Forum:When can we create "The Impossible Astronaut" page?

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Spoilers are strongly policed here.
If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.

I've been away for a while and basically want to know the details of creating a page now so...

When can we create "The Impossible Astronaut" page?? Michael Downey 17:45, April 10, 2011 (UTC)

Don't hold me to this but I think that the policy is to create the Admin-protected "skeleton page" one week before broadcast. --Revan\Talk 15:37, April 11, 2011 (UTC)

Is there anyone who can show me where to access that information please? Michael Downey 17:32, April 11, 2011 (UTC)

The Spolier policy has some information but no time scale as to when we create the page. Give it a few more days, maybe friday and I will create the page and protect it myself. --Revan\Talk 17:58, April 11, 2011 (UTC)

Our spoiler policy is a little more specific than you're making out, Revan.

Stories that have been confirmed, but have not been broadcast, are routinely created with their basic layout and infobox, and then fully protected to prevent further edits until the stories have been broadcast or releasedtardis:spoiler policy

Okay, there's not an exact date there as to when the article can be created by an admin. That date doesn't need any specificity because the article is created as a locked article. But there is an exact date as to when it can be opened to editing. That doesn't happen until the credits roll on the first broadcast wherever in the world has the debut. In other words, The Impossible Astronaut will be open to editing at approximately 8pm British Summer Time, 23 April 2011.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">18:49:46 Mon 11 Apr 2011 

Can we decide a time/date when the page should be created and locked? I think, personally it should be two weeks before. -- Michael Downey 18:55, April 11, 2011 (UTC)

Two weeks sounds good to me for the first episode of a series, then one week for each following episode in the series. --Revan\Talk 19:02, April 11, 2011 (UTC)

I can see that 2 weeks prior to the start would be beneficial from a linking / page creation POV as that's often when we start getting editors doing the "Story name (episode)/(Doctor Who)/story" and variations on that theme.

A week prior also seems to make sense for subsequent episodes. --Tangerineduel / talk 14:36, April 12, 2011 (UTC)

Can we put that in place then? and create The Impossible Astonaut page? -- Michael Downey 14:39, April 12, 2011 (UTC)

In a word, Michael, no.

I strongly disagree with creating the article prior to air date. We got bitten hard last series on both The Vampires of Venice and The Pandorica Opens. Starting both of these articles prior to watching the episodes forced us to go back and do a lot of "busywork editing" on the wiki, as people had begun to link to what turned out to be the wrong article names. We have to remember that not only is it exceedingly easy to change the name of an episode just prior to broadcast (as happened with Vampires), spoiler policy is not the only thing we're concerned about. Spoiler policy actually intersects with disambiguation policy, because we need to know whether the name of the episode describes a DWU item within the episode. The only way we can know that for sure is to — wait for it — watch the episode. That's how we got burned on The Pandorica Opens, which turned out — in a surprise predicted by precisely nobody — to be the name of a painting within the DWU. Thus we had to go back and change all the pre-broadcast links to The Pandorica Opens to The Pandorica Opens (TV story).

Now, I don't know about you, but that kind of editing, even with a bot, is not what I want to do on this site. I'd much rather wait until after broadcast to create the article correctly than to create it wrongly a week out and have to go back and fix things.

So I'm in favor of keeping creation of The Impossible Astronaut locked up until about 8pm BST on 23 April — given the current policies that are in force on this wiki.

The other option, it seems to me, is something for which I've long argued on this site. We could change the disambiguation policy so that either:

1. TV stories always had the disambiguation (TV story) (i.e. they — and all stores — got a consistent nomenclature. Thus short stories would always have (short story) appended, comic stories would always have (comic story), etc.)
2. TV stories never had the disambiguation (TV story) [i.e., they get priority over in-universe items of the same name)

Of the two options, I prefer the first, even though it involves the most bot work, because it means that there would be less need to disambiguate in-universe items. That would be preferable, because if you allow people to just start disambiguating pages how they want to, you force a choice between The Pandorica Opens (painting), The Pandorica Opens (van Gogh painting), The Pandorica Opens (art) — or, worse, A Christmas Carol (novella), A Christmas Carol (novel), A Christmas Carol (short story), A Christmas Carol (Dickens story).

I'm perfectly prepared to allow for the fact that the situation with The Vampires of Venice was highly unusual. It hasn't happened often at all that names given to us by official sources just a couple of weeks out were actually changed on transmission. But it has often happened that the name of an episode turned out to be the name of something within the episode. If we changed disambiguation policy such that every story was automatically disambiguated, we'd take this issue completely off the table. In fact, it would help with a lot of coding issues if story names had the same consistent disambig. If TV stories were always (TV story), parser functions, bot scripts, and regex expressions would all be massively simpler to write.

So I'm totally willing (and, at last, able) to make that kinda switch happen. However, I don't have the time to do it as far as The Impossible Astronaut is concerned. And I might not have time to do it for the first half of the series. But could it be up and running for the autumn "season"? Absolutely.

Thus it would be possible for us to have this "create-but-lock-one-or-two-weeks-ahead-of-transmission" thing that you guys are talking about by autumn, if and only if people agree to change disambiguation policy in the manner I've described above. But for right now, I'd argue for not starting articles prior to the date of first transmission.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">15:12:49 Tue 12 Apr 2011