User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-44988386-20200625144019/@comment-6032121-20200625153022

Never Forget The Day The 456 Arrived wrote: It's about making everything look uniform and professional. There's "uniformity", and then there's "making our coverage vaguer because some people think quotation marks have cooties". And as for "professional"… as it happens, citing individual episode titles between quotation marks is what most reference works do, and it's even our own weird arbitrary, idiosyncratic decision to cite serials in italics rather than quotation marks. As documented at T:ITALICS, there was a community vote on the matter, but its decision goes against every style guide around.

Now if we want to introduce the option to cite "The Tenth Doctor then regenerated into a young man with a large chin after having a good cry. (TV: "The End of Time - Part 2")"

- A petty good proposal

instead of "The Tenth Doctor then regenerated into a young man with a large chin after having a good cry. (TV: The End of Time)"

- Current policy

then I am okay with that. It wouldn't come up that often, but I'd be happy to see that codified into policy.

But again, I think we absolutely should keep the norms that italics are for "complete stories", while quotation marks signal an individual episode/installment.

But it would be ridiculously too much work to replace every instance of a citation of a full serial with a citation of an individual episode. What's this about uniformity at the cost of all variability? What are we, Cybermen? Quotation-mark-hating Cybermen? Quotationmen, if you will?…

Professional reference works allow themselves exactly the same kind of freedom we do. A mix of quotation marks and italics is fetching and smart-looking and intriguing, not an eyesore. I don't know what to tell ya.