Forum:Temporary forums/Names from novelisations in page titles

Around the time of the first NuWho Target novelisations, I created Thread:231243 about our treatment of novelisations. Beforehand, we'd put novelisations in a strange second tier of validity: parts which matched the TV story were valid, but parts which contradicted the TV story weren't. Thanks to the arguments in that thread, we changed the policy and validated all novelisation content, wrapped in "By another account" logic when necessary.

However, CzechOut carved out a specific exception for page names. There are dozens of characters who were unnamed or only given a first name in their TV appearances but received full names in novelisations. For instance, Co-pilot (The Horns of Nimon) – a generic and cumbersome page name if I've ever seen one – was called "Sardor" in the novelisation. Why not just call the page Sardor instead? CzechOut's reasoning, mirrored at Talk:Miranda (The TV Movie), was that "articles shouldn't be named on the basis of an obscure work, like a novelisation". I didn't fully appreciate this logic at the time, but I've come to see that it's very wise and shows a keen sensitivity to the needs of the full spectrum of our users. When I proposed that the old, TV-dabbed names would still exist as redirects, CzechOut replied at Thread:231243#4 that the way redirects are displayed in search results simply isn't sufficient to bridge the gap for casual users of the wiki.

In the five years since then, our benevolent overlords at Fandom have added a new feature: when you search for a name which is a redirect, it shows you both the redirect and what it redirects to! For instance, to use the example of a novelisation-original name later adopted by other media, when you search "Cass" it offers

Cass Fermazzi (Redirected from Cass (The Night of the Doctor))

This perfectly addresses CzechOut's concern. With the searchability issue resolved once and for all, we should officially grant novelisations the same weight as other sources in page naming, particularly in cases where it would help disambiguation. – n8 (☎) 15:43, 7 February 2023 (UTC)