Forum:Subpage proposals: TV only & "Wikipedia style" subpages

Index → The Panopticon → Subpage proposals: TV only & "Wikipedia style" subpages

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

Opening post

So as it stands now, Tardis.wiki has been forked from our FANDOM counterpart for several months. Since then, edits on both sides of the divide have continued, with the FANDOM site sadly becoming sponsored by none other than Disney. This has given that site an official, branded stamp of approval and will supposedly involve the creation of pages at the behest of the DW team.

While others might disagree, I think the most important goal we can strive towards at this time is creating a version of Tardis Wiki more likely to be enjoyed by general readers than the FANDOM counterpart. I’ve had this on my mind recently.

As much as it pains to say, the biggest issue with Tardis Wiki, going back long before the fork, is that the site is arguably written for *editors* more than *readers*. Our site has intricate rules and an obsession with decades of forum precedent. We have invented a categorization of content that we prioritize over academic terminology. Sometimes, a page will have passages explaining a story's “Validity” longer than the discussion of content, for instance.

As much as it pains me to say, validating things like a random Iris story or LEGO Dimensions isn’t likely to sway any readers to visit our site instead of FANDOM. With all this in mind, I would like to propose two new subpages which have been on my mind for ages. Both of these would exist with the explicit intention of giving alternative options to readers who want something different.

Wikipedia subpages

Now, I apologize that I do not have a better way to describe this concept. We would never make a page like Tenth Doctor/Wikipedia. But I am using this term because I feel it quickly explains what I’ve been thinking of. We can squabble over the proper term later.

A lot of people who visit fan Wikis do so looking for basic information about characters and concepts - and sometimes, having every important page exist only in-universe is a deterrent to that goal. A lot of people prefer a basic page stating “This character first appeared in 1971’s Terror of the Autons”, rather than some roleplaying guide treating you like a DWU character.

In this regard, there is great potential we can contribute here which Wikipedia does not capture. Following T:BOUND to an OOU extent means we can answer more complex questions than just when this character appeared on TV. We can cover topics like... When did Jo Grant first appear in comics? When did she start showing up in Big Finish? How has the writing on the character evolved since the 1970s?

These are questions hard to tackle when you cover stories from 1971, 1994, and 2024 in the same paragraph. This will also make it much easier to answer basic questions about other niche topics - for instance, a real-world page on The Beatles could jump to The Chase, if you’ll excuse the pun, and start talking about the band’s connection to the franchise.

It just happens that a lot of fans who search for a Tardis Wiki page on The Beatles don’t want a page giving every detail possible about the band’s “in-universe” career. They don’t want to hear “Oh this short story confirms the band is from Liverpool!” “This audio story confirms they used to have five members.” “Well this BBV story confirms they went to Germany for a bit.” All the average reader wants a discussion on when the band was featured in the Doctor Who franchise, which we can easily give users without making a mess of things.

This will have many practical uses. For instance, a while ago I got curious when DW first used the term “Type 40.” So I went to our page, only to see that we presented An Unearthly Child as the defacto "origin" of this idea. Having a page that gives an alternate telling of the history of lore like this is a great idea for making the site more multifaceted. It can allow us to present retcons as story elements with their own history, without having to cram that info into a short behind-the-scenes section.

In a sense, that’s what this page would really be. An extended version of the non-fiction section of Behind-the-scenes sections. Perhaps then, the best subpage would be /non-fiction, allowing for things like Jo Grant/Non-fiction, or something like that. In the long term, this could potentially mean that some Behind-the-scenes sections could be “expanded” into subpages, feeding into our long-term goal of shortening our longest pages.

The only issue this brings up is the fact that you could argue that we might consider renaming the “Behind the scenes” section to something else - as by this logic, it’s a little odd that /non-valid and /non-fiction are contained at the same “oou” part of the page.

TV only pages

As I go into this, I will admit that this will likely be the biggest change to site policy suggested in some years, but I feel very strongly about this.

If we want to compete with FANDOM and create a site that DW fans of all types can enjoy, we should consider creating a space that only includes material broadcast on television.

In the simpler age of Tardis Wiki, covering all mediums of Doctor Who storytelling under one umbrella was a lot easier. It was naturally fun when the Fourth Doctor’s page briefly described every adventure he had, in TV, comics and prose! (With one or two audio stories of course.)

