Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-16461120-20160218162200/@comment-10473115-20160313013212

Spencerz wrote: ...changing of characters to "common" name over the previous standard of "birth name", with few exceptions, seems like a bad idea to me, if only for opening the door to creating more headache and user debates on what name to use and when to use it. Beauty may be in the simplicity, but we're not a work of art, we're an encyclopedia. Standards and uniformity are a given. And encyclopedias use common name because it's easier to find. It has nothing to do with beauty or art. Simplicity could be called conciseness and is preferable in the encyclopedic writing. There have been some debates over real names also and it's not sure if this would increase and decrease discussions from that. Also, many editor debates actually make articles better so we shouldn't fear them.

Uniformity is usually appreciated here over conciseness. Few were afraid that making exceptions to article names would disrupt the templates but we should worry more about the human than computer readers. I can understand Earth-designation for every reality including 616 to have a standardized form, but I would have preferred to break uniformity rules for the sake of conciseness because 616 is so clearly the main universe. In encyclopedia, article about Thor isn't named Thor (God) although there is an article about Thor (comics). However, I don't understand how you can call that minimal reward because there's also huge benefit for editors by avoiding piped links. Are we so accustomed to piped linking that we don't see it as an unnecessary work?

As I wrote before, I agree that this kind of big change should be definitely announced to everyone but I'm not sure what should be the right time. I edited the policy page two days ago but couldn't make the announcement then because I wasn't still sure have I interpreted our consensus right. I think that a huge bot-run was a little premature but sometimes things happen little anarchically in wikis and otherwise could be stalled as in many of our conversations. Because our consensus was so thin, I felt that moving little slower was wiser, but if editors are already placing move tags, those shouldn't be a problem for a bot. You can make an announcement right away but I don't oppose if you want to open the discussion again based on too thin consensus. We had so few participants and opinions with only a rough consensus, that even one opinion would matter.