Forum:Meanwhile in the TARDIS

What would be the best prefix to use for Meanwhile in the TARDIS? The thing keeping TV from being entirely appropriate is of course the fact that the scenes were not televised, only released on DVD, though presented in a manner that seems to keep them placed in continuity rather than being discounted like deleted scenes or other extraneous material.

Currently all our BBC DVD-related prefixes are for out-of-universe material such as DCOM, while our in-universe direct-to-video prefixes apply to non-BBC licencees like BBV and RP. Should we perhaps come up with a new prefix for this sort of thing, or extend TV to include it? Rob T Firefly 21:57, June 7, 2011 (UTC)


 * I think something like DW-DVD would work.Zodisgod 22:29, June 7, 2011 (UTC)


 * Yep, DWDVD (without the hyphen) is probably good. We'd just need to make sure it's stated clearly on the page that it's for these official bits and not for things like deleted scenes or other stuff. --Tangerineduel / talk 15:04, June 8, 2011 (UTC)


 * Alright, I've started it up and added it to Tardis:List of prefixes. Rob T Firefly 16:39, June 8, 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, I wholly disagree with that, and am going to delete that prefix, pending more discussion. DWDVD is highly confusing.  It implies anything to do with the DVD.  If I saw DWDVD, I would think it might mean a documenary or a commentary or really anything that was on the DVD.  We have two sketches, two, that fall into this hypothetical special category.  I really think we can live with calling them just DW.  Speaking as a pedant, it's being way, way, way pedantic to make up a prefix for two sketches that hav ethe same name.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with the citation, TV: Meanwhile in the TARDIS.  03:34:54 Sat 11 Jun 2011

Let's look at what we're talking about here. Here's the full text of the page that Rob created:


 * The prefix DWDVD indicates the information cited comes from in-universe material presented on BBC DVD Doctor Who releases which wasn't previously broadcast elsewhere, such as Meanwhile in the TARDIS.


 * This prefix is not intended to refer to deleted scenes or other DVD-exclusive material that does not fit within Tardis:Canon policy; these are not citable references on this wiki and therefore do not require a prefix.


 * This prefix is also not intended for use on DVD-exclusive material presented with a real-world point of view, such as documentaries, commentaries, or info text. For the correct prefixes for those items and others, see Tardis:List of prefixes.

Okay, so un-broadcast in-universe material. But not deleted scenes. Don't know why not, actually. I'm not sure we've ever definitively ruled on the question of the canonicity of deleted scenes, have we? And would this mean the in-universe thing about Davros on the re-issued Remembrance would get this prefix? Or would it be DOC? Would the in-universe docos on Planet of the Daleks and Frontier in Space be DOC or DWDVD? Is the Jaggeroth bit on City of Death BBCDVD or not? Any time a documentary producer gets a little creative about the perspective of his or her work, it's gonna cause questions about whether a certain thing fits under DOC or DWDVD. See, this prefix highlights a problem area I'd rather just stay away from. If there's no prefix, there's no definition. If there's no definition, there's less chance of awkward, essentially unanswerable, questions about pseudo-in-universe material that litters DVD releases.

I think it's far better to Just let Meanwhile be a part of the overall content of series 5, as it was intended to be. There's no question at all that it's meant to be a part of the overall narrative of the season, is there? I mean instinctively we just know it's every bit as much DW as the episodes that got broadcast. This attempt to make it a separate kind of DW is a false division that's only going to take us down the primrose path to a lot of questions about other DVD content.

More than that, I think the prefix will be harmful to the useful organisation of other information from the DVDs. Most of what Rob wrote is explaining what the prefix is not. That's problematic. Cause that means people are certainly going to mistake it for those things. The most natural thing this prefix seems to describe are the documentaries on the DVDs. If we allow this prefix, we're going to start seeing slow "prefix creep" from DOC and DCOM to DWDVD.

In my mind, I can't work out why there's a need for this new prefix whatsoever, and I think it'll do more harm than good. 04:13:08 Sat 11 Jun 2011


 * Okay…I hadn't actually thought of it that much in depth.
 * CzechOut makes many more valid points than I really thought about like the prevalence of in-universe documentaries which this prefix would possibly fall into.
 * I think, we should probably reverse this decision, and just use the DW prefix. --Tangerineduel / talk 13:54, June 11, 2011 (UTC)


 * Those are all very good points, CzechOut/ I've changed the DWDVD references I'd added among the citations of Meanwhile in the wiki back to TV.  However, the TV definition would seem to exclude Meanwhile because it never aired on television; should something be added to allow for this one special case, or is it best left alone for now? Rob T Firefly 22:30, June 19, 2011 (UTC)

Archivist's notes
Now that it has become clearer that Moffat does in fact like writing new, series-linked material for the DVD/Blu-ray releases, we can answer Rob's rhetorical question more definitively. Meanwhile wasn't a one-off thing, so there is a need to change the definition of what the prefix TV means. As is clear, all three participants to this conversation agreed that TV was the most appropriate prefix for these "home video scenes", so the text at both T:LOP and TV was changed to allow for the inclusion of this, for lack of a better term, "extra features narrative". 16:17: Sun 06 May 2012