Aliasing range_murata -> murata_renji.

Reason: Artist's real name (村田蓮爾) in Japanese name order (http://www.pseweb.com/page/about.html).

Oh, please do this. Until now, I've been under the impression that his penname was pronounced and ordered as ra-n-ge mu-ra-ta.

Oh wow, I was in the same situation as sgcdonmai.

This romanization is similar to the case of kubo_tite <-> kubo_taito. The artist has come up with their own non-standard romanization scheme. Aliasing back to a proper romanization is a contentious issue, with some discussion of the kubo_tite case found at forum #23806. There are also some less extreme examples listed, such as shirow_masamune and yasuhiro_nightow.

So I see three options:
range_murata -> murata_renji (fix romanization + order)
range_murata -> murata_range (fix order only)
murata_range -> range_murata (keep current order + romanization)

Also, in the yasuhiro_nightow case, name order is first_last unlike shirow_masamune or kubo_tite (which are last_first).

My gut tells me to apply Danbooru's standard romanization and name order to all four of them for the sake of consistency.

I would be more open to keeping "Tite" and "Range" because they're made to sound like English words or names. "Nightow" seems to fall into this category as well, though "Shirow" just looks like a funky romanization to me.

I admit I never really thought about his real name either, so I'm glad this thread was made.

Definitely murata_renji, done.

So what about the others?

I had trouble finding him here (realised he wasn't on my favourite artists list) since I was automatically applying the logic that Murata was a surname, yet we didn't have murata_range...

According to Japanese Wikipedia yasuhiro_nightow should be naitou_yasuhiro, and shirow_masamune should be either shirou_masamune or oota_masanori (which is his real name, but it's marked "Citation needed").

What about kubo_tite? Do I hear kubo_taito (久保 帯人)?

Unless it's decided to go with his real name, which is apparently kubo_noriaki (久保 宣章).

If we standardize all of the above examples in the same fashion as murata_renji, we would also need:

kubo_tite -> kubo_taito
shirow_masamune -> shirou_masamune
yasuhiro_nightow -> naitou_yasuhiro

A simpler case that's not been discussed yet is:

aida_yu -> aida_yuu

which is a case of a long vowel that's not addressed in the artist's personal romanization.

kubo_tite -> kubo_taito
shirow_masamune -> shirou_masamune
yasuhiro_nightow -> naitou_yasuhiro
aida_yu -> aida_yuu

Done.

One more:
oh! great → oogure ito
Creative way of homophone-romanizing 大暮　維人, but Oh! Great is still just a penname.

Done

I know this is an old topic, but in cases where an artist uses an explicitly non-Japanese penname (like Kubo Tite and Oh! Great) I think it's a really bad idea to try to "properly" romanize it. If an artist publishes his art under something other than his real name, that's what we should tag by. And our current attempt to transform Kubo's penname into something that's fully Japanese seems especially ill-conceived to me.

Magus said:
cases where an artist uses an explicitly non-Japanese penname (like Kubo Tite and Oh! Great)

Neither of those cases are non-Japanese pen names. Kubo Tite signs his work as 久保帯人 (Kubo Taito) while Oh! Great signs his work as 大暮維人 (Oogure Ito).

It's true that the pen name Oogure Ito appears to have been created from the English phrase Oh! Great. It is a borderline case. However, at least for Kubo Tite and Range Murata, the nonstandard romanization is doing a great disservice because people are not pronouncing the names correctly (which is the entire purpose of romanization).

Note that we do respect pen names here and don't alias to real names, though they're often not known anyway.

seabook said:
Note that we do respect pen names here and don't alias to real names, though they're often not known anyway.

Huh? Are you referring specifically to Kubo/Ooguro here, or to artists in general? Because if the latter, it's exactly _not_ our policy on artist naming; and if the former, it's purely incidental (in that we don't know the real names).

I was making a general statement.

It's true that we don't respect handle names on pixiv or personal blogs, partially due to ambiguity issues. However, I'm not aware of any commercially publishing artists whose pen names we don't respect, even when the real name is known. In the problematic situation of artists publishing under multiple names we usually avoid the pen names, though there are exceptions such as Inazuma (real name Satou Shouji).

I'm not aware of any agreement to exclude commercially publishing artists from this policy. It's more likely that simply no-one has brought it up. Just like with, say, Murata Renji.

seabook said:
In the problematic situation of artists publishing under multiple names we usually avoid the pen names, though there are exceptions such as Inazuma (real name Satou Shouji).

The fact that any artist can publish under multiple pennames and user handles - and quite frequently do so in Japan - suggests, to me, that the most simple and expedient way to handle these handles is to alias all of them to the artists' own personal names, rather than continuing to use their most frequent pennames, wherever possible.

On that note:
inazuma → satou shouji

seabook said:
However, at least for Kubo Tite and Range Murata, the nonstandard romanization is doing a great disservice because people are not pronouncing the names correctly (which is the entire purpose of romanization).

Except that in Kubo Tite's case, he seems to have come up with the non-Japanese "Tite" for his penname and then went with 帯人 as the closest approximation possible in Japanese.

Also, I'd consider it to be a disservice to these artist to claim we know better than they do how to write their own pennames.