User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Tales from the Tardis/@comment-24894325-20190616002412

Editors have been recently creating pages for actors who dubbed localised versions of TV episodes in various languages. While it might have seemed like a good or at least harmless idea, it is not.

The first problem is that this task cannot realistically be completed. There are almost 200 countries in the world and more than 6k languages. Even listing dub actors for 50 languages/countries is going to dominate smaller pages. But it is worse because the same character can be dubbed by different actors in different episodes (as has happened) or for different local distributors (as has also happened). So we are looking at hundreds of new actors per character if the information is completed. This will never happen, of course.

But even the incomplete information is useless at best and misleading at worst. Firstly, it is not clear why English-speaking readers of this wiki would benefit in any way from knowing names of actors who have no presence in English-speaking media. For comparison, the German-language Doctor Who wiki generally does not have this information. If it is not even of interest to German speakers who German dub actors are, why should it be of interest to people who would never listen to them?

Secondly, while the names of actors at least present actionable information in European languages, giving a name of a Russian actor or a Hebrew actor is a shot in the dark. I happen to know firsthand that writing a Japanese name in the Latin alphabet conflates multiple names into one. An English speaker would not be able to find the actor based on the English version of the name. Thus, for languages not using Latin alphabet providing names of actors is not simply useless but misleading. We cannot, however, restrict the application of this rule to some foreign-language wikis but not others. If it is allowed for Deutsch, it would have to be allowed for اُردُو, and فارسی, and ქართული ენა, and 한국어.

Thus, all dub actors have been deleted and information about them removed. This information, if it is of interest at all, belongs on the wikis of respective languages.

Please do not attempt to recreate the deleted pages, nor create new ones.