Talk:Man with boat (Planet of the Spiders)

Using the name from the novelisation
As decided in Thread:167022, it is important whether the name is easily discoverable. "Customer" does not appear in the story and contradicts the novelisation. The credits call him "Man with boat", still a descriptive term not appearing in dialogue. Thus, using a name from the novelisation is preferable, with a redirect from the credits ensuring that he is discoverable either way. Amorkuz ☎  20:01, October 29, 2017 (UTC)


 * However, the page Hopkins (Planet of the Spiders) claims that it is him and not the "Man with boat" is turned into Bob Armitage in the novelisation. Must rewatch before making a final judgment. Amorkuz ☎  20:11, October 29, 2017 (UTC)


 * Final report: the two characters are rearranged in the novelisation, making either name unsuitable for the page. Thus, I implemented the original rename suggestion to base the page name on the credits rather than on the interpretation of the scene. Amorkuz ☎  23:12, October 29, 2017 (UTC)


 * For what it's worth, I didn't see either of them as a "customer" when I watched the story. My interpretation was that "man with boat" owned the boat, Hopkins owned the hovercraft, and "If I had enough money, I'd buy twenty of those" was an off-the-cuff remark about his neighbour's craft, not an indication that anyone was buying or selling it. Skteosk ☎  01:41, January 23, 2020 (UTC)

Rename proposal
I've changed the to a rename because there is a wider issue at hand here. "Man with boat (Planet of the Spiders)" has been suggested, quote, "Because there are many other men with boats in the DWU." And fair enough, I'm sure that there are.

And sure, the Ninth Doctor arguably has as much of a claim to be called a "man with chips" as the man with chips from The Bells of Saint John ever did. But our  is the only one to have ever received such a credit, and no common-sense future proofing would require us to plan for another character to be called just this. Now sometimes these names are really broad, and likely enough to occur again, even if they haven't so far. Or if it's a simple noun or noun group, like a particular profession -- car salesman and radio engineer, which I'm only now seeing need to be renamed -- then they should be dabbed even without conflict to allow for potential pages on car salesmen or radio engineers generally.

But up until now anyway, the general trend is to take distinctive qualifiers as disambiguation until themselves. Perhaps the most wonderful example I'm seeing is a quite anxious shopper, from AUDIO: Ghost Mission. This can include adjectives, sometimes ordinals, and also words attached by a preposition in a novel way, as here, or as with woman in doorway, man in pub, man in telephone box, man with carrier bag, etc. Or Accra reporter, which is specific (and non-Eurocentric) enough to (unfortunately) have little chance of coming up again in a DWU story.

So answering the question here would naturally affect the broader question of whether angry man, handsome man, scared woman and stressed woman also need dab terms, when there's no real conflict on the level of those titles. We've sure as hell had more than one murdered woman, too, but there's no real PAGENAME conflict there, and I see no call to create a page on the topic of "murdered women" generally (unlike with radio engineer, or even opera singer, which do need renaming). You might argue for, say, British captain on future-proofing grounds, but for the most part, in these cases, "with carrier bag", or "in doorway", or the particular organisation a character works for, barring conflict, is the disambiguation, and it's disambiguation the story credits gave us to help distinguish the character from others. 07:47, February 2, 2020 (UTC)