Halopedia talk:Manual of Style

Proposal: an end to the obfuscation of article titles
A while ago, I brought up an issue regarding the use of Template:Title on said template's talk page. I'll just repost a modified version of my original proposal here since one of my core points hasn't changed and neither has our practice. If no one has any massively strong objections to this I'll go and add the instructions regarding the use of the template to the MOS title section.

Currently, our pages use the Title template to hide bracketed disambiguation addenda (see Forward Unto Dawn (poem), Bradley (commander)) in article titles. However, this is problematic for a number of reasons. The template is useful for italicizing media titles and so forth, but the addition or omission of parts of the title itself is something I believe we should get rid of. Hiding the addenda can easily lead to confusion as to what the actual title of the page is since it's not very conspicuously visible aside from the URL bar. While looking at the address is hardly a colossal task, it's not something that's immediately obvious to a lot of people. That, and hiding the disambiguation serves no real purpose aside making the title itself slightly prettier, but I might again stress that the purpose of the article title isn't, ultimately, to be pretty or even be the most technically correct or all-encompassing name of the subject. The full title should always be readily available in the introductory paragraph (and in many cases the infobox), while the article title can almost be thought of as a shortcut.

This type of standard is also in place over at Wikipedia: for example, the titles of Joker (comics) or Flood (Halo) aren't rendered as "Joker" or "Flood" even though this would be possible with the title template. I defer to Wikipedia's conventions in this case since while a wiki such as ours obviously differs when it comes to content inclusion policies and the like, their formatting is generally a reliable precedent. --Jugus (Talk  | Contribs ) 11:42, 23 April 2014 (EDT)


 * — subtank   14:42, 23 April 2014 (EDT)

Character middle names
I'd like to bring to light an issue about our current unwritten policy of titling character pages. The rule is ostensibly to use First name+Last name only, but this wasn't the case in the proposal that cemented our supposedly current standard. The idea was to use a format similar to Wikipedia in that the use of middle names or initials is decided on a case-by-case basis rather than using one single standardized format based on the way a particular character is commonly referenced in canon, and I still find myself in agreement with this.

For example, William Arthur Iqbal would stay the way it is because it's his first and only introduction, plus it seems his middle name is important given its inclusion in the story's title. Marcus Stacker might become "Marcus P. Stacker" because of the meta-significance of the middle initial as well as the fact it's his first full-name introduction. Preston Cole would be "Preston J. Cole" as detailed in the proposal's original example. Based on what we'll see in Nightfall and the Halo Channel encyclopedia, we might also include the full names of Gregory Aio Ramos, Alistair Bov Estrin and Michael Bradley Horrigan in their article titles as the producers saw fit to include them in the casting sheets while leaving them out for other characters. --Jugus (Talk  | Contribs ) 06:02, 17 October 2014 (EDT)