This was a long-awaited change, and as someone who's dealt with this sort of stuff before, I know just how annoying the file-moving problem can be.
It's merely that they don't have legal names in 2017, but I think that point got a bit out of hand.
The present as in 2017, not the present as in the most recently aired episode. Michael/Rip was born after 2017, so he doesn't legally exist in 2017. But that's beside the point, isn't it?
Regardless of whether he legally changed his name (he has no legal name in the present day anyway...), he goes by Rip Hunter even in civilian clothes. And as I mentioned above, naming his article anything other than Rip Hunter would be horrendous for search indexing.
Ninja72 wrote:
In my opinion, Adrian Chase and Rip Hunter should stay the way they are now. Nyssa however has to be moved. We can go by the most common civilian name like Bwburke94 said.Nyssa doesn't have to be moved, but the evidence points toward Raatko as her civilian last name. We know it's her legal last name, and we know "al Ghul" is a title in this continuity, so it's not that much of a logical leap to say Raatko is her civilian last name.
I'm fully aware of why Jesse was moved, because I'm the one who proposed it.
Which is certainly more evidence than it took to finally move Jesse.
"Savitar" is certainly the most appropriate title for his page, but the more pertinent example is Rip Hunter.
Rip's common civilian name is not the name he was born with. Allowing his article to be titled at anything other than "Rip Hunter" would be absolutely horrendous to search indexing, which would cost us dearly in page views.
I know I'm not supposed to quote someone to disagree with them, but there's nothing that says I can't quote you to agree!
Leaving aside the definition of "real name" for now, the important point is that disambiguation pages have to exist for this wiki to function properly.
I believe we should use the common civilian name for titles, with Earth disambiguation if necessary. If Earth disambiguation is not sufficient, an alternate name or disambiguator may be used. Characters/concepts from Earth One do not use disambiguation if they are the most common use for that name.
This would title Gypsy as Cynthia and Breacher as Josh, but would leave Rip Hunter/Adrian Chase at their current page titles.
All viable alternate names should redirect if there is no conflict, so Gypsy would remain in use as a redirect. However, Breacher can also refer to the concept, so it should be a disambiguation page (or, if it covers the concept, should contain a hatnote pointing to Josh.)
What does that have to do with which we use on the wiki? It wasn't Cynthia/Gypsy who gave out her name, it was Josh/Breacher, making Cisco's question irrelevant to whether it's her real name or civilian name.
(Now for the second half...)
One thing that's kind of been bugging me in this discussion is the overuse of the phrase "real name". Even leaving aside the cases of Kal-El/Clark Kent/Superman and Simon Morrison/Adrian Chase, it's clear that what we should really be considering is the civilian name.
The real name of the Flash is Bartholomew Henry Allen, but obviously we aren't going to locate his page there. It's at Barry Allen, because he goes by a shortened form of his name.
There's no other Cynthia, so there's no reason to not do the move. If the readers are looking for Gypsy and don't know her civilian name, searching "Gypsy" will bring up the redirect.
The trouble is that people will try to use this policy for Savitar, and as I have stated, Savitar is outside the bounds of the normal naming policy.
(This is the first half of a deliberate double post, as I have two different points to make here)
We need guidelines specifically to cover similar scenarios in the future.
All this talk of "real names" is obscuring what the readers expect the pages to be titled at. No one expects Savitar's article to be at anything other than Savitar.
Savitar is a special case, because there is no viable disambiguation for "Barry Allen (whatever)" that describes Savitar, does not describe any other Barry Allens, and does not include the word "Savitar" itself. The proposed "Barry Allen (time remnant)" is closest, but there have been other time remnants of Barry Allen.
Gypsy etc. are different, because we have at least partial names for them, but they are primarily known by aliases. On a similar note, we have Adrian Chase (not Simon Morrison), and prior to Flashpoint we had Connor Hawke (not John Diggle, Jr.)
The point of the Gypsy discussion is that she is not Cynthia Reynolds. She has no revealed last name.
This discussion reminds me: did we ever decide on how to handle the Jesse Quick/Jesse Wells situation? The claim that "we can't use out-of-universe sources" seems to fall flat considering various other articles have been titled based off out-of-universe information.
SUPERBOY PRIME!
Please no.