Year means what year?
17 years ago
Posts: 142
This isn't so much a suggestion as a question, I suppose. And either my search-fu is failing me, or there's no info about this on the site.
I tend to fill in the Year field for a series according to what it says on the edit page, i.e. "The year the manga officially began." This is fairly clear cut. You just have to know when it began in whatever mag it first appeared in, and there's rarely that much of a difference from the time the first tank was published anyway.
Now, my problem arises when I come across books that are collections of one-shots, some of them published over a long time. In the interest of consistency, I suppose it should then be the year the first story was published. On the other hand, that looks a bit silly if there's, say, one story from 1990 and the rest are all from just last year, so using the year the book was published might be better.
So, which one should it be? (Maybe it's something more esoteric, like the median year? 😉
And just to not be too far off-topic for this section, I suggest that you write down the "policy" on this, on the edit page.
17 years ago
Posts: 116
I've come across this issue before too, and it would be nice to have a solid definition to go by, for consistency's sake.
17 years ago
Posts: 1705
Maybe for the collection of oneshots, they could list the date as from xxxx to xxxx?
17 years ago
Posts: 142
Quote from CatzCradle
Maybe for the collection of oneshots, they could list the date as from xxxx to xxxx?
That is not a bad idea, I just didn't think of that option.
Though, it would make things a little bit more complicated when displaying the data in a list with other manga, or searching through the database.
17 years ago
Posts: 2852
Honestly, I intended it to be the first existence of that story in the form that it is represented in our database.
For instance, if there is a manga entry, the date that the first manga chapter was released would be the year. If it was a novel, the day that the novel was released would be the first year.
I apologize if I've misunderstood... I read this quite quickly...
17 years ago
Posts: 10867
Manick, the weird part that came up is about anthologies...
A just ruler amongst tyrants
17 years ago
Posts: 142
Yeah, it's perfectly clear what year it is for a regular series. Or for a single one-shot as a separate entity.
And if we extend that rule, a collection of one-shots should get the year when the oldest story in it was published anywhere. But in practice, that is sometimes not very useful information, and the year the collection itself was published might be better.
I don't really see a huge advantage of one method over the other, I would just like to know which to choose.
11 years ago
Posts: 400
"the year the collection itself was published might be better"
I think thats the right thing to do.
