User:JoshuSasori/Opinions

These are my opinions, which might be reflected in my edits. I formed most of these opinions well before I started editing here, so these are my opinions as a wikipedia reader rather than an editor. Please reply on the talk page if you would like to respond to something I've said here.

Distracting details
One thing which is very distracting and makes Wikipedia articles very hard to read is that often articles have a lot of "add on" sentences which go off at a tangent from the main topic. I try to reduce or remove many of the "add on" sentences from articles. For example, people who have studied Japanese language a little bit try to add information about Japanese language topics and add silly statements like this to articles.

Renaming people
One of the worst things which Wikipedia does is to rename people. Although it's not limited to Japanese people, this phenomenon is particularly prevalent on articles about Japanese people. The rules for what name to use are in accord with the recommendations of style guides, but unfortunately many articles don't follow these rules.

Macrons
I don't know of a single example of a Japanese person who uses a macron in their names when writing the name in romanized form. Yet Wikipedia is littered with names with macrons. If there is no romanized form of the name, and it is not a person's name, I don't object to using a macron, but I have no idea how putting macrons onto people's names has become the default of Wikipedia, since in practice nobody uses them. I am gradually trying to get the names moved to non-macron forms, if I have conclusive evidence that the person does not use a macron, e.g. Tadao Sato or Kaneto Shindo.

Nihongo template
The "Nihongo" template is often added to articles, but its purpose is not clear to me. Why it is necessary to put English words inside a template called "Nihongo" I have no idea. For example, on Proof of the Man, there is Proof of the Man (人間の証明). I don't understand why the words "Proof of the Man" are inside the template, since they are not "Nihongo". I also do not understand why there is nothing here which actually tells people what the three components are: first, the title in English, then the title in Japanese orthography, then the title's Japanese pronunciation - but nobody has bothered to say what any of these things are - and then the question mark afterwards, which leads one to a page on installing Japanese fonts. It seems like a kind of insanity.

Filmographies
Although this account is quite new, I have used Wikipedia a lot for several years. When I used the Wikipedia pages to research about a film director or actor, I found it rather annoying that the person's work was always broken up into two or three lists of "television" and "film", each list in chronological order. I remember particularly noticing this when reading the Japanese wikipedia article on Taiji Tonoyama, who has played a huge number of roles. For me, as a Wikipedia reader, it would have made more sense and have been much easier to understand if the actor or director's work is put into just one list, all in chronological order, with a field like "Medium" to distinguish between film, stage, television or radio. For example, for an actor,

Why use Japanese?
E.g. "Never Give Up!, a shōjo manga by Hiromu Mutou" - why not say "a Japanese comic for girls" rather than "a shōjo manga"? It makes it more difficult to read and also makes it sound rather pompous, as if "shōjo manga" is some kind of precious cultural artefact rather than a comic for juvenile females. It also seems contrary to the spirit of the Wikipedia project. Surely the purpose of Wikipedia is to be an encyclopedia for everyone, not a place for fans of a particular thing to use their own obscure terminology?

Too much information
There is such a thing as "too much information". Articles should be written to be easy for the reader to understand. Articles should not robotically include ever-more-obscure and often poorly-related facts which the reader has wade through to puzzle the article's meaning out. For example, on the article Cinema of Japan, right after the first use of the word, there is a translation of "Cinema of Japan" into Japanese. What possible purpose could including this information serve? Even as a footnote it is barely worth including, and yet it is at the very top of the article, in the very first sentence. A casual reader gets the impression that it's necessary to learn Japanese words to read the article. I hope it is possible to write an article about Japanese cinema without worrying the reader with the burden of silly and pointless bits of information like this.


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