Forum:Colours identification and merge proposal
If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.
We have a Category:Colours on the whole it's fine for primary and secondary colours Red, Yellow, Blue, Orange, Green, Purple/Violet and even stuff like White, Pink, Brown etc.
But it's the ones that seem to veer off into odd specifics without any citation.
For example:
I'm proposing that because colour / its perception has nuances and personal perceptions we should merge and reduce these pages down to colours that are named in a T:VS.
Merging them down will provide I think a better resource of information without veering into personal perception. Also no information will be lost in this process, merely merged and integrated into other existing pages.
For an example where personal perception fails and VS picks up is Aquamarine which states
- Grace Holloway wore an aquamarine opera gown. (TV: Doctor Who)
That's not in the TVM's dialogue anywhere. However in the novelisation it describes Grace's dress as:
- the tight electric-blue ballgown she was wearing.
I've also written a policy that would be part of our Tardis:Naming conventions, see here for the policy. --Tangerineduel / talk 06:37, 12 June 2024 (UTC)
Discussion
See Talk:Olive (colour) for the earliest discussion I know of on this, over three years ago, all prompted by this one IP user. (It's very distinctly them, their edit summaries, when they care to write them, are always similar.) And, yes, forums have been down, and we've had other stuff to do. But just for reference as to how long this has been an issue people have been frustrated with. Jack, Nate, and OS12 had a discussion about what to do with them in late 2022, (largely present here and here), with no good solution. And more recent discussions are present at Talk:Wool, Talk:Herringbone, Talk:Peacoat and Forum:Loosening T:NO RW.
This last thread largely why people haven’t been trying to do anything, imo, since these pages are often in blatant violation of T:NO RW as written, and since the thread is open T:BOUND has been in effect. (I’m assuming it’s waived, given the OP of the thread. Scrooge also suggests in that thread that since these pages have gone on for 3 years under nu-T:BOUND they're kosher, but I'm unconvinced, due to the fact our forum systems were down and Talk:Olive (colour) explicitly puts the matter off because of this. This would be a catch-22.) Herringbone is perhaps one thing, though I'm less than confident that in-universe we know that they distinguish particular patterns in the same way that we do out-of-universe. But how do we know that they distinguish, idk, jackets in the same way we do? Maybe the reason something is called "X" is for different reasons than why we call it "X".
Regardless, I think the proposal here is a good first pass at a policy, but there are some areas where I think we could use some trimming up. Firstly, unless the valid source is a visual one that identifies that color, it is improper to say that other things we can see are that same color. Secondly, unless that same thing is true we should delete the color squares that are present on some of these pages. Thirdly, and perhaps most controversially, all of these pages should be locked to autoconfirmed users, as should the pages for various articles of clothing (including, for both, whatever is deleted). I actually appreciate, in principle, the IP user's efforts, but they often border on vandalism. They can learn our policies. Fourth, if we're preserving all this effort, there might still be disagreement on whether certain things should be, say, purple or blue, as opposed to when they were some new color in the middle. Since color perception is somewhat subjective, I don't see a clear way to resolve this. We might be forced to abandon information that doesn't fit neatly into the categories we end up picking. (Though the information may come back later if it's ever identified in a comic or on screen.) I think these will just be edge cases, and rare, but we should be up front about this. Najawin ☎ 16:59, 12 June 2024 (UTC)
- As long as we carefully apply {{conjecture}} tag, I can't say I'm worried about the question of whether "herringbone" etc. are in-universe names. I think it falls under the Talk:Hatbox thing, and while it's hard to word, it's one of the things I'm keenest to clarify in the long-delayed Forum:Loosening T:NO RW closing post — our Wiki is written in real-world English, not DWU-English. We don't need a DWU source for a specific word to use that word descriptively; when the Doctor makes an upward bouncing motion to avoid an obstacle while running, we can write "the Doctor jumped" even if there's no DWU source defining the verb "jumping" as such. In theory, the names of colours and patterns seem to me to fall squarely under that unspoken principle. We must not imply that "herringbone" is a word that's been used in the DWU, but it's fine to say "the Doctor's scarf had a herringbone pattern" in the samey way it's fine to say "Dalek bump were round". {{conjecture}} then allows us to call the page that (rather than Pattern (An Unearthly Child) or something) while clarifying that we're just using our own real-world term for this, not necessarily asserting that the word exists in the DWU.