But as more stories have been released and our site’s scope has expanded, the innocence of this mission has become muffled and divisive. We now extensively cover spin-offs to spin-offs to spin-offs. Characters introduced in Doctor Who Magazine have their appearances in Marvel Comics covered without pause. This now means that pages like Iron Man have more extensive coverage of Arno Stark as a real man than they do of Tony being fictional in the DWU!

I don’t think this is “wrong” per se. It’s the natural process of following our own rules to an extent that is fun for editors. But I think it’s a completely valid criticism that some readers are frustrated to find Tardis Wiki doesn’t prioritize Doctor Who when covering certain topics.

So my solution is simple - we maintain the mainspace as it is, but we create a new subpage for televised-only coverage. Thus, fans who want simple and precise coverage of every time Rose Tyler appears on TV won’t be turned away by the extensive and unironic coverage we give to almost EVERY piece of media that Rose has appeared in since 2005. Alongside this, people who want hyper-precise, detailed coverage of topics - keeping in mind all content released by the Faction Paradox, Marvel Comics, Big Finish, BBV, and Candy Jar - can still have their fun in the mainspace.

(I will note that my vision is for this subpage to blindly include all valid stories that use TV as a prefix. This would mean that all spin-offs including K9 would be grandfathered in - as would stuff like Disney Time, Dimensions in Time and the like. People who want these to be non-valid would have to make a forum that would simply apply to both the mainspace and the TV subpage. I will note that in many cases, subpages like Alistair Gryffen/Televised would be obviously redundant.)

In the end, I think this would be the absolute best way to truly compete with the FANDOM-hosted site, as these two subpages would make Tardis.Wiki the ultimate home for Doctor Who content in both the main franchise and the expanded mythos. OttselSpy25 ☎ 22:42, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Discussion

BTS discussion

I think that the creation of "/Behind the scenes" subpages for various characters and concepts would be amazing, and a great way to improve the area in which the wiki is most greatly lacking: real world coverage. It'd be absolutely marvelous, as in-universe coverage can only take you so far, and it'd be a great incentive for filling out bts information on character development and the like, which is generally really very interesting but the wiki is completely lacking in. Of course we can do this in the ordinary "behind the scenes" section, but a proper full article thing on it just means that we can go a bit more for it, and I think it's more centralised than something that's at the very bottom of an article. All in all, I think it's a great idea.

Regarding section names, if we are to go with a different name from "/Behind the scenes" I do think all the rest of the section titles should be named for consistency. (Also, I think all instances of "In non-valid sources" should be changed to h2s, as they're not written from an oou perspective any more, but not sure whether that's within the scope of the forum). Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 23:10, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

I'd like to reference Forum:Archives of the original Panopticon here. More to come, but to my mind I think this is key reading for this discussion. I also think that a change like this will need very strong reasons, given that this is literally the first decision made on the wiki forums ever, and is as T:BOUND as T:BOUND gets. Especially since the decision, interestingly for one of the earlier ones, wasn't totally arbitrary, and actually gave reasons. Not that they're comparable to what we use today, surely, but still. (I note that even saying this I'm not altogether against the idea, provided it's implemented properly. But it would have to be done so very carefully. Again, more to come.) Najawin ☎ 23:20, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Well, it functions as merely an extension of the current Behind the scenes sections, so it's not the most radical thing ever. Well, it is, but, uh, it's not going to be particularly disastrous to implement. Could you outline the arguments against out-of universe pages please Najawin, I can only see arguments for in-universe pages assuming there's a binary. Josiah Rowe says (and I'm paraphrasing here) "behind the scenes sections should be sufficient for out of universe material", but the wiki in 2005 was a very very different place from the wiki in 2024, and, well, it doesn't really seem sufficient. Our out-of universe coverage is ridiculously bad, and I think that this would be a great way to bolster it a bit. Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 23:33, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) I very much agree with having BTS subpages, I feel that they'd help to explain the topic more efficiently without demolishing our current in-universe sections (for example, crossover characters like Lady Penelope could have a subpage detailing her franchise of origin, how she's been referenced in mainline stories, etc.). Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 23:35, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

