Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-45692830-20200610235524/@comment-188432-20200831235920

Since the cleanup tag has indeed been removed, much of this thread's sails no longer have winds to animate them.

But let's do get rid of the deadname. This is easily handled with wiki software. Just create a redirect from the old name to the new one, but keep the name that's attached to the work on original publication and make a note somewhere on the article explaining the name change.

On any page about the author themselves, the canonical pagename (in the coding sense) should be the person's current name, and some note should be made on the page about which works were published under which name.

As for the alleged conflict between two rules, I'm not really comfortable using what is clearly a "special snowflake" of a case to redefine policy.

I think it's most prudent, for now, to just follow Scrooge MacDuck's suggestion on how to include this material and do this:


 * if we can find a way to cite that info, it's to the point that it might well support the creation of an page about Absence of the Daleks, not to mention extensive rewrites to the BTS section of such pages as Toclafane.

That's what we've done in other cases, and I don't see why it wouldn't work here.

The truth about running a wiki is that you're never going to be able to write rules that take into account every situation. Sometimes it's better to come up with a unique solution, like the one MacDuck provided, than top spend hours trying to jam a star into a square hole so that your policy fits every situation. Cause, sure as rain makes flowers grow, there'll be another snowflake in a few years that doesn't quite match up with our rules.

Basically, you gotta look at the size of the problem. If it's not happening a lot, then the common case on which the rule is built — that of some random person in their basement writing a blog based upon their own opinions — is the one that receives the focus.

That doesn't mean we're not gonna look at those rules again at some point in the future. We revise rules from time to time. But they likely won't be changed just so they can accommodate this particular case. Until then, please avail yourself of the reasonable solution MacDuck has suggested.