"Title - Author" page titles

[christycorr]

Having discussed the concerns ratcreature and Mrs. Potato Head voiced in this post, and given the excellent points they made regarding searching, artists, and authors' name changes, the Fanlore committee agreed to change our policy on fanwork articles' titles: Story Title - Author will be changed to Story Title, with disambiguation pages created as needed.

I'll be going though the wiki myself over the next few days and moving all the pages; if anyone wants to give a hand—especially with changing mentions to fanworks in other pages to each article's new title—your help would be much appreciated! :D

Comments

[christycorr]

It wasn't exclusively a zine problem; in fact, once we start adding more online fics to Fanlore, this problem would only be likely to grow. This decision was made with two things in mind, really: 1) pages' searchability and 2) editing practicality.

Some authors go by different names in different fandoms/websites—sarahtales, for instance. Users would never search for Drop Dead Gorgeous - Maya unless they were familiar with Fanlore's naming conventions, and search results are less than optimal if one—as most wiki users do—uses the 'go' button instead of 'search,' or simply presses the Enter key.

Improving user-friendliness the wiki's search where fanworks are concerned would entail creating redirects from [[Story Title]] to [[Story Title - Author]]—which was, incidentally, what we'd opted to do in the first place, until we realised that keeping track of what had been redirected or not would be an organisational nightmare.

We'll continue creating disambiguation pages for every fic/vid/zine with the same name; searching for a song name will continue to lead you to a page featuring links to all vids that use that song, in the 'Closer, a Star Trek vid by TJonesy and Killa' format. I don't understand how removing the maker's name from the page title will affect visibility, since his or her name will still be prominently featured both in the disambiguation pages and in the article itself.

(If by 'visibility' you mean just 'having the author's name in the link'—well, as you pointed out yourself, there are often many vids with the same name in every fandom. It's fairly probable that a vid will end up with the vidder's name in the link.)

I'm sorry that this decision ended up seeming rushed and imposed. We read the comments in the post I mentioned above and discussed the matter at length, but we should've made another post here asking for people's input on the matter.

Have I addressed your points properly? I'd be glad to clarify anything if I wasn't clear enough. And of course, if you have other arguments, by all means share them—a wiki is by definition an ever-growing, ever-changing behemoth, and no policies are set in stone! :)