Forum:The Master - 1 article

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This is a revisit of Forum:The Master, where the discussion had reached a conclusion but we hadn't quite gotten to an action point, so I thought I revisit was in order to get this settled and done.

But as we've recently had another instance of a user creating another Master article I felt we needed to revisit this again and get a decision.

As was surmised in 2008 and again during our Talk:The Master#Main image and the template discussion concerning the image for the article there are fewer Master incarnations than we think.

I'm still in favour of rolling all the articles back into 1 main article. I think this would help with clarity and editing and stop people from trying to create extra Master articles. --Tangerineduel / talk 16:41, November 15, 2011 (UTC)

Swiftly seconded.

The Master is unlike other Time Lords in that we don't have narrative names for the various incarnations. And the names we've chosen are completely random. There's not an easy way to make the character obey T:ONE NAME, the relevant policy, because it requires the use of the first story in which the character appeared. This disambiguation would be highly ambiguous for the Master, since The Master (Utopia), The Master (Doctor Who), and The Master (Keeper of Traken) all refer to more than one incarnation.

Thus, as a purely disambiguational question, I think the single most sensible thing to do is to put it all on one page.

Your still left, however, with finding a way to talk about the character. There are times where you're going to want to specify a particular incarnation, so redirects will inevitably be created to particular parts of the article. So you still need some name you can call these guys that makes sense. I think we could "pull a T:ROMANA" and slightly fudge our in-universe-only name rule. To me, the easiest thing to do would be to:

Put all the info on The Master
Create redirects to sections of The Master

These redirects should use common-sense names, in the same way that we have Romana I and Romana II, despite the lack of narrative evidence for those names. Obviously we can't use numbers for the the various Masters, but we can just use the actor or company name.

So you'd end up with the following redirects:

The Master (Delgado)
The Master (Ainley)
The Master (BFA)
The Master (DWM)
The Master (Roberts)
The Master (Jacobi) (and since Shalka isn't in canon, this isn't, practically, ambiguous)
The Master (Simm)

That way, you have a naming system that makes some kind of sense, but you can easily hide the out-of-universe nomenclature. Being redirects, no pages will ever bear these actors' names, but editors and readers can use a system that's far more straightforward than what we have.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 18:23: Tue 15 Nov 2011

Alrighty. I think the simplest way is do all this is to copy and integrate the information from the various articles into the one Master article.

I don't think it's practical to try and merge the histories of the various articles. It is possible to do (I think), it would involve merging two and two and so on. I think it's doable, but it would leave us with a long and fairly convoluted history for the Master article because all the the 7 Master articles' histories would end up merged. --Tangerineduel / talk 17:01, November 29, 2011 (UTC)

Added by Sinefirt

The Master (Koschei)|Hughes: The Master (Koschei)
The Master (UNIT years)|Delgado/Pratt/Beevers: The Master (Original)
The Master (Tremas)|Ainley: The Master (Tremas)
The Master (First Frontier)|Rathbone: The Master (Virgin)
The Master (Dust Breeding)|Beevers: The Master (Big Finish)
The Master (Bruce)|Roberts/The Master (The Fallen)|Glory: The Master (Morphant)
The Master (Yana)|Jacobi: The Master (Yana)
The Master (Harold Saxon)|Simms: The Master (Saxon)

Well, some of the above have issues: We can't call The Master (Bruce) as The Master (Morphant), because another story calls it a Deathworm. (see Talk:The Master (Bruce)) we should call the Unit years one Original, for it could be confused with the Koschei one. It may be a bit weird sounding, but I might suggest The Master (Thirteenth life), or maybe even Thirteenth Master... I dont think we should call a first master's page The Master (Koschei), because The Master (UNIT years) also went by this title. I do support the creation of a page for the original Master, though. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 00:40, January 10, 2012 (UTC)

Reminder[[edit source]]

By way of reminder, we do have agreement dating back to 2010 to put all the Master pages onto a single page called "the Master". This discussion was merely started to figure out how to do the redirects. Since we've gone a long while without implementation, I just wanted to give people a week from the following time stamp to put forward any new ideas about this process before it's done. Two years is long enough to linger on a decision, people.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 21:39: Sun 15 Jul 2012

