Style Guide
 

I've been working on an IMFDB Style Guide. I got the idea from the Common Mistakes page. I figure it'd be nice to standardize a few things that a lot of people know, but others don't. Ideas? Criticism?

http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Talk:IMFDB_Style_Guide

A few things:

- Gun image size. I've been starting at 300px and moving up from there. I'm not going to go crazy about it like Mr. Wolf, but I usually do 300px for pistols, 350px for SMG and short long guns, 400 px for rifles. That's just me though.

- Images on actor pages. 400px or 500px? Does it depend on the aspect ratio?

- Asian names, surname first (Asian style) or as specified in IMDb (western style)? Right now, I've been creating page name per IMDb, then creating an Asian style redirect.

As it seems to me, 350 for handguns images, and 400 for others (small SMGs, like MAC-10, count as pistols). For actor pages 400 fits very well, with 500px images the place for table is too small.

I would say 400 is fine for the actor pages. I wouldn't bother changing it for different aspect rations as if the actor is in productions with different ARs it would look odd if the width changed.

As for gun images, I tend to go for 300 for pistols, 350 for abnormally large pistols or small SMGs, 400 for SMGs and small carbines, 450 for assault rifles and 500 for big stuf like an M2HB or a Bazooka. TBH I probably overly complicate it though.

Also should the standard width for 16:9 caps be 600px or 500px? When I first started doing stuff for the site most 16:9 stuff was 500px but now it seems to have shifted to 600px, with 500px being the width for 4:3 stuff. If this is the case should the width for 2.39:1 caps be larger, like 700px?

700px seems a bit large, especially if the cap is in standard def.

The problem is that as it stands the 2.39:1 caps look small in comparison to the pages that use 600px for 16:9. I think we should either increase one or decrease the other. Also a 700px 2.39:1 image is still vertically smaller than a 600px 16:9 image, so it is not making the page comparably "longer".

Just for reference, can you link to a 2.39:1 screencap?

2.39:1 is the most common aspect ratio for modern cinema released films. For example, all the screenshots on the Expendables 2 page. An example of a page where the images are 16:9 using 600px thumbnails is Burn Notice Season 6 (along with most current television series like Hawaii Five-0, Nikita or Covert Affairs and movies that aren't 2.39:1).

I just did the math. Most of the Blu-Ray caps I've taken are 2.4:1.

I changed over the 21 Jump Street page to the proposed standard. Thoughts?

400px is probably the best size for an actor page. Any larger and it tends to affect the tables. As for the Asian names, I do them Asian-style first and then create a redirect for western style.

See, that's the kind of thing we should settle once and for all.

Pro-western:
-it allows us to stick with the established standard of going with what IMDb has.
-it allows some consistency with Asian actors who use western names, like Jet Li.

Pro-Asian:
-Some exceptions already made due to fame, like Chow Yun-Fat. IMDb has him as Yun-Fat Chow, but come on.

It looks pretty good. I went and finished the page for Rolling Thunder (only took me 27 months!) going with 600px for the screencaps and I like the look.

I would like to standardize the western style for Asian names.

- If we're going to IMDB for media titles, then it makes sense to extend that to actor names as well, and IMDB goes western style.

- Some Asians have western names, so it'd be weird having two standards. (Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Jay Chou, etc)

- As the rules mention, we're an American site, where the American release date and American release title comes first, and all pages must be in English. Well, in the US, the surname goes on the end, with very few exceptions. (Chow Yun Fat and Yao Ming are the only two I can think of.) Everybody else, Byung-Hun Lee (look at the GI Joe: Retaliation poster), Ken Watanabe, Ichiro Suzuki, the Chinese lady in the neighboring cubicle, every Chinese person I ever grew up with in the US, uses the western style.

Are there any objections?

How should we do ranks? Another user brought this up the other day, and I noticed it more while going though the Green Berets page. For example, Jim Hutton is credited on IMDB as "Sgt. Peterson," yet in his photo he's a SP5. Muldoon and Doc McGee are also listed as just Sergeants, yet their stripes say otherwise. Should actual insignia override the IMDB credit?

Well, Petersen begins the film as a Spec-5, but eventually gets promoted to SGT when the Duke wants him for his A-Team.

However, Doc and Muldoon are MSGTs and SFCs respectifuly, so they should be listed as such.

I think we should use service specific abbreviations for each rank as we can.

I've been doing that with my pages, but I don't know if people would agree to make it the site standard.

I think it would a nice touch, but perhaps we could standardize with one of the style guides the media uses. let me go dig out an old journalism text book.

It wouldn't be branch specific, but it would be standardized for all the American services atleast.

Maybe Nyles could shed some light on the CF abbreviation systems, as well.

The problem I've run into is that sometimes a soldier or marine is simply referred to as "Lieutenant <name>," and you can't see his bar, or if it's black and white and you can't tell what color it is.

And that is when, in my opinion, a generic "Lt." works well in the caption.

Heck, with the exception of a really, really good friend of mine, addressed any Lieutenant as anything other than Lieutenant, or in the case of my old platoon leader "ell-tee" or occassionally, especially if it was just us in the Humvee, "Mike"

As in "HOLY CRAP MIKE, I think we just got hit by an IED!"

"Commander" falls into that as well, but you don't see it as much as the Lieutenant thing.

And Colonel.

Also, General. But General shouldn't be hard to distinguish because we can all count to four. (hopefully)

Sergeant works for buck sergeants and (some) staff sergeants in the Army. For instance, I was never referred to as "Staff Sergeant" always sergeant or Mack.

The Marines, as I understand it, get persnickety about terms of address for enlisted folks and prefer to use the whole title

Yes, anyone who's ever called a Gunnery Sergeant "Sergeant" won't make that mistake again.

Seeing something Thejoker wrote on the wiki reminded me of this: Should we standardize how we do foreign titles? I've always preferred to have the page title be the US title, and then create redirects for the foreign/original title. That way, if you type in "Battleship Potemkin," it'll go straight to that page, rather than a search page. I see a lot of users use both, so it'd be Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin). Any thoughts?

Going by the rule of using the US title if it has one, it should just be called "Battleship Potemkin" as it has had an official US release which used this title. The times when we use as English title with the foreign title in parentheses is when there is not official US release title and it is just a translation of the official foreign title. There is the exception that if the film goes by its foreign title in the US then it is not translated.

I've added it to the style guide.

I agree that 2.39 to 1 widescreen films should only go up to 600px since this has been the standard widely used throughout the site. 500px was originally the norm, but it was logical to change this with HD sources more readily available.

I generally believe that films that are shot in the 16x9 or 1.85x1 format should be 600px if the screencaps are high quality enough (either HD or directly from a commercial DVD). Otherwise, 500px for these films.

As for older films in the 4x3 format, 400px to 500px depending on the quality.

I've changed the style guide back and changed the pages that were made in the meantime while we discuss this. For my two cents, I'm pro-700px for anamorphic widescreen, as A) most films today are filmed in HD, B) HD and BD caps are more and more prevalent, and C) widescreen monitors are also more and more prevalent. On the other hand, I agree that 700px caps for non-HD or BD caps don't look great.

(Speaking of, we need someone to get BD caps for Lawrence of Arabia.)