Forum:Temporary forums/Subpage policy

For a long time, the "Policy" section on my user page has listed a broad array of my concerns and suggestions. Over the months and years, I've come to realize that many of these could be addressed by a singular proposal: the establishment of a proper use of subpages on this wiki.

Tardis:Changing policy specifies that the forums are required for changing policy, so given their longstanding absence, our admins might be inclined to put this proposal on the back burner. But this is not a change to how we do things; it is merely a clarification of another, existing option – the longstanding precedent of Doctor Who Magazine/1985 – in a way that allows it to be applied to more pages. In fact, not only does this proposal detract nothing from our policies or precedent, it will allow us to enact existing policies which are currently not enforced!

As a result, forums are not necessary to enact this proposal. Given how it will clearly bring us into much closer alignment with FANDOM best practices and our goal of serving readers, my hope is that it will be swiftly approved to open these possibilities for our editors and readers.

Proposal
It's simple: when a page grows too big, consider splitting it using subpages!

When to create a subpage
Subpages are usually only meant to be linked to from their root page and navigation templates. For instance, Twelfth Doctor - list of appearances is only linked to from Twelfth Doctor and, making it an obvious candidate for a subpage.

Subpages should be named after section headers, usually those with headings formatted with ==, such as "Biography" or "Plot". Subpages should never have in-universe titles: for instance, if the subsection Twelfth Doctor were deemed too big, we would move it to a section on Twelfth Doctor/Biography, not Twelfth Doctor/Continued adventures with Clara.

These are some examples of subpage names, as proposed in the "Applications" section below:
 * BBC New Series Adventures/Covers
 * The Daleks' Master Plan (TV story)/Plot
 * Twelfth Doctor/Biography
 * Twelfth Doctor/Personality
 * Twelfth Doctor/Appearances
 * Twelfth Doctor/Other realities
 * Twelfth Doctor/Invalid sources
 * Time Lord/Name

Alternately, if you think some material represents a self-contained idea that other articles might want to reference as well, consider splitting it without using subpages. For instance, when conflicting accounts of the Doctor's origins on First Doctor became too unwieldy, I created The Doctor's early life. Other examples include pages for specific eras in the Doctor's life, like Exile on Earth, or pages for specific events, like Operation Mannequin. This decision is an art, not a science, and experienced users should use their best judgment to decide how to group content together into logical topics.

Here are some examples of when not to use a subpage:
 * Third Doctor/Exile on Earth – instead create Third Doctor/Biography or Exile on Earth
 * The Doctor/Sonic screwdriver – instead create The Doctor's sonic screwdriver
 * Last Great Time War/Origins – instead create Origins of the Last Great Time War
 * The Master/Missy – instead create Missy!

Moving material
Once you've identified a lengthy section and the new page that will hold it, cut the section's contents and paste it to the new page. Include any subheadings, images, galleries, footnotes, and infoboxes that are inside that section. Subheadings should be adjusted upwards: for instance, === subheadings should become == s. Any redirects to the sections you've moved should be updated.

Writing a summary
After moving material to another page, you have to fill the gap on the root page. Fandom's Editor Experience team explains the  method in this way: "When a basic article becomes long enough, it could have long chunks that could reasonably be split into their own independent articles. … The base article could then replace a long section with a spoiler-free summary with the most important points, linked by a context-link hatnote above it (such as )."

- Isaac Fischer

In effect, replace the copied text with a shorter summary of the same information and a link to the new page. Just as a lead paragraph summarises the contents of its page, this summary should give a broad-strokes overview of the subpage's contents, with a particular emphasis on the most relevant details. A general rule of thumb is to mention all major appearances as well as any notable minor appearances. The line between "major" and "minor" is up to editors' discretion.

For instance, take Tenth Doctor. If it were moved to a subpage, the summary left behind might cite all of the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones' major adventures, such as their televised ones, but not all of their minor adventures, such as PROSE: Wetworld or COMIC: The Skrawn Inheritance. Similarly, it would mention the Tenth Doctor's companions Gabby Gonzalez and Cindy Wu from the multi-year COMIC: Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor arc, but maybe not his minor companions such as Emily Parr or Rok Ma.