(Oh, and I also think the "In non-valid sources" sections should be their own thing, probably above "Behind the scenes") Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 23:37, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Firm support for making a Behind the Scenes section a (loose) requirement for most pages (or at least for things that span multiple appearances). Then following the new subpages precedent it should only get split off when it is large enough to sustain its own page. Realistically these section will probably be quite small for a lot of pages so I'm not sure they'd work "standalone" per-se. To look at another wiki, such a section is a requirement on Wookieepedia for any reviewed article. I wrote one on Henry Gordon Jago a while ago mainly just to test the waters - I think it works quite well for spin-off characters where it can be hard to track their evolution from a real-world POV. Guyus24 ☎ 23:45, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

What I mentioned in that thread are the reasons given for why the main POV used is the main POV used. Not reasons specifically against OOU pages per se, because, well, we have those. For actors and such. But reasons were given for the POV being primarily IU. Najawin ☎ 23:49, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

I strongly support out of universe subpages.

A while back, I wanted to know how prominent Radagast the Brown was in the original Hobbit book; upon going to his page on the LotR Wiki, which is written from an in-universe perspective much like this Wiki, the question was not really answered at all. I then sent over to Wikipedia where this information was presented to me in the first sentence.

I have, for a while, wanted to introduce out of universe leads to articles — see User:Epsilon/OOU leads for my attempts at this — but a full out of universe article would give so much room for detail. You can sure bet I'd be creating out of universe subpages.

However, some things are worth considering, like how we would format these articles, if everything needs to be cited like it is on Wikipedia, and with templates such as {{Infobox Individual}} — this template should be updated with lots of new out of universe fields for creator(s), copyright holders, debut years, etc.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

23:47, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Okay. Here's the longer, more in depth approach. If we do this, my suggestion for the page name is that we go with something like Out-Of-Universe or Real-World-View than BTS or Wikipedia. I am strongly against making this a requirement for new pages that concern entities that appear multiple times, for a reason I'll explain in just a bit. But if we're to do this, I think two immediate questions come up, and they're questions that have been raised, perhaps inadvertently, in the two times I've found that people have hinted towards this idea before.

The first: what are the pages that merit these subpages? When we discussed OOU ledes this is the immediate concern User:Tangerineduel had. I do not believe simply saying "any recurring entity" is sufficient to address this problem, for at least one obvious reason. There is no Earth/Appearances. And, indeed, there was a specific discussion to not make such a page. I simply don't believe it would be possible to write a /OOU page for Earth. Nor do I think it's at all feasible to suggest that every minor character that appears in two stories in a box set but doesn't appear outside that box set should have an /OOU section.

The second is the manner in which these subpages should be written. It's very easy to think of some articles for which there's no controversy, where we can easily write an OOU description of how they interact with the DWU without any large disagreements. But I can think of a few where there's very obviously going to be... Difficulties. Czech didn't quite seem to mean this at Talk:Eighth Doctor/Archive 1, but this is the conclusion I've come to here. Czech seems to be arguing that the only way in which an Eighth Doctor article can avoid being biased is to be written from an OOU perspective, as opposed to an IU one, but I come to precisely the opposite conclusion. The Wilderness Years had so much production drama, that has been so well documented, that any OOU discussion of characters that were prominent during that time will need to be incredibly careful, it's like walking through a minefield of bias. (A similar issue emerges with the most recent era, but much of that is rumor, so is much harder to cite for a wiki. You could fairly easily write a hit piece using sources that are wiki-citable re: Wilderness Years stuff.) And this doesn't even get into the concerns we'd have about using real world information to describe the entities on their OOU subpages that either fails to be supported by or outright contradicts the DWU. (Dan the plasterer, anyone?)

If we're gonna do this, we need to be very, very careful, and have very clear guidelines. Najawin ☎ 01:39, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

I think it would be very easy to have a real-world / BTS section (again note I'm only in favour of putting them on a subpage when they've outgrown the 'parent' page) for Earth. It would not just be a Wikipedia-like entry but an overview of how Earth relates to the DWU - you could write about the early historicals, the Third Doctor's exile on Earth, how the remainder of classic Who spent very little time on Earth, and how the revived series has spent a lot of time there. Obviously then it's a matter of how much should NPOV play into this with the non-TV stuff.

If you have a peek at Wook, quite a few of their BTS sections are like just a sentence long, "[character name] first appeared in [story] and was played/voiced by [actor]". This page has a good one, which is pretty much just that sentence and then pointing out a contradiction. Again, not something that would sustain its own page.

