Howling:IT IS SERIES 31!!

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Steven Moffat has confirmed in DWM 418 that this season (Series 5) is season 31. He said that series one will only be referred to as by him because it is his first season but it will be known as Season 31. So shall we start changing everything??????? -- Michael Downey 20:55, February 4, 2010 (UTC)

Again, no. We shouldn't change anything until we have a DVD boxset which confirms it. Ramblings of Moffat in an interview do not constitute anything close to proof. Besides which, it doesn't retroactively change the nomenclature for series 1-4. They are what they are. They were never marketed as anything but Series 1-4. They will always be Series 1-4, as per the authorial intent of the copyright holders. And all these pages are double linked anyway. So if you want to link to Series 4 or Season 30 you can without physically moving the page to some new name. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 21:39, February 4, 2010 (UTC)

What?? you want to wait for the release of a Box Set which probably won't be released until this time next year after the actual series has run and past the Christmas Special which has been confirmed????? -- Michael Downey 22:03, February 4, 2010 (UTC)

I want to wait for actual, tangible proof, yes. Seriously, look at the totality of Moffat's proclamations in DWM, just over the past 2 months. Read especially his first production column at the back of 417. He's totally having the piss. He's doing something he KNOWS will stir up fandom, but that no one else really cares about. Meanwhile, the only official thing from the BBC, namely Confidential, has actually labelled him, via a chiron, as the exec producer of "Series 5". Please, I beg of you, WAIT until you have something actually produced by the BBC before changing any pages over. Let's say that he's totally telling the truth and it will be marketed under the number "31" rather than "5". There's still the question of whether it's "Season 31" or "Series 31". We need to cross the bridge when we actually come to it, rather than making a change to season 31 now only to find out that actually they've decided to go with the word series. Patience allows for less work. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 22:11, February 4, 2010 (UTC)

It wasn't until the BBC started releasing videos of the TV stories that we got names for 100,000 BC, The Mutants and Inside the Spaceship (more commonly known as An Unearthly Child, The Daleks and The Edge of Destruction).

It isn't actually that long a wait, if the BBC continues its trend of "vanilla DVD releases" we need only wait a month (or however long it is after the first 2-3 episodes have aired) for confirmation one way or another. --Tangerineduel 14:38, February 5, 2010 (UTC)

Right okay so if we can't have it as Season 31 because Steven Moffat the Head Writer said in DWM then everything that is said in DWM must be deleted such as episode titles and everything. How can we trust writers interviews but when it comes from the Head Writer we just shake it off. It either one rule for all or none if not no-one is making sense. -- Michael Downey 16:34, February 5, 2010 (UTC)

Well, technically, I think it's premature for the new episode pages, yes. We don't need any more than the Radio Timees lead-in to start an article on a new episode. The RT comes out, it announces the title, and we start the article only then. That'd be fine. Hell, we could honestly start a page for a new episode at the moment the episode condludes its maiden broadcast and have just as accurate an article by midnight BST as we do by starting these pages months in advance. It'd save so much unnecessary page moving and speculation. People waste far too much time and effort on articles about future things on this wiki. Patience means less work, and more importantly, more accurate work.

As for believing interviews, of course you shouldn't. People say all sorts of things in interviews. Especially head writers/producers trying to get you to watch their show. Moffat, like RTD before him, uses DWM as a way to get his preferred message out to interested fans. He's not under oath. He's selling the show. And if that means creating a controversy that keeps the show in the news, or withholding the complete truth, or even basically telling a big whopping lie, he'll do it. DWM is a much better source about things that have happened in the past, but for future stuff, it's basically propaganda. And it's been that way since around the time it became known as Doctor Who Monthly and John Nathan-Turner was the credited "adviser" to the magazine. The editors of the magazine since 2005 have repeatedly made it clear that they do kowtow to the wishes of the production office. Hell, they delayed publicaiton of the magazine for the first time in the history of the publication just because the broadcast of an episode got unexpectedly delayed. 417's cover was embargoed until a particular moment because of a production office request. They are not journalists in the traditional sense of that word. DWM is NOT independent of the subject it covers; most of its employees are, at a minimum, angling to be asked to comment on a DVD documentary or Confidential. Many have some sort of ambition of actually working on DW. They are therefore not going to treat RTD or Steven Moffat with the objectivity of a journalist.

Understand that I'm not saying DWM is a generally awful source. No, it clearly gets a lot of stuff right. But we're talking here about what we fundamentally call something, the name of its page on the wiki, and that has ripple effects. We want to be sure the name is right, not jump on the first apparent official word. The classic example is the cover of DWM which called Peter Davison, Peter Davidson. If we'd gone off that "official word" we'd have a lot of untangling to have done by the time we first saw the credits. And I'm sure, for instance, that there have been cases of DWM announcing the name of an episode/serial only for it to be different on the day of transmission. That happened a lot in the 80s, I seem to recall. Think about all the places that an episode title or a series title is used and if you really want to take even the slightest risk of having to go through a "what links here" list to undo it all. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 20:57, February 5, 2010 (UTC)