Alright. I think these should be redirects to The Master's main page:

Koschei
The Master (UNIT years)
The Master (Tersurus)
The Master (Tremas)
The Master (First Frontier)
The Master (Dust Breeding)
The Master (Bruce)
The Master (The Fallen)
The Master (Morphant)
The Master (Yana)
The Master (Harold Saxon)
Delgado Master
Pratt Master
Beavers Master
Pratt of Beavers Master
Ainley Master
Roberts Master
Jacobi Master
Simm Master

These should all cover the movement for old users, as well as making navigation for new users easy. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 23:06, July 15, 2012 (UTC)

Given how many links it has, Harold Saxon on its own should probably count too. (As well as variants Mr. Saxon and Mr Saxon, unless Aliases of the Master is a more proper target?) -- Tybort (talk page) 23:28, July 15, 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure I readily see the point to our "made up" dabs, like The Master (UNIT years). That's not something anyone other than the frequent user of this site would even think to use. And if we go to the simpler actor identification redirects, like Delgado Master or Master (Delgado), then we can easily replace all the instances of The Master (UNIT years).

In other words, we needn't remain wedded to names that were never really that satisfactory anyway.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 17:49: Mon 16 Jul 2012

Yeah, I see your point. But old users returning to the site may get confused if we don't redirect those. If we do the actor's route, we should call them [[[actor] Master]], not [[Master ([actor])]], because the former is more common among people. Or maybe we shoud do both?OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 19:39, July 16, 2012 (UTC)

I don't think there is an elegant solution, but it feels as if Master (actor) is better than the other way, with links all which ways.Boblipton ^{talk to me} 20:22, July 16, 2012 (UTC)

Okay that's fair.

Can I start moving info from the individual Master pages to his home one? I'd be a lot of fun, and I'd love to do it before we delete them. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 20:24, July 16, 2012 (UTC)

Generally, when one asks a question, one waits for an answer. :) In this case, I'm temporarily locking the Master to prevent moving so that we can settle the redirect issue first. This will allow for a bit of a smoother transition, technically. I've got no particular objection to you being the one to do the knitting together, but please do it on a sandbox first, while we wait for a few more respondents to this thread.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 21:46: Mon 16 Jul 2012

[Edit conflict?]

I think, OS25, you proceed from the false assumption that long term editors will be terribly confused by this move. If it were one article being split into many, they probably would be. But the reverse? I don't think they will be. I dunno, though — others may join in your opinion, so I hope we get more feedback here.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 21:52: Mon 16 Jul 2012

Oh, okay, Sorry, I though that the plots being added to the page would not matter, sense those should have been added anyways. Where do I find this "Sandbox?" OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 21:53, July 16, 2012 (UTC)

The one question I have for...anyone...is the pages' histories.

I can merge them, but as there's 9 pages it means we'd end up with a very long and somewhat convoluted page history.

Page history we're always talking about for a wiki important. But with 9 histories to incorporate it's going make the history very long and potentially unusable.

I just wanted to know if we wanted all the histories merged or not? --Tangerineduel / talk 07:14, July 21, 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I think this is perhaps the one instance where preserving the page history might do more harm than good. Cause what it's going to do, I'm pretty sure, put a revision of The Master next to a revision of The Master (UNIT years), so long as those revisions are done within the same span of time. Given all the user:CzechBot-ery around, it will be a mess. We'll end up with a whole string of CzechBot edits really close together, all with the same revision notes. It'll be beyond unhelpful.

I'm definitely for losing the history of the other pages.

I'm also kind of in favor of deleting the Master altogether, and then restarting the page as a new page. This will keep the history available for admin to see if they really want to, but otherwise "restart" the page.

It seems to me that we're fundamentally rewriting the page so a fresh beginning may be in order. It will also remove the temptation some users might have for reverting to an earlier state of the article. If we restart entirely, people won't be able to revert the page to a point prior to when we combined it all.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 22:39: Sat 21 Jul 2012

With regard to the page histories, I think if we just note on the talk page that the various Master pages will continue to exist as redirects and their page histories still exist so they can be checked if need be that's enough page history wise.

