I've had a couple of issues crop up lately that really call attention to the problem of consistently dealing with certain sorts of data. My focus at the moment is Star Trek vessel registries, but this actually applies to a lot of other information presented outside of dialog or camera shot.
See, there's typically been a little bit of fudgery among the Trek canon tech aficionados insofar as vessel registries and certain other data obtained from backstage sources, and at some point I slipped into it myself.