Forum:Audio play, audio drama, audio story

Forums → Archive index → Panopticon archives → Audio play, audio drama, audio story

This thread has been archived.

Please create a new thread on the new forums if you want to talk about this topic some more.
Please DO NOT add to this discussion.

Original conversation

Big Finish generally refer to what they do (Doctor Who etc) wise as 'audio dramas', hence Big Finish Doctor Who Audio Dramas. Yet we've got the categories called Category:Audio plays, and then we have stories disambigged as Telos (audio story) and Zagreus (audio story).

I suggest we change the categories of 'audio plays' over to 'audio dramas' a more accurate description of what they are collectively. --Tangerineduel 08:26, May 26, 2010 (UTC)

Agreed, it should be changed to Audio Dramas if we want a more accurate, better description of the products Mini-Mitch 14:58, May 26, 2010 (UTC)

Does the BBC also call their stuff "audio dramas"? (I don't think there are any other major publishers of Doctor Who audio thingies, are there?) --Falcotron 00:11, May 27, 2010 (UTC)

The BBC's early stuff was for radio and is variously called 'Radio dramas', but this Press release from the BBC Worldwide Press Office is titled "Tom Baker returns as the Fourth Doctor in new audio dramas!" (which is for the Hornets' Nest series). --Tangerineduel 16:11, May 28, 2010 (UTC)

Though I will of course help with the bot to quickly make whatever change consensus suggests, I'm not particularly bothered one way or the other. They are audio plays. There's no difference between the two. I suppose where there's a slight bone of contention is that people have been putting Companion Chronicles and BBC Audio stuff into the "audio play" cats, and that's not really accurate. These are audiobooks or enhanced audio books. It might be simpler to just say "audios" and forget the play/drama/book distinction altogether. 21:10, May 28, 2010 (UTC)

Revisiting

I've been thinking whilst editing through a lot of real world and story articles. The rather than "audio drama" what these things are, whether they are full cast audio dramas, Companion Chronicles or BBC audio's stuff, they're audio stories.

So just as we've got TV stories we should have audio stories. I take on board CzechOut's note about calling them just audios, but that might be a little too vague with stuff like the music soundtracks.

Zagreus (audio story) would remain as it is, Telos (audio drama) would get moved to Telos (audio story) and everything in Category:Audio plays would be re-categorised into Category:Audio stories and all the other sub-categories etc would be changed from "audio play" to audio story. --Tangerineduel 13:22, December 4, 2010 (UTC)

Re-re-visiting this. I think given the Lost Stories and everything I've changed my opinion.

Perhaps it might be better to just have them as Story (audio).

But I do still thing that all category names that end in audio plays should be re-categorised and changed to audio stories. --Tangerineduel / talk 15:47, February 4, 2011 (UTC)

Hmmm, I'm glad you brought this back up. From a bot standpont, I definitely need to get them to be all one thing or another. Can't be having some of the pages as (audio release), some as (audio) and some as (audio story). Much easier if they follow a singular format.

I'm still thinking (audio) makes good sense , because it encapsulates both audio stories and audio releases. Not that we really need it for non-narrative audio releases. I think the "vague"-ness you mention above is a li'l exaggerated, because we almost never disambiguate musical soundtracks. We don't have to; they all have distinctive names. I can think of only one non-story release that's disambiguated, and that's Doctor Who at the BBC. Even that should probably be re-worked so that the Doctor Who at the BBC becomes that first release, and the article about the series becomes Doctor Who at the BBC (documentary series). (I'm not entirely sure about that, though, else I'd have just done it.)

As for cats, whatever.  :) I don't care either way. Lemme know what you want done and the bot will do it.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 

Well categories wise I'll rule that we use audio stories. Unleash the bot!

The only reason I'm a little iffy on the just (audio) disambig is that it means they're all out of line with (TV story) and (comic story), though this is just me being obsessive. I'll just look it on the flip side that they're in line with (novel). So for all the (audio release), (audio story) and (audio drama) you can set loose the bot (or we can do so manually as there aren't that many) and change them all to (audio). --Tangerineduel / talk 14:45, February 5, 2011 (UTC)

Hmmmm, you may be on to something, oh anal one. Wow that came out wrong. Anyway, what if we simplified the whole structure? What if we said the disambiguation was just the medium? So it became (TV), (comics), (audio), (novel), (short story) — or, if there's conflict at a less-than-medium level (that is, at a series within a certain medium), then we go with just our prefix for the series, like (DW), (SJA), (CON), (MA), (BNA)? I've started a little chart (though based on another naming principle) at User:CzechOut/Sandbox9, because I think we need to have a common system of disambiguation. While you mull that over, I'll get on to the cat switch.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 

I should just learn to keep my mouth shut/fingers off the keyboard.

I think not on the (TV) idea, as that would seem to connect them implicitly to just TV, whilst (TV story) more states what they are and gives logical context. The TV stories were TV, but now they're on VHS, CD and DVD, but they remain TV stories.

