Completing a Full Catalog Entry: Where to Find Complete Information

Why sourcing matters

A thin entry — a title and a cover image, nothing else — is worse than no entry at all, because it looks finished when it isn't. Every field left blank is a field someone else has to hunt down later, and a wrong value (a mistyped alt title, a season count copied from the wrong site) is worse than a blank one, because it looks authoritative. Good sourcing is what separates a Bronze entry from a Gold one — see How the Bounty System Works for exactly which fields each tier needs.

Use more than one source. No single database gets everything right, and the sources below are good at different things — cross-checking two of them against each other catches the errors either one would have propagated alone.

The four sources

AniDB

The deepest source for anime specifically. Strongest for:

• Alternate titles — official romanized and native-script titles, plus every alias a title has been released under.
• Episode-level detail — exact episode counts, air dates, and which episodes are recaps/fillers versus canon.
• Credits — full staff and cast lists, useful for the Producer/Studio fields.

AniDB is community-edited and skews toward completionist detail rather than a polished summary — good for getting a fact right, less good for a punchy synopsis.

MyAnimeList

The broadest, most-used community database for anime and manga. Strongest for:

• Synopsis — MAL's official synopses are usually the best starting point for the Synopsis field (still summarize/rewrite rather than copy verbatim, and always fill in Synopsis Source).
• Genres and themes — MAL's genre/theme tagging is a reasonable first pass, though see Writing Proper Tags for why it's a starting point and not the finished tag list.
• Related entries and series — sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations are usually linked accurately, useful for the Series field.

Anime-Planet

Smaller than MAL but stronger on editorial tagging and recommendations. Strongest for:

• Tags with actual specificity — Anime-Planet's tag vocabulary leans toward the kind of full-phrase, structural tags Weave wants (see Writing Proper Tags).
• "Similar titles" data — a good sanity check for whether your genre/tag choices actually group a title with things that feel like it.

Licensed 3rd-party sites (Crunchyroll, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and similar)

These are the source of truth for anything about how a title is actually being distributed today, which none of the databases above are authoritative on:

• Official release dates and season/cour boundaries for currently-airing or recently-licensed titles.
• Ongoing vs. completed status — a database entry can lag behind a platform's own listing by weeks.
• Legal availability — which platform actually streams a title, at what Cost tier (Free/Paid/Subscription), which matters directly for the Repository's "where people are reading/watching" starter links and the site's affiliate-link surfaces.

If a title is actively licensed, its official platform listing outranks any database for release date, count, and ongoing status — use the database sources for everything else.

Cross-checking, in practice

1. Start with MyAnimeList for the synopsis and a first-pass genre/theme list.
2. Cross-check alt titles, episode count, and credits against AniDB.
3. Rewrite the tag list using Anime-Planet's structural tags as a model, not MAL's alone.
4. If the title is currently licensed anywhere, confirm release date/ongoing status/count against that platform directly — it wins any disagreement with the databases.
5. Always fill in Synopsis Source with whichever of these you actually used, so the next contributor (or a moderator reviewing your bounty) can verify it themselves instead of re-researching from scratch.