User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Reference Desk/@comment-4139960-20130210170026/@comment-188432-20130211214419

I think there seem to be a couple of broad themes.

Overall, it seems to me that the early trend in DW fiction is re-emerging. It used to be almost always TARDIS control room. Under Virgin, it was sort of up to the individual author and I think something close to a 50/50 split. Then when the BBC initially took over publication duties, it slid much more in favor of console room.

But most BBC Wales-related products are again going for control room.

I think we can also say, without any doubt, that both terms are "correct", and that there's a strong correlation between use of console room in stories where there's another "control room" that's important to the plot. 1990s and early 2000s fiction relied on megalomaniacal enemies and science fictional settings to a much greater extent than the current BBC Books output. These villains tended to have a control room of some kind. It's perhaps no surprise, then, that the EDAs tended to use "console room" for the TARDIS.

Since this is such a close call, I would tend to break the tie between these two terms in favour of what's been in use for the longer time. For almost 30 years, it was almost always called "control room" in print. And it's been mostly called "control room" during the BBC Wales era.

It seems to me that calling the article "TARDIS console room" is giving outsized importance to part one of Castrovalva.