (Please be aware also that even if majority opinion is in favor of more demonstrations, the work ultimately will hinge heavily on a very small subset of editors who may not be interested in such work, and as such cannot be guaranteed to proceed.) Driftin Soul [Talk!] 02:34, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I think we should bring this back. A long time ago, I was talking with another editor about bringing these back; why did we stop? These were so great, and about the webpage strain, I have an idea that I will be proposing later, not sure when exactly. Anyways, I really hope we can bring back the demo videos, but no matter what, Stay Fresh! NewSquidbeakSplatoon (talk) 02:38, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Can we please change this?

So I've realized that in most of our strategy pages on weapons that have something that's not a bomb like beakon or ink mine one of its weaknesses are non lethal bomb. which I think is offensive to some players who might main that weapon. the sub weapon exists in the game for a reason. and can be used well, please tell me what you think in the comments Kraken1 (talk) 19:39, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Not all non-bombs are "bad", its just most are not used in competitive play because usually bombs are better. Not to say that bombs do everything better, but most situations competitive players find themselves in matches a bomb will handle that situation better. However, for casual players, almost any weapon (not just subs) can be viable and fun. Despite competitive players saying it's is one of the worst subs in the series, Angle Shooter is one of my favorite subs, because I find it fun.

The main thing is that Splatoon 3, like all games, is not perfect, even with balance patches. Plus, Nintendo can overlook a weapon or even change a weapon in a bad or unhealthy way. Although they have been doing a lot better for Splatoon 3 balance patches. The Thing 20:39, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes but I find it offensive calling someone's main "non lethal" because it doesn't have a bomb like the dapple dualies they have a bomb in their special and they are still called "non lethal" Kraken1 (talk) 21:08, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Non-lethal means that it does not kill in one hit. Like a Torpedo or Angle Shooter. It does not refer to an entire kit. It usually refers to subs, sometimes specials, and rarely (if at all) for mains. The Thing 21:12, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes I know but I found that any weapon that does not have a throwable bomb is called non lethal I'm not arguing just making a point Kraken1 (talk) 23:44, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

(Point sensor and toxic mist sobbing quietly in the corner) I understand your argument, but this is not meant to be offensive, and it's not meant to downplay weapons. It's just that in the current meta, lethal bombs (bombs that get reliable kills like splat and suction) are just better than utility subs like sqeakon or sprinkler. (yet pencil still exists?!) Your concern isn't right or wrong, but we just wanted to clarify. Stay Fresh! NewSquidbeakSplatoon (talk) 02:32, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Suffice it to say, we will certainly not be removing information from competitive pages based on some perceived "offense" by users of the weapon in question. "Lethal" bombs are considered a very strong & versatile tool by competitive players, so judgment by comparison is valid & warranted in the context of competitive info pages.

The proper way to tackle this subject would be to use an additive approach and supplement pages with mention of the strengths of a particular sub weapon, rather than ignoring or downplaying any of its corresponding weaknesses. Driftin Soul [Talk!] 02:05, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Italicization of appended bracketed text in song names

This is particularly about the italicization of brackets denoting a song's live/concert version, such as "Anarchy Splatcast (Splatoon 3 Live Concert)". Historically, these trailing brackets have not been italicized, so the result would be: Anarchy Splatcast (Splatoon 3 Live Concert), with only "Anarchy Splatcast" and "Splatoon 3" being considered minor/major works of art and thus being italicized.

I want to argue for the whole title being italicized, so Anarchy Splatcast (Splatoon 3 Live Concert), with the reason that as per the album jacket, the entire name is the full name of the song.

Compare this to cases where the brackets are generally considered not to be italicized, such as "Calamri Inkantation (Inner Agent 3)" or "Opening (C-Side)". Those cases are where the bracketed text is conjectural (Calamari Inkantation (Inner Agent 3), since that song is not on any OSTs or jukeboxes, etc.) and/or for clarification (to differentiate between the different versions of Opening that are called the same in official resources within the Wiki). None of these cases had the brackets included in official soundtrack releases, Nintendo Music, or in-game music players.

Then on the other hand, for cases like Ebb & Flow (Octo), the bracketed text is generally considered to be italicized. In this case, the bracketed text is included in official soundtrack releases, in-game music players, and Nintendo Music.

As such, I would generally propose the following:

• If the song is included on an album or official soundtrack release, the listed name is considered the name of the song, and thus should be italicized in its entirety.

• If we are introducing new bracketed text to differentiate songs with the same name in the official listing, those brackets are not italicized.

• If we are using bracketed text to name a conjectural song, those brackets are not italicized.

This would lead to an oddity where it would be "We're So Back (Grand Festival)", but "Color Pulse (2024) (Grand Festival)", since only the former is included in the Ordertune album with its full name. But I think that's just a consequence of them not including all the Grand Festival songs in Ordertune, and one of them would get the Conjectural template and all, so there's no chance of parity to begin with.

For the record, this was prompted by an edit on the Ordertune page undoing me first italicizing the titles, and on the Discord when informally asking about it, I got 1 consent and 1 dissent in response. Even so, this obviously has an impact beyond just the Ordertune page, since it applies to practically every album and the corresponding song pages. UnderFlorence (talk) 19:00, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Agree with all points; this is consistent with how I have been performing my own edits also, and I firmly believe it is the natural conclusion to come to.

We italicize official titles (or translations thereof); this is consistent with our policy, and we should not be picking and choosing which parts. Disambiguating appendments that we ourselves are adding for the benefit of our users should not be given a veneer of officiality. Driftin Soul [Talk!] 19:44, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Guys so I had this idea...

