Well, lamb commented on this on IRC and said there would be a problem for manga without any magazines added, so I'll add my solution to that here.

I would differentiate between "main-genre"(Shounen/Seinen/Shoujo/etc.) and "sub-genre"(Romance/Adult/Drama/etc). The manga's main-genre is decided by the magazine it runs in and can only be changed by by admins.The sub-genre again can be added and changed by the normal users.

Example:
manga: Vagabond,
main genre: Seinen as it runs in Morning
sub-genre: Historical, mature, drama, etc.

Good sources for magazine demographics are Comipedia and just recently created: MangaCast's mag page

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I'd rather call it target audience than main genre, because Seinen doesn't really seem like a genre to me.

It isn't, it's a demographic.

I mean, Kodoma no Jikan is a Seinen. .__.

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a) Try to explain all the leecher what "seinen" really means, tough luck...
b) "Target audience: Seinen" ? what? then just write: male 18-30 and don't use the terms: seinen/shounen/etc.

Also it doesn't matter, as most of us aren't Japanese, what its original meaning may be in Japan. In the west, like the term "hentai", it means something different. You don't create terms that have different meanings. Terms have to be consistent, which means they should mean the same thing the "general public" uses them like. It's easier to change the meaning of a certain term than teaching the people what the term actually means.

What I tried to use "seinen/shounen/etc" as, is like the common literature uses the three "main-genre": poetry, drama, and prose and then include sub-genre. You may wiki the genre page. But of course you can argue that we should use it the same way the Japanese do and then we might not want to call it "main-genre".

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Well, then they'll have to learn. This is an info database after all, and all information should be portrayed accurately.

I myself knew what those terms were within a day or something when I discovered this site. So it wouldn't be that hard to understand/deduct its meaning, I think.

Plus, you could always go to the "Genres" section, to figure out its general meaning.

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I'm still a little shaky on the difference between genre and demographic but I agree

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Demographic basically means target group. But because said target group always has some standard 'sell-points', they get defined by those 'sell-points'. No wonder they get mistaken for a genre. It isn't unusual though to have an action Shoujo for example; meaning an action manga targeted towards adolescent girls.

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Ugh, its not that difficult. T_T
GENRE; type of plot/story (Mystery, Thriller, Drama...)
DEMOGRAPHIC; the age category of the readership/audience the manga is specifically aimed at (Shonen, Shojo, Seinen, Josei,

I'm just going to chime in here and say that I also think something like this really needs to be put in place.

With the demographics in place as genres they end up going through a lot of subjective opinions, and as a result we end up with people doing things like marking, say, Death Note as seinen despite the fact that it's serialized in one of the most prominent shounen magazines out there. If you create an alternate categorization based on the objective classifications given by the magazines that they're published in, you can avoid that sort of thing compromising the integrity of the database.

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Here's a bump.
I agree.

For manga to be automatically assigned a demographic based on the magazine would be extremely useful and efficient--well, assuming that it can be done accurately, of course.
There are many many series that have no genre assigned to them at all, and this makes it harder for people to find manga they want to read (and to avoid the ones they don't), and it's a lot of work for people to go and manually select the demographic for them all: I've spent many hours looking up the demographic for series and then selecting it in the genre field for each one--plus, even though I try my best to find out the demographic and put it in correctly, if I'm doing a hundred or so in one sitting (which is not uncommon for me), it's likely that I make some errors, like clicking the wrong box by accident, using some information that turned out to be wrong, etc. If it were automatic, hopefully the opportunity for error would be significantly less.
There might be some trouble assigning demographics for certain magazines--I mean, for Weekly Shonen Jump and Ribon and such, it's very clear-cut and obvious, and for most that I've seen, it's usually reasonably easy to figure out, but there are sure to be some more vague magazines out there... I suppose that in these cases, a magazine could just be left without an assigned demographic, and its series would have to be assigned demographics manually...? Something like that, I guess. And then for manga that don't have any magazine listed for them (there are tons of series like this...), this won't work... well, I guess there's nothing that can fix that; just have to wait 'till someone lists the magazine for it, if possible (as some works aren't published in magazines, of course).

Anyway, yeah, I support this. I think it will save a lot of time and work for updaters and will also help everyone by providing more information on series quickly.

Edit:
Emmm... How stupid of me not to think of this before, but, you know, most of the series that don't have a demographic listed don't have a magazine listed for them either... That limits the usefulness of this by a lot... Well, even so, I do still think it will be useful, but not quite as much as I was fantasizing about a little while ago, unfortunately.

Edit again:
I forgot to mention this: I don't particularly care that much whether shoujo/shounen/etc. are separated from the other genres, as I don't really see any pressing reason to do so... except, maybe to have it so they (and they only, as opposed to locking the whole genre field) could be locked in order to keep them under better control (to avoid things like Crenshinibon mentioned a post or so ago)? I'm not sure if that's enough to make it worthwhile...

Last edited by lynira at 7:43 pm, Oct 28 2009

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Why isn't 'Hentai' regarded as a demographic in the genre area?
Yaoi and Yuri seems to be a part of the demographic family.
Why exclude a genre that is a polar opposite to another?

I urge a staff member or anyone to confront an admin about this.
This is a mockery. Hentai needs to be respected more.

Shouldn't the definitions for the demographics also be removed from the Genres page and be placed in a separate, new Demographics page alongside Genres and Categories?

This is to further reduce the confusion about certain demographics as genres, which they are not. We know demographics like shounen, seinen etc. aren't genres, but the ill-informed, upon seeing the definitions for demographics in the Genres page, will just reinforce their misunderstandings.

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