Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-1251315-20150527125159/@comment-34115-20150528033346

@Seelentau, please leave your bias against SuperSajuuk out of these discussions.

We delete users hard work all the time when we decide it's probably not useful to the wiki's readers. You even did a variation of this today.

Asking the community to discuss whether they even want the credits box on every Episode page is a perfectly valid thing to do.

@Omojuze, Whether there are or are not people shouting to volunteer is a red herring. Changing all the credits boxes, whether to add English voices or remove the boxes is a big job. Having a volunteer take one of those actions on their own and then telling them after that work that the community didn't want that option would be apathetic. So it's prudent to decide what the community wants now before anyone has volunteered and found the time.

Now my problem with the current incarnation of the credits table is in the formatting and excessive duplication.

Right now, on each episode page – a page type that uses forms to avoid boilerplate – with a credits table now has: A hardcoded wiki table with all the formatting (wikitable syntax, css classes, common table headers, link syntax) written directly into the page. Duplication of name translations into every page making mistakes more likely, harder to spot, and harder to correct. And redundant information.

Redundant information being the character name translations. This information is already contained within the referenced character article. We already reference characters in article text without associated translations and these references are nothing special, so theories about whether people need the Japanese names to understand who the character is are irrelevant. I believe Snapper2 touched lightly on this.

However, the Seiyū name translations may be useful. Their links go off site to Wikipedia and translations of person names are much more relevant in media credits.

I put together a CreditsTable template which can be used with a plain bit of text. A character name on one line, followed by actor names (in English) starting with  for Seiyū and   for English voice actors. On the off chance a character's name within the credits is an alias we don't have a redirect for, the character's name can be specified as "Page Name [Text to show]"

Instead of hardcoding seiyū name translations in every page, translations are kept in Module:CreditsTable/names where they can be edited. The formatting is all part of Module:CreditsTable, which we can change without editing hundreds of articles. The English voice actors column will disappear when none are present (like for episodes that haven't been dubbed). And redundant character name translations are gone (which conveniently frees up more space so we don't have to use tabs).