Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-7302713-20130519181606/@comment-7302713-20130520135734

Right now the Brigadier is listed in companion boxes by his full name, sans Brigadier. I'm in favour of adding Brigadier to that, but dropping his name altogether? That's a bit much.

I'm aware of the fact that we've adopted non-standard practices here before. But there have been real reasons behind them. Our use of American quotation marks is because using British quotation is a technical problem. Here, the only problem is that it makes the box slightly bigger vertically. Yes, that might affect people's load times. But we also might have someone come here who hasn't seen the Eleventh Doctor but read about the Pond name being created as a link to River. If the companion box was structured the way you are suggesting we have River but no Pond. And anyone who's load time is really effected by this small difference most likely has way bigger problems. If we're including mobile devices in out technical consideration than mouseovers are a much more serious technical problem then the additional load time cause by a few extra lines. Mouseovers are not only more physically difficult to do when using a mobile browser, but it's not a technical standard.

Also, grouping by last name has been helpful. The format or Madge, Lily and Cyril Arwell is incredibly useful. It makes it clear that these are all members of the same family and should be thought of as such. If we piped these characters to all be first name only and then alphabetised them by first name we'd be separating them. The names Lily, Cyril...they mean squat to me. I only remember who they are with a last name and their being grouped together.

You're not just propsing that we adopt a practice that isn't standard in the real world. You're proposing that we adopt a practice that isn't standard in the real world and that we create exceptions for characters for whom this practice doesn't work, and the only benefit is that the page is a few lines shorter and therefore loads marginally quicker? The practice of using full names and alphetising by last name works for everyone, because that practice automatically treats only names as last names.