Talk:Main Range

Rename

I have created this talk page to address the question: should the Big Finish range entitled Main Range on this wiki be entitled The Monthly Adventures as is it's official name on the Big Finish website? – The preceding unsigned comment was added by K9-1132 (talk • contribs) .

I'd agree with that. As that name has been used for several years while it's been active, that seems fair enough. Danochy ☎ 01:49, November 3, 2020 (UTC)

Think that this is wise. Aren't they coming to an end in early 2021 too? So main range isn't really appropriate when the range is discontinued. KennethBenidorm ☎ 02:43, November 3, 2020 (UTC)

I mean, neither would "The Monthly Adventures", by that standard, seeing how they'll no longer be coming out monthly. We don't call it "the main range of Big Finish", anyway. We call it "the Main Range" because that's what it used to be named.

In the abstract I could see us renaming to "The Monthly Adventures", but equally, we don't have a duty to use the latest name. Quite the opposite, in fact — we care a great deal about how things were presented at the time of release, which is why the TV Movie to us is "Doctor Who (TV story)", not "The TV Movie" of "The Enemy Within (TV story)". For series titles, the rules are somewhat more flexible, but the fact remains.

And the big roadblock I see is this: we link to "Main Range" an awful lot across the Wiki. It would be a lot of work changing every one of those links, and it would be a bit pointless to enact the rename without doing all that work. By which I mean: yes, we could rename this page to The Monthly Adventures but keep Main Range as a redirect and thus keep all the links the way they are. But if so, why even bother? Functionally we'll still be calling it "the Main Range.

Before anyone mentions using a bot to change links, even that is not without issues. "Main Range" doesn't have an article, so usually, when mentioning it in an article, we'll type something like

Ascendency of the Trods was the 789th story of the Main Range, released on Asbril the 89th, 2167.

or perhaps

Ascendency of the Trods was the 789th story of Big Finish Productions' Main Range, released on Asbril the 89th, 2167.

whereas under the new name, we'd want that text to read

Ascendency of the Trods was the 789th story of The Monthly Adventures, released on Asbril the 89th, 2167.

If it was a matter of swapping a link for another, a bot run could do it. But here we'd want the bot to grab not just the link "Main Range", but also a hypothetical non-hyperlinked "the", or indeed to rephrase the whole thing to better fit the new title! It's just not feasible.

That's not a hard no on the rename, then, but it's a pretty strong technical argument against. And as I said, there's nothing wrong with using the older names. Please address that problem, then, if you still want to argue for a rename. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 02:55, November 3, 2020 (UTC)

None of the pages directly use Main Range though, they are all (and I've checked a fair range of them) formatted as such:

Ascendency of the Trods was the seven hundred and eighty-ninth story in Big Finish's monthly range.

So the only change required there would be in the infobox, which would be a direct switch. If we also want to change the lead, the ubiquitous use of that format would make it very easy.

Whether we actually want to make the change is a different matter. While I'm now not entirely sure we should switch, I don't think the TV movie is a valid comparison, as that was a case of changing the name after the fact. The Monthly Adventures is very much an active range (for a while longer, and at least while the name was changed), so a closer comparison would be Doctor Who Magazine, although that one is much more clear cut given the longevity of its third and current name. Whatever the case, I feel we should go with the title which best has our readers in mind. I know a fair few people still refer to its as the Main Range, and as far as I know this is the most long-running name of the series, so perhaps that would be the best route to take? Danochy ☎ 03:22, November 3, 2020 (UTC)

I mean, we'd still want to change "[[Main Range|monthly range]]" to "[[The Monthly Adventures|monthly range]]", you know. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 11:16, November 3, 2020 (UTC)

Oh, I know, but we wouldn't have to worry about the surrounding formatting, would we? That's what I meant when I referred to the ubiquity of the current format. Danochy ☎ 11:26, November 3, 2020 (UTC)