Should we have like pronouncing uh like weapons and stuff? Kraken1 (talk) 17:29, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

Most of them are plain English words with the occasional portmanteau, coupled with the fact that few things are ever pronounced in media offically. I could only see a use for this for characters with names that are non-English words, like Acht, but other than that I see no use for it. Olivia (talk) 17:46, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, they'd be helpful for names that generally cause confusion, like DJ Octavio. NewSquidbeakSplatoon (talk) 18:21, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes I think it would be useful for things like acht or pearl "hozuki* or whatever Kraken1 (talk) 17:41, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Something about the new BancalaWalker and Ordertune translations

Hello! I've noticed most of the new material coming up after the launch of the magazine and album and being translated here is unsourced. How can we know if the translations are accurate to the Japanese material? Have they been "verified" by some reliable source? Maybe we could prove them with some scans of the book, if anyone working on this wiki has them, but the problems of fluency in Japanese comes around. Do you know if the book and album will also have international editions? Of course I'm just asking, I hope not to bother. Spleet (talk) 14:15, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

None of the soundtracks and the last three books have not had international versions. Olivia (talk) 18:09, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Generally speaking we also don't want to upload too many scans of the book if we can help it, since that might get the wiki in hot water legally if it turns out we're just effectively hosting the whole artbook via scans. Also, it's not like scans would help for people who don't speak Japanese, since they'd still just need to trust whoever translated those scans.

What should be done is to source "BancalaWalker artbook, page XYZ" if possible, since that way people who do own the book can confirm it. UnderFlorence (talk) 18:14, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Indeed; the source name and a page number for something longer like an art book is pretty much all that we would strictly require for a citation from these materials. Ideally offsite citations to reputable translators are preferred if possible (although it is still quite early for these materials, so they are still being picked apart & may not have detailed breakdowns yet), but many of those same translators have also been directly participating in our editing and fact-checking claims from newer, less experienced editors.

If any info wholly lacking citation is found, I would highly encourage both following up directly with the editor who added it to see if they can provide a detailed citation, as well as adding Template:Citation needed in the meantime. Driftin Soul [Talk!] 18:28, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Lyric romanization proposal drafting(?)

(This is my first proposal so I don't entirely know how this works. Also, pinging @Explorer09.)
After looking through the policies, I noticed that there's no actual policy for romanizing the lyrics, only names. I think Hepburn was just used by default.
With the release of Ordertune, it's become increasingly apparent that sticking to traditional Hepburn isn't effective. The songs make visual and aural distinctions with irregular kana usage that traditional Hepburn is ill-equipped for. Daybreaker Anthem and Big Betrayal are notable examples.
Near the beginning of Daybreaker Anthem, Frye sings ワンダィホ wandaiho, as three syllables (wan/dai/ho). Later, she sings バイヤ baiya, also as three syllables (ba/i/ya). The small kana present in the first one appears to make a visual distinction to tell the reader it's part of the same syllable (with the big one later to represent it's a new syllable), but Hepburn has no way to make this distinction.
In Big Betrayal, Frye sings a line with the irregular kana ノゥ (no followed by a small u, other songs have similar kana with other consonants). Normally this could be read as nou or nō, but the songs where this appears specifically make a point to distinguish it from these both visually and aurally. (Frye extends a ro normally when yelling Big Man's name in Big Betrayal, and Shiver has a nou in her dialogue as well.) Again, Hepburn does not have a way to distinguish ノゥ/のう from ノウ/のう/nou or ノー/のー/nō.
So, I want to make a proposal for a policy/policy reform for Inkipedia to use its own altered Hepburn romanization (thus forward titled Inkipedian Hepburn for simplicity) for lyrics.

• If an A syllable is followed by a small I (e.g. ダィ), it is always to be written as ai (e.g. dai). If elsewhere in the song, a large I is used instead (e.g. ダイ), it is to be written with an apostrophe (e.g. da'i).
  • No consonants have an exception to this rule, but if the Ai structure does not appear, it can be ignored.
• If an O syllable is followed by a small U (e.g. ノゥ), it is to be written as ow (using Marina's "WOW" in songs as a basis).
  • T (とぅ/トゥ) and D (どぅ/ドゥ) ignore this rule, as that is the only way to write tu and du.
• If a sokuon (っ/ッ) appears at the end of a word and is followed by a vowel, Y, or W, an apostrophe is appended to the end. (e.g. キッ ユナ / ki' yuna)
  • If a sokuon is followed by a consonant that is not Y or W, add the consonant to the end of the word.
    (e.g. キッ トゥナ/kit tuna, キッ シュナ/kish shuna)

I'd like opinions, suggestions, rewordings, objections, concerns, etc. about the details of the proposal before this gets moved to a proper policy/policy reform proposal. ArgentuTA164 (talk) 00:33, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

The romanization systems described in the translation policy are meant to apply to all instances of such transcription needed, not just names. Hepburn was added to that part of the policy after consulting Japanese speaking editors several times.

This pertains to a small series of fringe cases that can be resolved by simply following consensus every time the circumstance pops up. This concept does not warrant a new policy nor a policy revision, nor the invention of "Inkipedian Hepburn"; the notion of this is a bit goofy. If anything we could note "in the case of unclear/conflicting/unhelpful standards, follow consensus" (which is basically what the consensus policy says). We should avoid inventing rules in this way and instead try to follow internationally recognized standards as closely as possible. When the international standards don't cover us, we should seek consensus prioritizing native speakers' input above everything else.

We should also strongly avoid working off of perceived phonetics based on listening to the songs, and instead solely reflect the written material provided by Nintendo, similar to how we do not allow for unofficial lyric transcriptions in general (save for small instances of auditory pareidolia).

