Forum:Relaxing T:HONOUR: Difference between revisions

:Okay, I'll rephrase. The page should be at what they are most often called in-universe.(also,  Unless he was ever actually addressed as "Sabbath" in the sources he appears in, I'd argue that's not his name in any respect, especially as before joining the Faction he likely had another name. But that's besides, as "most often called in-universe" is enough imo). This also applies to other characters, like [[Ms. Young]], although the situation is slightly different with [[Brian the Ood]], as I'll bet, although I haven't done TLV, that he's most often called Brian. But out-of-universe, his character is known as "Brian the Ood", which I think should supplement the fact he's also sometimes called that in-universe. [[User:Cousin Ettolrhc|Cousin Ettolrahc]] [[User talk:Cousin Ettolrhc|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 06:18, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

::But this is just the same problem! First of all, you're just admitting that the principle you've suggested is fundamentally inconsistent in how you want to apply it, and that's just obviously an issue. But think about how often people refer to Mickey's mother. As of [[Odessa Smith]]'s first ''named'' reference in Rose, under what you're suggesting we should still refer to her as "Mickey Smith's mother" because she's been more commonly referred to as something else. Or what if Obverse decided to publish, idk, 7,000,000 AI generated short stories that all talked about Gallifrey as The Homeworld. Would we change the page name because now it's been referred to as something else more times in-universe?

::I cannot ''imagine'' consistently applying this rule, and I don't think you want us to. But if there's no fundamental principle motivating these changes, no underlying reason behind this, it's just doing it based on vibes. Surely you can see that "it's just vibes man" isn't a sound conclusion for a thread to reach. (Also, you know, you can have honorifics in specific page titles if forum threads make exceptions for them, see [[Dr. Who]] and [[Talk:Marticide (short story)|Marticide]]. I see no need to change the policy generally. I could imagine "Brian the Ood" given how he's represented on merch, but Vastra and Sabbath are really not good arguments imo. Vastra ''is'' actually referred to as Vastra from time to time, and Sabbath is part of a larger organization that uses titles, so changing his dabbing would suggest you do that for all of them, which is a really weird position.) [[User:Najawin|Najawin]] [[User talk:Najawin|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 07:05, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

Najawin, saying "You're basically never going to see the raw text 'Sabbath (Movers)' divorced from any context except when searching for Sabbath" strikes me as kind of like saying "You're never going to use your eyes except when seeing." Well, yeah! That's the whole unique purpose of a page title! Redirects can do linking, and {{tlx|retitle}} can do the main page display, but search is the domain of the page title alone.

Regarding concerns of consistency and precedent, the {{w|Wikipedia:Ignore all rules|classical wiki position}} is that consistency and precedent exist to serve the readers and editors, not the other way around. So "we can't do the sensible thing in situation X because it will be inconsistent with situation Y" isn't especially persuasive to me. All that said, I'm sympathetic to the concern of [[Mickey Smith's mother]], and if this is to be a new rule rather than a set of ratified exceptions, I agree that we would do well to carefully mark out the scope of this rule change to avoid unintended consequences elsewhere.

What I like to do when I have a concern is to suggest an alternative which would address my concern. For instance, in this case, maybe the rule should be that (a) we always prioritize proper names over descriptive ones, and (b) we only add descriptions to proper names when those are universally used and/or especially helpful for disambiguation or clarity. This would indicate that [[Odessa Smith]] is better than [[Mickey Smith's mother]] and that [[Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart]] is better than [[the Brigadier]], while also allowing us to use [[Queen Victoria]] and [[Brian the Ood]] etc. – [[User:NateBumber|n8]] ([[User talk:NateBumber|☎]]) 18:07, 10 June 2023 (UTC)