Thanks to everyone for discussing this. What I would say about this is that whatever it has been called in the past, this range is currently called, at least by Big Finish themselves, the Monthly Adventures. I also don't think it would cause any confusion as long as we sorted out exactly what would happen with the links. Of course, any links would immediately redirect anyone to the new page so i think that would work out OK. I personally think this change would be a good idea and if everyone else agrees i think it should happen. Thanks again for discussing it! K9-1132 ☎ 15:55, November 8, 2020 (UTC)

I strongly advocate for this change. As I see it, the difficulty of changing links is beside the point: yes, there are hundreds or thousands of pages that refer to it as the Main Range, and it might be a challenge to write a regex query that fits; but this is exactly why Magnus Manske gave us redirects. There's nothing wrong or shameful about most or all links to a page using a redirect. This doesn't make the rename "pointless", as the real "point" of a rename is for each page to have the most relevant and accurate name. And for this page, that name is The Monthly Adventures (audio series). – n8 (☎) 16:42, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

This has been open for quite a while, and the main point that the Main Range has since ended rather changes things. Now, the problem with renaming this to "The Monthly Adventures" — and changing all the links to claim that, say, The Chimes of Midnight was the "twenty-ninth story in The Monthly Adventures" — is that it quite simply wasn't. This range was going for 22 years, and right near the end of its history, Big Finish did some re-branding. The problem is: the name they're giving to their archive of old stories does not change the name of the range at the time of release, and the comparatively small collection of new series released under that heading do not make it so the series was "always named that".

We've always (always always) gone with original titles, barring exceptions like early Hartnell serials. If someone gained the rights to publish the Virgin New Adventures and called them "The Dying Days Collection", we wouldn't be running to rename Virgin New Adventures. We'd cover it on a new page. Now this is an interesting case, because the name changed partway through production. The thing is: "partway" here means "in the short final years of a long-going range".

So we have two major precedents here. The first is Doctor Who Magazine. We go with Doctor Who Magazine not because it's the most recent title, but because it's the name of the overwhelming majority of their releases. Importantly for us, we also don't pretend it was never Doctor Who Weekly or Doctor Who Monthly (though we stick to the "main" series name for magazine issue naming). Next up is The Eighth Doctor: Time War, which was The Eighth Doctor: The Time War for its first two releases. This is exactly midway through the range, so we've gone with the new branding even for the first two releases (though we still note the original release details).

With this in mind, Main Range was the name of this thing for the overwhelming majority of its history. If they'd rebranded in the year 2000, for sure, Phantasmagoria would be "the second release in the Main Range, later known as The Monthly Adventures." But it wasn't. And if we're having to reframe two decades of history as "it was all leading up to a couple years at the end before the whole thing face-planted", something is wrong with our coverage.

(Note: A neutral point-of-view does not value "recentness" over and above every other consideration, however easy it is to fall into that trap. As with character names in-universe, we go with the name which was used the most. For TV: An Unearthly Child, counter-intuitively, that is not the original name, our big exception above, and for Doctor Who Magazine as a range, this happens to be the one they're still using. By the same token, we would not rename DWM if it re-branded, because the existing history has weight already.)

So for now, Main Range stays. One final point on how to write these final releases. Supposing we fix up the leads to be more specific, it should be the exact inverse of what we'd do if this rebranding has taken place towards the beginning: "The Lovecraft Invasion was the two hundred and fifty-sixth audio story in Big Finish's Monthly Adventures, previously known as the Main Range." Obviously, both redirects still hold (and both should remain in the lead here).
×   SOTO contribs ×°/↯/•]   💬•| {/-//:   08:35, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Bring Back the Old List Format

