Tardis:Serials

From Tardis Wiki, the free Doctor Who reference
Redirects from the individual Hartnell era episodes exist on this wiki, and it's perfectly fine to cite a single episode rather than the whole serial. Use the BBC's' official guide to the classic series to determine the name of Hartnell-era serials.

For television serials, especially those produced before The Savages, the name given in the BBC's episode guide is preferred. Alternate names and names of individual episodes from the Hartnell era should redirect to the name given in the BBC guide. "Inside the Spaceship" should redirect to The Edge of Destruction, while the episode "The Cave of Skulls" and the serial's production title of 100,000 BC should redirect to An Unearthly Child. Episodic redirects need to be created in a specific way, however.

Hartnell-era stories are tricky because the serials themselves had no overall title on first transmission. Therefore, we decided that:

  • redirects for the individual episode titles are allowed
  • full articles about individual episode titles are not allowed

Exception

The exception to this way of doing things is Children of Earth. According to a hotly contested forum decision, COE is considered the name of series 3 of Torchwood, and the individual episodes are to be given their own pages. Children of Earth is thus handled differently to the usual practice with serialised stories in the "classic" era of Doctor Who, or with The End of Time, in which individual episodes do not get their own, separate articles.

Technical notes

The redirects for Hartnell episodes must link to the plot sections of serial pages. For instance, "Dangerous Journey" redirects not just to Planet of Giants, but specifically to the section Planet of Giants#Dangerous Journey (2). That way, readers are taken directly to the part of the article that relates to the named episode.

In order for this linkage to work, though, the section names on serial pages must not be altered. The format for these section heads is Episode Name (x), where x is the number of the episode within the serial. No punctuation other than the parentheses should be used.