- The subjectivity of specific hues is another matter, as it's not a RW problem but simply a problem of different interpretations/linguistic variants. To a point it's a universal issues. Going back to my "jumping" example, maybe not everyone would agree on where the line is exactly between a long stride and an actual running 'jump'. Disagreements just rarely come up. Still, the extremely fine-grained judgement calls the IP user has been making do give me pause. I am against fully collapsing our coverage into the primary colours — it seems important, for example, to have pages like TARDIS blue — but I agree something must be done. Not yet sure what. Tangerine's proposal of specifically forbidding the creation of \{{conjecture}}-named colour pages seems like it could do the trick, but maybe there's a less extreme solution. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 18:28, 12 June 2024 (UTC)
- I tend to agree with Najawin here on the hues; If character A wears a top that's roughly mustard yellow, and character B wears a top that's roughly pastel yellow, but no valid source names the colours of the tops, they should both be found on Yellow, and nowhere else. The patterns I agree with Scrooge. I mentioned in Talk:Peacoat that the structure of the articles is bizarre too, and while I've been doing some grammar passes while chasing after the IP editor's haphazard citation formatting, the wall-of-text-ness of some of the entries strikes me as odd and easily prunable without losing any relevant information. - CodeAndGin | 🗨 | 18:31, 12 June 2024 (UTC)
- I think it falls under the Talk:Hatbox thing, and while it's hard to word, it's one of the things I'm keenest to clarify in the long-delayed Forum:Loosening T:NO RW closing post — our Wiki is written in real-world English, not DWU-English. We don't need a DWU source for a specific word to use that word descriptively; when the Doctor makes an upward bouncing motion to avoid an obstacle while running, we can write "the Doctor jumped" even if there's no DWU source defining the verb "jumping" as such.
- Sorry, not buying these are the same thing. Entities and the things entities do are ontologically and linguistically distinct. (And, indeed, distinct in terms of the rules of this wiki!) If, ahem, someone, were to write a story that said "trenchcoats were any coat that, when worn, were less than two feet from the ground", it doesn't seem implausible to me that we should then apply that standard to other coats that are not, in the real world, trenchcoats in writing our articles. The DWU could quite easily define things in terms of length rather than style - length is just as much a natural kind as style is. And this is without getting into more tenuous cases like grue. Again, distinct patterns are one thing. Distinguishing between various types of a larger article of clothing are another, and I think you run into issues in how you make these choices. Najawin ☎ 19:03, 12 June 2024 (UTC)
- Not buying the relevance of the action/entity discussion here. To begin with, I also cited "Dalek bumps are round" as something we're allowed to say without a rigorous DWU definition of the term. (Okay, so that{'}}s an adjective… but I'd say the same thing for "Dalek bumps were sphere-shaped", or "circle shaped", or what have you. That's just a question of what sounds clunkier, and it would besides be bizarre to suggest that we're allowed to say something is "circular" without a DWU definition, but not that it's "shaped like a circule"!) We do have a policy stating we treat nouns differently from verbs, but that's only about what gets pages, not terminology, and moreover it isn't synonymous with an action/entity distinction; to cite something uncontroversial, regeneration is a "thing entities do", not an entity in itself. And Jumping is a page. Oh, and Someone™ could just as easily write that in the DWU the verb "jumping" only referred to hopping on one foot, and never two; that problem is in no way noun- or entity-specific, so I don't see how you could ground differing approaches there.
- What to do if and when we do get an explicit DWU definition of a word that conflicts with real-world English… that is a serious question, and one of the main ones I've been grappling with in the closing post. But, just as I plan to rule there, it seems insane to suggest that we can only use words (or even nouns) that have provably appeared in the DWU with those meanngs, for fear of dealing with such a situation in the future. Maybe no DWU source has yet given a definition for the word "green", and just maybe some gremlin will eventually publish one asserting that the word "green" refers to the colour of daffodils, gold coins and the Dalek Emperor. But it would, in my view, be ridiculous to say that we would have to wait for such confirmation before Raxacoricofallapatorian#Physiology is allowed to tell us what colour the Slitheen's skin was.
- In fact, even if we got a DWU source saying "green" was DWU!English for "yellow", and still had no explicit contravening sources defining "green" in the ordinary way, it would be user-hostile to start using the DWU word exclusively, and write about the Dalek Emperor's green casing and the green crystals in the Thirteenth Doctor's TARDIS. Even to the extent that DWU!English might differ from real-world English, it would (in my view) be a very great mistake to write the Wiki itself in DWU English. If we faced the situation I describe w. regards to the definition of "green", my proposal would be that we would continue to use the word "yellow" to talk about what colour things are, and only use the DWU "green" in ways specifically cited to the source asserting as much. Maybe we would create "Green (Story Title)", in the vein of "Mavity (term)":
- "Some accounts claimed that in the Doctor's universe, the word green was used to refer to yellow things, such as…".
- Outside of {{conjecture}} pages, we should stick to DWU terminology when it comes to what we call pages, because the general assumption is that a page name reflects a direct quote from a source. But I don't think we can reasonably hold ourselves to the idea of writing in a way that sticks to DWU terminology.
