Forum:TV Comic & other periodical issues
If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.
Opening post
Right, so a while ago, another user on this site went through various issues of TV Comic which featured Doctor Who-related content, and made pages for them. Admin CzechOut later decided that they didn't deserve pages due to not being released under the Doctor Who brand, and deleted the pages, redirecting them to a list of covers. Additionally, said list of covers only features the very top banners of these issues, with the article claiming that "Because of the lack of a need of Popeye content on this wiki, these galleries will mainly function to cover the top banner of the issue.". Personally, I quite strongly disagree. First off, in terms of a "lack of a need of Popeye content on this wiki"... we now have an overview for Popeye. And secondly, the full covers would allow the issues to be more easily identifiable (and be more in line with how issues of other periodicals are covered).
Additionally, the idea that the covers couldn't be featured on the site would also suggest that all non-Doctor Who-branded periodicals from TV Century 21 to BeanoMAX couldn't be properly illustrated either, at least for specific issues (although these do often advertise the DW content on their covers... but so does TV Comic!). Although the decision that TVC's issues couldn't have pages wasn't the result of a forum decision, I feel that a forum thread would allow this issue to be resolved if consensus is reached, as a single individual's choice generally cannot override forum consensus.
So, tl;dr, my proposal is as follows: any issue of a periodical which features licensed DWU content should be given a page, with its full cover shown (this may also apply to documentary-esque periodicals which could be useful for behind-the-scenes citation, but that's a separate issue). So, what are people's thoughts on this? Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 15:31, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
Discussion
Wholeheartedly agree with this opening post. Something a single admin decided years ago in a lost part of the Wiki without any input from other users, which not only doesn't hold up to current practise and, frankly, is therefore completely unenforceable under T:LOCAL RULES... we absolutely should official overturn this bizarre decision. Of course we should have pages on individual issues of magazines that contain DWU content; it's a step away from redirecting any anthology without DWU branding to the overall series page.
15:41, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
- Completely agree with everything here, we should totally have pages for individual issues of stuff featuring DWU content. Aquanafrahudy 📢 15:46, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
- It has always been my opinion that we should have pages on select issues not because they're DW material, but for pure navigational purposes. I, for instance, have recently bought a bunch of old issues of Marvel reprint publications. Because the wiki rarely has pages on these, I've often been forced to use the Marvel comic wiki. It's terrible. I hate the layout, I hate the search ability. I don't want to force our readers to use worse sites or even sites that don't exist (there is no TV Comic wiki).
- I will also explain, for those interested in being able to revisit historical debates, that the discussion I had with Czech happened in the defunct wiki chat window. Thusly, there is no historical debate to revisit. At the time I asked that we have a forum discussion before he delete everything but he insisted that there was no point as he was simply correct and it would be a waste of my time.
- I do think there is some kind of middle ground here. It is fair, in my opinion, that an editor on the Doctor Who Magazine has more of a right to have a full page on our website than the editor of BeanoMax issue one. So I think it's logical that we cover DWM more in the vein of "every collaborator to this publication deserves a page unless they don't want one", but that we still have navigational pages documenting reprint history and the like, otherwise the entire point of having reprint information documented in infoboxes is moot.
- I will say that the TV Comic banner thing was my choice. I was very weary about uploading full pages of comics to the wiki, due to the fair use argument, and thus I chose to crop the issues. I don't truly care much if we keep this choice, but I always felt the most important part was always the banner. OS25🤙☎️ 16:02, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
- Gonna surprise everyone and agree with OS25 twice over. I'm not thrilled with Czech unilaterally dictating policy, I think this is a fundamental mistake, and I think the fair use argument for portraying an entire comic strip is probably quite weak. The first row of the strip might be sufficient for identification purposes, or perhaps the entire thing with a blur attached below the banner. I dunno off hand. But the full comic is probably not the way to go. Najawin ☎ 16:35, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
- To be honest I doubt any copyright issues will arise over a cover-that-contains-a-comic from fifty years ago, especially as these covers are elsewhere on the internet and the people hosting them don't have issues. If we, in the unlikely situation where the copyright holders did object, blurring/redacting out parts of the cover would be my preference over cropping covers. 16:42, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
- (Edit conflict)
- Huh, I hadn't realised entire comics were shown on the cover (I'd assumed the cover story somehow continued inside). I mean, really it's their fault for putting an entire comic on the front cover of their magazine - just walking through a store at the time, you'd probably see the entire comic clearly on display. I'd personally still prefer to have the whole thing, but if people think that would run too large a risk, I guess some kind of compromise could work... Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 16:44, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
Do I think they care? No. Do I think that we should be wary of this given both ToU and the fact that if they suddenly do decide they care I'm pretty sure we instantly fail three of the four factors of fair use? (I think harm to market would be hard to show.) Yes. Najawin ☎ 17:17, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
- Yeah, I think we should play it safe in regard to the covers. Beyond that, I agree with what everyone else has already said, it was wrong for Czech to make a decision like that all on their own. These magazine issues should get pages. Time God Eon ☎ 01:02, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
- As regards the full-comic-on-the-first-page issue, may I suggest that we simply upload at a low enough resolution that the comic isn't legible? That's how I've known a number of online resources to do it — the INDUCKS database of Disney comics, for example, gives a thumbnail of the first page of any given comic (including one-pagers), but the page as a whole is too small to make out any dialogue, while a single panel is extracted in higher resolution as a fair-use preview. See here, for example. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 13:26, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
- Well, we could do both. The low-res full covers in the infobox on the issue pages, and the high-res cropped banners at TV Comic/Gallery, for example? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 12:48, 21 September 2023 (UTC)
