Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-7302713-20130519181606/@comment-188432-20130520235911

Reducing the footprint of the navbox is a legitimate concern unto itself. It's completely uncontroversial to pipe trick to a shorter name, and it's done with great regularity on this wiki. Do you think we put the full name of hospitals at ? Of course not. And it's already a best practice to use only a single name when filling out the and  variables of. So this is merely a decision that's inline with current practice. This isn't breaking new ground.

Why do we need to make this judgement call? Because we're genuinely editors, not just users of the site. And editors make judgement calls all the time, or they get fired. We have tons of pre-existing rules that are essentially arbitrary, like Tardis:K9, Tardis:Doctors, Tardis:Romana, Tardis:The Monk, Tardis:Quotation marks and the like.

But it's important they be specified because we have one of the most diverse user bases on Wikia. People of all ages, and all English language fluencies, edit here. Administratively, it's deeply important to have a rule to point to.

So going with the single name or word (since not all characters actually have a name in the DWU) is better than using a last name for some characters but not for others. And I really don't think it's going to be as tricky as you seem to suppose. In any navbox labelled "Companions of the Tenth Doctor", "Christina" can mean only one person. Indeed, she's the only Christina there is anyway, so even if the box were labelled "Companions of the Doctor", full stop, it still could only mean Christina de Souza.

I think you're devaluing the utility of context, along with the willingness of users to just click on the name if they're confused.

The other thing that you seem not to appreciate is the basic function of a navbox. It's not there to give information. It's there to facilitate navigation. We want people to click. The only thing we want to say with these navboxes is, "Here are links to the companions, arranged alphabetically by media". That's it. It's not a promise to give the whole name of the person. It's just a promise to give a link so that they can click through and find more details — the surname usually being the chief detail.

Having a standard way of arranging those links lets readers know what to expect the template to do.