Talk:The Wedding of River Song (TV story)

Keep calm and stay focused.

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OK to create?

Granted there won't be much of an infobox, but seeing as the BBC already has the preview up and that it's here already shouldn't the episode page be up as well? Or are we just waiting for 1) the actual showing or 2) an admin to create it?– The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.235.235.5 (talk • contribs) .

Well, generally the page is created on the day of broadcast as there really isn't a need for it to exist except as a skeleton, ready to have some meat chucked on it. However, nothing seems set in stone and, as you can see, the page has been created.--Skittles the hog - talk 13:10, September 26, 2011 (UTC)

I vaguely recall during the first part of this season the pages being posted as a skeleton with the BBC synopsis and any Cited Rumors, but I saw that those now fall under Spoilers 167.142.212.235 20:42, September 30, 2011 (UTC)

Just to amplify Skittles' point, there is, under our current policies, zero need to create a story page prior to first broadcast. While The Wedding of River Song was briefly created, it was swiftly deleted. So long as we have a policy whereby story names can be un-disambiguated unless a DWU topic of the same name exists, we'll have to wait to see each episode to verify whether the episode title names a thing in the DWU. For instance, no one knew that The Pandorica Opens was actually a painting, until that episode was aired. Because we had the story page already created at The Pandorica Opens, we had to move it to The Pandorica Opens (TV story), in order to allow The Pandorica Opens to be the place for the painting.

If we had a more sensible disambiguation policy, which simply said that all story names had to be disambiguated by media type, this wouldn't be an issue, and we could create story pages much earlier. In other words, we could force TV story pages to be created as Episode (TV story), but allow redirects of the format Episode (so long as Episode wasn't a topic in the DWU). If we did this, story titles would be predictable, instead of the current hodgepodge. Under the current policy, some are like Castrovalva (TV story) and some are like An Unearthly Child.

It's no exaggeration to say that you need a scorecard to remember how the story pages are titled. Now, you might not think so if you only consider television. Long term editors, at least, tend to have memorised which TV story titles are disambiguated and which aren't. I don't think it makes too much immediate sense to newer editors, but people still have a pretty good chance of having seen the episodes in question. The situation is much worse with other media, however. I'm constantly finding articles which need to be disambiguated because the people who started the article hadn't actually read or heard the story, so they had no idea that — to take an example from yesterday's bot work — Red is a thing in the DWU, which is the focus of Red (audio story).

When you look at the entirety of the story titling chore on this wiki, the need for automatic disambiguation is much more profound. And it needn't change the way we write articles. People think that if we go to an all-disambiguated format that we're going to increase the number of keystrokes necessary to refer to a story. But that absolutely needn't be so. For instance, we'd formally change the name of An Unearthly Child to An Unearthly Child (TV story). But you'd still be able to link to An Unearthly Child, because the act of moving would leave a redirect behind. This proposed system would in fact be no different to the current system, except in terms of what appeared on top of story pages.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">15:19: Sat 01 Oct 2011 

By the way, if you're frustrated by how we've handled this page's creation, and would like to change how we handle all this, please go to Forum:Story names should be automatically disambiguated and vote to change the disambiguation policy.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">16:18: Sat 01 Oct 2011 

Lock page please

Could whoever has the power please lock this page for only registered users to edit, as someone keeps vandalising it.