For Epsilon's OOU lede for Muriel Frost, I think that would work pretty much 1:1 as a BTS section instead. I think having a different version of the bio rewritten OOU would have too much duplication, but that rewritten lede is a pretty comprehensive view of the character's evolution in a way that's probably more digestible. Guyus24 ☎ 04:16, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Obviously then it's a matter of how much should NPOV play into this with the non-TV stuff.

Well, yes, that would be the issue, wouldn't it. It's a rather large one. Najawin ☎ 04:41, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

(Also, I simply don't see what purpose these paired down, minimal, OOU sections serve that infoboxes don't. Again, my objection is to the idea that every recurring entity needs an OOU section. I just don't think this is true. Some seem perfectly well served by the status quo, because while they're recurring they're still so minor that there's simply no point, or some seem so complicated that it would be effectively a new page that would be near impossible to write.) Najawin ☎ 07:04, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

(For the record, I think Najawin makes many good points.)
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 15:36, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

There's just a lot of areas where I don't think this is thought out, and that lack of clear direction will cause issues. For instance, I think you'll get fans arguing over what sources are authoritative enough to be cited on certain pages, whether you're allowed to infer things at all from collections of sources, and what things follow from those inferences. (This already happens on pages for upcoming series when people argue over if you're allowed to make inferences about production blocs. I think the issue will be worse over controversial characters / plotlines. Things related to Thasmin come to mind. It's relatively easy enough to stop this from happening on IU pages because we have the Valid Sources rule, even if you occasionally get some weirdos trying to say the Cybermasters are the Hybrid, but on OOU versions of IU pages we're opening up many more types of sources that could be cited. Prominent pages could very easily become heavily contested and/or biased.)

Wikipedia articles sometimes have "reception" sections for character pages. Do we.... Want to do that? Forum:Story pages should have reception sections is the closest prior discussion here, I guess. I actually think critical analysis of stories can probably come back, and have thought about doing a thread for it eventually. But reception of characters is... a bit more of an issue. Even if we restrict it to major characters, ones that have clear enough receptions to write about I think this is a big can of worms. Once again, Thirteen comes to mind, as does Rose Noble. (Or even Meep, given that they were commented on by Andrew Tate.) I'm not saying "no" here. Just "we should really think this through".

And even if we solve the bias issue, I really want to reiterate that how much RWK we allow on the OOU descriptions of these things is a real problem. Obviously the NO RW thread hasn't resolved yet, but are we following NO RW in the same way on /OOU? If not, is that a license to just misrepresent how the entity is portrayed in the DWU? Because that can very easily happen. As a corollary, Big Finish promo pics. What would we do with them? I'd think that this subpage would be a natural place for them, but would we need to label them as simply being promo pics, and not appearing in a valid source?

And one further delineation I think is really necessary is to figure out just how OOU we're being here. Are we just writing facts about the IU concept from an OOU perspective? Because this is still a can of worms and hits every problem I mentioned above, imo. Or are we also elaborating on creative intent behind these OOU facts when we know it (eg, "Moffat stated that his impetus for creating the Weeping Angels was a statue in a cemetery"). I really want to underline that certain articles are problems either way, but if we're doing the latter they become much worse, and I don't think anyone here is even qualified to write them. (Buddhism, physics, technology, military, etc) Najawin ☎ 17:38, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Hang on, what BF promo pics? What do BF promo pics have to do with anything? The vast majority of them are quite valid now. I don't see how the small fraction for which we have no theory of coverage at present poses any kind of obvious crisis in relation to the idea of BTS subpages. Do you mean those pics of actors in recording booths and the like, which don't have any validity credentials? But those are so obviously BTS that I don't see what problem they would pose. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 21:49, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

I'm thinking of the distinction made at Forum:Temporary forums/Overhauling image policies.

• The suggestion to start using promotional images of characters willy-nilly in e.g. infoboxes is, however, rejected. It is an essential part of this Wiki's ethos that every in-universe element must be cited to a valid source, and that goes for images as well. To use a promotional image on in-universe pages, it must either be "lumped in" with a particular valid source it illustrates (as described in the two bullet-points above), or constitute a valid "(illustration)" in its own right as per the parameters set by Forum:Temporary forums/Non-narrative fiction and Rule 1 [Edited]. Which is the case of photographic promotional images sometimes, just not all the time. But fear not, archivists, because…
• …notwithstanding situations like that which arose at The Doctor (The Brain of Morbius) where the copyright-holders disapprove, we should still strive to keep a complete archive of official promotional images on the Wiki, even if they're not used on in-universe pages.

