Wikiword / custom title cleanup thread

The Trailing punctuation in trope custom titles thread, as well as many, many discussions over the past ten and a half years, have made it obvious that we need a centralized discussion thread for page titles. I intend for this thread to be a place to both discuss titles and request they be changed.

(If you're looking to capitalize an existing wikiword, there's a different thread for that.)

Courtesy link to How to Make a Custom Title, for those who aren't familiar with the custom title policy, as well as the now-archived The Ptitle Replacement System which details how things were done before 2011.

Edited by bwburke94 on Sep 21st 2022 at 5:14:58 AM

Here's a broad list of custom title no-nos, for the sake of kicking off this discussion:

• Replacing words with symbols or numbers, unless those are part of the official title of the work. A classic case is changing "and" to "&". Only do this if the original title of the work uses that symbol.
  • A specific exception is when a trope title is expressed as a mathematical formula; for example: 2 + Torture = 5. However, Beauty Equals Goodness is not a valid case for substitution.
• Adding trailing punctuation to the end of a trope name. For work titles, it's acceptable if and only if the punctuation is part of the official title; for example: Airplane!. For tropes, they need to make sense in a sentence and we should not force the writer to use a pothole to remove punctuation. Common offenders include exclamation points and ellipses.
  • Quoted punctuation is allowed. For example: Big "NO!" encloses its punctuation in quotation marks, so it doesn't disrupt a sentence.
• Adding words that are not present in the Wiki Word title.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 9th 2021 at 9:24:22 AM

Looks good to me.

An important thing to remember is that custom titles are supposed to work within the running text of an example.

One of the main pages which spawned this thread was WebAnimation.Death Battle (currently custom titled to DEATH BATTLE!), because it frequently gets used to refer to the battle itself, e.g. "Goku's Death Battle against Superman", and the custom title screws that up. That one has both gratuitous allcaps and gratuitous punctuation.

Yeah, even if DEATH BATTLE! is the official title of the series, it looks really bad in a sentence when formatted that way.

Well, to be fair, it's weird to use the name of a work as a noun in that context at all... I'd get it if we had a Death Battle trope that collided, but nobody should be writing a sentence that goes "Goku's WebAnimation/DeathBattle against Superman..."

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 8th 2021 at 2:40:30 PM

Even if it is used that way colloquially?

Well, there's a difference between referencing the work and pretending the work is a noun or a verb. The title is formatted the way the work is formatted. I don't see a point in forgoing accuracy just so people can shoehorn it into a sentence where they're referring to the work as an event that happened between the characters. Just pothole it or something. Titles shouldn't be used in that way.

I mean, imagine this being done with literally any other title, and it becomes just as bizarre:

• "So, once Ted boarded the Film/{{Airplane}}..."
• "Elphaba really did turn Theatre/{{Wicked}} for a moment."
• "Remy whipped up the kitchen and got them to make a delicious WesternAnimation/{{Ratatouille}} for Ego."

It comes off more as a cheap Title Drop than an actual reference or sentence.

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 8th 2021 at 3:46:40 PM

True enough, but using DEATH BATTLE! in a sentence to refer to a genuine episode of that show seems to be somewhat common. It's not being used generically in that situation.

Still, if we want to discourage that usage, leaving the custom title alone is fine.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 8th 2021 at 3:50:19 PM

My point is that it is being used this way, and (at least for now) it's easier to fix the custom title instead of running through thousands of wicks.

Sure, but being easier doesn't mean it's the proper solution...

And this is only really a problem because of the trailing punctuation.

Speaking of which, I assume Big "NO!" (and the rest of the Big Word Shout subtropes) are fine? Ending on a quotation mark doesn't mess with running text.

That is correct.

Should My Grandson, Myself have punctuation? It reads to me like My Grandson: Myself or My Grandson, Myself.

We always read that as "My Grandson, Myself", yeah.

I think it works both with and without a comma, but a colon looks strange.

Compare with the more mundane case of somebody mentioning his real grandson:

”My grandson John” or ”My grandson, John”.

There’s a difference in nuance but both forms look OK to me.

Edited by GnomeTitan on Nov 8th 2021 at 12:57:22 PM

What about Suddenly Shouting?

Seems like the punctuation should be removed there.

That reminds me of the unending debate over the custom titling of "Well Done, Son" Guy.

Definitely remove the punctuation from that one. Also remove the ALL CAPS. It's unnecessary and distracting. Trope titles don't need to be self-demonstrating.

I've submitted a new title.

Given that "custom titles are supposed to work within the running text of an example," what would be the preferred practice for when a works page has a disambiguating suffix appended to it? I ask this because Music.Heroes David Bowie Album (written that way to avoid a custom title clash with Series.Heroes) uses the custom title "Heroes", matching how the album title is actually formatted. However, a request I sent to format Fanfic.Security Worm (written that way to avoid a custom title clash with Music.Security) as Security! in the same vein was turned down for removing "Worm" from the title; I ultimately sent a successful request to format it as Security! (Worm).

In this case, Security! would actually fit with an example's running text, while Security! (Worm) requires potholing it as [[Fanfic/SecurityWorm Security!]].

This also applies to other works pages like Up (R.E.M. Album) and Up (Peter Gabriel Album), and especially ones where the official title includes punctuation marks, like Uh-Oh (David Byrne Album).

Edited by bowserbros on Nov 10th 2021 at 9:16:50 AM

Disambiguation should not be removed from the displayed title, as discussed in this ATT.

There is one weird exception, and coincidentally it's also a David Bowie album: Music.Blackstar Album displays as ★. (As before, for those from the future, that's a solid-colored star.)

This is correct. Disambiguation should not be removed from the custom title. For work titles, they do not disrupt sentence structure when formatted properly (with parentheses).

''Fanfic/{{Security|Worm}}'' displays as Security, omitting the punctuation. In this particular case, potholing is necessary, but in the general case it isn't.