Forum:Subpage proposals: TV only & "Wikipedia style" subpages
If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.
Opening post
So as it stands now, Tardis.wiki has been forked from our FANDOM counterpart for several months. Since then, edits on both sides of the divide have continued, with the FANDOM site sadly becoming sponsored by none other than Disney. This has given that site an official, branded stamp of approval and will supposedly involve the creation of pages at the behest of the DW team.
While others might disagree, I think the most important goal we can strive towards at this time is creating a version of Tardis Wiki more likely to be enjoyed by general readers than the FANDOM counterpart. I’ve had this on my mind recently.
As much as it pains to say, the biggest issue with Tardis Wiki, going back long before the fork, is that the site is arguably written for *editors* more than *readers*. Our site has intricate rules and an obsession with decades of forum precedent. We have invented a categorization of content that we prioritize over academic terminology. Sometimes, a page will have passages explaining a story's “Validity” longer than the discussion of content, for instance.
As much as it pains me to say, validating things like a random Iris story or LEGO Dimensions isn’t likely to sway any readers to visit our site instead of FANDOM. With all this in mind, I would like to propose two new subpages which have been on my mind for ages. Both of these would exist with the explicit intention of giving alternative options to readers who want something different.
Wikipedia subpages
Now, I apologize that I do not have a better way to describe this concept. We would never make a page like Tenth Doctor/Wikipedia. But I am using this term because I feel it quickly explains what I’ve been thinking of. We can squabble over the proper term later.
A lot of people who visit fan Wikis do so looking for basic information about characters and concepts - and sometimes, having every important page exist only in-universe is a deterrent to that goal. A lot of people prefer a basic page stating “This character first appeared in 1971’s Terror of the Autons”, rather than some roleplaying guide treating you like a DWU character.
In this regard, there is great potential we can contribute here which Wikipedia does not capture. Following T:BOUND to an OOU extent means we can answer more complex questions than just when this character appeared on TV. We can cover topics like... When did Jo Grant first appear in comics? When did she start showing up in Big Finish? How has the writing on the character evolved since the 1970s?
These are questions hard to tackle when you cover stories from 1971, 1994, and 2024 in the same paragraph. This will also make it much easier to answer basic questions about other niche topics - for instance, a real-world page on The Beatles could jump to The Chase, if you’ll excuse the pun, and start talking about the band’s connection to the franchise.
It just happens that a lot of fans who search for a Tardis Wiki page on The Beatles don’t want a page giving every detail possible about the band’s “in-universe” career. They don’t want to hear “Oh this short story confirms the band is from Liverpool!” “This audio story confirms they used to have five members.” “Well this BBV story confirms they went to Germany for a bit.” All the average reader wants a discussion on when the band was featured in the Doctor Who franchise, which we can easily give users without making a mess of things.
This will have many practical uses. For instance, a while ago I got curious when DW first used the term “Type 40.” So I went to our page, only to see that we presented An Unearthly Child as the defacto "origin" of this idea. Having a page that gives an alternate telling of the history of lore like this is a great idea for making the site more multifaceted. It can allow us to present retcons as story elements with their own history, without having to cram that info into a short behind-the-scenes section.
In a sense, that’s what this page would really be. An extended version of the non-fiction section of Behind-the-scenes sections. Perhaps then, the best subpage would be /non-fiction, allowing for things like Jo Grant/Non-fiction, or something like that. In the long term, this could potentially mean that some Behind-the-scenes sections could be “expanded” into subpages, feeding into our long-term goal of shortening our longest pages.
The only issue this brings up is the fact that you could argue that we might consider renaming the “Behind the scenes” section to something else - as by this logic, it’s a little odd that /non-valid and /non-fiction are contained at the same “oou” part of the page.
TV only pages
As I go into this, I will admit that this will likely be the biggest change to site policy suggested in some years, but I feel very strongly about this.
If we want to compete with FANDOM and create a site that DW fans of all types can enjoy, we should consider creating a space that only includes material broadcast on television.
