User talk:Master Jaro

Regarding recent edits to Touhou Project items

Hello Jaro - I'm Kurzov.

I wanted to reach out and ask about some recent edits you made to items of different Touhou Project games.

Since 2018 I've been involved with adding and updating Touhou-related Wikidata items. (Albeit very irregularly: Brief periods of high activity followed by prolonged periods of absence, mostly due to IRL circumstances that have only recently cleared up)

I had a question - Why did you add "([number] Touhou Project)" onto the ending of every game's item name? For example, you put (6th Touhou Project) at the end of the name for EoSD/Touhou 6.

This isn't necessarily a complaint, just a curiosity. The numbered "[#]th Touhou Project" names are almost never used to identify the games in the English Touhou community, instead they almost always either use acronyms (EoSD) or shrink them down to shorthand, such as "TH06".

I was going to revert the changes, but before I did that I wanted to reach out to you and ask.

Thanks, Kurzov

Kurzov (talk) 23:54, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Hi Kurzov, nice to e-meet you and thanks for you message :)

Among other things, I am on working on keeping a good games database on https://gamerprofiles.com (Social Media For Gamers). We often check back with Wikidata to make sure games and names are up to date, and help maintain Wikidata at the same time in return. Apart from trying to have all games in the world in GamerProfiles, we also wanna keep the games database clean, understandable, well-readable, and well-searchable. E.g. if you would search for "Pokémon" there (e.g. on https://gamerprofiles.com/games), as a user you would want to find all Pokémon related games, right? When we were working on adding the Touhou games there as well, we noticed that the style of their naming differs vastly among 3rd party websites, and even within Wikipedia and Wikidata. Many styles of naming were seemingly mixed together. English names, "Engrish" names, Japanese names, Hepburn Japanese names, or a mix of these with brackets, minuses or colons, sometimes written as "Tōhō" and sometimes as "Touhou". Even within the main Wikipedia Article the names in the history timelime, the sub-titles in the Wikipedia article page, and the names in the link and the names of the game in the Wikidata article behind were different. I had quite some trouble identifying the individual Touhou games, until I saw one style from someone on Wikipedia which made it very clear that the game is a Touhou game and which generation it belongs to. So I figured it would be good to use this naming style as a standard for the English names to make it easy to understand and easy to search for English-speaking people, as apparently there was no common standard in use on Wikidata yet.

I am by no means a Touhou-expert, so I would value your opinion on this a lot. We check back against Wikidata and other sources regularly when it comes to game names on GamerProfiles, to make sure names are updated regularly and understandable even for people which don't play the specific game yet and don't know the insider-acronyms. This specific naming standard I found on one of the games on Wikipedia made finding Touhou games very easy, so I figured it would be helpful to have them at least in Wikidata as well, as it provides a bit more structure, the alternative names and acronyms are still there, and it does not affect the namings on Wikipedia articles. The history timeline on the main wikipedia article for Touhou was a real gem in helping to find all games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touhou_Project), and it had a similar structure :). The names in Wikidata essentially became a bit longer and have "Touhou" in their names now.

Happy to hear your thoughts here! We have the same goal of using the correct naming of games, so people can find and understand them. It's quite easy with pure English names, and that much harder with translated or combined names :)

Best regards,

Master Jaro Master Jaro (talk) 08:30, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Alright, I see. Thanks for the swift response. I do appreciate wanting to keep things consistent - as you stated, the naming consistency of the different games between sites (and there are a lot of them - the Touhou Wiki, old download (pirate) sites, online videos, high score listings, among many others) is indeed pretty variable and inconsistent.

Most of the time, the Japanese titles of the games are along the lines of 東方OOO - but unfortunately, ZUN (the series creator) isn't completely consistent either and there are exceptions.

I am going to drop the "[number]th Touhou Project" sections but leave the rest as is (minus one exception explained later) - going forward they'll be named under the template of "[Hepburnized Name] ~ [English-translated subtitle]" (e.g. "Touhou Fuujinroku ~ Mountain of Faith"), and reversed when necessary (see below) - the two most common English abbreviations are already (or will be in short order) input as the alternate English names for their respective items (in Mountain of Faith's case, "TH10" and "MoF"). I will be adding "Touhou [#]" as an alternate.

When you updated the games to fit the format you used, all - minus two - of the following non-standard names were dealt with in the same manner that I would have done. Here are some general oddities about the game titles:

• Touhou 1 (Highly Responsive to Prayers) has "The" (definite article) sitting at the beginning of its original English subtitle - although only on the title screen as there's no English text at all on the game box. Akyuu's Untouched Score, a series of five CD albums from ZUN that entailed FM synthesis renditions of the soundtracks to the first five games - the last of which featured the soundtrack from Touhou 1 - dropped the definite article from the game name for unknown reasons. No change
• Touhou 6 (the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil) also has "the" sitting at the beginning of its subtitle. I'll be including the definite article in Touhou 6's main title, but the shorter version (e.g. "Embodiment of Scarlet Devil") will be kept as an additional alternate name.
• Touhou 12.3 (aka Hisoutensoku) has a Japanese subtitle instead of an English one - technically, it's an expansion of Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, but it also doubles as its own game. Usually it gets shortened to "Soku". This is the only other change that I feel the need to revert - the Hepburnized Japanese subtitle just doesn't work, it's only been named "Touhou Hisoutensoku" (or "Hisoutensoku") in the western community.
• Touhou 12.5 (aka Double Spoiler) also has a Japanese subtitle instead of an English one. It also has its title ordering reversed, even by ZUN. The subtitle goes first, followed by the Japanese title second. The resulting name is "Double Spoiler ~ Touhou Bunkachou". No change
• Touhou 12.8 (aka Great Fairy Wars) combines both of these outliers - Japanese language subtitle with reversed title ordering. The game is officially titled "Yousei Daisensou ~ Touhou Sangetsusei", since it's connected to a manga of the same name (Touhou Sangetsusei, that is). No change
• Touhou 17.5 originally had no English subtitle as well - most folks just called it "Touhou Gouyoku Ibun" in my experience. When the game was released for the Switch in 2022, it was given the English subtitle "Sunken Fossil World", which seems to be slowly catching on. No change
• Three other Touhou games - in particular, Touhou 14.3 (Impossible Spell Card), Touhou 16.5 (Violet Detector), and Touhou 18.5 (100th Black Market) - drop the usual first half (the Japanese language title) in favor of something else. No changes

As detailed above, the definite article addition for Touhou 6 and the Hepburn subtitle removal for Touhou 12.3 are the only changes I'll be making to the primary item titles beyond stripping out the "[number]th Touhou Project" ends.

Thanks -- Kurzov Kurzov (talk) 21:59, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Hi Kurzov,

wonderful, thank you so much! And also thanks for giving the detailed explanations, this makes sense. Let's keep it this way then indeed here.

On GamerProfiles we will update the Touhou names during the next game-update-phase as well.

Best, Master Jaro

(And if you happen to find any other inconsistencies on GamerProfiles, or missing games, or if you have feature-wishes there, feel free to tell me there as well! :) ) Master Jaro (talk) 09:44, 19 January 2024 (UTC)