The tag alias #71497 h.p._lovecraft -> h._p._lovecraft has been approved.

Reason: fixing spacing

EDIT: The tag alias h.p._lovecraft -> h._p._lovecraft (forum #409889) has been approved by @slyroon.

What's with the 😐 votes? It is in fact correct to have spaces between initials.

faucet said:
What's with the 😐 votes? It is in fact correct to have spaces between initials.

It's also correct to not have spaces between initials (or smaller spaces, but we don't have those), it's just up to a matter of style. Underscores just make the tag feel pretty unwieldy

Regardless of whether the initials get spaced or not, the two tags still need to be merged.

(Personally, I'd go without the space as that would save on space, in more ways than one. But it ultimately doesn't matter.)

It may be a matter of style, but spaced is in common use in most English-speaking countries. With the exception of UK.
When in doubt, I tend to default to whatever Wikipedia uses — and it's using the spaced standard. So... 👍

Downvote because correct or not it looks ugly with the underscore.

Just googling "H.P. Lovecraft" finds both pretty consistently, even a few places which go as far as "HP Lovecraft".

Interestingly enough, looking at book covers and title pages, both are common there as well. Especially the ones that have the period under the P with little spacing except between H.P. and Lovecraft. Though some omit spacing altogether as well. Though based on other stuff, it could be the H.P. signatures were a stylistic signature, with their proper form being H. P., so who knows really.

This kind of seems like a "both are correct" situation, so I'd say "HP" is way too shortened and uncommon, but due to both the H.P. and H. P. begin common even in publication, I'd go with H.P. because it looks a bit better with underscores, and was used in official works at original release.

I think it should still be aliased, I often forget if a name has spaces or not when it involves initials, and since nobody is searching for a different h.p. lovecraft with a space then it being aliased could be beneficial.

The bulk update request #8729 is pending approval.

create alias h._p._lovecraft (779) -> h.p._lovecraft (0) # has blocking transitive relationships, cannot be applied through bur

Reason: The reverse alias, for those that prefer it.
Also yeah the website should standardise initials with spaces/no spaces

deadoon said:
Just googling "H.P. Lovecraft" finds both pretty consistently, even a few places which go as far as "HP Lovecraft".

Yes, the latter is the proper way to type it if the punctuation is omitted. Nobody uses 'J R R Tolkien', but 'JRR Tolkien' is valid — this is known as the Vancouver style.

A bit of history about these: originally, those were supposed to be separated by hair space ('J. R. R. Tolkien'). But as hair space has fallen out of use, there are two schools of thought about it: replace it with regular space (APA style), or omit it entirely (Harvard style). Neither is technically correct, it depends on which style guide you follow.

Like e e cummings, Lovecraft didn't care for the standards and had his own distinct way of signing his name. So that may be a poor basis for site-wide tagging of initials.

By the way, am I the only one who feels that it's odd to attribute all of cthulhu mythos to Lovecraft? It's been out of copyright, and a lot of recent content has basically nothing to do with Lovecraft's works anymore. And even when it was still copyrighted, it was a shared mythos by authors known as the Lovecraft Circle. On other sites this genre is commonly called 'Lovecraftian', rather than directly attributing all of it to Lovecraft.

genjar said:
By the way, am I the only one who feels that it's odd to attribute all of cthulhu mythos to Lovecraft? It's been out of copyright, and a lot of recent content has basically nothing to do with Lovecraft's works anymore. And even when it was still copyrighted, it was a shared mythos by authors known as the Lovecraft Circle. On other sites this genre is commonly called 'Lovecraftian', rather than directly attributing all of it to Lovecraft.

Fanfiction gets attributed to the original work, and I don't think we have a history of nuking copyright because something goes public domain, it's still retained for searching purposes. I just see it as treating the origin point... as the origin point, Lovecraft's works might as well be their own mythology at this point, honestly, so I don't see it as any different than using the "Greek mythology" tag for entities originating in greek mythology.

votp said:
Fanfiction gets attributed to the original work, and I don't think we have a history of nuking copyright because something goes public domain, it's still retained for searching purposes.