It seems you're requesting we enshrine custom romanization exceptions as part of policy when instead they should simply be discussed then established via consensus case by case. I would highly, highly prefer we simply consult native Japanese speakers case by casis for each exception that occurs rather than invent new custom standards. My understanding is you are not a native Japanese speaker. There's no telling how many more such exceptions may crop up as further lyrics are published as the series goes on, nor whether or not if the example new standards you're offering here may logically apply to future similar instances. Yoshifan52 (talk) 01:40, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

I've attempted to consult native speakers on what to do and got one response, from outside Inkipedia, from someone who I'm not even sure is a native speaker. If you have an easier and more efficient method for getting in touch with native speakers, please share with me. ArgentuTA164 (talk) 01:49, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

We have several native Japanese speaking editors on the wiki as well as the wiki's Discord server. The best method for our purposes is to ping the related role in the server; it may be necessary to patiently wait for the awaited response. Yoshifan52 (talk) 01:52, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

I already tried that two days ago before consulting outside resources, and still haven't gotten a response from an Inkipedian. ArgentuTA164 (talk) 01:55, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

The related material is not time sensitive or urgently due. This is more like a forum than a social media platform, where there is less pressure for immediacy. The Discord server is an extension of the wiki's communication avenues; people may reply later on to previous messages at their leisure. People may be busy at a given time. We completely allow for editors to take their time with any and all material as it is a volunteer based project. I would wait a lot more than just 2 days before suggesting we invent new rules rather than simply await more specialized/familiar input. Yoshifan52 (talk) 02:02, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Time for my comments.

• I agree with Yoshifan52 in the point that we should not rely on the perceived sound based on listening of the audio. The reason is canonicity: The seiyūs (voice actors) may deviate from the canonically printed lyrics when they sing for various reasons (emotions, or to make the pronunciations more smooth, etc.). Just like real life singers, they can sing differently on every performance (studio recording / live concert / radio), which is "artistic expression", thus only the printed lyrics should be consulted when it comes to the question of which sounds are canon.
• I don't like the written-in-stone policies when it comes to unusual kana combinations in lyrics, simply because exceptions always exist and once they are coded as a policy they are difficult to change later.
• I would suggest an alternative solution to this: mark and track those unusual kana combinations instead of dictating how they are romanized with a policy. This would allow changes of them in the future and all in a consistent way. The tracking can be done with a template, though I'm not sure how to name this one: how about {{Unusual kana romanization|nou|ノゥ}} that would display as nou? I would be able to use Special:WhatLinksHere to track every instance of them.
• Thus, we could free from defining what "Inkipedian Hepburn" is about. However, I have commented on Argentu's romanization specific cases and I would post them again:
• Sokuon (っ/ッ) appearing at the end of a word: This appears in Japanese too, and the usual solution is using an apostrophe at the end of it (not part of Hepburn, but just a convention established by many Japanese people). Copying the consonant of the next word unnecessarily complicates things and I would vote against it. So キッ トゥナ becomes ki' tuna.
• I would vote against ow for any prolonged o vowel with small ゥ (u). English has ambiguous pronunciation for the ow vowels in words. E.g. cow vs. row. The English word bow has both kind of pronunciations (for different meaning) that is enough to show the ambiguity. (No pun intended on the word show.)
• ダィ vs. ダイ: I have no solution for this other than just mark the ダィ case with the template above. Doing the other way of adding apostrophes would risk deviating too much from Hepburn that has been internationally known (Hepburn marks apostrophes only for ん/ン cases).

That's all I can think of.

Explorer09 (talk) 11:14, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

The idea of a tooltip template to explain odd romanization would work very well. Alternatively we could simply use typical notes, but I think the example you've given here would be perfect. Yoshifan52 (talk) 20:04, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Only tooltips. No footnotes, because the kana version of the lyrics would be presented before the romanizations already. The main purpose of the template is tracking, not annotation.

Actually I wish this romanization problem would become moot as we would push these Hepburn limitations to the readers who read Inkipedia articles. They can tell we have tried the best in romanization. And the unusual small kana problems would not be our fault. Explorer09 (talk) 20:58, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

@Explorer09 Slight tangent, but one simple question: is there a reason you say "seiyūs (voice actors)" instead of just saying "Japanese voice actors"? Is there something different about the career of Japanese voice actor that warrants using the Japanese word instead of the English word? Kind of like how saying "baka" has quite a different impact than saying "idiot", or like saying "sushi" instead of "fish and rice"? It can't be about faster typing, because the "ū" character isn't on any English keyboard. Heddy (talk) 00:32, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Nothing actually. It's just in my country that we call them "seiyūs" more often than VAs or voice actors. Actually it's 聲優 vs. 配音員, while 聲優 hints more about the Japanese voice acting. Explorer09 (talk) 09:17, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Merging of Side Order floor themes

All of the Side Order regular floor themes share similarities in arrangement and often even melodically. It also makes it difficult to refer to a particular series of themes as a whole. I think if the pages were to be merged, it would make each of the contents be able to be conveyed a lot clearer, particularly when it comes to similarities or certain throughlines. This can also be seen in the fact that some of these articles already outright mention that later songs are more "intense" version of previous versions. I would recommend using the "1" version of each song as the article title. UnderFlorence (talk) 04:44, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

This was recently discussed on this talk page.

There's merit to the concept but it's a bit difficult to execute; the songs seem to follow a progressive evolutions on previous themes system, but they're less obviously variants on the same "base" theme (compared to Upward), instead picking-and-choosingly reusing specific elements. Yoshifan52 (talk) 05:55, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, that makes sense. I'll see if I can improve on the quality of some of those articles in the coming weeks with the structure as-is then, since a lot of them are currently very incomplete. underFlorence (talk | contribs) 06:48, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, anything that can reduce the article count, I can agree with, but instead of having the “1 version” being the page name, it should just be the regular name; for example, instead of the page being named Demol1sh, it would just be Demolish, while Demol1sh, Demoli2h, and D3molish would redirect to it. Not sure if this is allowed or not, I’m spitballing here. Just my opinion, but either way, Stay Fresh! NewSquidbeakSplatoon (talk) 16:25, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Ordertune lyrics section

People in Inkipedia may have noticed that a "Lyrics" section has been added in the Ordertune (Splatoon 3 Original Soundtrack) page. Well, I transcribed them and added to the page. And thanks to Wasarety and Argentu for some transcribed lyrics that saved some of my work.

