User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-1046-20180501024620/@comment-188432-20180524222513

Our primary concern with page naming is to choose the names that will be in most people's minds as they search. It does no good to have the most complete name for a page — like Odessa Smith or Sakkoth — if the majority of users can't possibly know that name from experiencing the most ubiquitous version of a story. Remember, Tardis is being built for the not we. Therefore, we must first get people to the page, and then educate them on the finer details.

Since there is a long tradition at Tardis (fuelled by end credits, mainly) of naming minor character articles by the function that character performs in the story, there’s no imperative whatever to prefer Klegg over Sergeant (The Highlanders). A page like Mickey Smith's mother is no different, as it's just naming a person by their function, too.

Moreover, though Mickey Smith's mother might appear slightly different because the character never appears on TV, and therefore has no credit, the nomenclature has significant precedence on Tardis. Many pages have possessive proper nouns in their titles. Unknown family members have been rendered as x's , like Bill Potts' mother, Susan Foreman's father and Martha Jones' grandfather. Objects are sometimes someone's , like The Doctor's TARDIS — one of our most-used articles. So regular users of the site really shouldn't find this nomenclature off-putting. And — for less-regular users — the page is pretty findable as it is, since entering "Mickey Smith" in the search bar returns this page as the #2 hit. And, if you don't know her name, why wouldn't you start looking for Mickey Smith's mother by typing in "Mickey Smith"?

Indeed, its searchability highlights a good technical use case for having a base name like Sergeant (The Highlanders) and the redirect at Klegg. Let’s say that you are someone who read the novelisation and remembered that the Sergeant’s name was Klegg. Maybe you love novelisations so much that they are your preferred form of the Shepherd's Bush version of DW. So all these names come as second nature to you. But there’s a lot of 'em, and nobody's memory is perfect. So when you start typing in Klegg — and as long as you don't complete the name — autosuggest will pull up Sergeant (The Highlanders) for you. That’s super handy!

But it doesn't work that way in the reverse. In other words, you can use Nyssa of Traken to quickly confirm that the PAGENAME is just Nyssa, but you can’t use Nyssa in search alone to see that she’s also known as Nyssa of Traken. Or you can type in a Hartnell-era episode name to confirm which serial it comes from. Or you can test your spelling of Perpugilliam by entering it letter-by-letter, and if Peri Brown is still showing, you know you've done it right. Or you can confirm that "Dorothy McShane" is the real name of Ace.

Whatever the case, if the more complex/accurate name is a redirect, it'll help you find the more common or descriptive name before you hit "enter". That's a really important function that we don't to remove, particularly for our mobile users, and for people who edit a lot.

The other technical point is that in the majority of cases, the page is at something like Function of character (Story Name) or Somebody's relative. Changing it around would involve a lot of work by the admin staff for no particular return. I know it's exciting that we've got these new novelisations, but they aren't cause to rip up the wiki and do a lot of page moves for what are really minor characters. If you happen to know the name of a minor character because of your reading, great! You should definitely have a redirect to reward your knowledge. But with the availability of redirects, there is no cause to do a lot of page moves.