Tenth Doctor is another lengthy section. It details each of the Tenth Doctor's various clothing and hairstyle changes. If this information were moved to a subpage, the summary would describe his major outfits – for instance, those worn on television or for an entire comics run or Big Finish boxset – and any particularly notable minor outfits, such as his lei from The End of Time.

Note the Editor Experience team's emphasis on a summary being "spoiler-free". While this may not be possible in some circumstances, ideally a new fan should be able to read the summary of a character's biography without having the experience of the stories being totally spoiled for them. For example, a summary of Twelfth Doctor/Biography might mention that his travels with Bill, Nardole, and Missy concluded in TV: The Doctor Falls during an encounter with, without explicitly spelling out that enemy's identity or the circumstances of Bill's fate. Like a lead paragraph, a well-written summary should "lead" its readers to want to learn more, whether that means clicking through to the subpage or actually experiencing the stories in question.

Applications
There are a number of disparate problems that this proposal will solve. This section discusses those problems and the motivations for this proposal.

Subpage-like pages
Many articles on this wiki are already written like subpages. Our 1000+ lists of appearances are perfect examples of subpages in both purpose and execution: The only problem is that … well, they're not actually subpages! We've been using a dash instead of a slash for no reason. Twelfth Doctor - list of appearances, to name of one of many, should be moved to Twelfth Doctor/List of appearances.
 * 1) when a page section (the infobox list of appearances) grows too large and unwieldy, it's moved to a separate page;
 * 2) the new page is titled in reference to the core page (Character name - list of appearances); and
 * 3) the core page retains a summary of the most important information (first mention, first appearance).

You might ask, "Why are subpages better than the status quo? What are subpages, anyway?" Well, you're on one! Because of the slashes in the URL of this page, it's a subpage of both User:NateBumber and User:NateBumber/Sandbox, and as a result there are links to those pages at the top of this one, just below the title. This is great for navigation. Fandom's Editor Experience team explains, "Google understands that subpages have a distinct parent relationship with the base page. […] These subpages have a natural method to get back to the base article: they're linked from the top of the page!"

- Isaac Fischer

Additionally, a subpage can also be linked to from its parent page with only a partial title: if you're on Twelfth Doctor, the link  will take you to Twelfth Doctor/List of appearances. It's even more powerful than the pipe trick!

Our lists of appearances aren't our only subpage-like pages. We also have almost 100 "galleries" which function just like subpages; most of them are even already linked from story or series pages with. Their form should follow their function: BBC New Series Adventures covers should be moved to BBC New Series Adventures/Covers without hesitation.

I'm willing to bet that there are more examples, too. These are the low-hanging fruit when it comes to integrating subpages onto the wiki!

Story summaries
Tardis Wiki is notorious for our lack of plot descriptions. A vast majority of story pages have plot sections that say to be added. This is understandable: few editors actively enjoy typing out lengthy plot descriptions, and those who do often hold themselves to extreme standards of detail. But these to be added tags, many of them 15 years old or older, are a problem: according to the Editor Experience team, "Stubs do provide a bad experience because the readers and search engines that encounter them are left wanting more and an incomplete page (even if it is marked incomplete) has not been proven to "attract editors from the reader base to add to or expand the page" as was once assumed. Every day that a stub exists and remains incomplete is a day that bad experience persists."

- Isaac Fischer

Subpages offer us a way out. Rather than marking thousands of story pages as stubs just because they lack lengthy plot breakdowns, we should put these breakdowns (when we have them) on "Plot" subpages. This wouldn't even require a change to our preload templates! It would look something like this: Summary A brief, non-spoilery teaser that someone could use to check if they're interested in a story. If a publisher's summary is provided, this is where it would go, in which case the section is called "Publisher's summary". In rare cases where a great many publisher's summaries have been provided, such as Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, this section may have a  link.

Plot

A short synopsis that someone could use to get a gist of a story or remind themselves of the plot. For an example, see Silver-Tongued Liars (short story). Unlike full plot descriptions, which tend to provide enough detail that one could experience the story without actually experiencing it (!), these shorter plot synopses could be written from memory without any editors needing to pause or relisten to take notes on every aspect of a story. Not only would synopses make our pages less likely to appear unfinished, their length would also make it easier for readers to scroll and access other sections on the page. All the while, readers interested in nitty gritty plot details would still be able to easily access that information when available by clicking to the subpage via.