There are a few points I'd like to mention, though (as my personal commentary of this work).

• I use left alignment for the lyrics in the {{Quote}} box, as opposed the center alignment that is the default for the template. It's just the center alignment would look ugly, destroying the aesthetics of how the booklet formatted the lyrics, including the placements of the chorus marks (★~★), etc. Not sure if people would like this left alignment, or whether we should apply this left alignments to the lyrics section of the past Splatoon albums.
• For Big Betrayal, Suffer No Fools and Three Wishes three songs, I use CSS Grid for formatting. I was partly forced to do this for the Three Wishes song, because of its alignment of the squid kana lyrics and their Japanese counterparts. People who physically own the album can see the booklet for what I mean. With CSS Grid, it just comes with another advantage that you select and copy the whole lyrics without the Japanese "translations" mixed within - an accessibility improvement, I think (in contrast of using HTML tables for formatting the lyrics like this).
• @Argentu, I would not adjust any transcription error in your "Lyric Table Sandbox" page, even though I found one such as this. I would leave to you to correct them.

Explorer09 (talk) 19:19, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Page or information about Agent 8's appearance changing as you pick up color chips?

I and others have noticed that as you pick up more color chips of the same type, 8 and her weapon's appearances change. Am I just stupid and can't find the page for it or should we make a page or section about this? Bamboo52 (talk) 21:40, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

Color Chip#Effects on Agent 8's ink color contains info on how color chips change Eight's ink color, but I also am not finding info on how the design changes. I believe I recall there being an effort on the Discord to catalog the effect that you are talking about (using the "Spire Clear" screen in order to keep a consistent pose and angle), but I'm not sure what became of that. underFlorence (talk | contribs) 01:04, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

External information in album tracklists

This was brought on by an edit by @Petal Mail that added in-game artist credits to Splatoon Live in Makuhari -Shiokalive-, but I think this is to do with a more general point on how we represent music in general and albums in particular.

Generally speaking, album tracklists are torn in two distinct directions:

1) They often serve as the most definitive and comprehensive listing of a game's soundtrack, as the Music subpages currently don't contain real-life composer information, and most articles on individual tracks currently don't contain that information, either. As such, I assume many people (including myself) see the big album pages like Ordertune as the primary comprehensive resource for accumulated music.

2) Many albums have quirks with how they organize their tracklists or display credits. Stuff like Ordertune only crediting real-life artists to in-game artists, so any one of five artists could've written any given Free Association song, Splatoon 2 OST Selection containing no credits whatsoever, or Splatoon Live in Makuhari -Shiokalive- not crediting any in-game artists (to my knowledge). And ideally, those quirks should be represented in the pages, and in my opinion not just as a note, but by having the tracklist accurately reflect the information contained in the album. Particularly, trying to fill in those quirks, like the in-game artists in Splatoon Live in Makuhari -Shiokalive-, can quickly get conjectural when it comes to instances like the "MC" tracks vs. the characters' sound effects, or concert tracks in general, which rely on other albums' precedence.

With that in mind, my suggestion would be threefold:

1) Expand on the Music subpages to serve as a more comprehensive resource on a game's soundtrack, so they can be on par with the core album tracklists. This would largely consist of adding real-life composer information, plus potentially more.

2) Keep album tracklist info to only the info included in an album, except in cases where that information would be wrong (i.e. a misprint) or misleading (i.e. the Ordertune tracks that have vague credits in the album, but have a clearly defined composer as seen in the music sheets of the Behind the Scenes videos). Even then, keep a note explaining what the original content was.

3) A stronger push to include real-life artist information on individual track articles' infoboxes. I have been doing some assorted work on those, but ran into a roadblock when it came to the divide between composer and arranger. While for original tracks, the idea would be that the same person is doing both, for cases of remixed songs, like Calamari Inkantation 3MIX, we have no way of knowing if the original composer also helped arrange the new song, and whether the new artist was only doing arranging work, or also composed new section (and then also: how much new content would an arrangement have to have to consider this?). To my knowledge, arrangement credits are given very rarely in these albums, largely only for the live versions of songs, as far as I can tell. As such, in order to make the process of entering credits into the infoboxes clearer, I would suggest a "Music by" (which is the credit that most albums seem to use for composer and/or arranger) field to be added to the music infoboxes, and for that field to be used unless we have explicit confirmation of who handled composition and/or arrangement (i.e. via an interview). This would also might make things clearer for Ordertune, which seems to have foregone crediting the original composer for remixes entirely (i.e. Inkopolis Punch being a remix of Battle Victory, but not crediting Toru Minegishi whatsoever). By abandoning the producer/composer/arranger divide unless specified and abiding by the credits where possible, I believe that adding information to the infoboxes will be made much easier, and I would also volunteer my help in getting that information added. underFlorence (talk | contribs) 15:45, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

These are very sound propositions. It's a strong case of now that you've pointed it out, all these issues stick out a lot now, looking over those pages again.

The album pages should definitely prioritize the credits their booklets provide, and revamping the music subpages to be a better "home base" for general information per track in one place would be best. For individual infoboxes (or anywhere else it may pop up), "music by" seems like the perfect catch-all if nothing more specific has been confirmed. Yoshifan52 (talk) 04:40, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

Real life template usefulness

This topic of the real life notice template's scope came up in the Discord chat: Gaming32 pointed out certain articles such as Splatoon 3 ought to have the notice, which sparked debate as to where the line is drawn between "real life" and "in-universe" differentiation.