I'm just gonna say in advance, this post is going to get ranty, so try not to take it personally. It must have been a long time since I've visited this page because it seems about two years ago someone decided it would be a good idea to get rid of the list of main range releases and instead divide them all into smaller lists divided up by year and listed in a sub-page for that year. Without trying to sound too rude here, I just want to ask: Who thought this was a good idea? Granted I completely understand that back then whomever made this change would have been unaware at the time that Big Finish would be bringing there main range releases to an end within a few years' time and so they had no idea that this list wouldn't have just gone on forever. But putting aside whether or not having one long list on a single article is an issue (I don't see why it would be, but that's just me), I fail to see how this is a good alternative. As it stands, there is no way someone could use this list effectively. Not only does browsing through all the releases require opening multiple articles, which itself is far more of a hassle than simply having one really long list on a single page, looking for a specific title on this list requires a person to have knowledge of the year that it came out. While I'm sure there are probably one or two users on this site that have the year that every sing main range title came out committed to memory, for the rest of us, this would require us to search for that specific title's article so we could find the year it was released then pull up the sub-page for that year so we could find it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that entirely defeat the purpose of having a list like this to begin with? Lists like these are meant to not only show the order of releases for these titles, but also to provide important information regarding these releases such as their writers, directors, the characters featured, and the month and year that they were released. Lists like these are extremely useful for people who want to find information on multiple titles and don't want to have to mess with wading through their associated articles. Just as an example, earlier I came to this article wanting to see the order in which all the Thomas Brewster stories were released. Imagine my surprise when I suddenly saw that in order to find the information I wanted, I would have needed to know the years that all the Thomas Brewster stories were released which, as I pointed out earlier, kind of completely defeats the purpose of why I came to view this list to begin with. So instead I just pulled up an archived version of the article from 2018 so I could quickly find the information I needed. I'm sorry, I'm really not trying to be rude here but can someone explain to me who thought this was a good solution to keep an article from becoming to bloated and how they though that this list would be useful to anyone by forcing people to have to open it in multiple tabs just to view the damn thing properly? The fact that pulling up an archived version of this article allowed me to find what I wanted quicker and easier than using the current article means that something is terribly wrong here. As I pointed out earlier, the main range titles will be coming to an end soon, and I don't think having a list of around 300 titles is enough to justify having this list being broken up as it is. We can still go ahead and keep the sub-pages because those pages do contain some useful information summarizing all the main range releases of those years, but there is no need for them to have them at the expense of having one long list of all the releases on this article. I've already brought this issue up in the wiki channel of the the Doctor Who Discord server and a couple other editors have are onboard with re-adding the list to this article. I'm going to let this post sit for a couple of days to see if anyone has any opposition to this change. If not, I will be re-adding the old list to this article and update it to include all the main range releases that have come out since then. –Nahald ☎ 05:42, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

I agree that for usability's sake, all the stories should be listed on this page. But before you change anything back, it's worth noting that this move wasn't performed by a random user but by User:OncomingStorm12th [fixed – n8 (☎) 16:24, 31 January 2021 (UTC)], with the help of User:SOTO. The given reason was, "This page and Main Range covers are far too big, specially when there is a policy disallowing too many images in one page. A similar approach to Doctor Who Magazine/2012, et al. will be taken." That said, I'm not really sure how the pre-edit version of this page violated the image policy at all. A viable compromise position would be to keep the covers and production details at Main Range/2012 et al. while still listing all the releases on this core page. – n8 (☎) 16:42, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Made the edit, edit was undone. Someone insisted that it needed to be talked over more in this talk page before a change like that could be made. Did they post in the talk page? Nope, neither has anyone else so far. Is it just me or does it seem like lately people on this Wiki seem to put more effort into making sure that nothing gets done than actually getting things done? I'd also like to point out the hypocrisy that no such discussion was had on this talk page when the list was originally removed from this article. So diminishing an article's usefulness by removing a list from it and dividing it up into multiple sub-articles requires no consulting with other users but trying to restore said list for the convenience of users does? That's to say nothing of the fact that this entire thing reeks of gatekeeping in that the functionality of this list is now limited to people who know the exact year that each main range story was released. But what's even more absurd is that, if what Nate says is correct, the entire reason for this edit was base don a false pretense. So the user who made this edit noticed an issue with the Main Range covers article in that the amount of images on it violated this site's policy of having too many images on one page... and they used that to justify removing a list from this page? What? No seriously... What? How are those two things even remotely connected? As far as I can tell, covers were not included in this article, so how does this even factor into that particular policy? I'm sorry to rant again, but the more I'm learning about the rationale behind this edit, the more I'm convinced that it was a terrible idea to begin with. What's even worse is that I know this is just going to be forgotten about unless I make a huge deal about it, just like everyone seemed to forget about that discussion involving the new profile pic for the Bernice Summerfield article. –Nahald ☎