But perhaps my concern here is rather pedantic? IDK. Najawin ☎ 22:07, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Oh that. But that's really more about non-BF promo pics, such as those associated with the TV series itself, hence my confusion… And more to the point, /Gallery pages are the obvious page for these archives to exist. It's what the #Promotional_material sections are for! Even if we did introduce BTS subpages we wouldn't put them there. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 22:50, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

tbh, I'd think it's a natural place to put one? But it's very much so not the largest issue I mentioned here. So if nobody else has my intuition that's fine. Najawin ☎ 22:54, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

This proposal sounds decent enough, but I have just one question; would this mean anything that already has pages for both in and out of universe perspective (e.i. a page for a real world actor and a page for their fictional, in-universe counterpart) would be effectively merged? WaltK ☎ 19:24, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

I don't see why it would. William Hartnell (in-universe)/Behind the scenes (or some other subpage name) would be a discussion of the in-universe counterpart of William Hartnell from an out of universe perspective and I do not feel that this is the same as a discussion of the real William Hartnell.

In general, I support this proposal and would have proposed it myself in the future at some point. I plan to produce a draft of how I would write one of these pages to serve as an example to discuss. Bongo50 ☎ 17:00, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

Wow a lot of words in this discussion for a very common sense idea. My understanding is that the proposal is a Behind The Scenes subpage for pages with unwieldy Behind The Scenes sections. The same way we have an Appearances subpage for pages where that section gets unwieldy. If that understanding is correct then I do not understand any of the above controversy. This is obviously a good idea and I support it. WarDocFan12 ☎ 16:03, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

This is very clearly not correct, because what's being suggested includes things that current BTS sections don't currently do. Najawin ☎ 16:11, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Yes — to summarise the difference, the idea is for the BTS subpages to also give an overview of the character's role in their stories from a BTS point of view, similar to Wikipedia's character pages like this one. The specifics are, of course, controversial, but that's the basic gist. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 16:14, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

I was thinking about how we could use this as an excuse to give more in-depth documentation to behind the scenes connections to pieces of popular culture that only have in-universe pages. Which then made me wonder how would pages in "Real World Series with DWU connections" factor into this? WaltK ☎ 03:46, 24 May 2024 (UTC)

TV only discussion

I tentatively also support creating "Television only subpages", however I think covering all televised stories in these subpages would be deliberately obtuse and unhelpful and rather contra the spirit of the thing. Declension of what we should cover on these by medium is rather unhelpful, because that still means covering Curse of Fatal Death and various comedy skits, which are exactly the sort of thing that fans wanting a TV-only wiki don't particularly want. One might say "then how do we decide which TV stories to cover", and this is a valid argument, and I really don't want to say "we should base this policy on common sense yet subjective thingymabobs", but there we are, I am. (Oh dear, I probably shouldn't be writing this at this time of day, never mind.) Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 23:23, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

This is an interesting porposal, and of course a basic idea that's been mooted before many times. I think there's considerable practical issues with doing it with subpages, though — most off-the-record conversations in that area that I've seen have been about a Star Trek-style two-Wikis split, possibly implemented via a subdomain. (Though of course that would have its own issues.)

For one thing, what information is covered on which pages is sometimes informed by non-TV content. Dalek Prime covers both the "first Dalek" from Genesis of the Daleks and the Dalek Emperor from The Evil of the Daleks, as well as mentioning the accounts according to which the Dalek Emperor in the Last Great Time War (as seen in The Parting of the Ways) was that same Emperor. TV doesn't say that the Emperor isn't the First Dalek, but it never says that it is. On a Wiki that only covered television, these would be three different pages, none of them at "Dalek Prime". Dalek Prime/Televised, covering Genesis, Destination: Skaro, The Evil of the Daleks, and The Parting of the Ways, would be an absurdity. I'm not saying this problem is unsolvable, but it does need serious consideration.

The other problem — and it would apply equally to the subdomain idea — is the duplicated edit-load. Having the same content duplicated across pages opens us up to a buildup of errors and inconsistencies as errors are fixed, or statements updated, on one page but not the other. I don't know if there's a way around this problem (editable modules, maybe? but how widely would we have to use them? aaaah), but it would be a great boon to such a project if we could think of one. Without such a fix, I think we could equally dread the TV-only subpages becoming derelict because more editors want to edit the main-namespace versions, or the TV coverage in the main-namespace becoming subpar as TV-enthusiasts focus their efforts on those subpages.