Other realities
Doctor Who is notorious for its inconsistent treatment of time travel mechanics, and nowhere is this more apparent than in parallel universes and alternate timelines. What do these terms mean in Doctor Who? There are as many opinions as there are fans, and each definition has a counterexample among our valid sources. Despite this, the wiki persists in different treatments for different types of different realities.

T:MERGE proclaims that "Continuity of consciousness is key", meaning that in cases of ongoing stories like Doctor of War, editors are left in limbo for months or years until they can see how (or if) the timeline resolves. This policy has led to nitpicky and counterproductive distinctions, such as the idea that Moira (The Pilot) wasn't a recurring character in series 10 because it was technically Moira (Shadow World) who appeared in Extremis. And all the while, the proliferation of split pages with strange dab terms means that many articles now bear below their infoboxes, increasing the glut of obscure material which readers must now scroll past to find a page's actual contents.

To our admins' credit, many of the more creative page splits – for example, Third Doctor (He Jests at Scars…) – have been diligently merged back into their originals, and Talk:Susan Foreman (Prologue: The First Doctor) provided a much-needed clarification that not all versions of characters from other realities deserve separate pages: "As a rule of thumb (there are exceptions, of course), if there's no more to say on the separate page than what can already be stated on the prime version's "Alternate timelines" subsection, it's not worth creating a separate page for the alternate-timeline version."

- Scrooge MacDuck

Scrooge's explanation hints at part of the reason we began splitting these pages in the first place: a page covering all of a major character's appearances in all realities (main and other) would simply be very lengthy!

Tenth Doctor/Other realities – not, as the section is currently called, but a title also inclusive of parallels, pockets, and so on – would provide the space for this coverage. It would have room for separate sections discussing the character's appearances in alternate timelines, parallel universes, simulations, and other alternative states of reality. Such a subpage would also provide a more suitable home for specialized templates like. It wouldn't remove the need for or existence of separate pages for many alternate versions of characters, but it would go a long way towards alleviating the pressure which has caused all this muddle in the first place!

Subpages might not be the silver bullet that solves this problem once and for all, but they do offer a more consistent path for addressing the issue.

Other validities
Death Comes to Time, which is currently invalid, depicts an alternative fate of the Seventh Doctor and Ace following Survival. We're meant to recognise these names: within this story, Ace is the same character who we met in Dragonfire, and her actions are shaped by her experience in The Curse of Fenric and other stories. This background is assumed as understood.

Now read our article for Ace (Death Comes to Time). There's no mention of her shared roots with regular Ace; in fact, there's no citation of any story besides Death Comes to Time itself. If you read the page in a vacuum, you could come away thinking she was one of Dan Freeman's original characters! To an extent, this is understandable: it would be very silly to duplicate half of Ace on two pages. But there's a better way.

Many pages for characters and concepts which appear very briefly in invalid stories, like George W. Bush, feature a "Behind the scenes" subsection called "Information from invalid sources". This is better than the Ace (Death Comes to Time) approach, since it establishes a clear link between the valid and invalid topics, but we understandably haven't chosen this route when it comes to major characters from invalid stories, since it would be cumbersome to cover that much material in a behind-the-scenes section.

You should know what's coming by now: in this case, Ace/Invalid sources, decorated by a helpful new template, tentatively named :

In Ace, a subsection called "Information from invalid sources" will briefly list or recap Ace's more prominent invalid appearances, with a link to the subpage covering Ace-related material in these invalid sources in maximum detail.

For those who dare to dream, this template-based approach would also unlock a new solution to another old problem: our coverage of concepts that originate in invalid stories but are referenced in valid ones. Right now we either shove most of these pages' material in their "Behind the scenes" sections, like on Canisian, or we jam our fingers in our ears and pretend we don't understand the obvious connection, like on Man with a bent nose. Using the above template on "invalid-first" pages like these – not on a subpage, but on the original thing! – would enable much better coverage of not just the Minister of Chance and friends but also crossover concepts like the Vivaldi inheritance or the Gwanzulum.

