I'm entering the characters for Zelazny's Amber series and there is one character who is introduced in book 2 but who is revealed to be someone else, someone who had been missing, in a later book. Should I enter him as his actual name perhaps with his pseudonym in parenthesis in all the books where he appears? I could enter it with his pseudonym in those books where he is known by that name and his real name where he is known by that name. I don't like that since he is a single character and I'd like him to be linked across all the books. Is there another way that I'm not thinking of?

I think I usually use the real name and add the aliases in parenthesis. Though I have done it the other way as well, I think it depended on whether the reader should know who the character was or if it was a surprise later on.

surprise - Alias (real)
known by reader - real (alias)

don't know if that is good or bad.

It's the surprise case. But if I enter it as Alias (real) in the first few books and Real in the last books (and Real (Alias) in the book where the surprise is revealed?) then all the names won't be connected, by which I mean if you click on Real it won't show you all the books in which that character appeared.

I know the books and am pretty sure about the character you are in a conundrum about. Maybe you could you just enter the characters real name without the alias. This ensures that the character is connected in the books they are in, but to the uninformed you wont know who their alias is (they are mentioned a lot in the book by the others so might constitute a character anyway). Just a suggestion of course.

If there's a real risk of spoiling things for people who haven't read them yet, I'd suggest that the two names be left unlinked. Somebody who's read the series will know that the two characters are "really" one and the same.

What's the real benefit of having the aliases linked? Just seeing all the appearances listed on one page instead of on two separate pages? Does that outweigh the drawback of giving away important secrets?

I think in general, entries in Common Knowledge are not supposed to worry about spoilers, they are for information.

3> actually they will still be connected, try it. everything in the () also gets a link and searched. so if you click Alias it will give you all the books with Alias(real) and real (Alias)

I'd go with #4, and just enter the charatcer's name only, particularly if they occur as references by other characters.

That brings me to a different question. I presume someone who is just mentioned by another character isn't a character. But if a character relates something that happened in his past that goes on for several pages, are people mentioned in that flashback characters (and are the mentioned places worth recording)?

ck is reference information and in my opinion the more information you have available the better. If you have read all the books and you want to know which ones someone was using an alias or maybe someone missed that person A was also person B in a different volume, that info should be available.

"flashback characters (and are the mentioned places worth recording)"

generally I don't unless it is fairly significant.

If the mentioned character is in any way pivotal to the story I would consider including them. This would be a case by case decision.

Here's the thing about spoilers. I agree that anyone looking up CK character information for a book they haven't finished does so at their own risk, but when you're dealing with series, this is problematic.

There's a case in Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books, where in the seventh book (publication order, of course) it is revealed that two characters, both of whom have been important since the beginning, are actually the same person.

To list those two characters for the first book as Character A (Character B) would be pointless and massive spoilers at least for books 2-6, even if nobody looks at the CK for the first book until they're finished with it. It would be reasonable to do so for books 7+, but to do so for all books in the series would be malicious.

In that case lorax, I would tend to agree with you. Most of the 'rules' for ck data have some wiggle room.

#8

If you look at the Lord Of The Rings CK it seems anything goes. Even simple mentions of a name seems to be enough to get listed. There are even names which are just mentions in the appendix.

Yeah, I complained about that, but people seemed to think that since someone put so much work into it that we shouldn't just delete them. I think that if we really want to put this kind of trivia into CK that we should at least have major and minor character fields so we could have one field that is relatively uncluttered. Of course what is a major and a minor character is open to interpretation, but no more so than if a character belongs in a single character field.