Handling of duplicate anime entries

CAR doesn't provide a feature to remove duplicate anime entries.

But as long as no review to any such entry has been submitted, the anime can be overwritten by any new anime.

For this purpose we might think of listing duplicate anime entries here and take one of these for the next new anime that would otherwise require the "Add a new series" mechanism.

But there's an easier mechanism. Imagine there were a convention to rename each duplicate anime entry so that the main title of a duplicate anime without reviews would be replaced by "Duplicate entry #xxxx" (with "#xxxx" being the number of the entry), and both the synopsis and attributes be cleared (their current content won't be useful anyway). It would then be easy to find those entries by searching for said string, and no list/posting to permanently be updated/maintained.

Note that a duplicate anime with reviews would be a different case: Its name and attributes ought to remain intact so that the reviews could be merged into the other entry of the same anime. It might be useful to prefix the main name of such a duplicate entry with "Duplicate entry - "; then again, which one of two entries for the same anime, both of which contain reviews, is the duplicate? These cases must be handled by Rebecca anyway so the only thing we could to is post the pairs of entries here and request a "merge" of the reviews by the administrator.

Edited on 06/04/2010 02:02 PM.

Duplicate anime entries:

• .hack//Tasogare no Udewa Densetsu (7 reviews)
• Duplicate entry - .hack//Legend of the Twilight (3 reviews)

series 1978 would be a candidate to be overwritten by Stretch as he's the one reviewer who already has a review there (an empty one).

(EDIT: This has been done in the meantime, so the link would now be misleading.)

Edited on 06/08/2010 02:10 PM.

Duplicate anime entries:

• Duplicate entry - Boogiepop Never Smiles (1 review)
• Boogiepop wa Warawanai (10 reviews)

Duplicate anime entries:

• 426 (4 reviews)
• Classical Zoids:Chaotic Century (4 reviews)

Duplicate anime entries:

• Duplicate entry - S.A, Special A (1 review)
• Special A (3 reviews)

Duplicate anime entries:

• Duplicate entry - Jigoku Shoujo: Mitsuganae (1 review)
• Jigoku Shoujo: Mitsuganae (2 reviews)

Duplicate anime entries:

• Duplicate entry - ef ~ a tale of memories (1 review)
• ef - a tale of memories (5 reviews)

I will try to remember to use series 1978 for my next new show review.

Duplicate anime entries:

• Duplicate entry - Senkaiden Houshin Engi (1 review)
• Senkaiden Houshin Engi (3 reviews)

Bentou no Gokui would be a candidate to be overwritten by Jan-Chan as he's the one reviewer who already has a review there (an empty one).

I'll go through this... but I would like to add some facility for letting you all deal with duplicates directly. Any thoughts on how that should work?

Obviously, if there's a series without any reviews, there's little danger in allowing it to be removed, particularly if it's more then a couple hours old.

When there are reviews, they need to be merged, the problem being that if two unrelated series were merged, that could cause significant damage, at least, using the methods I've historically used to merge them. However, as I type this, I realize there is another possibility.

I could keep the two series entries separate in the database, but merge them on display. This would allow merges to be undone. This is what I'm thinking:

You go to Series B and say that it's a duplicate of Series A. Now Series B no longer shows up in searches. Bringing up Series A shows all of the metadata from Series A, along with reviews from both Series A and Series B. If you had a review on both, it shows your Series A review.

If you go to edit Series A, you see a new tab, Merged Series, which, upon clicking, gives you a list of "Series A" and "Series B" (along with ID numbers, to make it clear they're different). From here you can unmerge the series, select which one you want to be the primary series, and view them separately. The last is important as it allows you to collect any useful metadata from Series B to manually merge into Series A. If you had reviews in both Series A and B, but you wanted to keep your B review, you'd go in here and copy and paste it to the normal review editing interface.

How does that sound?

Duplicates with no reviews are no problem as we can simply overwrite them with new anime.

Duplicates with reviews do not require any reaction real soon. We can make adding more reviews to them less attractive by tagging the synopsis with a "this is a duplicate" comment or even prefix the entry as "duplicate". Whether you ought to implement a merging tool would depend on two factors: a) how much work is it for you to execute a merge with the already given mechanism (it might be one SQL replace statement for the anime numbers of the review) and b) how frequently you'll show up here to do just that. If you have only a small amount of work for a merge and show up here every couple of months to cleanup all duplicates (that we post in this thread here) then I can easily live without a merging tool and rather wait for you to perform the merges; there might be more rewarding projects to devote your time to. Implementing a mechanism that allows an undo of a merge might be overkill for that small an issue.

We can handle everything ourselves (including the metadata merge) except for the transfer of reviews from one series to another one. So this would be the only operation that a tool could make easier. As for who'd be allowed to use this operation, I have no idea; if transferring a review would be difficult even for you, Rebecca, then it might be useful to build a tool even when only you were allowed to use it.

It's only difficult when someone has a review on both series. Regardless, it -is- error prone, so one way or another there'll be a tool. My goal here though, is to make the site as self managing as possible-- if something requires my intervention then I haven't achieved that goal. I'd like to limit my required intervention to bugs and social problems.

You might then want to enhance each user id by a flag indicating whether this user is a "trusted" one, and make the use (and even visibility) of more powerful tools (such as moving a review) depending on this flag being set.

"Moderator" or "Senior" tags is what we've mentioned before.

I think the senior tag would be most appropriate for this site and seeing how it's always us (village elders as Jan-chan so "enthusiastically" put it - lol), there would be only a small handful of promotions (if you will) to deal with.

Of course, incorporating these new options/features for said seniors will be a "unique joy ride" you would enjoy, Rebecca. (^_^)

If there are village elders, then there must also be a village idiot. Any volunteers?

But but... then I have to pick the village elders =D I suppose there -are- some tools that really do call for it, like as DD mentioned, moving reviews from one series to another. Or being able to delete comments, which actually is something that's in the UI, but only for me. =p

I actually do have a "moderator" flag in the reviewer database, it's just thus far I'm the only one with it. And I don't remember at all what features it gives access to. Edit: It seems moderators can edit anyone's comments.

Edited on 06/13/2010 07:38 PM.

If you don't use such a flag you're "picking" everyone as village elder. Would that be better? ;-)

Recently we transferred a lot of synopsis stuff into "Franchise" entries (see Pages) to let them be included in all synopsis sections of related anime. This mechanism has the positive side effect of transferring information that's currently editable by everyone from an "anime" entry into the Wiki space which has a version mechanism, thus allowing for an easy undo operation in case anyone performs unwanted modifications. Would there be any plan of moving other areas that are writable by "world" into the Wiki space? (And by the way, will there ever be a feature to rename a Wiki page?)

Renamed a bunch of "Please delete me" entries to "Duplicate entry - xxxx".