Ambiguous Name: Series.Taken

The additional entries displayed at the top of the Miniseries "Taken" all direct to the alternate pages for the movie Taken. It took me a couple very confusing moments to realize this was the case.

This is the problem with using the namespace system for both media categorizing and subpages (and why I personally prefer the Wikipedia approach on names).

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

While our current approach may be less than perfect, the usual solution in cases like this is to soft-split the shared sub pages.

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

I thought the usual solution was to suffix each one with something like year. That way all their subpages get hard-split, not soft.

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

That's for cases where there's more than one work in the same medium, i.e. two films with the same name. When it's a series vs a film, or literature vs anime, we soft-split. I think. I haven't had to deal with it a lot, so someone with more experience is welcome to chime in here.

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

Yes, in general we soft split the page, although usually we're talking about adaptations rather than media that coincidentally has the same name.

See YMMV.Ultraviolet for an example.

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.

Well, softsplit is what we did for The Game, but with only two entries for the series and one for the film, it's a less than ideal example. The YMMV page, meanwhile, is even worse, having five examples which are all from the series. I'll see if I can find something better, such as a character page.

Soft-splitting adaptations of the source material is one thing, but applying that solution to completely unrelated media that coincidentally have the same name is ... wrong.

edited 16th Jul '12 9:39:25 PM by Stratadrake

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

Agreed. The titles don't even refer to the same thing.

I'm really not sure how you assign a value judgment to something like this. I mean, are you afraid that one work might catch another work's cooties if they're forced to share a YMMV page?

There are tradeoffs—pluses and minuses—to either approach, and the sensible thing to do is discuss those tradeoffs instead of getting all obsessive-compulsive about the matter. The advantage of sharing? You don't have to use some bizarre modified name for the main works pages. The disadvantage? Um, cooties?

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

It's not ideal, but naming the pages Film.Taken Film and Series.Taken Miniseries is less ideal and more likely to cause confusion.

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.

More clearly put than my comment (and less snarky), but yes, that's exactly the argument for not moving.

Ultimately, the real problem is that we're limited to a two-deep hierarchy. It would make so much more sense to have separate pages at Film/Workname/YMMV and Series/Workname/YMMV for cases like this. But...oh well.

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

Incidentally, there is some precedent for the "tack on a modifier to the name" approach, in the Battlestar Galactica (Classic) and Battlestar Galactica (Reimagined) situation. Just as incidentally, the The Game example has the potential to become a bit more problematic than Taken does, as it's got not just one series and one film, but another film currently on the disambiguation page in case anyone ever bothers to make a page about it.

Even more intereting: there are apparently seven different movies called Easy Money, and we only have a page for one of them (there's also six songs, a TV series and a board game).

All in all it looks like Taken is a pretty simple example and the soft split approach should work fine, at least for now.

What about The Avengers?

Edit: Never mind, only the YMMV and Trivia pages have anything from the TV show, though both are still useful reference points. In other news, Most Tropers Are Young Nerds.

edited 18th Jul '12 2:53:26 AM by MorganWick

The precedent is only for things with the same name that would also share the same namespace. Both Battlestar Galacticas were TV series, which means they'd collide in the Series.Battlestar Galactica page. That isn't the case here - we're talking about a film and a miniseries.

edited 18th Jul '12 5:34:37 AM by ccoa

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.

Taken Film, Taken TV Miniseries, Taken Video Game...

I don't see what's so bad about naming them with the exact media format mentioned in each name.

It makes it much harder for people to find the right page—it's a hassle. I don't see anything at all wrong with shared YMMV pages.

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

It might be harder if people like to get to YMMV and Trivia pages by typing their names, but I think it's more common to use the links from the main page, which would be unaffected. However, I still think cases like Taken and The Game are too rare to really justify making exceptions to the current mechanic. As long as there are only a few examples on these "softsplit between identically named yet unrelated works" subpages, it's not a big deal.

I'm talking about getting to the main page, not the YMMV pages. And by "find", I mean, "add the proper wick to". Obviously, if the wick is already there, you can just click it, but people edit the wiki as well.

edited 22nd Jul '12 3:00:43 AM by Xtifr

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

@11/12: Which kinda proves my argument on why Wikimedia-style article names (everything goes in Main namespace by default, media is appended to the title as a suffix) is the ultimately superior naming convention. No stupid Double Standard that depends on whether unrelated series occupy the same or different media.

edited 22nd Jul '12 10:40:05 AM by Stratadrake

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

Navigating to series/workname is no harder than getting to main/workname(series), because in either case there's a disambiguation page at main/workname. And editors who link to that disambiguation page instead of the work they're looking for wouldn't be any less likely to do so under either system.

With over 70% of all works now namespaced, I rarely bother to look in main any more, unless the the namespaced version turns up red in my preview.

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

Changing to a different system for works is pretty damn unlikely at this point. But more to the point, this is a topic for Wiki Talk, not the TRS.

Locking this up.

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.