Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1293767-20151029072618/@comment-24894325-20160602223849

This is, indeed, the main problem, from my point of view. There are many authorised licensed sources that contradict each other (and sometimes contradict themselves from an earlier time).

Note also that only BBC is the primary source, whereas all others are secondary opinions. And I started asking myself: why should we value the opinion of, say, DWM over that of our whole community? Sure, DWM are experts, but so are some of senior Wikians. We are formulating transparent criteria (whichever will be the decision, we will know it), whereas I'm not sure DWM ever explained why they group stories together and how many people were involved in that decision. And if Moffat/BBC approved/did not disapprove their groupings, shouldn't we then turn to BBC, as the primary source, instead? Naturally, I use DWM here only as an example and mainly because it was mentioned recently.

However, after the mention of DWE, I've realised another thing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but DWE is produced by BBC. In other words, we have the primary source confirming that they in principle consider stories with different titles as two-parters.

I'm a bit hesitant to just take their groupings. Apart from the necessity to find sources to cover all series, there is also a danger that these groupings by BBC itself might not be completely consistent.

However, while thinking about different BBC sources, I thought of another possible sanity check. I think it would be completely mad for BBC to release a DVD set that only contains one part of a two-parter. What kind of a two-parter would it be if the second part is not necessary to enjoy the first. It's a bit too late for me to check now, so I don't know if the PB proposal passes this test. (I know the all-single proposal does :) But I thought about this with Good Man and Let's Kill Hitler in mind. And lo and behold, there is a DVD set with the Man but without Hitler. I take it as an independent confirmation that they are separate single episodes. Just to be clear, I do not propose to group things based on DVD releases, but I do propose to make sure that stories are ungrouped if they were released separately.

PS Sorry about AE. I make more effort on the Wiki pages. I hope y'all can live with it.