Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24081824-20160718235446/@comment-23.122.217.39-20160720170831

I would be more accepting of that argument (that there are no other good sources for people to read the detail that the articles currently have) if those details weren't based on incredibly faulty translations, to the point of quoting them verbatim sometimes. I do not feel they are doing a credit to the fandom by doing so. Even though the Tab idea is a good one, it doesn't fix this very real problem. Wording errors are abundant, and there's several minor factual errors as well.

One thing I did think of, which I don't know how agreeable it is to everyone else, is that instead of a tabbing system, information is cut down as is (though I agree we should be cautious as to how much we cut down) BUT, the source citations area links to the translation it's drawing from (and it is possible to link to specific entries in forums because Servant does that himself). This allows people to read the translation for themselves rather than a word by word replay of it on the article space, and also see where the information is coming from for the sake of transparency. This also would allow editors, if/when a better translation comes out, to simply change the link rather than have to do a ton of revisions on the wording. Of course this also has the problem of implicitly "endorsing" the translations linked to, but the articles are already sort of doing that by borrowing almost the exact wording choices.

Anyway, it's true that while I personally strongly believe article length is one of the things that needs addressing (and if nothing else the idea of tabbing would solve the problem of providing the easy and quick to read source for those who need it that the articles are supposed to be), I'll agree it's not the most pressing matter.

At the risk of my complaints sounding redundant one thing I also wanted to go into more is that the wiki in the past had massive amounts of Google Translate and things that read an awful lot like it on its information gathering (a lot of album booklet translations in the compendium are like this). I assumed that when the wiki started shaping up, they would either disregard these, find better ones, or seek to have someone improve them. This has not happened in any way. The Wiegenlied and Cloture translations that KER mentioned are good evidence of that--absolutely nothing whatsoever has been done about them. They have no disclaimers. They are still linked to on their wiki articles. They have not been revised at all. And they are still linked to on the wiki-endorsed Evillious-Sidestories blog.

Whenever any kind of corrections on any of his blogs, or any of these measures at all are suggested, Servant says he'll ask the translators who made it; if they want a disclaimer added, or a word changed, etc. Sometimes this is also the case with song lyrics--back when I was more involved in translation discussion with Servant I had to argue corrections with people (using him as an intermediary) who needed to have basic Japanese grammar explained to them first (which was as recent as Seven Crimes and Punishments). Even though almost no one knows who all of them are, and several of them are apparently vanishing due to diminishing interest. That is unacceptable. A wiki like this can't forgo basic quality control measures because of unaccountable translators. I'd almost wager that the majority of users assume that Servant does everything translation related himself. I certainly didn't know about the alleged Skype group until recently.

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I feel like at some point we should make an itemized list (probably one outside of this thread so it doesn't get repeatedly drowned in discussion) of specific problems we can agree on and the tangible ways they can be addressed (as a sort of oversimplified example, "Grievance 1. Bad translations are still linked to on External Links section. Proposed solution: Do not link to bad translations on the External Links section.") Just because I feel like discussions in the past died out because people couldn't agree both on what constituted a problem or a plan of action, and so they stopped caring about fixing it.