User talk:Beanie

	Welcome, Beanie, to explain xkcd!
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— The 𝗦𝗾𝗿𝘁-𝟭 ^{talk stalk} 16:38, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Adding the title text to the transcript

Hi, I am curious. What is your motivation for this monster project to add the title text to more than 2400 comics? It is always already found in the page. --Lupo (talk) 13:40, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

The transcript includes the whole comic, so I believe it should include the title text. Beanie (talk) 14:08, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

Also, I don't have a whole lot else to do. Beanie (talk) 14:30, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

Hi there Beanie, thanks for all your contributions to explain xkcd! Just wanted to mention a couple things before you continue your ambitious project of adding the title text to all the transcripts, in case this saves you a bit of effort.

• Currently, I believe the site policy is to not include the title text in the transcript, as mentioned in the Editor FAQ.
• There was recently a brief discussion about it in the community portal. As I understand it, the rationale for the transcript is to include a textual representation of the graphical text in the comic (so that it can be searched, for example); but the title text is already represented textually (below the comic image), so for this purpose it would be redundant in the transcript, and I believe that's the reasoning behind the current policy.

I, for one, certainly appreciate the title text that Randall adds to the comics; but FWIW, even according to Randall himself in his talk at Dartmouth College, the joke in the title text should never be critical to the main joke in the comic – i.e. the comic should work on its own, even if the title text didn't exist. I'm not saying you can't add the title text to the transcript, nor that you shouldn't – for instance, as you mentioned, maybe the title text ought to be considered as part of the comic, and so maybe it should be included in the transcript. But just letting you know that the current policy is to omit it, so you might want to discuss it in the community portal and make sure everyone's on-board before putting in a bunch of effort on it, only to have someone else come along and undo all your hard work. Cheers, and thanks again for all your contributions to the site! – Yfmcpxpj (talk) 03:36, 12 March 2021 (UTC)