In the simpler age of Tardis Wiki, covering all mediums of Doctor Who storytelling under one umbrella was a lot easier. It was naturally fun when the Fourth Doctor’s page briefly described every adventure he had, in TV, comics and prose! (With one or two audio stories of course.)
But as more stories have been released and our site’s scope has expanded, the innocence of this mission has become muffled and divisive. We now extensively cover spin-offs to spin-offs to spin-offs. Characters introduced in Doctor Who Magazine have their appearances in Marvel Comics covered without pause. This now means that pages like Iron Man have more extensive coverage of Arno Stark as a real man than they do of Tony being fictional in the DWU!
I don’t think this is “wrong” per se. It’s the natural process of following our own rules to an extent that is fun for editors. But I think it’s a completely valid criticism that some readers are frustrated to find Tardis Wiki doesn’t prioritize Doctor Who when covering certain topics.
So my solution is simple - we maintain the mainspace as it is, but we create a new subpage for televised-only coverage. Thus, fans who want simple and precise coverage of every time Rose Tyler appears on TV won’t be turned away by the extensive and unironic coverage we give to almost EVERY piece of media that Rose has appeared in since 2005. Alongside this, people who want hyper-precise, detailed coverage of topics - keeping in mind all content released by the Faction Paradox, Marvel Comics, Big Finish, BBV, and Candy Jar - can still have their fun in the mainspace.
(I will note that my vision is for this subpage to blindly include all valid stories that use TV as a prefix. This would mean that all spin-offs including K9 would be grandfathered in - as would stuff like Disney Time, Dimensions in Time and the like. People who want these to be non-valid would have to make a forum that would simply apply to both the mainspace and the TV subpage. I will note that in many cases, subpages like Alistair Gryffen/Televised would be obviously redundant.)
In the end, I think this would be the absolute best way to truly compete with the FANDOM-hosted site, as these two subpages would make Tardis.Wiki the ultimate home for Doctor Who content in both the main franchise and the expanded mythos. OttselSpy25 ☎ 22:42, 5 May 2024 (UTC)
Discussion
BTS discussion
I think that the creation of "/Behind the scenes" subpages for various characters and concepts would be amazing, and a great way to improve the area in which the wiki is most greatly lacking: real world coverage. It'd be absolutely marvelous, as in-universe coverage can only take you so far, and it'd be a great incentive for filling out bts information on character development and the like, which is generally really very interesting but the wiki is completely lacking in. Of course we can do this in the ordinary "behind the scenes" section, but a proper full article thing on it just means that we can go a bit more for it, and I think it's more centralised than something that's at the very bottom of an article. All in all, I think it's a great idea.
Regarding section names, if we are to go with a different name from "/Behind the scenes" I do think all the rest of the section titles should be named for consistency. (Also, I think all instances of "In non-valid sources" should be changed to h2s, as they're not written from an oou perspective any more, but not sure whether that's within the scope of the forum). Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 23:10, 5 May 2024 (UTC)
- I'd like to reference Forum:Archives of the original Panopticon here. More to come, but to my mind I think this is key reading for this discussion. I also think that a change like this will need very strong reasons, given that this is literally the first decision made on the wiki forums ever, and is as T:BOUND as T:BOUND gets. Especially since the decision, interestingly for one of the earlier ones, wasn't totally arbitrary, and actually gave reasons. Not that they're comparable to what we use today, surely, but still. (I note that even saying this I'm not altogether against the idea, provided it's implemented properly. But it would have to be done so very carefully. Again, more to come.) Najawin ☎ 23:20, 5 May 2024 (UTC)
- Well, it functions as merely an extension of the current Behind the scenes sections, so it's not the most radical thing ever. Well, it is, but, uh, it's not going to be particularly disastrous to implement. Could you outline the arguments against out-of universe pages please Najawin, I can only see arguments for in-universe pages assuming there's a binary. Josiah Rowe says (and I'm paraphrasing here) "behind the scenes sections should be sufficient for out of universe material", but the wiki in 2005 was a very very different place from the wiki in 2024, and, well, it doesn't really seem sufficient. Our out-of universe coverage is ridiculously bad, and I think that this would be a great way to bolster it a bit. Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 23:33, 5 May 2024 (UTC)