I'm not sure though about deleting the Master article. We are continuing the development of the article, and I had the thought that we were adding and expanding the article with the other articles' information rather than wiping it all out and beginning again.

The Master article has a layout to it that we can expand and broaden detail on, so I don't think deleting and beginning again with a clean slate would be the best way to go.

I acknowledge that we may be open to some reverts of the page, but I think that's just something we have to deal with. Keep it admin locked while it's being worked on and the layout and redirects get in place and then we can stagger the unlock from admin to registered user and then much later along unlock it for IP editors. We can keep all the redirects admin locked so no one tries to recreate The Master (UNIT years) or whatever. --Tangerineduel / talk 12:34, July 22, 2012 (UTC)

Just to confirm — yes, we're merely integrating the various Master articles into one article. That is, from a certain point of view, "starting over", however, so a deletion and recreation wouldn't be out of order philosophically. If you want to live with the possibility of reversion to an earlier state, though, I certainly won't oppose that. Restarting would simply be a way of keeping the previous form of the article under admin control, much in the same way you're suggesting we lock the redirects.

I am, however, completely opposed to retaining the current article names as redirects. It's not a convincing argument that we need to keep the redirects so in order to keep the page histories. Obviously, the page histories remain even if the page is deleted. Sure, not everyone has access to those histories, but they're still there in the event that a user at some theoretical point gets curious about them.

But we absolutely should delete the redirects. Not only will this make cleanup easier — by forcing The Master (UNIT years) onto the Special:WantedPages list — but there's no point to this exercise if we're just going to keep these crazy Tardis-invented names around. I want them gone. Links to specific sections of the article can be effected by a simple template that will be created allowing people to type {{Delgado}}, {{Ainley}}, {{Roberts}}, {{Jacobi}}, {{Simm}} or whatever, that will then redirect to the appropriate section but present only the Master as a link.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 14:57: Tue 24 Jul 2012

There's going to be a lot of cleanup on Forum:Timeline - The Master I gather. Also, how do we deal with pipe switching to "he regenerates into The Master (Harold Saxon)|this incarnation" like on List of causes of regeneration?

And would {{Master stories}} remain more-or-less as is, or would the different "incarnations" be simplified into DWU and non-DWU? -- Tybort (talk page) 15:33, July 24, 2012 (UTC)

Well, yanno what I'm gonna say bout Forum:Timeline - The Master, right? It's a forum thread and therefore need not be considered when working on this problem.

I take your point, however, that there might be a need to discuss one "incarnation" in the context of another one. The solution would be an optional variable on these proposed templates, which would leave the naming up to the individual editor. So you could type:

The {{Delgado|last of the Master's natural incarnations}} stole the body of Tremas to become {{Ainley|a unique combination of Time Lord and Trakenite}}. Easy.

I haven't even thought of {{Master stories}}, as it's not really relevant to this discussion. Navboxes are a law unto themselves. Not saying it shouldn't be discussed. Just saying it's a separate issue. I don't immediately see why it would need to be changed, however — except that we'd need to do relinkage on the particular version's name.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 22:35: Tue 24 Jul 2012

I agree with CzechOut regarding the Timeline pages. They're an interesting distraction, but they're not a reason for us not to do something that's going to overall help the wiki function.

It's not really about reverting to an earlier state, it's more about knowing easily what came before, sometimes people want to be able to trace back information and how it all came together over a series of edits.

I'm neither for nor against deleting the pages rather than leaving them as redirects, their histories are important, but on balance they're not so important that they should remain and mess up the efficiency of the search function.

I think {{Master stories}} could remain more or less as it is. --Tangerineduel / talk 14:56, July 27, 2012 (UTC)

I never meant it as a reason to not merge the Master pages. I was talking about after the merger's finished as a reminder to whoever looks over those pages. -- Tybort (talk page) 15:32, July 27, 2012 (UTC)

So, is it absolutely required that we need relevant redirects to the section headers before we go through? Or am I misreading the debate here? The article's been locked in preparation for the move since July... -- Tybort (talk page) 02:47, September 1, 2012 (UTC)

Okay, yes, time to turn our attention back to this issue. User:OttselSpy25 had wanted to take a crack at the rewrite, so he was labouring away for a while. His rewrite has now been moved to The Master/Rewrite for people to continue to edit while we continue to debate this whole question of redirects.

