Forum:Son of Using Full Names

Late last year, Forum:Using Full Names had a pretty full discussion about how to change the Manual of Style to name articles about people. A consensus was reached and the policy was re-worded.

But I'm still really unclear about one aspect of it. Because this language went through specific discussion, I think it needs consensus to overturn it.

The end of the first paragraph at Tardis:Manual of Style reads:
 * Exceptions to this rule are articles in which usage of the common name would result in the need of brackets to refer to which episode the character came from. An example of this is Andrew Stone whose commonly known name Andy, would result in the article being called Andy Stone (The Waters of Mars)."

Really? Is that what we want to say? We want the MOS to explicitly give people a loophole around our disambiguation policy? My read of disambig policy is that if two people have the exact same name, you disambig both. You don't change to a more formal version of the name to avoid doing a proper disambig. So there should be Andy Stone (The Dalek Book) and Andy Stone (The Waters of Mars). I mean, why would we choose to make the Mars dude Andrew and not the Venus dude? There's no rationale for it. By strictly following disambig policy, you don't run into these kind of value judgements. You just disambig them both, without question. It's crazy, too, that Andy Stone (The Waters of Mars) exists, but redirects to Andrew Stone. So this whole case it totally subverting basic disambig theory. We're redirecting from a disambigged name to non-disambigged one. Which is odd, to say the least, because the way it usually works is that shorter names are redirected to longer ones.

I say we should just strike the quoted passage from that section. There is no need for exceptions to the main ruling:


 * By forum consensus, the titles of articles about individual characters should be the name by which the character was most commonly known in the Doctor Who universe, with later names preferred to earlier names. If a full name is provided, though is not generally used, the body text of the article itself should start with it. For example, the article should be named "Amy Pond", but should begin with:
 * "Amelia Jessica Pond, more commonly called Amy Pond, was a companion of ..."

That's fine. There's no need to muddy that with any exceptions. Instead it might need a bit of clarification like:


 * If names that result from following this rule are identical, then they article names should be parenthetically disambiguated according to our disambiguation policy. Hence, Andy Stone (The Waters of Mars) and Andy Stone (The Dalek Book).

See, the frustrating thing about the earlier forum discussion is that nobody brought up the notion of searchability. The average user can't get to TWOM Andy Stone through the search bar or autosuggest by typing in "Andy Stone". They get a disambiguation page — which they wouldn't even suspect was a disambiguation page — and the Venusian dude. Contrast this situation with "Adam Smith". If you type that in the search bar or use autosuggest, you get all pages on the wiki with that name and are able to make a fully-informed decision about which to choose. There's not a "hidden" Adam Smith out there.

In other words, this "exception" in current policy has made information less accessible. And that's why it needs to be changed. 18:26:21 Tue 14 Jun 2011