not a committee post: Sherlockian character pages

[aethel]

We (some editors) have been discussing how to disambiguate the character pages for the many versions of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, etc. on a talk page. Fanlore's standard naming convention for disambiguated character pages will result in some very clunky page names for this fandom (e.g. [[Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes (2009))]]). If anyone has any ideas, input would be welcome! At the moment, it looks like we might go with disambiguating Holmes by actor name, though this approach might create other difficulties. We're also considering main "hub" pages to collect links/info on multiple versions of the characters: here's the first one, which I just now slapped together.

Speaking of character pages, at present there is only one character page in the Sherlock Holmes category (here). This is depressing, and I, for one, would love to see more! (I wonder if we could organize a fandom-specific editing party like the Merlin party back in ... March? That was an amazing thing.)

Comments

[sprat]

Wow, that's a lot of editing for a short period of time. That looks awesome.

(I wonder if we could organize a fandom-specific editing party like the Merlin party back in ... March? That was an amazing thing.)

I'd be up for that, time-permitting. At the very least, I would post about it and cheerlead.

[aethel]

I've been busy avoiding RL (though I will need to stop procrastinating this coming week). :)

I have a vague idea of posting about editing Sherlock Holmes pages in a community to bring in more people, but which community I don't know--cox_and_co? sherlockbbc? I'm not active in any of them.

[sprat]

I'm not especially active in sherlockbbc but I am a member of both the LJ and DW versions. If you tell me what to post, I can post it to each. I'm not sure which comms would be best for other Holmes versions, though.

[anatsuno]

First, why not [[Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes - 2009)]] instead? It breaks the pattern, yes, but is less awkward, and, well, we're talking about breaking the pattern anyway to remedy the situation, righ

Second. Considering that sometimes the same series (Granada, anyone?) has two actors in a row for the same character - not Holmes in this case but Watson, and yet - suggests that using the actor's name to differentiate will lead to other issues. I think I would settle for either the country or main production entity (BBC, etc) and media type, because entity + date should make it clear enough, but then, you'll have the same brackets issue if you don't decide to remove the one around the date:

[[Sherlock Holmes (BBC series - 2009)]] and [[Sherlock Holmes (USA movie - 2009)]]

since surely there is a disambiguation page about Holmes himself, gathering all these links, you can also decide to shorten his name to Holmes only in the page names...

I see there's already http://fanlore.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes_%28Granada%29 which is another solution I would have suggested...

There's a character page at the moment that's [[Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock (BBC))]], sans date - that's not too bad either... Though in the long term I think the lack of date will become annoying, perhaps.

Er. That was probably not so helpful.

[frogspace.livejournal.com]

Considering that sometimes the same series (Granada, anyone?) has two actors in a row for the same character - not Holmes in this case but Watson, and yet - suggests that using the actor's name to differentiate will lead to other issues.

This assumes that we would need to stick to one disambiguation criterion, in this case actors, but we can disambiguate by whatever works best. That could mean actors for some versions of the characters, like [[Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey, Jr.)]] and [[Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch)]], while using other criteria for other versions.

[anatsuno]

This is true! I was groping for a solution that could be used consistently throughout problem pages (if not throughout the site), but there is probably no need to reach for that.

[kylara]

*late* I've put in my (long-winded (sorry)) opinion on the talk page.

A fandom-specific editing party would be great! \o/