Forum:Italics or Quotation marks?

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I think I may have asked this somewhere two years ago, but I don't remember the answer. How do we resolve the difference between TARDIS:Manual of Style#Capital letters#Italics#Series and episode names and TARDIS:Manual of Style#Citation#In-universe articles? One tells us "An Unearthly Child" is correct; the other, An Unearthly Child. It seems to me like serial names are far more commonly italicized, so should we make a move to delete that part of the MOS that says differently? I've got other thoughts about this subject, but let's get past the serial names first. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 09:04, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Ah...yes. This has been on my to fix list for some time. (It just comes from how this wiki started and how it developed and the changing styles as it all grew, bits of the manual of style based on various things here and there). I'll now fix it to state that story names are italicised. --Tangerineduel 13:25, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, I'd hasten to point out that it's not, strictly speaking, grammatically proper to italicize names of episodes or short fiction (like short stories and most comic stories). The solution given by the DW group at Wikipedia is that episode names — as dominates the new series, and is occasionally found in various BFAs) is to italicize serials, books, multi-episodic BFAs — and put everything else in quotes. This is a stylistic choice that confirms the general Wikipedia edict on text formatting, which is in turn a confirmation of standard English rules. I know we're not Wikipedia, and that we're at liberty to set our own conventions. But we do use the English language. I admit It'd be a pain to go back and convert everything, but it's "good English". CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 02:32, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

While not grammatically accurate (and while I would prefer to have everything mostly grammatically correct) it does follow continuously, through in and out of universe referencing. Anything in in-universe articles that is referenced is (prefix italics title /italics) out of universe mostly doesn't use the prefix. (We could do the reverse of the wikipedia MOS and put "Doctor Who" like this and have the story titles italicisd, or would that be going even further outside the grammatical shark net?)

Just to clarify you're not suggesting we go back through all 13,000 pages in and out of universe and change, for example DW: An Unearthly Child to DW: "An Unearthly Child" (someone I'd be totally opposed to) or are you suggesting just changing out-of-universe styling? --Tangerineduel 15:36, 25 April 2009 (UTC)