There was some good natured fun in the comments of the question, Why Can't Artoo Talk? about the spelling of R2-D2. However, it occurred to me that the current spelling (Artoo) makes it harder for people to find the question.
Should we agree on one way to spell these droids? For example:
This will also mean changing the existing r2d2 tag.
We can't hope everyone to follow an editorial policy in a site that is made of community-generated content. But we can strive to make questions searchable. What I try to do in these situations is include all variant spellings or wordings so that the post will be found whatever variant someone searches for. This can often be done organically, for example using a shorter variant in the question title and a longer variant in the question body.
The main issue I see with this is that if such a guideline is established, only a limited number of people will know about it, so it'll be the responsibility of the moderators to go through and edit all posts with the names spelled out.
But, as for searching abilities, I think as long as R2 is used once in the question or answer, that would make it findable. Personally, I use Artoo instead of R2 or especially R2D2 because I think it's a pain in the rear to have to use the shift key multiple times or use hit the caps lock key at the start and end of a post (and I think r2d2 is just sloppy).