Biographies and leads
In Thread:264489, Shambala108 ruled that the biography sections on pages of "highly-recurring characters" should only have 2-3 sentences per story. This ruling was widely ignored – it hasn't been enforced on any page anywhere – and I believe that many, myself included, did not understand it at the time. But I have come to see the wisdom in Shambala's approach.

To quote the Editor Experience team a final time, "There's no one ideal length of an article; it should cover all the important and noteworthy points without being so lengthy that readers lose attention. While there is both clear and unclear research on the topic, an informational article should likely take about 7 minutes to read, and be somewhere between 1000 and 2500 words (not bytes). There are legitimate reasons for individual articles with 4000 - 5000 words of prose if they engage the reader and stay on-topic; beyond 5000 words, contributors should review a body of text for opportunities to summarize and break out potentially independent text into new articles."

- Isaac Fischer

Here on Tardis Wiki we fall hilariously short of this standard. Our pages Tenth Doctor and Eleventh Doctor are both over 60,000 words long, requiring (according to WordCounter.net) over 3 hours of reading time each – and it would be hard to argue that their prose is especially engaging. No person is sitting down and reading either of these pages in their entirety. And don't even mention The Master!

If Shambala's decision was implemented properly, we would see a dramatic reduction of these page lengths, but two problems would remain:
 * 1) the matter of what to do with all the material we'd be removing; and
 * 2) the fact that such a reduction would be nowhere near drastic enough to meet best practices!

Subpages would solve both problems. Biographies which are too long by Shambala's standard can be moved to subpages, rather than deleted outright; and the  method would unlock far larger potential reductions in page length.

As described in my above summary writing guide above, the information in a summary should be chosen for its relevance to the not we. I've received some pushback for this part of the proposal, but in actuality, it satisfies both the spirit and the letter of Tardis:Neutral point of view. Our entire purpose as a wiki is to cover DWU-related stories and concepts in whatever way will best serve DWU fans, and the reason we have T:NPOV is because long ago our admins judged it was the best way to achieve that purpose, not because promoting non-TV content is one of our priorities. A neutral point of view does not prevent us from realistically assessing what information is most relevant to our readers: otherwise it would be against the rules to use the "Main actor" variable in infoboxes!

This guideline has implications for lead paragraphs, as well. Peter Capaldi himself had such a hard time finding relevant information in our article on The Beatles that he ultimately gave up! I've since fixed the issue with that specific page by moving information about TV: The Chase from its 14th paragraph to its 2nd. Applying this approach more widely across the wiki will be huge for general usability.

Miscellaneous other cases

 * One of the biggest advantages of subpages is that they provide more room for not just ordinary coverage but also specific templates and sections. Subpages like Tenth Doctor/Appearance could have their own "Behind the scenes" sections discussing real-world information related to the topic.
 * There are thousands of orphaned images on this wiki illustrating characters and concepts. Per the ruling that DWM illustrations cannot be used to illustrate in-universe pages, many of these images cannot be used on their pages even if there was room for them. Gallery subpages for major characters would solve these problems by providing a "dumping ground" for images of a character or concept.
 * It's often remarked that T:SPOIL is too strict and that we should cover future cast information based on official announcements. (See the brief argument on my user page.) While one option would be to put on a cast article, spoiler subpages for real-world cast and crew might be a closer compromise with the current spoilerphobia-friendly goals of T:SPOIL.
 * Chris Cwej's Superiors is one of many pages which shoehorn every once-used alternate name into the lead paragraph. These names do belong in the article, but the place for them is a "Name" section, such as we see on many Wikipedia pages; the actual lead paragraph should only mention the two or three more prominent names at most. For some cases where the naming discussion is particularly difficult, however, it might be appropriate to expand it into a subpage. Aliases of the Doctor represents an edge case here; due to its length and the fact that it's mostly linked through redirects, it might qualify for splitting into separate pages for individual aliases, such as Time's Champion and Time Lord Victorious.

Comments
If you have any feedback on this proposal, please feel free to add comments here or embed them in the text above with  '' tags. I reserve the right to incorporate, reject, and/or remove anything added to this page. – n8 (☎) 15:41, 19 September 2022 (UTC)''