Hey everyone, I'm the one that reverted the change. I think that while I certainly have qualms about procedural issues, you can look at my track-record on this wiki and see that characterizing me as

put[ting] more effort into making sure that nothing gets done than actually getting things done

Is simply ludicrous. I won't address it further.

The reason I have for not commenting on this discussion is that quite simply I never got into the audios and so can't adequately comment on this issue. I really should some day, but I feel like I don't have anything in particular to add to this discussion. What I objected to is that you made a massive, yes, massive, change to this page after there being two comments, one of which was Nate's, which said, and I quote,

But before you change anything back, it's worth noting that this move wasn't performed by a random user but by User:OncomingStorm12th [fixed], with the help of User:SOTO.

Both of whom are admins. The series of events was literally [You comment], [Someone else agrees, but then adds a big whopping disclaimer about admins doing something], [nothing happens], [you make the change]. Compare that to Talk:Sleepy (novel) which has had regular admin participation and active evidence found in favor of the change but no action has been taken. It is simply inappropriate to make the change you did based on the limited discussion that existed, especially given that you were told that the people who made the change to the current format were admins and you did not have any admin comment on your proposed change. This is precisely the point of T:BOUND. Najawin ☎ 06:25, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

I agree with Najawin that the change was very pre-emptive for such a large edit. If you wanted more discussion, maybe asking an admin of their opinion may have been a better way to go, or at the very least, inviting other users to discuss it. Two users does not a consensus make.

That being said, I personally am not too fond of the list being split up into years. However, I do recognise that the main purpose of this page is not necessarily the list but rather information about the series in which the list is merely a part of. Basically what I'm saying is that I understand the desire for an easier listing system and would happily see it changed, but I'm not too bothered if it isn't (it is a monthly range, so it does make some amount of sense to sort it into years). LauraBatham ☎ 06:58, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

If anybody cares what I think, I think that this page should be a list of audios, with further, more expansive details and a cover gallery on the respective year page. (Which is essentially what has been said here already, but what are ya gonna do?)

Epsilon 📯 📂

13:07, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

I'm on board with Nate's compromise of having all the stories listed here but keeping the galleries seperated by year. The possibility of this article being the longest page at Special:LongPages is no longer an issue with the conclusion of the range so it makes little sense to me to divide the information up between twenty pages if people might only want to search for one specific thing. Borisashton ☎ 17:01, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Alright, this all sounds reasonable to me. And as has been proven, it's not difficult to revert back to an old revision if compelling reasons to keep the list off the page are found later. Splitting the list made sense when we thought the Main Range was going to go on forever, but as it winds down to a close, the actual final count doesn't look unmanageable at all.

I declare this discussion closed in favour of the compromise proposal: a table listing all the audios, their authors and their dates of release will appear on this page, but the cover galleries will remain on the split pages with greater detail. Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 17:13, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

I just want to take a moment to apologize for coming across as so aggressive in these posts. Needlessly complicating things that should be relatively simple are a huge pet peeve of mine. Not to mention that lately I've been having issues at work with people in charge refusing to take care of things that need to be taken care of to the point where I'm forced to take the initiative to do it myself, only to get yelled at for doing so. So when a similar thing happened here, I kinda just took out my frustration here in these posts. That was wrong of me and I should have exercised more restraint. –Nahald ☎ 08:17, 1 February 2021 (UTC)