- (Edit conflict) I very much agree with having BTS subpages, I feel that they'd help to explain the topic more efficiently without demolishing our current in-universe sections (for example, crossover characters like Lady Penelope could have a subpage detailing her franchise of origin, how she's been referenced in mainline stories, etc.). Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 23:35, 5 May 2024 (UTC)
TV only discussion
I tentatively also support creating "Television only subpages", however I think covering all televised stories in these subpages would be deliberately obtuse and unhelpful and rather contra the spirit of the thing. Declension of what we should cover on these by medium is rather unhelpful, because that still means covering Curse of Fatal Death and various comedy skits, which are exactly the sort of thing that fans wanting a TV-only wiki don't particularly want. One might say "then how do we decide which TV stories to cover", and this is a valid argument, and I really don't want to say "we should base this policy on common sense yet subjective thingymabobs", but there we are, I am. (Oh dear, I probably shouldn't be writing this at this time of day, never mind.) Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 23:23, 5 May 2024 (UTC)
- This is an interesting porposal, and of course a basic idea that's been mooted before many times. I think there's considerable practical issues with doing it with subpages, though — most off-the-record conversations in that area that I've seen have been about a Star Trek-style two-Wikis split, possibly implemented via a subdomain. (Though of course that would have its own issues.)
- For one thing, what information is covered on which pages is sometimes informed by non-TV content. Dalek Prime covers both the "first Dalek" from Genesis of the Daleks and the Dalek Emperor from The Evil of the Daleks, as well as mentioning the accounts according to which the Dalek Emperor in the Last Great Time War (as seen in The Parting of the Ways) was that same Emperor. TV doesn't say that the Emperor isn't the First Dalek, but it never says that it is. On a Wiki that only covered television, these would be three different pages, none of them at "Dalek Prime". Dalek Prime/Televised, covering Genesis, Destination: Skaro, The Evil of the Daleks, and The Parting of the Ways, would be an absurdity. I'm not saying this problem is unsolvable, but it does need serious consideration.
- The other problem — and it would apply equally to the subdomain idea — is the duplicated edit-load. Having the same content duplicated across pages opens us up to a buildup of errors and inconsistencies as errors are fixed, or statements updated, on one page but not the other. I don't know if there's a way around this problem (editable modules, maybe? but how widely would we have to use them? aaaah), but it would be a great boon to such a project if we could think of one. Without such a fix, I think we could equally dread the TV-only subpages becoming derelict because more editors want to edit the main-namespace versions, or the TV coverage in the main-namespace becoming subpar as TV-enthusiasts focus their efforts on those subpages.
- After all… In a certain sense we tried something very like this once before, when we decided "FP-only subpages, in the form of keeping the FP Wiki to provide "FP-centric coverage" in parallel to FP becoming coverable on Tardis proper as well. And that, uhm, did not go well for the "FP-only pages" in the long or even medium term.
- It's besides the practical point, but I also want to push back against the idea that the site is "arguably written more for editors than for readers", in that I think it's an insufficient dichotomy. I primarily write for neither: I write for accuracy and exhaustiveness. I don't cover obscure media because I think it's funny, or even because I like all those media (dear god, I would not have Wikified so many latter-day P.R.O.B.E. Case Files if that were the case) but because I genuinely value the long-term project of creating a complete, clear, unbiased encyclopaedia of the overall topic of the extended DWU, piece by piece. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 23:26, 5 May 2024 (UTC)
- I feel like this idea has potential, although I do see the concern of editors not adding information to both - in an ideal world, with infinite storage and 100% up-to-date pages, I feel like this could be good in various cases (perhaps not all, though). Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 23:35, 5 May 2024 (UTC)