After all… In a certain sense we tried something very like this once before, when we decided "FP-only subpages, in the form of keeping the FP Wiki to provide "FP-centric coverage" in parallel to FP becoming coverable on Tardis proper as well. And that, uhm, did not go well for the "FP-only pages" in the long or even medium term.

It's besides the practical point, but I also want to push back against the idea that the site is "arguably written more for editors than for readers", in that I think it's an insufficient dichotomy. I primarily write for neither: I write for accuracy and exhaustiveness. I don't cover obscure media because I think it's funny, or even because I like all those media (dear god, I would not have Wikified so many latter-day P.R.O.B.E. Case Files if that were the case) but because I genuinely value the long-term project of creating a complete, clear, unbiased encyclopaedia of the overall topic of the extended DWU, piece by piece. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 23:26, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

I feel like this idea has potential, although I do see the concern of editors not adding information to both - in an ideal world, with infinite storage and 100% up-to-date pages, I feel like this could be good in various cases (perhaps not all, though). Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 23:35, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Against, against, strongly against. Wildly against. It's a blatant violation of T:NPOV, as anyone can see. And NPOV is one of our oldest policies. See, once more, Forum:Archives of the original Panopticon as well as Forum:Let's Get Organised. "Some fans would like it, because they don't understand the interconnection between the show and other media and how impossible it is to draw lines between them" is not sufficient justification to overturn the T:BOUNDest of T:BOUNDest policies. Moreover, it doesn't even solve the issue you're raising, as it would do things like include Curse as TV still, which the median fan would find wildly counterintuitive. (And those fans that understand why we might include Curse but would prefer we don't include Faction Paradox are the sort that might prefer we include Big Finish, for instance. It's just impossible to do this properly, which is why we don't try.)

But, I understand the desire here, and I think it's somewhat reasonable. So here's what I suggest instead. User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon II has Thread:129501. Which comes up with an interesting idea. It references a GoT site that allows users to pick the books they've read and show spoilers / text based on that decision, suggesting that we do something similar on our site, allowing users to pick the media types they think are "canon" and hide statements that come from elsewhere. Now. This is implausible for us. Both because it would be very difficult to code and it would be impossible to write articles like that. (Especially if a sentence is sourced to two different mediums.) And so it was rejected out of hand. Quite rightly, at the time, I think. Czech details some of the reasons why this entire approach is so difficult in that thread. But I think a more limited approach here might be useful. I, for the life of me, can't remember who it was, or where it was, and so I apologize. I thought it was in F:FORK, but I can't find it there with a quick search. But if we color code media dabs, I think this will help solve the problem that people are concerned about, at least somewhat, without violating T:NPOV. Najawin ☎ 23:42, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Regarding T:BOUND and T:POINT of it al: nah, sorry, not seeing it. "Some people, in their ignorance, would like it" would be a bad reason, but "We have forked and need to drive up traffic" is a perfectly sensible one. I don't think the OP is in violation of T:POINT at all, and a non-T:POINT-violating OP is perfectly capable of overturning "current policy" based on new concerns or perspectives, making T:BOUND irrelevant to this discussion.

I don't understand what "colour-coding media dabs" is supposed to mean — did you mean to say media prefixes? But if so, I think that's… basically nothing? At best it would make it fractionally easier for some readers to spot which sentences are sourced to TV stories, but I think in terms of sating TV-focused readers' wishes it's in no meaningful way better than just the current prefix system. And it seems like a lot of coding bother in itself, when it comes to accounting for one more colour when devising colour schemes for a given theme-design.

