(Disclaimer: this post utilizes Hushbugger's Undertale/Deltarune text dumps as evidence for its points. I recommend you Ctrl+F through it!)
Lately, the wikis (mostly Deltarune Wiki, to be honest) have seen a bunch of changes. Title-cased pages and page sections are being moved to sentence case, pages with pluralized titles are being moved to singular, instances of typesetter's quotation are being changed to logical quotation. In this whirlwind of changes, I would like to propose a perhaps more drastic one: moving characters with their full names as their page title to their most common names.
Analysis:
Let's start with Deltarune, and take as our first example "Kris Dreemurr". In-game characters, menus, battle UI, developer commentary, all merely call them "Kris". Even our wiki primarily uses just "Kris" to refer to them, only using the full name for section headers or to link to their article on their first mention. The only two places where the surname is officially stated is in the URL for one of Noelle's blog entries and one of TV World's random quizzes, and only the first one actually utilizes their full name. The string of text "Kris Dreemurr" is actually completely absent from the game of Deltarune, and yet the wiki titles the page for its protagonist after it, and relegates the name the game actually uses to a mere redirect.
Other characters are not as egregious, but still follow the same trend. "Rudolph Holiday" is another page name that is straight up never used within Deltarune itself; he is only called either "Rudolph "Rudy" Holiday" by his hospital plaque, "Mr. Holiday" once by Toriel, or "Rudy" by everyone else. The same goes for "Noelle Holiday", "December Holiday", "Carol Holiday" and "Catti Cattenheimer", all names that I could not find within the text dump. "Gerson Boom", "Catty Cattenheimer", and "Asgore Dreemurr" have all been named in-game, but the last two are still primarily referred to as "Catty" and "Asgore". ("Gerson" is more of a 50/50.)
You know what character pages are under their first names? Toriel and Asriel, since they have never been full-named within Deltarune, and we teeechnically don't know if either of them kept the surname after the Dreemurr divorce. You know which character pages were under their first names? Kris, Catty and Catti, since their surnames were revealed in the Chapter 3 + 4 update. After that released, their pages had to be moved.
Also, what about Darkners? "Spamton G. Spamton", "Mr. "Ant" Tenna", "Serial Number Q5U4EX7YY2E9N", maybe even "The Roaring Knight"... we have a bunch of Darkners with surnames or full names, and we have no trouble keeping them under their in-game moniker. The only exception is Rouxls Kaard, seemingly because that was his most common name back in Chapter 1, though checking the text dump, it seems he's more commonly called just "Rouxls" nowadays.
Even when it comes to Undertale, a game with significantly less characters with surnames, Asgore Dreemurr and Asriel Dreemurr have their pages titled after their full names. Out of 107 instances of Asgore's name being stated, only three are followed by his surname. Asriel has 37 mentions, and just as well, three of them are his full name. I know one of those is his in-battle name, but that's still less than 10%. (And yet, Loox is still just "Loox".)
Thesis:
All in all, this paints the picture that characters in Toby Fox's games are near-exclusively referred to by their first names. If the amount of characters that straight up do not have surnames was not enough, the few characters that do have them are barely ever referred by them. So, why do we title their articles like that? It seems to me that it's just not an accurate representation of the games's naming conventions.
Besides the above point, these full name page titles are also just, kind of a hassle? Our page text still primarily utilizes the character's most common name, which means a lot of piping [[Rudolph Holiday|Rudy]] and [[Kris Dreemurr|Kris]] and the like. It also means that if any other characters get a confirmed full name, we're going to have to move them and change all their links as well.
Going back to my proposal, moving all these characters to their in-game monikers would solve all these issues. It would accurately represent how the game itself refers to them, it would prevent unnecessary piping, it would avoid conjectural names that have not been uttered in-game, and it would prevent unnecessary page moves if further information is revealed. It would also be consistent with the recently added rule in the Manual of Style that states: "Name of subject must be mentioned or depicted in-game. Otherwise, game asset names should be used if unavailable, or commentary from developers, such as social media or the official Newsletter. In the latter case, a citation must be used."
Now, I know what people are going to say. "Why not just use redirects?" Personally, I am against utilizing redirects to substitute piping, as it makes features such as the "What links here" tab not function correctly. We are not Wikipedia, and the circumstances that warrant its "NOPIPE" policy do not affect us. We're small enough that I could comb through every page in Deltarune Wiki to fix quotation mark formatting in under three days, and I could've done it in one if I had a larger attention span. Linking to redirects because you do not want to pipe a link is just ignoring an integral feature of MediaWiki for no good reason.
If this change is enacted, the following pages will be affected:
Undertale Wiki:
- Asgore Dreemurr to "Asgore"
- Asriel Dreemurr to "Asriel"
Deltarune Wiki:
- Kris Dreemurr to "Kris"
- Asgore Dreemurr to "Asgore"
- Noelle Holiday to "Noelle"
- December Holiday to "Dess"
- Rudolph Holiday to "Rudy"
- Carol Holiday to "Carol"
- Catty Cattenheimer to "Catty"
- Catti Cattenheimer to "Catti"
- Gerson Boom to "Gerson"
- Father Alvin to "Alvin" (I neglected to mention him in the proposal, since it's technically not a "full name", but he is known as "Alvin" four times compared to "Father Alvin" once)
- Rouxls Kaard to "Rouxls" (would also affect Rouxls Kaard (soundtrack) since it would no longer need an identifier)