What's the policy on abbreviating titles of Movies & TV Shows?

Question

I've been browsing M&TV questions, tags, and meta discussions regarding tags, but haven't been able to pin down how we as a community decide whether to abbreviate tags or not. Here's a few discrepancies I've noticed:

• Movies with joining words ('the', 'of' etc) missing, whilst other movies have them.
• TV shows where the community/fanbase abbreviation takes precedence, when the full name would fit.
• Other, more general inconsistencies, spelling errors etc

Some Examples:

The Star Trek tags would fit if they were written out fully, even before the tag length was updated from 25 to 35 characters - (albeit some would have had to drop some connecting 'the's):

• star-trek-voy (star-trek-voyager)
• star-trek-tos (star-trek-the-original-series)
• star-trek-tng (star-trek-the-next-generation)
• star-trek-ds9 (star-trek-deep-space-nine)

Titles where we leave off a leading 'the':

• avengers
• shawshank-redemption
• incredible-hulk
• big-lebowski
• bourne-legacy (in fact all the bourne movies)
• cabin-in-the-woods
• blues-brothers
• mentalist
• green-lantern
• dark-knight-rises (which has the-dark-knight-rises as a synonym)

Titles where we leave a leading 'the' on:

• the-departed
• the-godfather
• the-good-the-bad-the-ugly
• the-west-wing
• the-amazing-spiderman
• the-devils-advocate
• the-hangover
• the-order-of-the-phoenix
• the-hobbit

Other inconsistencies:

• buffy-vampire-slayer-tv could just be buffy-the-vampire-slayer. If and when we get questions about the movie, we can tag it something like buffy-the-vampire-slayer-movie or buffy-the-vampire-slayer-1992.
• scott-pilgrim could fit as scott-pilgrim-vs-the-world
• the-order-of-the-pheonix spelling mistake (since fixed to the-order-of-the-phoenix)

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I'm mainly an Arqade community member, and over there we tend to only abbreviate tags when they won't fit the 35-character limit. If the game has a well known, fan/community-made abbreviation, we add that as a synonym of the full game (for example, WoW->World of Warcraft).

So what is the policy on tag names and abbreviations for Movies & TV?

Answer 1

I agree with your policy that we shouldn't abbreviate titles as long as they fit into the 25 character limit. Abbreviations that are made without apparent reason, like all those Star Trek examples or the choice of AVP for Aliens vs. Predator, should be discouraged as they (at least if done out of mere ability and in lack of actual reasons) tend to carry a bit of elitist group thinking or fanboyism that tends to lock out anyone not acquainted with their actual meaning, which damages the seriosity and accessibility of the site.

Tags should capture the original title as best as possible, as that is the only completely objective criterium to rely on (though problems arise for non-English movies and such special cases, but that is an entirely different question dicussed in this related meta post). This includes any usage of small connective words like "the", "of", or "a". Therefore I find e.g. the rather famous dark-knight and dark-knight-rises tags quite unintuitive and the role of primary tag and synonym (which have "the"s) should be reversed for those.

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Yet a completely different case is when the tag doesn't fit the 25 character limit (and my above opinions are only meant for the cases when it does). In this case small connective words are probably the first things that can be dropped, if their lack doesn't impede the dynamics of reading flow and doesn't destroy the actual meaning of the title (while that may be rather subjective, it is indeed a movie by movie decision done mostly by reason rather than hard facts), which makes leading "the"s the best candidates for removal. If that is not enough and maybe the whole title is completely overlong, there have to be taken individual decisions. An interesting example I once had was Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, which would have only fit as flying-swords-dragon-gate, but this IMHO doesn't read that well, so based on the fact that there seemed to be more movies in this kind of franchise I settled for simply turning it into a rather franchise-style dragon-gate, but that was indeed a rather sbjective decision.

The Scott Pilgrim example is a good one, too, allowing for a wide range of possibilities. I think in this case simply scott-pilgrim would work, given that it's so unique a name. But if using a larger more accurate tag name, I'd rather settle for scott-pilgrim-vs-world and thus remove little connective tissue but still conveying the original meaning, instead of abbreviating a word or removing the wrong word, as in scott-pilgrim-v-the-world or scott-pilgrim-the-world, which destroys the original meaning.

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And as long as there are no questions about the Buffy-movie, the tag for the TV-show should really be buffy-vampire-slayer. Tag changes that extend tags by meta information in order to resolve ambiguities, like this -tv or the common year-appendages, should be postponed until those ambiguities actually arise. This is also why I freely described the U.S. version of Wilfred in wilfred's tag description, but am happy to change this to wilfred-us once there is a question about the Australian original some day. Nobody forbids to rename existing tags once their name could be more appropriately used for another topic.

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So to sum up, if the original title fits into the limit, it is the only objective criterium by which one can go and thus should be captured as accurately as possible. And if it doesn't fit it is really a (maybe sbjective) movie by movie decision driven by common sense, reading esthetics and archival purposes. And meta appendages should only be used when actually neccessary.

Answer 2

Nice points raised. I agree with you on most, with some exceptions.

• I think "the" should never be ignored from the title if the total count is less than 25 characters long.

• In the example of Buffy I disagree with you. Because buffy-the-vampire-slayer tag will we confusing between TV series and movie. So I think we should keep the tag as it is.

• Abbreviation tags are also helpful in many cases. Such as Aliens Vs. Predator which is more famously known as AVP. (We can make both tags and make abbreviation tags synonymous to the original).

• Phoenix spelling mistake surely needs to be corrected. Even Scott Pilgrim tag needs to be more descriptive in its name, as you suggested.

In addition to this-

I think spartacus-franchise tag also need to be renamed to spartacus-tv-series. There is no use of the word "franchise" here, as all question are regarding the TV Series.