I'm not particularly in favour of the TV subpages idea, insofar as I think the "Wikipedia-style" subpages, if done right, would be a much less confusing way of fulfilling the same goal. But your primary rationale against it, and your stated alternative, both seem quite weak. (The parenthetical at the end of your first paragraph seems like a very strong argument, though.) --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 00:10, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, prefixes. I changed that after copying it, but then there was an edit conflict, and forgot to change it again after pasting it. I don't think it would be a lot of coding at all. Seems a fairly easy change to the style sheet? "We have forked and need to drive up traffic and will do so by doing dumb things that are bad" is still, to me, a weak argument. Like, if we're to sacrifice the quality of our coverage and/or policies to drive up traffic there's all sorts of things we could do. That doesn't mean we should do them. They should be independently good or neutral. Najawin ☎ 00:18, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

To give another data point for Scrooge's objection, since I'm going through the stuff I have on file, see Talk:Interplanetary Mining Corporation. Najawin ☎ 00:29, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

I didn't say it was a good argument. Just that it's a sufficiently novel one to put the thread clear of a T:POINT violation. An argument might be completely novel and still completely wrong! --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 00:34, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Oh, I don't think it's a T:POINT violation. But I think there's a massive amount of logical/rhetorical inertia it has against it that it just hasn't made up. Najawin ☎ 00:36, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Not a fan of this. In general I think such a site should exist but it should be its own thing and not bolted on here. I don't think tardis.wiki necessarily should be the one-stop resource for Doctor Who, it should focus on the one thing and doing that well - namely being the all-encompassing in-universe encyclopedia. I think by trying to do everything then it runs the risk of not doing anything well. If the hardware gets to the point where running a tv-only wiki on a subdomain is possible then perhaps that will work, and we just link off to this main wiki when anything gets messy. It's in the same way that I don't think this site really should be trying to compete with Wikipedia either on the front of entire real-world POV articles - the two sites serve different purposes and I think that's fine. Guyus24 ☎ 00:48, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

I totally agree with Guyus24. The time and effort put into TV-only subpages would be better spent working on what the wiki already does. The appeal of TV-focussed pages on Doctors and companions would be greater coherency and less speculation on Doctor pages, and I think that there are ways to achieve that in our own house style. BTS subpages sound good tho, and could definitely fill parts of the niche that in-universe can't. TheChampionOfTime ☎ 13:00, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

I completely oppose this. From an editing point of view we're doubling up editing and keeping and maintaining edits in sync is going to be a nightmare. Having two versions is also going to suggest that one medium is more "valid" than another. Better that attention just be put into one page.

I also think some people will just contribute to these TV pages, so if the argument is that these pages serve as a source for new fans, then they should be written, and locked. So they're guides, rather than actively edited pages. Note, this is not me approving this suggestion, just a suggestion of how it might work. --Tangerineduel / talk 15:09, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

I am also very strongly against TV-only subpages, for the reasons outlined above.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 15:29, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

I agree with Guyus24. I'm primarily a TV-only fan, who sometimes dips into other media. As a reader, I enjoy how in-depth this Wiki goes (into all media). If for some reason I want TV-only information, I either skim-read here or (as I assume others may do) I visit other fanmade websites which have guides or different mediums broken into different sections of said websites. Doing that sort of thing here feels clumsy to me - for reasons outlined above - and I think it'd be hard to keep track of from an editing standpoint, and we'd be trying to spin too many plates. I know there are fans out there who joke about the Wiki being too in-depth, sometimes to the point of (in their view) insanity [I've heard people say things like "I checked the Wiki for something simple and ended up reading X Y Z and I either didn't care about it or I was utterly baffled"] but isn't that sort of what we do... we're an all-inclusive encyclopedia, covering as much as we physically can. Trying to then split such a Wiki so we have TV-only pages feels like more hassle than it's worth, especially with duplicated information, etc.

Sometimes I wish I could filter out information here so I could immediately find what I'm looking for, but I'm used to this Wiki and how expansive it is. If I need something quick, I have about 4 other Dr Who websites I visit where I can find it with ease. I know I won't be the only one. And that isn't a detriment to here either. As said above, we shouldn't try to be everything to everyone. Let's stick to what we do best, and keep focused. — Fractal • 20:51, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

I also strongly oppose TV-only subpages. I find myself agreeing with Fractal, in that I am primarily a TV-only fan, mostly because getting into Big Finish is expensive and the Wilderness Years novels are difficult to source at any reasonable prices (I recently bought Timewyrm: Genesys ^[+]Loading...["Timewyrm: Genesys (novel)"] for £20, and that was a surprisingly cheap listing), so a lot of my knowledge (and enjoyment) of the wider sphere of content has come from reading this wiki. I enjoy that this place is comprehensive almost to a fault. There are stronger arguments outlined above that I won't rehash, but I also tend to agree with. - CodeAndGin | 🗨 | 00:38, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

In theory, TV-only subpages might make the wiki more appealing to the general public. But in practice, they would be such a massive undertaking that I doubt they would be worth all the extra effort. BastianBalthazarBux ☎ 01:49, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

I strongly favor the idea of creating TV only versions of pages for the wiki. With a couple asterisks I will elaborate at the end.