As for the comics argument we need only look at the other comics discussion. --Tangerineduel / talk 13:45, February 7, 2011 (UTC)

Category conversion

As indicated above, I've now changed most of what needs to be changed. But I've come across some outliers which need further discussion.

• There are now category:Big Finish audio stories and category:Big Finish Doctor Who audio stories (originally, their names ended with "Audio Dramas"). I haven't changed the content at all. But as you can see, there's not that much difference between the two. I suppose the original intent is that the DW material would go into the specifically DW cat. But what's actually happening is that it's just splitting the product up, so that neither cat is complete. It would be relatively easy to clean up the cat, and dump all the DW material into the DW folder. I'll do that this time, but we need to be aware that editors seem likely to ignore the "Big Finish Doctor Who audio stories" cat.
• Should the other subcats of category:Big Finish audio stories follow the nomenclature of "<series> audio stories"? I think it makes sense until you get to category:Lost Stories which would become "The Lost Stories audio stories".
• Similarly, should the subcats of category:Magic Bullet Productions audio stories and category:BBV audio stories have "audio stories" appended?
• I don't know we can do anything about category:Torchwood radio dramas. I can't think of alternate language that makes sense. Yes there's category:BBC Radio audio stories, but in that case, we're talking about the legal entity "BBC Radio" and their audio stories. Here, it's Torchwood audio stories on radio. Anything that doesn't start "Torchwood radio" may not be easily findable using category auto-complete.

Let me know if you see any other problems.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 

The first one was my intent (so many things like this were/are...that's what comes from being an exalted leader...or whatever you called me). As is evidenced with the other categories I got to the other shorter series' just the DW ones were long and tedious (there's only so many times I could hit Control-E across several tabs and then Command-V pasting that "Doctor Who" into the category link).

Second, yes. I think so. "The Lost Stories audio stories" seems fine, it's no odder than some other categories (none that immediately come to mind, but it doesn't look that odd).

Third, yeah, for clarity and consistency I think so.

Torchwood...hmmm... Torchwood radio audio stories (or Torchwood radio-audio stories)? Is autocomplete operability a big concern? --Tangerineduel / talk 13:37, February 7, 2011 (UTC)

Wow, this is such a bigger project than I envisioned. Most of the BF spin-off series had never been categorised by series before, so I've had to greatly expand the Big Finish audio spin-off series cat. And this has led to an understanding that we can't have "audio stories" after everything, because it would be extremely confusing. BF have tended toward less-than-imaginative names for their series, meaning that we're stuck with situations like: Category:Sarah Jane Smith audio stories, which is for audio stories in which the character appears, and Category:Big Finish Sarah Jane Smith series, which is for releases in the SJS series. The same is true of Bernice Summerfield, Cyberman, UNIT, Iris Wildthyme and Jago and Litefoot. There's a need to track a character's audio stories, versus the releases in the BF series named after the character. I haven't figured out a perfect, standardised nomenclature for the "BF series" cats yet, but at least I'm getting them into a category for the first time.

I'm particularly uncertain whether they need "Big Finish" at the start. Somehow I think these cats would be more elegant with just the name of the series right up front: Sarah Jane Smith audio series, Gallifrey audio series, Jago and Litefoot audio series, Bernice Summerfield audio series, Lost Stories audio series, Excellis audio series, etc. The only one that requires Big Finish is the supercat, category:Big Finish Doctor Who audio stories, because BF isn't the only producer of DW audio stories. Still, since the basic structure of the category tree needs to be created with these cats, you have some time to puzzle over the cosmetics of the naming conventions.

Oh, and autocomplete operability is a huge concern, I think. It's the difference between whether new editors can find a category or not. You and I may well put in cats the old fashioned way by manually typing them into [[ ]] structures, but I'm sure a lot of people click the "add a category" button and hope they can find something suitable after a few key presses. That's why I think it's probably best that these series be named like the category:audio stories by featured characters categories. When someone begins to type in "Sarah Jane Smith", the things that will immediately pop up are "Sarah Jane Smith audio stories" and "Sarah Jane Smith audio series", which I think would result in a higher percentage of correct filings.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 

Leaving Big Finish from all the audio series does seem to make sense. As long as these are all within at least one category that has "Big Finish" in the title it shouldn't be an issue.

This problem we're having might speak to a larger issue with the categories of stories featuring characters or things.

I'm sure I (or maybe you, actually probably me) mentioned the episodes vs stories thing, so we've got Category:1970 television stories and Category:UNIT episodes (as mentioned previously technically only stories up to Invasion of the Dinos had episodes, then they became parts) but what the category actually has in them are stories.

Maybe we should look at disabling the autocomplete function, perhaps that would solve some issues? (I'm only half joking on this front) --Tangerineduel / talk 13:56, February 9, 2011 (UTC)

Archivist's notes

Except for TD's last little suggestion about disabling autocomplete, the broader concepts of this thread were all enacted and the (audio story) dab nomenclature is now widely enforced by bot.

czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 16:01: Tue 25 Oct 2011