TV schedule
AniDB's anime entries allow for a number of resources to be added. This article in particular deals with one of them, the Japanese TV schedule, and with how it's useful to add and edit data for recent anime and episodes.
The Japanese TV schedule
Since circa 2002, Japan has made our lives a bit easier by maintaining a TV schedule. It has a lot of information, but what we specifically want from it is a per-show page stating when each episode airs on which TV station in Japan. Its main page can be found here. Normally, for every anime where that applies (that is, for TV anime aired since its creation), we want to have a link to its page on it. Just as every other resource, it will show up in the Resources line of the main information table for the anime, to the right of the anime pic, and, unless renamed, it will be called Schedule.
Adding a TV schedule link
- The description is missing or severely incomplete.If you can, please help by explaining it.
Understanding the TV schedule table
Now let's assume there is a link to the schedule for the show you want, and you want to use it to add, update or fix whatever sort of information. Here's a quick explanation of how to extract that information. Let's take the schedule for Code Geass R2 as an example.
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The columns on that page are:
| Name in Japanese | Explanation | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| チャンネル | TV channel | Of very little importance to AniDB as far as my knowledge goes. |
| 開始日時 | Date and time when the episode starts | Given in the "year-month-day hour:minute" format. As explained in several articles in this wiki, Japan is a funny country that has strange hours such as 26:00; if you see, for example, a slot allocated for 2nd of August, 26:00, it's actually 3rd of August, 02:00. |
| 分 | Scheduled time slot | Given in minutes. That time also counts commercial breaks; a 30 minute schedule generally means a ~25 minute episode, not a 30 minute one. |
| 回数 | Episode number | If it's empty, it generally means the anime's producers decided that episode is a special that goes outside the regular count. Those are filed as S specials in AniDB, unless the mods say otherwise. |
| サブタイトル/コメント | Episode title and/or notes | Check the actual content before blindly adding what's written there as an episode title! It may be a note. |
| フラグ | Flags | Standard sorts of notes that get used often in the schedule. See the information on them below. |
| 更新日 | Date the information was last updated. | Given in the "year-month-day" format. Useful for when you're trying to keep information up to date and things start to change. |
| - | ? | I have no idea what this field is for. |
Please note that adding episodes over one month in the future is frowned upon, even if the time slots are already scheduled, because, as the "last updated on" field might hint, things may always change in the future.
Flags
End-of-show flag - The schedule only counts the, well, scheduled episodes, which isn't all of them until it also specifically says it's the final one. For the last episode, there will be a purple square with the word 終, meaning "end", written on it; if you hover your mouse pointer over that square, you'll see a tooltip saying 最終回, "last episode".
- The description is missing or severely incomplete.If you can, please help by explaining it.