Talk:Tricky Van Baalen

van Baalen

Why has this page been moved? Both the end credits for Journey, as well as the iplayer listing credit the brothers' surname as "van Baalen", with a small v (although all letters are capitals, the "capital" letters are in a bigger font size, and the v isn't). iplayer aside, surely the end credits of the episode itself should be prioritised over close captioning?? Geek Mythology ☎ 14:26, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

I know it's not the clearest image, but here is a screenshot from the credits. Geek Mythology ☎ 14:36, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

We should go with whatever was used in the episode. The name was spelled on a patch on their uniforms. And I just looked and it's all caps on the patch. I vote for the end credits then. Closed captioning is good when we don't have anything else but we do. Anoted ☎ 14:58, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

This is a case where wiki technicalities rule, since the narrative is inconclusive. If we make it "Van Baalen", as the closed captioning suggests, then searches for van Baalen (or van baalen) naturally work, in the sense that they actually take you to the page. If instead we make it "van Baalen", then Van Baalen doesn't take us to the page (though it will show up in the search list that's generated). Don't ask me why Wikia searches work that way, but they do. That's why if you put in "vincent van gogh" you only get to the page because of a redirect at "Vincent Van Gogh". Note the difference when you enter "tricky van baalen" into the search bar. We go straight to Tricky Van Baalen, no redirect required. It's just easier if we go with the cap, because of technical limitations in the software.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  15:16: Sun 28 Apr 2013

Ok, as much as I disagree, I guess that it makes sense. From the reasoning you gave when moving the page though, have to say it would have made more sense if you gave that reason originally, rather than the closed captions. 91.125.231.182^{talk to me} 15:32, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

The narrative is inconclusive? Is this because we don't get capitalisation within the story or are CC and credits equally weighted by this wiki?

Also, I'm a little confused about the wiki limitations here. Is the naming of this page being driven by the naming of the page Van Baalen Bros. or are you saying that Capital Capital Capital will not return Capital capital Capital? If it's the later then why do we use sentence case?

Also, is it worth adding a redirect at Trickey? It's not so much that I think it's a super-common error as it is that searching for "trickey van baallen" returns a result of every other "van" name possible. No "van baalen" page appears in the first page of results and it doesn't even appear in the text of articles until the last few results. Anoted ☎ 16:00, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

To answer your questions, Anoted,

1. Yes, that's what "the narrative is inconclusive" means. Nowhere within the story is capitalisation made clear. Indeed, the story makes capitalisation less clear by deliberating using all caps, at every opportunity.
2. Credits usually outweigh closed captioning. But T:NAMING establishes that technical limitations can outweigh everything, even if that policy does not mention every possible technical limitation.
3. This search limitation isn't driving our sentence case choice. The bug is crazy and stupid and I really don't know why it occurs. But it has to do with what happens when you set up a page like this one originally was, and then get rid of the redirect. Since elimination of the redirect was entirely likely, it's important to consider that eventuality. Simply going with Van Baalen from the off is the easiest option. It's easier to have the redirect on the lower case version of a page name than the uppercase. If you delete the lower cased version, it'll still takes you to the right page on a go-search. If you delete the uppercase version, it'll take you to the page that says, "this page has been deleted". Now, obviously, with a known figure like Vincent van Gogh, we can't just do what we want. But in this case, where the evidence for a particular capitalisation was so sleight, I made the judgement call to give the CC ever so little more weight.
4. No, the only case in which we allow for an improperly-spelled redirect is for some AmEng variants of BrEng words. We don't just allow for every phonetic possibility of a word, as this would allow for a lot of misspellings to enter the wiki. (AmEng redirects, even if entered into the text of a page, would eventually be corrected by SBOT, so they're harmless in the medium term.)
5. You're talking there about Special:Search. I'm taking about the search bar that appears int he top right of most pages. They're two different beasts. I'm also talking about what's called "go searching", not just "searching". "Go searching" is the far more useful type of search because it takes you directly to the page you want to get to. See Forum:Search bar in state of flux. At the moment, I wouldn't trust the results of Special:Search too much. It's pretty broken. Putting in any capitalisation of "Van Baalen" gives you next to nothing on the first few pages, not the episode page, not even Van Baalen Bros. The ranking is wholly messed up. Rank should be, roughly: 1) titles in which the full term appears; 2) pages in which the full term exists, ordered by number of times the term exists there; 3) pages in which part of the term exists. But it's not like that at all. I literally have no idea what the organising principle is. Now, if you go all the way to the end of the results, you'll find everything, eventually. But that's not the way any other search in the world works. Happily, the auto-suggest results given by the search bar, however, are much more reliable. What they should do, though, is make all auto-suggest work the way that category suggest works. That thing is awesome. As long as you get one of the words right, you'll get suggestions. The search bar only works as long as you get the letters in order, which you don't always know.
   czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  16:16: Mon 29 Apr 2013