Tardis:Disambiguating story titles
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Disambiguation term → Disambiguating other realities → Disambiguating in-universe counterparts → Disambiguating story titles |
Stories are universally disambiguated here. So if you have a story which occurs on television, it's automatically a (TV story). If you're starting a page on a Big Finish audio, it's an (audio story). If writing about a Doctor Who Adventures comic, it's a (comic story). And so on.
Why do stories get the dab term and not the in-universe terms? Simple!
- Out-of-universe things get dab terms; in-universe things generally don't.
This means that if you have a choice between the city Castrovalva and the story Castrovalva, the city stays at Castrovalva and the story goes to Castrovalva (TV story). This notion was one of the first things decided by our founding editors, and it has gained widespread acceptance by our community.
A literal problem
If this were Wookieepedia or the DC Comics Database this stance would be unproblematic. We'd only have a few instances of literal titles — that is, titles that name something from the universe.
But authors in the DWU are unusually literal with their titles. Depending on the range, the percentage of DWU stories named for a thing in the universe can be as high as 50%. Many DWU literal titles — like Logopolis, Castrovalva, The Ark, The Ice Warriors, Dalek and Paradise Towers — are named after places or species.
Look at just this one run of five television stories:
- Warriors' Gate — not a literal name, so it was safe to title it without a dab term.
- The Keeper of Traken – really, quite a literal title, but because the office was at Keeper of Traken, we got away with not having a dab term.
- Logopolis (TV story) — Logopolis is a planet, so we need the dab term
- Castrovalva (TV story) — Castrovalva is a city, so we need the dab term
- Four to Doomsday – and we're back again to a metaphorical title
Of course, most of our users didn't have too big a problem recognising when television stories had literal names. The real problem is with titles in other media. Do you know, for instance, that:
- Verdigris is a couple of things in the DWU, not just a novel title?
- the Gemini Plan was more than just the name of a Third Doctor comic story?
- The Crystal Bucephalus was actually the name of a restaurant, not just the name of a novel?
You begin to see the problem. There are thousands of story titles. How can the average editor possibly know which will require (novel), (comic story) or (audio story)? The answer is that they can't.
A simple solution
For years, we had this approach:
- Leave the page without a dab term until you discover the title is literal.
In other words, it was a "Wikipedia-esque" approach of waiting to add a dab term until a conflict was discovered. But this approach meant a steep learning curve for us. New editors had to figure out on their own which stories required a dab term and which didn't. As we discovered that the title was literal, story names would be moved — and something which had for years been Verdigris, would suddenly be Verdigris (novel). After a while, the sheer number of moves required became so, frankly, annoying, it was decided that the system was becoming overly complicated. Users questioned why some titles had dab terms and others didn't.
To make matters worse, we began to discover that titles of classic serials sometimes were repurposed by later stories as in universe items. The best example? The Five Doctors is actually an in-universe video game!
So, rather than asking editors to memorise a changing chart of which titles got dab terms and which didn't, we simply decided to require all story names to have a disambiguation term attached.
The exception to this is invalid stories: it was decided that to highlight their special, "second-class citizen" status, stories which are covered as invalid sources do not get automatically dabbed. They only get a dab term only if there is a risk of confusing them with something else (whether it be another story or something in-universe).
For example, Dr. Who and the Daleks (theatrical film) starring Peter Cushing shares a title with many, many other things, so it does get disambiguated. But Search Out Space is hard to get confused with anything else; we don't need to specify that it's a "(TV story)".
What are the dab terms that apply to stories?
A more complete list of dab terms (including things like documentaries) exists elsewhere, but the terms used for stories are these:
- (audio story)
- (comic story)
- (game)
- (novel)
- (short story)
- (theatrical film)
- (TV story)
- (video game)
- (webcast)
- (video game)
You'll note that this is more elaborate than our citation prefixes: for example, PROSE covers both "(short story)" and "(novel)".
