User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-1827503-20141023232658/@comment-188432-20151029035140

'Please do not'' change the title. The majority of this discussion is about AGMGTW and LKH, and really they're the only two things at issue. If you want to change policy''', you need a new thread. You can't hijack this one after it's been open for a month.

What's more, the central push to change this thread into a policy-changing thread is built on a false foundation. It's been alleged that somehow Forum:Numbering stories (Turn Left and Planet of the Dead problems) didn't write policy simply because it was put into Category:Discussions without clear resolution.

A discussion can produce some agreement, even if it doesn't resolve everything. If the discussion had failed to achieve any agreement, it would have been placed in Category:Failed proposals.

The topic of that discussion was page-specific in that it named Turn Left as relevant to Planet of the Dead. Essentially, it was asserting that if POTD was number 200, then Turn Left must therefore be part of Journey's End and The Stolen Earth. This question was never definitively resolved by the thread because there are other ways to get to 200. As we would later discuss and absolutely resolve in Forum:Story Numbering, Shada "counts" for numbering, something that had not been resolved at the time of the earlier discussion. Taken together, the two discussions actually do achieve resolution. It's very important when reading forum archives to understand relative time of discussions.

What was not controversial at the time was this notion that a "to be continued" message indicated a multi-part story. That notion is never seriously rebutted in the thread, so it is deemed to have been agreed to. After all, that thread was open for 1.5 years — plenty of time for additional, contradictory discussion to have occurred. And decisions are made by those who participated, so long as a reasonable period of time is allowed for discussion.

As for what "we agreed to" means, it's a truism of this, and really any other long-lived community, that you are bound by existing policy, even if you personally didn't vote on that policy. You can try to change the policy, of course, but you can't just ignore it until it's been changed.

So, here's where we are in terms of the history of discussion on this matter:
 * Prior to 2005, the counting unit is the serial, not the episode, excepting the TVM and the so-called "one-part serials" of The Five Doctors and Mission to the Unknown.
 * Shada counts. (But it didn't really count here at Tardis until 2012, so you will still find some vestiges of counting where it appears not to count. These are wrong and should be changed, if encountered.  It is, in fact, wrong that the List of Doctor Who television stories skips Shada, which is the true story 109.)
 * New series stories that end with "to be continued" are multi-part stories.

So, as far as this thread is concerned, we are left with only one question: is "the Doctor will return" truly, materially different than "to be continued"? Personally, I think you'd be splitting truly fine semantic hairs to think so. After all, "to be continued" on Doctor Who necessarily means that "the Doctor will return".

And remember another truism of proposals on wikis. If it's agreed to, someone has to make the change. This isn't something that can be done by bot. So if you argue in favour of splitting these two episodes, please think realistically about how much time you personally can commit to making the change.