Forum:Alternate vs. alternative timelines

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In the thread Alternative timeline individuals, a side issue came up about whether the Whoniverse has "alternate timelines" or "alternative timelines".

Our main article on the topic is Alternate timeline; Alternative timeline is a redirect to that page, and the word "alternative" doesn't appear anywhere in the text. However, there are other articles on the wiki that use the word "alternative". I'm not sure which is more common, but that doesn't seem too important.

CzechOut's argued that (at least according to one reference book), "alternative" is the more common UK usage for this sense, and I believe he's right.

However, I think there's a much better way to decide in this case: which is more commonly used in the Whoniverse? I can't begin to guess off the top of my head, but I do have most of the subtitles for the new series, dozens of subtitles for the classic series, and dozens of fully-scanned novels and samples of other novels that I can grep through when I get home. (I'm not putting forth TV and novels as more important than comics and audios, just a lot easier to search.) --70.36.140.19 08:06, September 18, 2011 (UTC)

I'm afraid this is an issue like Artifacts or Artefacts of Rassilon? or K9. Truth is, you're going to find it sometimes one way in DWU fiction, and sometimes another. As I said in the thread that spawned this one, we just need to make a brute-force decision, one way or the other. The reason we need to do this is because it's important, from a purely technical standpoint, that all articles having to do with the subject of "alternative realities" use a consistent spelling of the word. Otherwise, it makes it hard for:

1. Bots
2. DPL calls
3. Humans trying to use a search bar

Any seraches which begin with "alternative" will obviously miss any categories or titles beginning with "alternate". This isn't a case where necessarily one way is right and the other is clearly wrong. It's more a case of just deciding something so that searches can reliably be made on one term or the other. In other words, this is a "librarian's debate", not on that has much traction beyond those who care about structure. The only reason I'm leaning towards alternative' is because more categories are already using that word. Yes, it's likely to have more traction in British usage. But since alternate is perfectly understandable by Britons, and you can find such usage in the DWU, one could argue that alternate is the most universally comprehensible word to use.

Again, it makes me no never mind, except that we need to decide on something as the preferred term for page and category titles.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">01:47: Mon 19 Sep 2011