I'm in agreement that real life product articles such as Splatoon 3 would qualify to have the notice, but the more I thought of it, started to think there's a boiling point after which we are disclaiming the obvious about something the reader could reasonably intuit immediately as they start to read, or even already know before reading our article. It's typically very clear from the first few lines of an article, and there are ~200 pages to which this template has been applied, with even more article candidates should we widen its scope.

The concept of discerning between "real life" (developers, artists, products, merchandise) and "in-universe" (characters, locations, mechanics, "lore") topics across the wiki is helpful, but it's already achieved by sorting into the related categories. The concept of disclaiming topics as clear-cut "real world only" is additionally somewhat muddied by certain promotional content "crossing over" with real-life brands or such that are per the storyline extinct/nonexistant/impossible in the Splatoon world, but are directly mentioned by the in-universe characters as if they're "canon". I bring this up not with the concept of canonicity in mind, but rather whether or not a page like our idol concert article would technically necessitate a "real world" notice; it's obvious from the article's lead section the topic concerns a real life event that still holds some degree of direct connection to the in-universe continuity.

I'm of the opinion we should do away with the real life notice and instead focus on related categorization, as the distinction exists mostly for wiki navigation; readers should be able to tell what is or isn't a real life product, person etc. from the opening paragraph. Organization tools like the games category should be placed within the real life topics category, without the need for a "note: this game exists in real life!" message on game pages. Yoshifan52 (talk) 08:00, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

A point that was brought up by a user in the Discord discussion was that this user felt a high number of our pages currently using the notice would be significantly dampened by its removal because of them being insufficiently constructed so as to obviously be about a real-life subject at a glance. While I haven't gone over the list of these pages with a fine-toothed comb to verify this grievance (as Yoshifan has said, there are minimum a couple hundred articles), I don't believe we should be relying on a notice template as a band-aid solution to articles being poorly constructed. Even if the notice is not retired immediately because it is believed that it is currently acting as this band-aid solution, I do believe we need to act to overhaul any articles deemed problematic with the ultimate goal of removing this template. Driftin Soul [Talk!] 08:17, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree that notices should not convey information that should be in the article in the first place, so the focus should be on cleaning up those articles (though it'll likely be no small undertaking). Ideally we'd get cleanup fully done and then get to removing the template. underFlorence (talk | contribs) 18:54, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

I like the usage of the real life template but I would exclusively use it on pages where there is an in-game equivalent or a similar concept. For example characters vs real people, bands, companies, teams, events, etc.

I don't think it's that necessary and a bit redundant for stuff that doesn't have an equivalent in-game as I don't think there is as much confusion and specifying it on the first paragraph would be enough imo. It's moon [Talk!] 19:10, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Unnecessary (and secretively motivated) “nonbinarization” of characters and living people

Hello to you all. Sorry for the bother.

I'm quite confused about some recent edits made to the pages of Chirpy Chips (specifically Sid's section), Diss-Pair (in regards to Mashup), and the manga section of the newest version of the image guidelines policy when referring to the writer and illustrator Sankichi Hinodeya.

I've noticed Sid and Mashup's description sections being edited with the substitution of their listed gender from "male" to "unspecified" and their pronouns being changed to "they/them" with the given explanation in a note telling that the original pronouns used for the two in Japanese material are "not exclusively male"; furthermore, the "fan translation" pages provided by user Rassicas have been taken out of their gallery pages with the motivation being listed as "per policy". This has raised a couple doubts and questions to me.

1. According to the user (not calling their username out since this is not an attack on them personally) who edited the information regarding Sid and Mashup, both characters utilize the pronoun 俺 ore when referring to themselves; while it's true that any personal pronoun in Japanese, including ore, is not as strictly linked to gender as in (pre-2016) Western languages, this specific pronoun is almost always used by males, both in reality and fiction, as it conveys a strong sense of masculinity than other more "neutral" pronouns such as ぼくboku (used by both "confirmed male" Big Man and ambiguously-gendered-in-English Acht, just to provide cases from the franchise) and 私 watashi. Their pretty-much-male physical appearances and names also don't help, making the thought about their identities being "fluid" a wee bit far-fetched in my opinion, especially since the introduction of more willingly ambiguously coded characters such as Orion, Acht, Kiki and the other members of Riot Act.
2. If we went for completely unequating pronouns to gender, as some Western people do, then we should do the same with all characters regardless of pronouns used and devoiding their profiles of the "gender" parameter entirely; since we follow a convention that most parts of the world stands for (eg. "he/him"= male or "ore"= male), then any character who uses pronouns strongly associated with a gender, both in Japanese and in English, are to be assumed as such.
3. The same user listed BancalaWalker as a source, even though this cannot be proven unless the scans containing said dialogue is posted on Inkipedia; there is no actual link to those pages in Japanese provided in the notes.
4. In both cases, their gender being male was sourced by the translations Rassicas provided, which are present on the wiki and thus assumed to be reliable; if they really were to be held as "unofficial" and thus "not canon", then so should be Karla's gender, which is still listed as female with the same BancalaWalker translations as the only basis, and most of the info regarding band characters, for whom we do not have any in-game profiles that confirm in English what is said about them in Japanese. Other characters, such as the ones I previously mentioned, have their pronouns translated as "they", "them" and "theirs" by the same author, implying that Sid and Mashup are 90% intended to be males. Worth noting is that Rassicas themselves identify as non-binary according to all their social media profiles, thus "correcting" their work or implying they're "inaccurate" in regards of gender topics honestly baffles me. If anything, their different stance on, say, Orion and Sid, shows professionality from their part, with no bias to "take" all characters to their own "side", as people on the internet still do, for example, when making headcanons about characters such as Shiver, whose gender-related issue was cleared at launch. As much as people of this kind are free to express their own interpretations of the characters, a wiki environment would not be the ideal place to do that.

