User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-28349479-20180405163637/@comment-24894325-20180407191413
Now for the tricky case of changing personalities. Note that there are two possibilities here.
- In the simplest case, the name is (partially) changed (possibly together with other personal details), but the function of the character in the story is the same. The very recent case is H.P. Wilson, chief electrical officer, from Rose (TV story), who became Bernard Wilson, senior caretaker, in Rose (novelisation). Whatever backstory he was given, his function remained the same: he is the guy Rose was supposed to give lottery money.
- Characters' roles are merged/swapped/combined. An example of this is Man with boat and Hopkins (Planet of the Spiders) (see behind the scenes notes). These are two characters from the episode. Essentially, their lines and actions are combined and redistributed among two novelisation characters who are given different names. Thus, there is no one-to-one correspondence of the TV character with the novelisation character, and I do not know how to determine which of novelisation characters is closer to which TV character.
I would propose to treat these cases differently. Namely, if it is clearly the same character, then having one page with clearly delineated and sourced names and one-account/another-account routine for differing actions seems to be the best choice. (Incidentally, there are also cases where lack of proof-reading caused the same story to give two different spellings of the name, like in Alice Xanada.
However, if it is not clear which novelisation character matches which TV character (this means, in particular, that the name does not match at all and the actions do not match decisively), I propose to keep two pages to avoid a flowchart style on the page.
