Talk:Tales of the TARDIS

Dab?

Surely this page needs a dab to differentiate it from the multiple existing things under the same title? WaltK ☎ 18:39, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

No other subject exist under this title. Multiple subjects exist under the title Tales FROM the TARDIS. Similar title, but distinguishable from that one word being different. Danniesen ☎ 19:23, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

Well, it's not just a case of it currently being a subject with nothing to be disambiguated from, but future proofing too; I think it would be likely we could get Tales of the TARDIS (reference book) down the line...

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

20:10, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

Bi-generation

Since RTD's commentary on The Giggle revealed that the Tales of the TARDIS Doctors are the products of the Doctor's timeline splitting, shouldn't we create alternate pages for them as they're essentially from alternate universes? I feel like this franchise's timeline is confusing enough without feeling the need to condense information about characters from alternate timelines on one page. -- MattTheNerd42 ☎ 13:51, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

I don't think that's quite right; didn't RTD say it wsd his personal theory that previous Doctors have retroactively bi-generated? And even if he said that he actually, meaningfully intended for the past Doctors to have bi-generated, that doesn't necessarily mean that the TotT Doctors are the bi-generated Doctors.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

14:09, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Merger of TotT TV story pages

Merge tags have been put on Earthshock (TotT TV story), The Mind Robber (TotT TV story), Vengeance on Varos (TotT TV story), The Three Doctors (TotT TV story), The Time Meddler (TotT TV story). There is a small discussion of the merge on Talk: Earthshock (TotT TV story), but wanted to add something here as it covers multiple stories. The merge tag claims they're framing devices, rather than stories. However they have a larger existence than just being a framing device. If it was considered they needed consolidating and moving away from how they're named at the moment, a solution could be making them a subpage of this page. --Tangerineduel / talk 12:57, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

That'd be a nightmare for citations, though. Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 13:46, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

That is not how subpages should be used. We agreed through forums that subpage types should be applicable to many pages. Bongo50 ☎ 17:25, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, we should absolutely NOT be merging those pages into the series page itself. That’d be ridiculous, not least because if you take the Classic Who TV stories away, each Tale of the TARDIS is a story in its own right. Danniesen ☎ 18:20, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

I very much agree with merging them back into the parent article. There is no need for separate episode articles. Simply link them to a subsection of the primary initial serial. Aw21212121 ☎ 03:50, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

I don't, not sure what more to say. Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 07:48, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

I suppose we could have a story page as well as this, but that just feels... Wrong, not least because they're different stories. I suppose merging them into individual story pages could be an option, but they're by no means the same story as their counterparts. Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 09:01, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

It's the same story, just shortened, exactly the same as the recent release of The Daleks - same story, shortened. And in this case, with maybe a few minutes of extra footage. Is three to four minutes worthy of being called an entire episode? Aw21212121 ☎ 12:11, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

They're sort of entirely new productions, though. They're on iPlayer under their own section. They're produced as "Tales of the TARDIS", etc. In my view, they warrant their own separate pages. — Fractal Doctor @ 12:41, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Conclusion

This feels related to ongoing issues about how to cover information exclusive to the animated recons. However, until then, the current policy is I think best drawn from the precedents of The Dalek Tapes, The Daleks in Colour, and arguably Mission to the Unknown. Even if they incorporate a lot of "archive footage", these are new productions, marketed as such, and they include fictional information which is unique to the modern version and should be cited to the modern version.

Until/unless someone starts a formal, rigorous Forum thread about the broader issue, these pages should remain separate to better enable precise citation under {{cite source}}, as well as documentation of characters' appearances in the framing sequences: do we really want to just list the original The Three Doctors at Clyde Langer/Appearances? Come on. As I said, there is a bigger discussion to be had here, but this talk page is not the place to have such a massive and complex discussion, and out of the two "bad options" of separate pages that kind of overlap, and single pages which don't allow for precise citation or listing in LOAs, the need for precise citation and LOAs handily trumps the mild inconvenience of repeated information. Removing the merge tags. Please do not discuss this here again, or as a matter specific to Tales; any attempt to formulate a policy on "issues like this" should think carefully about the implications for all cases, i.e. anything from animated recons to something like Dalek Tapes to Blu-Ray special editions. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 14:03, 19 January 2024 (UTC)