Side note: I am honestly disappointed with a staff member reverting my edit on Chirpy Chips' Clash, basically assuming bad faith on my side, despite the next editor proving me right. When reverting my edit, said staff member provided "a discussion on the Discord server" as a motivation, which I find concerning (just as much as using a non-indexed platform to discuss a public wiki's etiquette…). If said issue is of concern, as any other, why not do it publicly on the Ink Pump we have here? It would be accessible to any wiki user, even those who do not wish to join the Discord server for privacy or any other reason, and be moderated in order to avoid conflicts that are way more likely to happen in a private location.

In the case of using the pronouns "they" and "their" regarding Sankichi Hinodeya, despite feminine pronouns being used on her page, I personally think it was a mistake instead. If not, however, then we should make our stance on gender of living people consistent and use the same pronouns in all text regarding Hinodeya.

Please understand this is not a tirade on anyone, nor a complaint; I do not mean to disrespect any person "involved". Just wanted to have my part. Thank you and sorry again. Hope you can understand my point of view. Spleet (talk) 18:28, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

To start off: no one is attempting to "non-binarize" any characters. As a wiki, we have never once claimed any characters, even those who explicitly use they/them pronouns in English, as "non-binary". We use "unspecified" and they/them pronouns to indicate a person of ambiguous or unknown gender, and provide info about any further details (such as Japanese first-person pronoun use) so readers can come to their own conclusion.

Context is key in discussions such as these, and generally we value the use of Japanese third-person pronouns more heavily than first-person (the equivalent to ex. English "he" or "she"). As another example, Frye in Japanese uses a first-person pronoun commonly associated with more elderly men, but because of further context such as gendered third-person pronouns and lore details explaining said pronoun use we have of course not proclaimed her as male or of unknown gender. This is also why Clash is listed as male (he is referred to with 彼 (kare, "he"), but Sid is not. Rassicas was involved firsthand with the discussion in the Discord, and although they agreed on a personal level that they felt it was unlikely Nintendo explicitly intended the genders of some of these characters to be ambiguous (and reflected as such in some of their own translations), that the ambiguity is definitely still there for some. It would be editorially irresponsible for us to deliberately state or imply otherwise; again, we prefer to lay out the known information and let our readers go from there.

On another note, I think you are being somewhat uncharitable to assume that a staff member reverting your edit is "assuming bad faith". Staff members make mistakes like anyone else; there were a lot of characters being changed, and it was a simple error by the original editor that was misinterpreted. No need to jump straight to assuming your character is being attacked. For another thing: the fan translation artbook pages have been removed from mainspace pages due to copyright concerns; these sorts of edited pages are to be used only in the onsite Twitter archive. This is not a new decision being made just for this situation and is not at all related to them being deemed as containing 'incorrect' pronouns.

Lastly, about Hinodeya Sankichi, I believe it was indeed just a simple mistake. Again, nobody's intent here is to "non-binarize". I've fixed the relevant block of text. Driftin Soul [Talk!] 19:41, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for clarifying on the topic. Please don't always be so rude on me though- since I am (willingly) not on the Discord server, I may not know things most of you do (I don't know if anyone will agree with me, but I still stand clear on my wish for the forum to be public). Of course the word "nonbinarization" was not meant to be literal, more like a neologism I probably crafted out myself to call a whole concept in a topic title. x) Also forgive my "uncharitableness", I just tend to be very strict on my personal sense of wiki-correctness. Be of course mindful that I do not intend to attack who I presume to have "assumed bad faith" in my edits, rather it's me who feels "threatened" (justly, I'd say, as a non-staff user). I know wiki admins can be very hard on people who seemingly ignore rules, and I wanted to make clear that I was not acting out of bad faith. Spleet (talk) 21:26, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

I don't believe I've been rude. I understand your concern about discussions having occurred behind what may seem to be 'closed doors', and this is why I have specifically attempted to clarify the contents of these discussions in my reply without being brusque.

I also found it very difficult to perceive your choice of the phrase "nonbinarize" as non-charged or clinical when you included such phrases as "gender [...] in (pre-2016) Western languages", "the thought about their identities being 'fluid'", and "'tak[ing]' all characters to their own 'side'", which is why I felt the need to make it quite clear that none of these phenomena are occurring. Driftin Soul [Talk!] 21:55, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

Probably I've been too involved in serious Splatoon drama. I've seen too much people being highly toxic and polarizing in regards of their perceptions of the characters, so I admit a fear of mine is it happening on this wiki (you can't imagine how many times I've seen people reiterate their own mandela effects as "canon" and calling who disagrees, even politely, names- you know, the whole “-ist” and “-phobe” discourse). The 2016 thing was to point accuracy (I would only be a fool to say that, as of now, pronouns always equate gender, as it is no longer the case in English) and make a comparison to the Japanese pronouns using what would be a "stricter" system, but noting that it's actually not the case anymore. Don't assume my words are hate-filled- bear in mind that I am from an entirely different language and culture than American and I can't always manage to successfully translate my thoughts, especially on such delicate topics, to English. That would be assuming "bad faith" as well lol Spleet (talk) 22:29, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

It's weird that you're implying sourcing as an issue here when the change of Sid's gender (and I assume Mashup's, too, though that would've been much longer ago - at the very least there's no particular sourcing or explanation on the Diss-Pair page at the time I was editing it) from Unspecified to Male originally happened without any actual sourcing back when BancalaWalker came out. Ideally I would've liked to reference particular pages for the Chirpy Chips livestream, but I could only find mention of the livestream when this was discussed in, and don't own the book, so I went with this as a stopgap measure while asking for a more precise source. This sourcing is still more than what was on the page previously, so really the bigger issue is that we had the gender changed for over a month now without any given source in the first place. As soon as someone who owns the book can give an exact page source, it'll be added to make it complete, but currently I believe it's better than nothing.

