Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1293767-20151029072618/@comment-1432718-20161209021554

This discussion is extremely long, over 300 posts (I can't even get to the bottom on my Ipad without it crashing), and we've had quite a few new faces chiming in lately, so I'm going to sum up what we are trying to do here.

We are trying to decide how to determine whether an episode is part of a multi-parter. Sometimes we stray into a discussion about numbering stories, but that's really only a subset of this one. Whatever we decide on the multi-parts will affect our numbering system (if we decide to keep it).

There are two basic facets of this discussion (any decision must take both of these into account):
 * 1) What do we do about stories/series that have already aired.
 * 2) What do we do about future episodes.

For #1, we have to look at things we are given by the production team and decide as a wiki how we define what a multi-part story is. This will affect story numbering on List of Doctor Who television stories and other similar pages and in infoboxes, and it can affect the leads of story pages (some of which have statements like "story X is the yth episode of series Z").

For #2, we have to make sure we define multi-parters in such a way as to minimize any chance of having to re-hash this discussion for later series (we call this future-proofing).

This entire discussion really only affects BBC Wales Doctor Who and Class (and possibly Torchwood series 1 & 2) for now. SJA already has multi-parters clearly defined; K-9 doesn't have multi-parters, and Torchwood series 3 & 4 have been covered in forum decisions that will not be affected by this decision. We do not need to make concessions for classic Who, because they are not a part of this process.