Forum:What does it mean for a story to be released in its entirety?

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Okay, this sounds like a silly question, but bear with me. T:SPOIL says that

A spoiler is any information — in-universe or behind-the-scenes — coming from a story which has not yet been officially released in its entirety(notwithstanding multi-part stories with days-long gaps between the release of their constituent installments).

Back in the day this was held by some to apply even to page creation/opening a page to editing, and the following statement was made

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. -User:CzechOut

However, as The Star Beast began in the UK, the entire video was uploaded to Disney+. I could watch any part of the story at a whim, skipping immediately to the credits before the actual title sequence. (And, indeed, I used the "preview" function to scan ahead in the story as I watched to see if a certain leak was true. I had it guaranteed <2 minutes after the episode was uploaded.) It's tempting to suggest that we just ignore the nuances of this potentially going live earlier in some areas than the UK, but Forum:Implications of US premiere for our Torchwood Miracle Day coverage says we explicitly can't do that.

So the question becomes, was the entire episode released at this time? I... think so? The file is on a server, it's being sent out, if we say that youtube videos release at when they're uploaded rather than that time + runtime, I think we have to say that for this as well. But it's a weird situation. And if so, this means that as soon as the episode starts in the UK the page would be open for editing unless a change is made. Is this what we want? Does it matter? I dunno. But it's definitely worth discussing. Najawin ☎ 22:49, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

Aaah. Good question.

I'm inclined to say "it is released its entirety but we should maintain the one-hour-grace-period policy with different language to justify/explain it". The policy's good in itself, but insisting on an idiosyncratic definition of "released in its entirety" that wouldn't really make sense to an outsider is not a good idea. It's common for online spaces to have a "no spoilers about the just-released thing until [length of time] has elapsed" policy of some sort; this could be ours, no more or less.

But I'm interested to hear others' thought.Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 23:34, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

I agree that there should be some form of grace period, even just so that editor's policing recent changes (as I was doing during today's broadcast) and stuff aren't spoiled. Moreover, with episode pages being able to be created months in advance, this removes the need to rush in and get the page's foundations layed. There's a lot less that needs doing immediately after broadcast, and letting the full length of the episode pass feels most cortious to editor's who are watching the whole thing in order. Bongo50 ☎ 23:44, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

What if there's a 90 minute special? Is the grace period still one hour? Najawin ☎ 00:17, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

I think we should alwayz have a grace period of runtime, without pretending that the story hasn't been released until runtime ended. Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 06:08, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

Does this apply to all releases? If Big Finish uploads a narrative short that's five minutes long do we have to wait five minutes after upload time before we can make a page on it, the full runtime? If an audio is released do we have to add on the runtime after its release before we can make pages? What about books or comics? Those don't have runtimes. Is there a grace period with those? Skipping ahead on the Disney+ stream isn't fundamentally different in kind from reading other parts of the book first. It just so happens that the words are scrolling by at a fixed speed for people in the UK, in the metaphor. Najawin ☎ 06:30, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

(nb: take these comments as probing, trying to draw out distinctions, not as inherently against these things.) Najawin ☎ 06:31, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

With books and comics, the period of grace would have to be ridiculously large to account for shipping and ordering and all that. It's slightly different with TV episodes (and potentially BF audios, but I'm not actually sure whether they have a specific release time), where everybody gets them at the same time. Oh, and stuff that releases on BBC Sounds it would make sense to have the period of grace as well. Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 08:14, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm surprised T:OFF REL hasn't been cited yet. That policy basically covers everything relevant here, including the grace periods for different mediums. I was typing up a larger response but I hadn't realised quite how many nuances there were on top of the basic top/bottom of the hour rule. For now, though, I'll just note the closest specified example to Disney+:

Example three: Class episodes premiere on BBC Three at 1000 BST/UTC every Saturday morning. Even though they air on BBC One later on, the online release on BBC Three is the premiere broadcast. As episodes are 45 minutes long, articles about those episodes can be edited starting at 1100 on Saturday morning.

