Content:Characters
The cast of an anime includes the characters and their seiyuu (voice actors and actresses).
Cast info sources
| Note | This section is a mostly untouched copy of some of the text from nwa's forum post and still needs further details, proper editing and formatting. |
The following are acceptable sources for information on the cast:
- VIDEO - yeah... well... as always.
- The official page for the anime - Lists the main and secondary cast generally. Sometimes gives the hiragana readings as well (from which you can get the main name).
- Japanese wiki - this should be the BEST source for characters since they most of the time also give the hiragana reading (inside brackets). And they mention seiyuu changes, generally...
- Generally, every page I gave to get the anime staff data from also lists cast, just without a reading.
One thing to note, if you add a character WITHOUT the official Japanese name and WITHOUT any links whatsoever, well that's just lame and makes it quite hard to track down the character to see if that's really his name and what not, but alas, we're not as strict with characters as we are with creators. I bet we have quite a number of characters by now whose name order is wrong or who don't meet our romanisation standards.
Note from nwa
| Note | This section is verbatim copypasta from the bottom of The Big One . |
Note from nwa: since we're all here too lazy to actually write guides and standards, I'm afraid you guys just need to check the existing examples of data for now. If there are any questions regarding the addition of characters/creators/songs/staff credits or anything else related to the new features, please ask so in the forum. Hopefully some day there will be a notes section on the add/edit pages. But for now, just remember that AniDB is meant to display the original Japanese data, character and creator names depend on how they were given in the video or on Japanese sources (family name vs given name order anyone?). Oh, and... NO spaces in Official Japanese names, and always try to provide them!
- Examples of full cast: Death Note, Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu (the Cast tab, click on "show all" at the bottom of the table)
- Examples of full staff credits: Top wo Nerae! Gekijouban, for something that's still ongoing - Queen's Blade (the Staff tab, can also check Staff per episode)
- Examples of full anime OSTs (collections): Cowboy Bebop Original Soundtrack 3: Blue, Gankutsuou Original Soundtrack, and a single - Hemisphere
- And for something completely chaotic, useless, yet somewhat awesome - warning - may crash your browser (will certainly crash older browsers).
Notes about adding character data
| Note | These are some items I learned about while adding characters on my own. These notes may not accurately reflect AniDB policy, but may be helpful to other users just getting started adding character data. |
- For all data it is preferred to stick with original Japanese sources, written in Japanese. This means your primary sources should be Japanese broadcast (or R2 DVD) video, official Japanese web site (.jp), and Japanese Wiki.
- Automatic translation services such as Google Translate and Babel Fish may be helpful, but should not be trusted on their own. Expect some words (especially names) to be translated incorrectly. Try to find a more authoritative source to corroborate translated information.
- Spoiler tags should be used in character descriptions to hide potentially spoiling information. English Wikipedia contains a lot of spoilers.
- For character images the official Japanese web site is preferred over screen caps from the video.
- Character images may be as large as 400 pixels wide by 500 pixels tall, but must not exceed 102400 bytes in size. discussion
- Episode relations are added by editing the character to anime relation and entering values into the Episodes field. Acceptable values consist of a series of comma separated ranges which may be delimited by hyphens. Just enter something like "1-26", or "2,5,8", or "9-13,16,22,26".