User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-4028641-20151101035254/@comment-24894325-20160706224024

First, two apologies: sorry, I did not realise that posting bare links to a website with spoilers is also a violation of T:SPOIL. Secondly, Bwburke94 is right to call it a "supposed confirmation". This criticism is also justified.

As for his two suggestions, I think Option #1 is a bad idea. It would create a precedent and could lead to a total chaos if out-of-universe sources, be it interviews, podcasts or cast lists, are allowed to determine names of characters. (I feel like cast lists is actually a tricky issue, the discussion of which would take us off topic. Suffice it to say that cast lists have been used to hide the real identity of a character on multiple occasions, as early as The Rescue.) For comparison, even using names from novelisations causes considerable headache. Though I cannot claim that I fully understand the rules, I'm pretty sure there are situations when the name from the novelisation is not allowed in the page name.

But Option #2, on the other hand, seems very reasonable to me. Inversion is an in-universe source. The question is in its interpretation.

I think the real question is this: Do most of us, at this point in time, believe that her name is Petronella, as stated in-universe? We didn't believe it some time ago. I have changed my opinion since then. Perhaps, others have too. Why we changed our opinion is immaterial. We exercise our power of opinion every time the First Doctor mispronounces Ian's last name. We can believe that Ian also has that other name or choose to treat it as a production error. We make this judgement based on many factors, not all of them in-universe.

Perhaps, the question to ask is: does someone still believe that Petronella is not her name? If so, then the safest thing is to wait till November.

However, if it is pure caution that stops us from changing the name, then there are rules on the books suggesting we should still move forward with the change. To summarise, unless someone objects, it seems reasonable to me to go ahead with the renaming of "Osgood (The Day of the Doctor)" into "Petronella Osgood".
 * The most immediate example is comic books. It is expressly acknowledged in T:SPOIL that it is unreasonable to wait six months until the release of the last issue before editing a multi-issue comic book, just on the off-chance some things may change in later issues. Again, it boils down to our judgement: do we think it is likely to change or not. No one could see the big reveal in Issue #5 of Weapons of Past Destruction coming. That required a page renaming and a complete recategorisation. But I don't think that creating that page before the big reveal was a mistake.
 * Another example where using imperfect information (in that case, about spelling) was preferred to waiting was in CzechOut's reply on Thread:194337: "I'd rather have editors being bold and taking a shot at the spelling" and later "It's probably a bad idea to create a template which allows people to doubt themselves so much that they are too paralysed to start relatively minor articles". The way I interpret these replies is: if information is available but not 100% certain, it is better to act on it now than wait for the 100% certainty that may or may not happen in the future. (After all, 100% certainty is still in the eyes of the beholder.)

Wait, I just remembered something. Ah, why do I always undermine myself? To be continued...