Substitute BBC Three for Disney+ and we have our current policy. Although, to be clear, I think we should still continue the discussion to see if we can improve it. The top/bottom of the hour rule was always a strange one to me; it's fine with the current time slots but episodes of yore sometimes remained off limits for 20-25 minutes after the end credits and I can recall a couple of occasions where admins explicitly disregarded that aspect of the policy. Borisashton ☎ 08:51, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

A grace period of the runtime seems like a good policy to me. While it is true that with streaming someone could skip to the end and make edits, I reckon those edits would probably be redone once people with more context came along, rendering them counterproductive. There are exceptions of course, such as credits that don't need context, but I honestly can't think of a single reason why it would be so important to add this info so quickly. Are people really that impatient that they would skip through the episode just so they can have first dibs on the wiki article? LauraBatham ☎

I think, in general, we have already have a bit of an unofficial precedent on the matter of how T:SPOIL should operate in the immediate aftermath of a release, just based on how we editors tend to act. To use a recent example in The Church on Ruby Road's novelisation, Epsilon used a grace-period of 90 minutes after its release on digital before editing the page with details. From a technical standpoint, the novelisation is released in its entirety at that point... and technically, anyone could jump to any page within said novelisation. This was also true of the midnight digital drop for, say, the Four From Doom's Day audiobook anthology. Nobody edited that one until early morning, but again - technically - it was released in entirety and could be 'skipped' to the end of the last story just like that.

Therefore, it seems uncontroversial that even with TV episodes being effectively released in their entirety at midnight on Disney+ (and presumably iPlayer; though we've actually no confirmation just yet that the iPlayer copy will be skippable-to-end...), just as they apparently were with the 60th Specials at TV broadcast time - that we should have some form of 'reasonable experience of entire source' grace period. I would say perhaps: 60 to 75 minutes after release on platforms for these upcoming episodes, based on length of episode. (60 minutes after for a 50 minute episode, 75 minutes after for a 60 minute episode.)

The real question to me is, actually, should we have some form of banner to cover the 18 hours between the official digital drop & the TV broadcast? Something to warn users that "This page contains spoiler details from a recent official release, that has occurred before the UK TV broadcast."? As we will no doubt have updates to series page, episode page and character pages during that time...

Of course, another thing we've yet to see any clarity on is what will happen with the official podcast and the commentary tracked versions of the episodes.

PS - @Aquanafrahudy, to answer that BF question, typically they drop audios around 9:30am. But as with the technicalities of 'Class episodes drop on iPlayer at 9am', there can be variance on exact timing. For Tonight We Might Die, I recall, actually went up at 8:47am.
JDPManjoume Regular Editor ☎ ✍ 15:18, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Getting this closed before the new series is probably a good idea, unless anyone else wants to argue for a longer buffer period. I just missed a policy. (And while I'm here, let me go ahead and say that I'll probably be able to write plot summaries for the upcoming season before people in the UK are likely to be awake if we don't change anything.) Najawin ☎ 08:26, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

Closing post

Deciding on this is strictly necessary, with the premiere coming around at the end of the week. Here's how it's going to work: based on the above discussion, and in the spirit intended by T:OFF-REL, a streaming-first TV story is considered to have been "fully released" once enough time has elapsed to allow viewers to watch it from start to finish, and editing will be open at the top or bottom of the hour once this condition is met, as usual.

In the unusual case of a double feature (both episodes released at the same time), this logic is extended so that we only begin counting for episode 2 once there's been enough time to watch the first episode.

Your viewing habits are yours to determine, but it is strictly forbidden to skip ahead to the end of episode 2 at 12:00 and use this to spoil story details for others. In the case of the current broadcast schedule, however, we will not be waiting for BBC One. The premiere for season 1 (Doctor Who 2023) instead takes place on BBC iPlayer and, simultaneously, Disney+.

T:OFF-REL will now be updated to reflect this discussion.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 15:52, 6 May 2024 (UTC)