Great question. I've been wondering about whether we should add franchises as series or not. I'm inclined to think franchises will be difficult to understand as series in BookBrainz, as ordering may not make sense and constituent parts could be all over the place. Without being able to group or order things, it could confusing when seeing a ton of unordered works in a series. Of coures, I think the information is still valuable.
2025-11-09 31330, 2025
jwillikers[m]
When works can be ordered in a franchise, I'd definitely add the series. Where that's not the case, I'd be more cautions, as it could end up adding a lot of relationships that are better expressed with a simple series-series relationship in the future instead of a ton of work-series relationships for each individual work. Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek:_…, I'd probably avoid
2025-11-09 31330, 2025
jwillikers[m]
adding each work to a Star Trek and/or Star Trek TNG series. You could still create series for these, but maybe you could just link to the subseries in the annotation for now as a stop-gap? Or we could just make the series in the future when series-series relationships exist. I've created an issue for this: https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/BB-871
I'd like to avoid excessively long, layered titles for this kinds of books
2025-11-09 31303, 2025
jwillikers[m]
For works, the style guidelines aren't fleshed out very well, where for editions it should match the cover as closely as possible. I'd probably match the title on the cover of the first published or most notable edition in the original language without any unnecessary subtitles, i.e. what it is currently for that work. I'd definitely keep the series in the name when each work is presented as a numbered volume in a series, even if
2025-11-09 31303, 2025
jwillikers[m]
it has a subtitle, which is most common for light novels. Most fantasy / sci-fi novels in a series will have a dedicated title, but vary on whether they incorporate the series as part of the title. Many sites documenting books will omit the series if there is a title for a volume, which is what I've seen on ISFDB. I don't know if it's been hashed out enough for me to say anything definitively
Memory Beta is a wiki dedicated to Star Trek and they practice omitting any series and title prefix if they don't appear to be part of the title Phrase. For instance... (full message at <https://matrix.chatbrainz.org/_matrix/media/v3/download/chatbrainz.org/xbnGGLqgeobyZcrZSIVtjHTC>)
