Board Thread:Help!/@comment-2129131-20140623073254/@comment-188432-20140627205300

I don't see any need for a special parameter. If you can define for me the actual difference between content delivery methods these days, I'd be much obliged. As far as I can work out, it's all TV, and its all web. There's no distinction between them, so they're all (TV story), simply because that harmonises usage since 1963. That is, we could call The Curse of the Black Spot a webcast, because it was, but that makes it unnecessarily difficult to compare it with, say, The Smugglers.

(TV story) means, simply, that it could be commonly and easily viewed on a TV. This has been the meaning of that dab term since at least Dreamland. And it makes sense to go with a more forward-looking definition, because there are an increasing number of editors who just won't get a distinction based upon "method of content delivery". It might, in fact, be time to think of changing our dab terms again, swapping (TV story) for (video story), which will cover all cases better — even if there's the slight possibility that older British fans might consider think we're talking about "stories on VHS".

In any case, the term (webcast) is an antiquated one that might apply in a few cases in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but even those are dubious. You could view Scream of the Shalka on your TV, after all, since it was also released on the precursor to BBC Red Button.

There are very few things which are pure webcasts, and in these days when things can be Airdropped from your iPad to your TV with the flick of a finger, and your TV is delivered through the same fibre-optic lines that bring you the internet, there is zero meaningful distinction between webcast and broadcast.

I rather strongly feel that the most useful way to organise these things is to consider them genuine, if short, episodes of the television series. I mean, is anyone seriously prepared to argue that The Night of the Doctor is just a webcast? I think most people feel that it's an absolutely vital piece of the series' narrative, made with no less attention than The Day of the Doctor itself. Heck, it's the same damn production block!

The Battle of Demons Run: Two Days Later is obviously post-A Good Man Goes to War and pre-Let's Kill Hitler, so we should probably do the simple thing and directly state that in the infobox.

Web of Lies is slightly trickier, but mainly only because Miracle Day was so bloody disappointing, no one wants to go back and piece together the narrative relationship between WOL and MD. But "interquel" is a really posh name for it, in my view. I think it's something happening concurrent with Miracle Day, but at definite points in the MD narrative. I think you can plot a course that leads from a Miracle Day ep to a WOL ep and back again to MD. Viewed in its totality, WOL has the effect of just being some additional scenes of MD that were animated, rather than filmed in live-action. It's essentially just a Dreamland-esque thing — and, well, we call that Dreamland (TV story). In any case, Web of Lies shouldn't be the reason we do anything on this wiki.

At the end of the day, I think we serve our guests better by trying to place the shorter stories relative to the longer ones in a logical narrative order than just kinda vaguely attaching them to an episode.

From a technical standpoint, we should remember, too, that we'd have to allow for multiple values, if we were going with a line in the top of the infobox, because several of the shorts are more relative to each other than to the larger episodes.