Regarding pronouns != gender, to my knowledge it's a much more common thing (though still unusal) to use "unfitting" first-person pronouns - see what Driftin Soul pointed out about Frye in Japanese, whereas there is no current case of a character using English third-person pronouns that are incongruous with their gender.

To give some context on how this all even happened, I went into this with the intent of wanting to source Mashup's gender to particular pages in HaikaraWalker/BancalaWalker, since this was unsourced previously and I've generally been doing a ton of cleanup. If you go back even a few revisions, you see an edit where I added a ref to Mashup's gender as male, which has not been noted as such previously. However, in the process of finding these refs, a discussion came up about the implications of first-person pronouns on gender. I did not go into this wanting a "policy change" to happen. Also, to be frank, I don't think any of this was much policy to begin with, given that people were just changing genders without any attributions at first, so I would chalk it up moreso under "in-game band pages are generally not as big of a priority for most wiki users, so unsourced edits are more likely to go through," to be quite honest, than any particular policy for how gender should be handled.

I find it frankly a slight bit unfair to assume bad faith on the staff member's part in reverting my edit, but then not even check my contributions to see what I was doing with the pages and assume I was engaging in "nonbinarization." If I was really engaged in "nonbinarization," why would I first perform edits that more conclusively provided a source for Mashup's gender as Male? In fact, I was the same editor that later reverted the staff member's edit that reverted your edit, because obviously it was done in error.

In any case, in the process of asking for the specific evidence for their gender, there was a discussion with rassicas about this all, and the conclusion was that while they almost certainly intended for those pronouns to signify gender, it's something that's ultimately still conjectural. It's something that I find a bit silly at times, too, and in my personal view I also still think that Mashup's almost certainly intended to be male, but part of being a Wiki is keeping conjecture to a minimum. It's the same kinda policy as when pre-Ordertune, track names such as Fest Zest (Grand Festival) didn't link to "The Grand Festival Version of Fest Zest", because even though to me and most everyone else they're obviously the same thing, it wasn't confirmed until the OST came out and confirmed that they were the same song. It's a bit silly, it doesn't have to influence how most fans see things, but it's avoiding conjecture at the end of the day. It's the difference between making a faithful localization and a being a wiki, at the end of the day.

Regarding the scans: Driftin Soul talked about the copyright concerns, but there's also a bit of INK:IM that's relevant here:

"User-generated images uploaded for this purpose should be categorized as internet archive files. Tweets archived in this way are expected to be wiki relevant, but do note that their inclusion in our archive does not automatically mean their related files must be used elsewhere across the wiki. For example, if an informative user-generated Tweet being used as a citation contains a Marie meme image, that image should be uploaded then added to our Twitter archive, but it should not be added to Marie's gallery page or anywhere else on the wiki."

While these translated scans are obviously more relevant than a Marie meme, it's still important to remember that assorted files that are uploaded from Tweets are not assumed to be accurate or in accordance with wiki policy, even if on a personal level I'm more in agreement that these characters are intended to be male.

Sidenote: I do think there's an argument to be made that the Ink Pump/talk pages ought to be used more over the Discord, but that's a way way bigger philosophy shift (since people are more active on the Discord, you're more likely to get responses there, so you're incentivized to post (or cross-post) on there, so more people prioritize the Discord, etc). Though to reiterate, this started as a simple, "Hey people that know Japanese, what is the source for Mashup's gender so I can add it to the page?" to which the response was, "it's pronoun use, same reason as Sid and Baker," and then from that a discussion about pronoun use started.

Other sidenote: I'd say that the null hypothesis (i.e. the basic assumption) is that characters have unspecified gender, and the burden of proof ought to be on proving that they do have a specified gender. I don't think appearance should play any role here, since what "looks" male or female is inherently conjectural and subjective. A rassicas translation that uses those pronouns is at best a secondary source, since it doesn't actually point to where the gender is confirmed (in fact, the Chirpy Chips band bio from BancalaWalker uses he/him for Sid, but the pronoun use is taken from the livestream log, so it wouldn't be an appropiate source). rassicas or another translator saying, "Sid's gender was chosen to be male here due to pronoun use in the livestream transcription," would be a much better source, but to my knowledge this was not present in those articles at any point. underFlorence (talk | contribs) 21:10, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

Ohh. I swear I remembered something like Splatoon Base officially sourcing Clash's gender as male in English. If that's not the case, then I admit my fault. Anyway, thank you so much for being open and civil about it and clarifying your very stance about it since you are the author of the edits I was referring to (I didn't want to explicitly call your name since it would have felt warlike on my part).

PS: sorry for my ignorance, but what is a "livestream log"? I don't have any Splatoon book, so I don't know what it is (in relation to the series) and how relevant it is as a source material. Spleet (talk) 21:46, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

The livestream transcript is a particular article from BancalaWalker that is a transcript of a (in-universe) Chirpy Chips livestream. You can find images of those pages here and a fan translation by rassicas, with help by MagicalGirlFia, here. It's relevant in that it contains a use of オレ by Sid, which is the source that was used by fan translators for referring to Sid as male later down the line. The source on Clash's gender apparently comes from when they're referred with the third-person pronoun 彼 in the band member bios from HaikaraWalker, though this is second-hand info and I don't have a source or page number on hand - I'm currently working through the bands roughly in order (though Front Roe and Diss-Pair were pulled a bit forward due to their heavy connection with Squid Squad making it infeasible to edit only part of it) and am generally hoping to find refs for all minor characters with specified genders so that the question of "where/how was this gender confirmed" doesn't have to be asked as much. underFlorence (talk | contribs) 22:43, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

Ohh, that makes sense! So cool. Hope we'll get an English version of the book, it seems to have many gems relevant to the games' background and I'm curious on how they will localize things (even though it probably won't happen since HaikaraWalker has not been translated as far as I know. Kind of a shame on Nintendo). Thank you again. Spleet (talk) 23:11, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

This is a very bad faith reading of the related edits.

