Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-98.220.8.69-20130503032552/@comment-188432-20130504161250

From a technical standpoint, what's going on at the link you provided is fascinating. But there's no comparison between our two franchises. Song of Ice and Fire is a handful of books. Doctor Who is a multimedia franchise spanning thousands of stories. The size, scope and ambition of that site is tiny compared to this one.

And the thing is, towerofthehand.com is not a wiki. It doesn't allow the general public to edit articles, so they have an extraordinary amount of control of their content. They don't have to consider building something that can be edited by anyone of practically any age. Moreover, they're not a part of a wikifarm, so they don't have to worry about any parent company telling them what standards they have to maintain. They can do it precisely the way they want to do it, and not worry whether their design is too far away from their host's "norms". And it's not built on the MediaWiki platform. It appears to be a completely custom, purpose-built site. So they've integrated this concept into their site from the ground up.

We could do something like this through javascript or potentially SMW, but it would actually require starting over. From ground zero. We'd have to tag every bit of information as belonging to one of the several groups: TV, AUDIO, PROSE, whatever. That task would be … formidable in the extreme. Game of Thrones is a literal handful of books. Doctor Who is thousands of stories. And we have tens of thousands of pages about those thousands of stories.

Finally, I've seen this approach done with Doctor Who stuff, and I find it difficult to understand. There are sites where people will colour the text to indicate the source of the statement. Imagining how that would work if we actively hid information is challenging. There are many short stories, for instance, which require an understanding of precedent (and sometimes antecedent) audio and television stories. So if someone wanted to come here and allow only prose stories to display, they'd be lost. I mean, sometimes literally half a sentence would be visible. There are any number of sentences I know I've written which integrate facts from different media so tightly that hiding the various media would result in only a few words to be visible at a time. Sure, we could rewrite the sentences so that full statements were given for each media, but then the text wouldn't flow the same way, or at all.

Doctor Who doesn't actually lend itself to a separation of media like this. Most non-televised stories trade on the references they make to other media. There are very few totally original, free-standing stories out there. And Doctor Who fans are, I would say, hardwired to be most interested in finding the connections between one story and another. Big Finish and the DWM and IDW comic stories clearly trade on the notion that they're creating stories that amplify and enhance televised stories.

For example, if you choose to show only information from comic stories, then I'd suggest that The Eye of Ashaya or The Time Machination or Hunters of the Burning Stone would make very little sense to you. Or at least you'd be missing the emotional impact of the stories. These stories, like so many others, trade on what you know about various characters from their appearances in other media.

And it's not just that the stories all require knowledge from television. If it were true that every story derived from television, then we could make TV information permanently visible, and the rest, optional. But there are audios that have characters from prose and comics, and short stories that are wholly based on audio characters and situations, and books that are based on things that originated in comics.

Being able to freely write articles that can pull in things from different media allow us to tell the reader why it's important that the writer put this character in that situation while equipping them in a certain way and saying a certain phrase.

So, yes, I concede that being able to hide the information per media would make the source clearer. But it would make the meaning much more opaque.