Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-28349479-20190924134633

Over the past decade, we've been blessed with a plethora of new audio series from Big Finish. This has given us a chance to fine-tune our system of titling pages for audio series, which started out clearly listing the publisher (for instance, the recently-retired Big Finish Bernice Summerfield series), then shifted to the Title (audio series) format, which has been further fine-tuned and worked into law by our resident dab term king, User:Amorkuz.

Only a few relics remain of the old, dabless system. One of them is Big Finish Torchwood series. Another is all of our prose series pages.

Unlike with audios, we haven't been given as good a chance to evolve our protocol for book series. But using what we've learned in the case of audio series, and swapping the medium from "audio" to "prose", I think we can take a bold leap forward into the beautiful future.

Case in point: Virgin New Adventures. That formatting seems kind of weird, doesn't it? New Adventures is the name of the series; none of the (many) cover logos ever included "Virgin" as part of the title. So it should really be Virgin New Adventures. Try writing out that formatting every time! And lord help the poor soul who then clicks on the word "Virgin" expecting to see Virgin Books.

In contrast: New Adventures (novel series). Easily pipe-tricked into New Adventures; easily placed into the very-sensible Virgin Books New Adventures; and (most importantly) faithful to the actual usage of the term in official branding.

And to pre-empt the SEO critique that has foiled my proposals in the past: this will actually help! If a not we was trying to find a page about the Eighth Doctor book series, is it more likely that they'd google "Eighth Doctor Adventure books", "Eighth Doctor book series", or "BBC Books Eighth Doctor Adventures"? I'm guessing one of the former two. In fact, I guarantee that virtually no one is searching for the last option. (There's only one Eighth Doctor book series.) Now, bearing in mind that Google includes synonyms by weighting searches, would "BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures" or "Eighth Doctor Adventures (prose series)" be a better fit for that search?

As it happens, some form of this idea has already been implemented: for instance, at Dr. Men (series). The infobox on the page describes the series as a "book series", so it's apparent that a lack of precedent is the only reason the dab term isn't more specific. I say we make the precedent, and make our wiki clearer in the process. 