Anime News Network Tezuka Coverage

[putrocca]

I don't know how familiar all of you are with Anime News Network, but they are a truly exceptional web page, which provides up-to-date information about all things Anime and Manga. Their daily news updates are often the first place I hear about new Tezuka news, and their Encyclopedia of anime and manga is the best out there:

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/

That said, there are some gaps in ANN's coverage, as is inevitable with a volunteer-run page trying to cover such a vast amount of information. Luckily ANN's encyclopedia has a great system for increasing its coverage. When you go to ANN you can sign up for an account. If you do, then from then on you can submit new information to any ANN encyclopedia article that has a gap, supplying pictures, series summaries, episode titles etc. Over the past month I have been using this fabulous feature to go in and add lots of information about Tezuka series, and to submit new series to the encyclopedia which aren't covered yet.

Now, updating ANN's Tezuka coverage is a huge project, so if any of you are willing, I'd love to have you join me in signing up with ANN and adding Tezuka info. The trickiest part of this is submitting new series which aren't yet listed in their encyclopedia. While their Anime coverage for Tezuka is pretty complete, there are many, many manga which aren't listed yet.

When you go to the encyclopedia, you can suggest new manga to be covered, simply by submitting the title and a url with info (I recommend either the Tezuka World page or the Tezuka in English page). HOWEVER (and I can't stress this enough) PLEASE DON'T go through and try to submit every manga Tezuka ever wrote - we don't want to innundate the Encyclopedia with information about series very few people have heard of or care about, and they won't take kindly to 500 new series submitted all at once. Instead, I recommend that you only submit series which (A) have been released in Europe (which demonstrates international interest), or (B) series which are particularly important in the Tezuka corpus for some reason, for example Adventures of Rock, or Alabaster, which are both critical turning points in Tezuka's career, and exerted a significant influence on the Metropolis movie, something which many English-speaking viewers care about. If we are careful and submit only real, useful information, we can be a big help to ANN and to Tezuka's fame in the US, but if we spam them they'll just get annoyed.

That said, are you all willing to help? Right now, if you go to ANN's list of "most prolific staff" Tezuka is #3 on the list with 117 staff credits. I'm sure we can put him in his rightful place as #1.

[mippa]

I will happily volunteer myself, being in Japan, though my first priority is contributing to this place.