Firstly some comments in support. Everyone take a look at Fandom’s Fourth Doctor page. Here is an archived version so you don’t give them clicks. What do you see. The Biography section is aggressively readable. All the infinite details are still there on a subpage. But it is very easy to get a sense for important information about the characters life such as the TV serials that started and ended his era. Compare ours at Fourth Doctor#Biography. Which will new fans pick? Or old fans who need a refresher? Fandom has the obvious obvious advantage over us in this so I do not understand why on earth we have not copied their approach here.

Even set aside reading issues. We have to deal with realities of the new site and the fact is that performance issues are super bad. I have a iPhone 15. Not some antiquated model. Using Safari I clicked to open the auto-collapsed “Biography” section on Fourth Doctor. It took more than 9 seconds to load. There was no loading indicator so at first I thought my tap hadn’t gone through! Then I tried to scroll and the page crashed. Wow. This seems like a disaster since mobile traffic makes up a wide majority of all internet traffic these days. A much shorter TV only page would not cause this problem.

Ok that was my support. Here are my asterisks.

1 I am not sure “TV only” is the right metric. I say this despite agreeing that it is nonsense to treat all sources equally. Yes all of us here are neurodivergent and it may be comforting to pretend we are brains in vats agnostically accepting inputs as pure data. But we are not brains in vats and there is no point in tying one hand behind our backs and refusing to a knowledge that there is a difference between Rose and The Hungry Night. Similarly it is also silly to pretend there is no difference between Under the Lake and Heaven Sent. So while TV only may be a convenient default rule of thumb. Making it a firm line is less agreeable (to me).

We already do this subpage and summarization approach for the physical appearance page section. We already do it for personality. In fact we already do it for biography through the overly long opening part of the page. Which is not what opening parts are for. Simply take that text and give it the proper source citations and make it biography section header. If it is TV only then it is TV only. If it is not then it is not.

2 I am not convinced that putting the TV only summary on subpages is the proper solution. The Fandom wiki does the opposite and that seems much better. Or the Guides idea could work I guess although it does not fix the other big big issue. Either way the page should clearly be locked as a simple fix to all the overstated worries above about duplicating efforts. And clearly there is no need to give this splitting treatment to a short page like Fifteenth Doctor yet. Too soon to tell.

I know there are plans to fix performance issues down the road if the technical admins find time and or money. And they have been very generous. But season 1 is HERE. Time has run out and we need to get real about the sites independent present. No offense but far too many of you have your heads stuck in the era of Fandom Buxx. Without a serious plan we will lose to Fandom so everything needs to be on the table. Simple as. Or this whole split was doomed from the start. WarDocFan12 ☎ 16:03, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

This seems like a lot of words in defence of a completely different proposal. "Shortened biography on the main page, featuring only the 'highlights', which are not necessarily TV-only but often will be" is a perfectly sensible proposition, and one which has been the subject of prior controversy; but it's very different from the idea of making a TV-only version of the overall page (also including such elements as "Physical appearance" etc., and presumably not abridging any of the TV-based info it does include). For what it's worth, the reason the proposal had been dismissed in the past is that it was feared there would be irresolvable controversies regarding what "counts" as "important". But it's a question we've been wanting to revisit for the many reasons you cite. This thread, though, is a different proposal, and I think a redux of that discussion should be its own thread, not grafted onto the TV-only-subpage proposal. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 16:10, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Scrooge is correct. See Forum:Temporary forums/Subpages 2.0. What you're suggesting we do is in blatant violation of policy, and, yes, the Fandom pages are in violation of policy as well, and come from one user deciding to violate policy regardless of what it actually is. Shambala said she wanted to get around to the issue at some point, but she's busy, don't know when she'll do it. As it stands, the biography sections on large character pages can, and should, be reduced, under current policy, though every story must still be represented to some extent, it's just a headache to do. Nobody has any issue with writing a shorter version of the bios than what currently exist, because they've gotten a bit long. Trimming out certain stories, or placing the primacy on certain mediums, that's where we run into issues. Najawin ☎ 16:21, 10 May 2024 (UTC)