The scanlations were removed from the page irregardless of the mentions of characters' pronouns in them. The related policy I linked to in my edits says the following:

Please refrain from uploading whole pages of artbook materials to the wiki; images cropped as to only show the specifics of the topic being discussed in the article at hand are the generally anticipated scan format.

Above this paragraph, in the context of the manga series, there is a mention of fan translations/scanlations and how we should avoid them due to them being technically piracy-adjacent. We don't allow pirated materials on the wiki. I added a notice to these scanlation pages that explains the situation.

It would be completely fine to quote parts of this Rassica's unofficial translation in text form for use as a citation; please do not re-add the scanlation images to the pages, as we try to not provide full-page artbook scans on the wiki, even if they have been edited. Please do not seek out full page scans/scanlations of BancalaWalker as you mentioned; we highly prefer (brief) text transcripts as that could not constitute piracy.

In the Discord chat, a few days ago we had a conversation with people fluent in Japanese regarding the handling of characters who have not been gendered at all in English (or other) localizations, instead only being referred to with Japanese personal pronouns. This mostly affects the minor band characters. Here is a link to the conversation (you must join the server to read it). If you don't want to join the server, I'd be happy to copy and paste the conversation for you to read. The gist of it is certain Japanese personal pronouns are strongly connotated with certain genders, but in the absence of other gendered words it is best to "play it safe" by listing "unknown" and neutral pronouns (they/them). We do this not as evidence the characters are nonbinary/otherwise gender non-conforming nor to lean credence on Nintendo/the Splatoon developers for including such, but out of wanting to accurately reflect the official material. In that conversation we were provided popular examples of definitively non-male characters using ore, such as Susie from Deltarune.

I would strongly prefer you ping me or mention my username when you are discussing my edits in an accusatory way. It turns out there is a more definitive masculine word (not a personal pronoun) used for Clash/Noisy from Chirpy Chips that I wasn't aware of. I was mistaken, and underFlorence immediately corrected my edit, with further discussion in our designated quick discussion space, our Discord server, to explain the specifics.

The Discord server is not intended as a "non-public" area where secret discussions take place, it is a free chatroom carried out on a free platform that anyone may join. It tends to be the quickest and easiest way to reach staff members for editing help, so we highly promote it to our editors. Yoshifan52 (talk) 00:26, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Lol… guess we're making a bad-faith war, apparently. I'm joking of course, but I'm personally not in the mood for it, since I've clarified my intentions with UnderFlorence about the issue (and with you now, hopefully). Anyway, don't worry! I will not add anything back or interfere with the edits made by both of you; I would have no purpose doing it other than making myself look like a complete fool and bringing up unnecessary polemics that would only waste me time and energy. As I've mentioned with UnderFlorence, I also do not have any book, nor do I know people who do (and are fluent enough in Japanese to give a reliable translation), so I can't add anything x) Thank you for expressing your preference about mentioning you. I didn't do it because I thought it would have been impolite and unnecessarily attacking you, but it turns out I was in error. Didn't know about Susie as well.

Regarding Discord, one of my fears is that no publicly known moderation allows bad-talking and gossip about users who are not in; I can't of course speak with experience in this specific server, but I pretty much imagine there has been some controversy about me in there, therefore I'm not personally interested in joining, especially as of now. If anything, an indexed server would make disagreements more civil, as one is supposed to think a few times before publicly asserting their dissensus (a bit like we're doing here, without the need to calling names or attacking). That is my reason for not wanting to join Inkipedia's Discord server. Anyway, thanks for the clarifications! Spleet (talk) 01:06, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean. I made a mistaken edit then had it corrected, I don't think I've made any bad faith assertions... you made a long, accusatory post about a mistaken edit that had already been fully dealt with, in which you claim I'm pushing an agenda based on your misreading of completely unrelated edits. You made this topic 14 hours after underFlorence had fixed it, which I was made aware of because we were discussing the topic in the chat. Please note I did not re-remove the "he"; the issue was fully resolved. This is unconstructive behavior on your part.

The Discord server is heavily moderated by staff and select exemplary chat members. We have the channels split between editing related and non-editing related, so you could join and only engage with the editing parts. As moderators we work to keep the discussion civil at all times. I personally have stepped in to ensure chat-involved editors are not bad-mouthing "wiki-only" editors, which has only happened on very sparse occasions, ensuring everyone gets to have a say on matters they're involved with. We typically delete inflammatory messages, or at least privately communicate with the troublemakers to explain to them how their behavior has been unconstructive. I frequently advocate for people to hold discussions onwiki so as to generate a paper trail rather than keep everything in the Discord. Several other staff members and regular editors do the same.

"I won't join your secondary discussion space because people have probably been bad-mouthing me in there" is again, an incredibly bad faith assumption. I don't know what to say here; you don't have to join but this is really nonconstructive and unhelpful. You're nearly accusing us of even more misconduct... Yoshifan52 (talk) 03:34, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Hi Spleet, I did a quick search of your username and I don't think there has been any controversy or accusatory messages on the Discord server about you (nor any discussion).

While I can see why Yoshifan52 would think of your comment on this as bad faith or accusatory, I can rather understand it coming from insecurity about people talking on your back.

Messages on Discord about people that are outside of the server aren't much constructive as they do not help to fix the user's behavior so there's not much purpose on sending them.

I also like to think that all mistakes are opportunities to learn and all users always have room to improve. In my experience while some feedback might sound harsh a few times, non-constructively or negatively criticizing users is something that we try to avoid.

Our staff works hard to maintain a safe, respectful, and kind space on the Discord server for all users. You’re always welcome (though not mandatory at all) to join the server to see this for yourself.

Take care and I hope to see you around, It's moon [Talk!] 18:47, 21 January 2025 (UTC)