User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-188432-20130110024510/@comment-188432-20130110145130

There are a lot of reasons to need to distinguish between the wiki and the vehicle.
 * The wider Wikia community, as I've pointed out elsewhere, reference our wiki based on our url, not our actual full name. Thus, they will simply refer to us as "Tardis" anyway.
 * The technical name of our project — that is, the name assigned to our project namespace — is Tardis. It's not TARDIS, and it will not be changing to TARDIS. It's syntactically confusing for our project name to have the same  as one of our content pages.  The distinction between "Tardis" (the project) and TARDIS (the page) is technically useful.  It would therefore be "odd", to my mind", to have the project namespace use Tardis and then insist upon TARDIS in the literal representation of the wiki's name.  That would mean we could end up with a page like Tardis:TARDIS Data Core, which would just be weird.
 * Word choice within the Tardis and Help namespaces. We don't want to be obliged to type out "TARDIS Data Core" or even "TARDIS wiki" each and every time we refer to the wiki. It's much easier just to say "Tardis" and be done with it.
 * We do need a rule about whether to use "TARDIS" or "Tardis", since hundreds of licensed stories — and the Radio Times and the Oxford Dictionary — use the latter. You can snigger and say that World Distributors annuals and novelisations don't count, but these were the dominant publishers of prose for almost 30 years.  Moreover, most early reference books also use Tardis over TARDIS.  The latter form only came into prominence from the Wilderness years onward.  It's out of respect for the fact that more things have been published using TARDIS that we allow that form to be on the page about the object.  But it is clearly wrong to say that Tardis is "incorrect".  Any objection to that capitalisation cannot be on the basis that it is "wrong".
 * The work on pages in the MediaWiki and Tardis and Help namespaces done prior to yesterday's name change universally supports T:TARDIS. It would be much more laborious to change away from this rule.  It's all very well to have an opinion like, "I don't like Tardis" — but it's the practise of actually implementing that opinion that I'm more concerned with.
 * Using Tardis allows some differentiation between terms that are more or less exactly the same. Just to give one small example of a genuine problem that would require a surprisingly large amount of editing to undo, the Tardis Manual is a different thing to the TARDIS Manual or the TARDIS manual.  The point's been made above that context alone will make it obvious which thing we're talking about, but this is a case where that's not so.  The capitalisation of "Tardis" is the only thing that tells you which is talking about the wiki's manual and which the show's.