We're implementing a change in the submission policy in order to increase the quality of new submissions. This will also make it easier for our staff to understand the edits so that they can intelligently accept or reject them in the queue. We have a great community here, and we appreciate all of the work that you have done, gathering and researching information for some pretty obscure albums. To keep the accuracy and quality of this information as high as we can, we'd like to ask you to take the time to follow one more step:

When you submit an edit to any field on an album or artist page, please use the discussion thread to provide a rationale for your edits.

Here are a few guidelines to help with this:

• Sources
• For many albums, the official site is the most useful source.
• Album scans are also great sources.
• Be careful with other user-submitted sites like Wikipedia or IMDB. They are probably fine for some basic information like game titles and release dates, but they are not very reliable for artist credits.
• Sites like Joshinweb, Anison Generation are good sources for vocal composition credits.
  
  Artists
• Please don't add artists to the artist fields (Composer, Arranger, Performer, Lyricist) without posting a source.
• When there are multiple artists, please show which tracks they worked on in the notes.
• All speculation and guesswork should stay in the discussion thread.
• Staff rolls are good sources, but keep in mind that soundtrack releases are not always complete.
• Composer identification by "ear" is not an eligible source. The only exceptions are for arranged tracks, where you can listen to recognize the original source, and medley tracks where you can identify the tracks played.
• Strangely, sometimes the game media is "tagged" with composition credits, and this info is valid. However, tags found in music you downloaded from some unauthorized site aren't a valid source.
• Show your work. If you pieced together the credits from 10 different games on an arranged album, don't just put those names in the artist fields. Show how the credits break down for each track.
  
  Translations
• If you change a translation, please post a reason for the change. Minor cosmetic edits (to match the tracklist in the booklet) don't need to be sourced.
  
  Japanese Names
• If you can't find a source that confirms a reading for an artist name, then leave it in Kanji.
• Don't use romanizations from a Kanji Translator for artist names.
• Romanizations from Anison Generations seem problematic, and might be auto-generated, so they also shouldn't be used.
  
  Auctions
• Sometimes an auction is all we've got for a rare album. We've allowed these in the past, but please link to the auction, and if possible, copy the text into the post.
  
  New Submissions
• Quality over quantity. One good entry is better than 100 incomplete entries.
  

Presently there isn't anything to force submitters to follow these guidelines, and I don't want there to be, so please remember to provide justification for any edits. Submissions can be rejected if no supporting information is presented. I think the main thing to take away from this is this: when an edit is made, we all need to know why the new information is correct, and why the old information is wrong. We need the opportunity to discuss changes too.

Just a bump to move this onto the Today's Posts page.

I'd suggest putting the text into an additional (collapsible) notes box on the submission pages along with a post entry field which gets automatically posted in the correct related thread.

there is something I need to say about Anison

artists written in kanji are ok, however I noticed for some artists written in katakana (when mouseover the artist in kanji) that the katakana can be wrong (I noticed it when I checked for gundam songs)

and joshinweb can have erronous and incomplete info (e: tracknames, i: artists)

I've recently come across quite a few entries with bad artist linking (namely, linking non-doujin artists to doujin albums due to similarity in aliases, or forgetting to set the "featured" checkbox).

I will be putting in place some features to help prevent this in the future.

That's a good point. We have alarmed about it in the forum (like this), and perhaps we should in this guideline too.

Gotta agree with this suggestion.

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Thanks. I forgot about this, so I added a section in the guidelines to cover names.

Good update. I'll try to follow it myself from now on. I almost didn't see the update though, because there are so many new releases on the front page. I'm glad the site is still running strong; I use it all the time. Here's to another good year in 2011! =}

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hi~

I too agree with this suggestion. A simple note feature like in musicbrainz to inform the reviewer of what changed and why. Helps them make an informed decision.

Another helpful guideline or addition would be a small area where people put the typos. A quick example. http://vgmdb.net/album/191 track 11 is 5:10 on the back cover, the actual length is 7:40.

Having this information in notes or a "typos" area keeps people from a cycle of editing based on what they see.

One think I think we should to encourage is to add more links directly to the album entries, it saves me a lot of time.
Particularly for new albums, a link to the official site or announcement or any source would be most appreciated (including entries by the staff). "Citation needed" and all that.

Often I find some empty upcoming entry and I try to see if it can be updated, but I take a while to find official sources and end up giving up.
And rather the having to read a whole thread for edit sources, a direct "Artist info" link to (for example) joshinweb tells me more than enough.


(though I'm not sure if regular users can add them)

Is there a place or way, we could get an area to add the data for sourcing of our edits too when changes are being made?

Even a tiny off the side box that allows for putting (Back Cover, or linking to the artist website, a specific twitter comment)

This I think would help to keep most of the data easily accessible. Rather than a forum post. Assuming someone looks at the change log 2 years later, they would then have to look at the forums post to see why there was a change if someone decided to post it. Rather than just seeing the change and a small area to the side of it showing the link to the image scan, the twitter post (archived or not), website, etc.