Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-24894325-20160528204037/@comment-188432-20160530012409

While I'm generally in favour of getting the spelling right the first time out, I think there are orders of magnitude.

Should we get the names of episodes right, the first time out? Yes, wherever possible, because those episode names are going to be used as references across multiple articles. That's principally why we're so strict with T:OFF REL. Also, with episode names, we're not going to have to wait forever to get the name right. We know exactly how long we have to wait.

What Amorkuz seems to be talking about, by contrast, are comparatively minor names. I'd rather have editors being bold and taking a shot at the spelling. Chances are the attempt they make will be at least useful as a redirect. If you heard it as "Mephistol", chances are so did most of the other people who listened to the audio play, and so that's how they're probably going to look it up. If the page then corrects the very logical spelling to the rather absurd "Mefistol" and leaves a BTS note that the script spells if that way. even though it's an obvious play on "Mephistopheles" — fine! That's what the site should be doing. But the page has to exist at "Mephistol", at least as a redirect, so that people can look up the more logical spelling.

Then, there are clearly times when the script is wrong, or ambiguous. To take one old example, the script to The End of Time has us believe in the Zaggit Zagoo bar as the location of Captain Jack's final meeting with Ten. Only it was never said — that's just a thing from the scene description, and really, truly isn't all that admissible under our house rules. But we got nothin' else, so we use it.

By contrast, the script can be flatly wrong. It is not at all wrong to spell "Ringstrasse" as "Ringstraße". Those are equivalent spellings, and if I were asked through rename to make a change, I absolutely wouldn't. Equally, the example of "Kran" from one of the Tenth Doctor audios being moved to "Kram" because of the script is insupportable, in my view. It sounds like "Kran".

See, the big problem I'm having with this proposal is that the script to, well, anything is a tertiary source at best. And I'm not prepared to give it the power over spelling. See, if we do it here, we'll have to do it for television, and that's a whole other can of worms. And then you've also got to think that some things that were on television made their print debuts in comic books and prose, and you get into this situation where you can have a standoff between a script and end credits, or a script and a comic strip — and it's just a mess.

Amorkuz gave a great example of this kind of mess. Is it "Kran" or "Kram"? The audio itself is pretty clear. There might be some pronunciational leeway with diphthongs or vowels, but single, unblended consonants? No, something which sounds like "Kran" is "Kran", and the script can be safely assumed to have a typo. Put more simply, the performance itself is a better source than the script.

It's probably a bad idea for people to doubt themselves so much that they are too paralysed to start relatively minor articles. They're great places to start editing the wiki.

Nor is it likely a great idea to create a long-ish list of articles whose spelling needs to be checked. Especially since the thing we'll be checking against — the script — may well have typos. Or it just may not be the audio equivalent of a "shooting script". The writer could well have meant "Kram", but on the day the director and actor(s) chose to swim away from the author. And if Big Finish didn't go back and reflect that change then we're actually introducing an error by using the script.

So I personally think it's awfully dangerous to see the script as definitive.

At the end of the day, if people make a good faith effort to hear character/object names in the audio, and then they create links from the audio's page to their character/object page, I think most readers will be able to follow along in their hymnbooks.

Indeed, the problem with incomplete cast lists on audios that Amorkuz has sited in the last paragraph of the above post isn't, I don't think, a spelling problem. It's a problem that afflict a ton of story pages. It's simply a lot of work to do a story page well, and people don't want to do it, even when they've got the names of all the characters right in front of their noses.

So I wouldn't create the proposed template, because it's just going to generate a lot of self doubt for editors. If they start seeing we're marking pages based on the fact that it's an audio-only name, then they'll probably start slapping the name on a lot of pages, and there'll be a mountain of spelling checkup work to do — using scripts that may or may not be accurate in the first place.