Sometimes. I mean, we don't tag all Tolkienesque fantasy as J. R. R. Tolkien, do we? It's exactly the same with Lovecraftian horror. Just because he started the subgenre doesn't mean that it should all be attributed to him. A lot of cosmic horror elements that are considered Lovecraftian actually originate from other Lovecraft Circle members, such as Robert Bloch and Clark Ashton Smith.

genjar said:
Sometimes. I mean, we don't tag all Tolkienesque fantasy as J. R. R. Tolkien, do we? It's exactly the same with Lovecraftian horror. Just because he started the subgenre doesn't mean that it should all be attributed to him

We do have lovecraftian_(genre) as a separate tag from h.p._lovecraft/cthulhu_mythos.

genjar said:
It may be a matter of style, but spaced is in common use in most English-speaking countries. With the exception of UK.
When in doubt, I tend to default to whatever Wikipedia uses — and it's using the spaced standard. So... 👍

One of the main issues with that is that the choice isn't between spaced and not spaced, it's between not spaced and an underscore acting as a space.

snpthecat said:
One of the main issues with that is that the choice isn't between spaced and not spaced, it's between not spaced and an underscore acting as a space.

Underscores are displayed as spaces on the tag sidebar and wiki titles, practically the only place you're going to see the underscores is this alias request itself or when you're typing the tag to search it.

faucet said:
Underscores are displayed as spaces on the tag sidebar and wiki titles, practically the only place you're going to see the underscores is this alias request itself or when you're typing the tag to search it.

I would argue typing the tag to search for it is a pretty crucial area. The autocomplete doesn't show up for the tag until you've typed at least 3 characters, and this convention would mean having to type the underscore. For (my) default mobile keyboard the underscore is 2 menus deep (and I would have to switch 5 times to type the first 5 characters of this and similar tags). Though this is not a big as a point as the alias can take care of it.

If we're considering wikis, the underscores are often used in links to the other wikis, and the implications also display the underscore.

You're also likely to see the underscore if you're editing the tags, and if adding a tag, underscores are usually where tags fragment into smaller ones though it is unlikely for to tag lovecraft manually

genjar said:
Sometimes. I mean, we don't tag all Tolkienesque fantasy as J. R. R. Tolkien, do we? It's exactly the same with Lovecraftian horror. Just because he started the subgenre doesn't mean that it should all be attributed to him. A lot of cosmic horror elements that are considered Lovecraftian actually originate from other Lovecraft Circle members, such as Robert Bloch and Clark Ashton Smith.

I'm not talking about themes, we can consider that all Cosmic Horror, or Lovecraftian if we want. That is independant of the Cthulhu mythos; content directly set in the mythos or derived from it should be tagged accordingly. Things originating in Lovecraft's works should have his tag associated, things originating in the other authors' works in the mythos, theirs.
To use a point of comparison, do we not tag the original myths/folklore if it's a Disney adaptation of it? It is still portraying these things, a hydra does not magically not be a hydra because disney animated it, nor does Zeus cease to be Zeus. Cthulhu is Cthulhu, a creation of H.P. Lovecraft, part of the overarching mythos. There is enough incest between works of writers in the circle, however, that you'd need to devote a year to try to untangle who made what, so for the time being, just linking it all back to Lovecraft for want of more specificity seems logical enough to me.

This is well beyond the scope of this thread, however. If you wish to make a tagging project to tackle this and assign each creature/location/character to their relevant author of origin and unlink Lovecraft from the Mythos and instead link the creations directly, so it implies Lovecraft AND Mythos rather than Lovecraft via Mythos, and similarly Derleth AND Mythos for others, so on, so on, I suggest making a thread to coordinate such efforts and house relevant BURs.

The tag alias h.p._lovecraft -> h._p._lovecraft (forum #409889) has been approved by @slyroon.

snpthecat said:
The bulk update request #8729 is pending approval.

create alias h._p._lovecraft (779) -> h.p._lovecraft (0) # has blocking transitive relationships, cannot be applied through bur

Reason: The reverse alias, for those that prefer it.
Also yeah the website should standardise initials with spaces/no spaces

Bumping this for consideration. Is the format for initials now going to contain underscores?