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:
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

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:

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 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. I've got no particular objection to you being the one to do the knitting together, but please do it on a sandbox first, while we wait for a few more respondents to this thread.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">21:46: Mon 16 Jul 2012 

[Edit conflict?]

I think, OS25, you proceed from the false assumption that long term editors will be terribly confused by this move. If it were one article being split into many, they probably would be. But the reverse? I don't think they will be. I dunno, though — others may join in your opinion, so I hope we get more feedback here.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">21:52: Mon 16 Jul 2012 
Oh, okay, Sorry, I though that the plots being added to the page would not matter, sense those should have been added anyways. Where do I find this "Sandbox?" OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 21:53, July 16, 2012 (UTC)
The one question I have for...anyone...is the pages' histories.
I can merge them, but as there's 9 pages it means we'd end up with a very long and somewhat convoluted page history.
Page history we're always talking about for a wiki important. But with 9 histories to incorporate it's going make the history very long and potentially unusable.
I just wanted to know if we wanted all the histories merged or not? --Tangerineduel / talk 07:14, July 21, 2012 (UTC)
Yeah, I think this is perhaps the one instance where preserving the page history might do more harm than good. Cause what it's going to do, I'm pretty sure, put a revision of The Master next to a revision of The Master (UNIT years), so long as those revisions are done within the same span of time. Given all the user:CzechBot-ery around, it will be a mess. We'll end up with a whole string of CzechBot edits really close together, all with the same revision notes. It'll be beyond unhelpful.
I'm definitely for losing the history of the other pages.
I'm also kind of in favor of deleting the Master altogether, and then restarting the page as a new page. This will keep the history available for admin to see if they really want to, but otherwise "restart" the page.
It seems to me that we're fundamentally rewriting the page so a fresh beginning may be in order. It will also remove the temptation some users might have for reverting to an earlier state of the article. If we restart entirely, people won't be able to revert the page to a point prior to when we combined it all.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">22:39: Sat 21 Jul 2012 
With regard to the page histories, I think if we just note on the talk page that the various Master pages will continue to exist as redirects and their page histories still exist so they can be checked if need be that's enough page history wise.
I'm not sure though about deleting the Master article. We are continuing the development of the article, and I had the thought that we were adding and expanding the article with the other articles' information rather than wiping it all out and beginning again.
The Master article has a layout to it that we can expand and broaden detail on, so I don't think deleting and beginning again with a clean slate would be the best way to go.
I acknowledge that we may be open to some reverts of the page, but I think that's just something we have to deal with. Keep it admin locked while it's being worked on and the layout and redirects get in place and then we can stagger the unlock from admin to registered user and then much later along unlock it for IP editors. We can keep all the redirects admin locked so no one tries to recreate The Master (UNIT years) or whatever. --Tangerineduel / talk 12:34, July 22, 2012 (UTC)
Just to confirm — yes, we're merely integrating the various Master articles into one article. That is, from a certain point of view, "starting over", however, so a deletion and recreation wouldn't be out of order philosophically. If you want to live with the possibility of reversion to an earlier state, though, I certainly won't oppose that. Restarting would simply be a way of keeping the previous form of the article under admin control, much in the same way you're suggesting we lock the redirects.
I am, however, completely opposed to retaining the current article names as redirects. It's not a convincing argument that we need to keep the redirects so in order to keep the page histories. Obviously, the page histories remain even if the page is deleted. Sure, not everyone has access to those histories, but they're still there in the event that a user at some theoretical point gets curious about them.
But we absolutely should delete the redirects. Not only will this make cleanup easier — by forcing The Master (UNIT years) onto the Special:WantedPages list — but there's no point to this exercise if we're just going to keep these crazy Tardis-invented names around. I want them gone. Links to specific sections of the article can be effected by a simple template that will be created allowing people to type {{Delgado}}, {{Ainley}}, {{Roberts}}, {{Jacobi}}, {{Simm}}, {{Dust Breeding}} or whatever, that will then redirect to the appropriate section but present only the Master as a link.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">14:57: Tue 24 Jul 2012 
There's going to be a lot of cleanup on Forum:Timeline - The Master I gather. Also, how do we deal with pipe switching to "he regenerates into this incarnation" like on List of causes of regeneration?
And would {{Master stories}} remain more-or-less as is, or would the different "incarnations" be simplified into DWU and non-DWU? -- Tybort (talk page) 15:33, July 24, 2012 (UTC)
Well, yanno what I'm gonna say bout Forum:Timeline - The Master, right? It's a forum thread and therefore need not be considered when working on this problem.
I take your point, however, that there might be a need to discuss one "incarnation" in the context of another one. The solution would be an optional variable on these proposed templates, which would leave the naming up to the individual editor. So you could type:
The {{Delgado|last of the Master's natural incarnations}} stole the body of Tremas to become {{Ainley|a unique combination of Time Lord and Trakenite}}. Easy.
I haven't even thought of {{Master stories}}, as it's not really relevant to this discussion. Navboxes are a law unto themselves. Not saying it shouldn't be discussed. Just saying it's a separate issue. I don't immediately see why it would need to be changed, however — except that we'd need to do relinkage on the particular version's name.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">22:35: Tue 24 Jul 2012 
I agree with CzechOut regarding the Timeline pages. They're an interesting distraction, but they're not a reason for us not to do something that's going to overall help the wiki function.
It's not really about reverting to an earlier state, it's more about knowing easily what came before, sometimes people want to be able to trace back information and how it all came together over a series of edits.
I'm neither for nor against deleting the pages rather than leaving them as redirects, their histories are important, but on balance they're not so important that they should remain and mess up the efficiency of the search function.
I think {{Master stories}} could remain more or less as it is. --Tangerineduel / talk 14:56, July 27, 2012 (UTC)
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