Ask The Tropers

I think it's the kind of thing that has to be taken case by case, but yeah, if the usual editors of Benson don't want it there, they'd be justified in taking it down. Edit-bombing of pages of shows you don't watch, and I imagine the overlap there isn't huge, is, ah, impolite.

I like Names The Same, but the biggest draw for me is the cross-media subpages because they're kinda funny to read, so that could be moved to JFF with nothing of value lost tbh.

As for this problem itself, yeah, we need some sort of standards on this sort of thing. I personally only do it if it's something I think could be legitimately confusing, or if the note is funny.

It strikes me as more of an etiquette issue. That and just — know your audience, read the room. Don't make a joke for its own sake on a page where 90% of the people who would get it probably aren't ever going to read it.

The note was added to Benson about four years after the page was created, by Bob Riddle, who otherwise did not contribute to the page at all.

So this was definitely just someone stumbling upon a page and inserting this note because they thought it would be funny.

Found another obnoxious one, this time on Judy Garland's page.

Don't confuse the actress with the Big Bad of Final Fantasy, everyone. Because that's totally a thing that could happen.

I'm going to concur that, yeah, that sort of thing just seems annoying.

Tasteful editing is often beyond the ken of many a user. Those "disambiguation" entries should be relevant and there should be a reasonable chance someone might confuse the items in question.

^ Alright, with that in mind I'm just going to start cutting these whenever I find them.

Looks like someone already got the Judy Garland one.

Shane Douglas: Not to be confused with Franchise Index or any of the tropes associated with media franchises.

^cut. his nickname is barely referenced on the page and it took me a minute to even figure out why that was there.

^^ Chop it, for sure.

So, I am largely in agreement with everything said here, but as someone who put that note on both Annihilation pages (EDIT: Apologies, it seems like I got it mixed up with another page), I should probably weigh in with my ground rules for this kind of thing, and see if anyone disagrees.

To me, when I see in the top-of-the-page headers that two works share the same namespace, the default assumption is that one work is an adaptation of other. On that particular page, I genuinely thought, "Wait, Annihilation was another comic book movie after all?" From then on, I have been adding these notes for all cases of shared namespaces.

The only time when I wouldn't do it is with DarthWiki entries, since well, they are things that are never going to exist in 99% of all cases, and have no relevance outside of this website. Thus, I put a note clarifying that there's no connection between VideoGame.Generation Zero and ComicBook.Generation Zero on both pages, but didn't extend the note to a DarthWiki entry of the same name.

I feel that fanfics can also be a borderline case, but prefer to err on the side of adding them if there's already a page on the same namespace. For the Glass namespace, I decided to put the same note on both Film.Glass, VideoGame.Glass, and Fanfic.Glass back when the former came out, because I thought there was a reasonable risk of visitors assuming the film may have had a game spin-off, or that a fanfic was about the film.

Another instance where I find Similarly Named Works note to be practically required is for multiple works of the same medium and of the same name. My most recent example of this is Homesick (2012) and Homesick (2015). Another instance is when the difference in name is so minor, the confusion is likely: how many people can easily tell apart Film.The Blue Dahlia and Film.The Black Dahlia, for instance?

However, I would never contemplate placing such a note about work-character or character-character (lack of) a connection. (which uses Names The Same trope anyway, not Similarly Named Works I've been using.)

P.S. I genuinely had no idea Dexter's Laboratory and Dexter weren't related, as I don't watch either. Then again, many years ago I also thought there had to be some connection between Gears of War and Metal Gear games, but that probably doesn't justify placing a note there now.

^ Similarly Named Works is exactly the kind of thing these notes are for, but I don't feel that referencing fanfics is important. The fact that they're fanfics alone should be enough to let you know that they're unrelated, and AFAIK fanfics generally don't have the same name as the work they're based on since that would make them basically impossible to find. But that being said, it's far more acceptable than the nonsense involving character names.

Also, you're not the one that added the notes to Annihilation. Saveelich added the note to the film page, and I added the one to the comic book page.

I mean, yeah, there's a big difference between "Do not confuse with this very similarly named work" and "Do not confuse with this thing only tangentially related to the subject we're talking about here."

In the specific case of fan works sharing names with official works, it's often possible to disambiguate the fan work by its fandom or author to avoid this collision.