Yes, I do think it important to settle the redirect questions, and to do all the necessary bot work, before we open up the article proper again. But you're right, Tybort, this has been in limbo way too long. Therefore people have until 8 September 2012 to propose alternatives, or we go with the template idea I proposed above. I think we've waited long enough on this issue; somewhere between 8 and 15 September:

individual incarnation pages will be gone
links to individual incarnations will be repurposed as links to sections of the Master
the Master/Rewrite will become the Master.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  00:01: Sun 02 Sep 2012

...it's the 20th now. Have things just got too busy or something? -- Tybort (talk page) 18:10, September 20, 2012 (UTC)

I'm just making sure people have no cause to bitch when the guillotine comes crashing down. So am I taking you're passing on the opportunity to add your fixes to The Master/Rewrite?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  23:01: Thu 20 Sep 2012

I think we all did 5 days ago. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 23:20, September 20, 2012 (UTC)

I think not, actually. Tybort, TroopDude and Shambala have all taken at least one swipe at the article since the 15th. Some good work is being done in the rewrites. I'll get to the actual change sometime in the coming week, but as long as work is being done on the /Rewrite version of the article, time's not being wasted.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  00:43: Fri 21 Sep 2012

Closing[[edit source]]

Having allowed more than ample time for the proposal of alternate plans — and hearing none — I'm now completing my final review of The Master/Rewrite to ensure we don't lose any information that is a part of the sub articles. The Master/Rewrite is now locked to ensure that I'm looking at a "constant" version while conducting the review.

Link changeover will begin as I delete each of the previous articles. The current link — e.g. The Master (UNIT years) — will be replaced by a template involving (mostly) the actor's last name — as in, {{Delgado}}. This will produce a link to the Master#Nemesis of the Third Doctor but will look like the Master. If you need the "the" to be capitalised, you'll type {{Delgado|c}} and it'll be rendered "The Master".
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  20:36: Fri 16 Nov 2012

Arrgggh. Wikia are reporting something in this week's bug reports that has a direct impact on this project. If you link two two different sections of a target article in the current article, then the links render to only one of the sections. So let's say I'm on the article Earth and I'm talking about the number of times the Master has been on Earth. I'm gonna inevitably link to {{Delgado}}, {{Ainley}}, {{Roberts}} and {{Simm}}. But because of this bug, all of those links are going to point to the section of the Master having to do with the Delgado Master. Which means this concept won't work right now. It's on their to-do list, but for the moment, we're going to have to put this project on hold even longer. There's just no method of guaranteeing a valid section of a section of the Master. I'll let you know when we can proceed.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  01:28: Sat 17 Nov 2012

Don't suppose there's anyway to force a double redirect to pass through, that way we could link out to 4 separate pages that link back the different sections of the page? --Tangerineduel / talk 04:16, November 17, 2012 (UTC)

Actually, it just took some time talkin' to folks to figure out precisely what the bug was so that we could devise a way around it. Good people like 452, Acer4666 and Mathmagician have figured out a more precise definition of the problem, and thereby delivered a solution. The trick is apparently just to make the link text different than the base page name. So you can't do

[[the Master#sectionname|the Master]]

because the base and link text are both "the Master". But you can do

[[the Master#sectionname|the&nbsp;Master]]

which makes the base "the Master" and the link text "the Master". A subtle but key difference. The project is back on!
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  16:18: Sat 17 Nov 2012

The only problem I see is that some editors might try to edit the "&nbsp" stuff as junk; is there some way to avoid that happening?

Anyway, the page looks great so far, and I really like the "making sense of the 90s" box you put in there. Shambala108 ☎ 16:13, November 20, 2012 (UTC)

Work finished[[edit source]]

The work of Forum:The Master and this thread is now finally over. The removal of links to the individual incarnations' pages proved more tedious than I had envisioned, but from this point forward, individual incarnations are to be linked via the following templates:

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this discussion, or who helped to rewrite the Master over the last three years.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  01:19: Tue 11 Dec 2012