Forum:The Master - 1 article

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This is a revisit of Forum:The Master, where the discussion had reached a conclusion but we hadn't quite gotten to an action point, so I thought I revisit was in order to get this settled and done.

But as we've recently had another instance of a user creating another Master article I felt we needed to revisit this again and get a decision.

As was surmised in 2008 and again during our Talk:The Master#Main image and the template discussion concerning the image for the article there are fewer Master incarnations than we think.

I'm still in favour of rolling all the articles back into 1 main article. I think this would help with clarity and editing and stop people from trying to create extra Master articles. --Tangerineduel / talk 16:41, November 15, 2011 (UTC)

Swiftly seconded.

The Master is unlike other Time Lords in that we don't have narrative names for the various incarnations. And the names we've chosen are completely random. There's not an easy way to make the character obey T:ONE NAME, the relevant policy, because it requires the use of the first story in which the character appeared. This disambiguation would be highly ambiguous for the Master, since The Master (Utopia), The Master (Doctor Who), and The Master (Keeper of Traken) all refer to more than one incarnation.

Thus, as a purely disambiguational question, I think the single most sensible thing to do is to put it all on one page.

Your still left, however, with finding a way to talk about the character. There are times where you're going to want to specify a particular incarnation, so redirects will inevitably be created to particular parts of the article. So you still need some name you can call these guys that makes sense. I think we could "pull a T:ROMANA" and slightly fudge our in-universe-only name rule. To me, the easiest thing to do would be to:

1. Put all the info on The Master
2. Create redirects to sections of The Master

These redirects should use common-sense names, in the same way that we have Romana I and Romana II, despite the lack of narrative evidence for those names. Obviously we can't use numbers for the the various Masters, but we can just use the actor or company name.

So you'd end up with the following redirects:

• The Master (Delgado)
• The Master (Ainley)
• The Master (BFA)
• The Master (DWM)
• The Master (Roberts)
• The Master (Jacobi) (and since Shalka isn't in canon, this isn't, practically, ambiguous)
• The Master (Simm)

That way, you have a naming system that makes some kind of sense, but you can easily hide the out-of-universe nomenclature. Being redirects, no pages will ever bear these actors' names, but editors and readers can use a system that's far more straightforward than what we have.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">18:23: Tue 15 Nov 2011 

Alrighty. I think the simplest way is do all this is to copy and integrate the information from the various articles into the one Master article.

I don't think it's practical to try and merge the histories of the various articles. It is possible to do (I think), it would involve merging two and two and so on. I think it's doable, but it would leave us with a long and fairly convoluted history for the Master article because all the the 7 Master articles' histories would end up merged. --Tangerineduel / talk 17:01, November 29, 2011 (UTC)

Added by Sinefirt

• Hughes: The Master (Koschei)
• Delgado/Pratt/Beevers: The Master (Original)
• Ainley: The Master (Tremas)
• Rathbone: The Master (Virgin)
• Beevers: The Master (Big Finish)
• Roberts/Glory: The Master (Morphant)
• Jacobi: The Master (Yana)
• Simms: The Master (Saxon)

Well, some of the above have issues: We can't call The Master (Bruce) as The Master (Morphant), because another story calls it a Deathworm. (see Talk:The Master (Bruce)) we should call the Unit years one Original, for it could be confused with the Koschei one. It may be a bit weird sounding, but I might suggest The Master (Thirteenth life), or maybe even Thirteenth Master... I dont think we should call a first master's page The Master (Koschei), because The Master (UNIT years) also went by this title. I do support the creation of a page for the original Master, though. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 00:40, January 10, 2012 (UTC)

Reminder

By way of reminder, we do have agreement dating back to 2010 to put all the Master pages onto a single page called "the Master". This discussion was merely started to figure out how to do the redirects. Since we've gone a long while without implementation, I just wanted to give people a week from the following time stamp to put forward any new ideas about this process before it's done. Two years is long enough to linger on a decision, people.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">21:39: Sun 15 Jul 2012 

Alright. I think these should be redirects to The Master's main page:

• Koschei
• The Master (UNIT years)
• The Master (Tersurus)
• The Master (Tremas)
• The Master (First Frontier)
• The Master (Dust Breeding)
• The Master (Bruce)
• The Master (The Fallen)
• The Master (Morphant)
• The Master (Yana)
• The Master (Harold Saxon)
• Delgado Master
• Pratt Master
• Beavers Master
• Pratt of Beavers Master
• Ainley Master
• Roberts Master
• Jacobi Master
• Simm Master

These should all cover the movement for old users, as well as making navigation for new users easy. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 23:06, July 15, 2012 (UTC)

Given how many links it has, Harold Saxon on its own should probably count too. (As well as variants Mr. Saxon and Mr Saxon, unless Aliases of the Master is a more proper target?) -- Tybort (talk page) 23:28, July 15, 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure I readily see the point to our "made up" dabs, like The Master (UNIT years). That's not something anyone other than the frequent user of this site would even think to use. And if we go to the simpler actor identification redirects, like Delgado Master or Master (Delgado), then we can easily replace all the instances of The Master (UNIT years).

In other words, we needn't remain wedded to names that were never really that satisfactory anyway.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">17:49: Mon 16 Jul 2012 

Yeah, I see your point. But old users returning to the site may get confused if we don't redirect those. If we do the actor's route, we should call them [[[actor] Master]], not [[Master ([actor])]], because the former is more common among people. Or maybe we shoud do both?OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 19:39, July 16, 2012 (UTC)

I don't think there is an elegant solution, but it feels as if Master (actor) is better than the other way, with links all which ways.Boblipton ^{talk to me} 20:22, July 16, 2012 (UTC)

Okay that's fair.

Can I start moving info from the individual Master pages to his home one? I'd be a lot of fun, and I'd love to do it before we delete them. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 20:24, July 16, 2012 (UTC)

Generally, when one asks for a question, one waits for an answer. :) In this case, I'm temporarily locking the Master to prevent moving so that we can settle the redirect issue first. This will allow for a bit of a smoother transition, technically.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">21:46: Mon 16 Jul 2012