Talk:Larcenia Floyd

It seems like it is becoming more and more common to have pages being named after real world names that were never given in the source material. Shouldn't this be George Floyd's mother? DrWHOCorrieFan ☎  15:19, 28 April 2022 (UTC)
 * No — for historical/rea-world figures especially, it improves searchability to use in this way. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 16:05, 28 April 2022 (UTC)
 * According to the tag "merely announces to readers that we've had to make up a name for a thing because story writers failed to". That does not go hand-in-hand with using real world information to name pages when there is an equally acceptable alternative. T:NO RW goes into great detail explaining that we shouldn't use real world information when the source material fails to. DrWHOCorrieFan  ☎  16:20, 28 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Well, crucially, this is only for page names. As per, indeed, T:NO RW, these names should not be used in the in-universe sections of the text itself — you should always write "Floyd's mother", outside BTS sections, using the pipe trick.


 * Page names are always a different kettle of fish than in-universe text — for example, when a character has multiple names, T:NPOV has to bend because the page can in practice only be named one thing. In-universe Susan's last name is Susan English just as much as it is Susan Foreman, but the "Foreman" version is more searchable, so we go with that, even though per T:NPOV and T:VS we shouldn't give a certain sources precedence over another.


 * Here, the idea behind this practice is searchability, which is a concern that factors greatly into page names (it's the rationale for Bruce (Doctor Who) not being Bruce Gerhardt, for example, even though that name does appear in a valid source). Larcenia Floyd is maybe a non-central example, because she's not quite a household name; in her case people are as likely to look up "George Floyd's mother" as her full name. But in most cases, people wanting to look up whether Doctor Who has ever referenced some real-world figure/fictional character or other — say, Bart Simpson — would not be helped any by a page named something like Little boy (Party Animals). The conjectural page-name allows searchability, and then the page itself, with the prominent template and the way the lead is written, makes it clear that the name doesn't appear verbatim in the source, so there's no confusion/real-world-creep to mislead readers into thinking the DWU source contains more than it does.


 * (The conversation at Talk:Tara King addressed a slightly different, but related, question, and you should probably read it.)


 * This is also in line with the decision taken in a Forum thread when COMIC: Assimilation² came out that, in a crossover story, we could use the over-crossing franchise's names for characters and concepts as conjectural titles, even if those names are not used in the DWU crossover itself (e.g. we don't need Assimilation² itself to define what a phaser is for us, we just call it what it is when we see one on-page). In a certain sense, what is a celebrity historical, or other interaction between the Doctor and historical figures, but a "crossover" with real-world history? The same logic applies, at least on this issue.


 * A point that applies to this and to the infoboxes business from our earlier discussion: I admire your commitment to going back to what the policy pages say. I sincerely do, and I wish more new users were this studious. However, much as it may pain one to admit, it, policy pages aren't an infallible holy writ — it's written by actual humans, trying their best to stay up-to-date with the practices and decisions of the community. In principle it should accurately represent all the Wiki's choices and stylistic decisions. But please, please try to bear in mind that if you stumble upon a widespread practice on the Wiki that isn't written down anywhere yet, the issue you should bring up is "this de facto policy needs to be properly recorded in a policy page", not "hundreds of pages and users, including admins and other long-time editors, are acting in error and this should be corrected".


 * Case in point, I'll now go make notes on Template:Conjecture/doc and T:NO RW to reflect the subtleties I explained above. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 16:49, 28 April 2022 (UTC)