Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-188432-20121207092215/@comment-188432-20130104210405

Skittles the hog wrote: I see... then the case for changing is to conform to the url...? No, the case is that there is no such thing as a "Tardis Index File". Let's look at exactly what Tegan and Nyssa say. Note the first two lines, because they're really the most relevant:


 * TEGAN: Tardis Information System. Ready For Entry.
 * NYSSA: A databank!

It couldn't be more explicit that the name of the "databank" is "Tardis Information System". And the picture, which I've posted upthread, confirms this visually. So both what we hear and what we see says that the name of the whole database is "Tardis Information System". It's not "Tardis Index File", which three words are never said consecutively, nor even intimated, in the script of Castrovalva. According to Nyssa, the index file is just a part of the TIS:


 * TEGAN: Will it tell us how to fly the Tardis?
 * NYSSA: I'm sure that's in here somewhere, once we find the index file.
 * TEGAN: How do we find the index file? Of course, if we had an index file, we could look it up in the index file, under index file. What am I saying? I'm talking nonsense.

Clearly, the index file is merely a navigation aid through the database. It is not the database itself. And the phrase "Tardis Index File" is in itself ambiguous because you could have index files on several systems in the TARDIS. There could be a navigational computer index file. The food machine almost certainly has some kind of index file. The chameleon circuit could have an index file. An index file is, in more modern computing parlance, simply a directory. That's it. So every system on the ship would, at some level, have an index file.

Thus, "Tardis Information System" is the closest narrative analogue to what this wiki is, though just Tardis is what most people who don't edit here think the name is.