Forum:Pre-Airing episode articles

I feel that we should have a rule for episode articles. I feel that they should not be made until the episode airs. This is mainly due to the fact that the titles are subject to change. See Talk:Death of the Doctor for more arguments about this subject. 18:52, June 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree, to a point. I mean, the SJA isn't going to air until September(?) and there's literally no information that's worth keeping those pages around. When they get closer to a month or so before they air, I wouldn't mind the pages being made, as long as there is information on them, the titles are confirmed, and the spoiler tag etc is put on them. Otherwise, they shouldn't be created. The Thirteenth Doctor 19:15, June 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * I generally make it a rule to semi-protect all articles related to the current series. But should these pages be fully create protected, that is full protected so only admins can create the page? Until maybe a month before the broadcast date so we keep all the info on the SJA series page. Or is it more useful to have the pages created and just have them semi-protected allowing all signed in users to make edits. --Tangerineduel 10:14, June 26, 2010 (UTC)


 * I feel there's nothing wrong with having the episode articles before they air, so long as the title has come from a reasonable (BBC) source. There's lots of useful, verifiable info that can be gathered before airtime from proper sources, whether it be verified casting info, certain plot details, or even the stuff in the "next time" trailer a week before. Even having the empty page stating "___ is an episode in series ___ of ___" followed by a bunch of to be added is preferable to nothing, because we know the information will be added as it becomes available.
 * Additionally, outside the BBC's broadcast radius the official airtime happens before local airtime anyway; the functional result of keeping it out only applies to the BBC's part of the world.
 * Even if the titles do change before broadcast, moving the page and updating the links to it is really not as much of an inconvenience as all that; a user could do it in minutes, a bot in seconds. Keeping the pages semi-protected would seem to be the best limitation to place. Rob T Firefly 00:51, June 27, 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, there is what seems and what is.


 * Semi-protection is barely any protection at all. It only stops people without an account from creating a page. The errors that have been created during the broadcast of series 5 have come from registered users, against whom semi-protection offers no barrier.


 * And a bot could not do a changeover "in seconds". That's a common misnomer. The change from The Pandorica Opens to The Pandorica Opens (TV story) took about 24 hours, with a bot, and even then I didn't get everything. Bots operate largely on categories. Since you can't tell ahead of time which categories have been affected by a bad name, you have to assume all of them, and that takes time. You also have to allow for slightly different usage, e.g., whether it's in a template or just a raw link, meaning that you run the whole operation twice. Since our category trees have some real kinks in them (people keep organizing subcats in a way that leads to recursion), a bot's work on a general search like this one will sometimes get halted. So you have to begin again, but with a different category. (And, again, you have to do it a minimum of twice, because of variation in usage. Yes, you could probably do it once if you wrote a clever little bit of programming, but honestly it's easier just to do it twice.) Even if the cat tree had no recursion, and you only had to run it once, you're talking about a job on the order or hours, not seconds. And the longer a page exists prior to getting the correct title, the more chance there is for it to be cited, as was the case with TPO. Plus there's the additional problem that wrong titles don't get automatically waved away. For instance, Vampires in Venice is still, insensibly, a legitimate link. We don't see this as a problem, becuase it's a blue link, and it takes us to the proper The Vampires of Venice. But of course it is a problem because — and this might be falling on deaf ears — the job of an encyclopedia is to be accurate, not merely approximately accurate. So I definitely, strongly feel that ep and character pages should be locked down to admin use only until the episode airs. And none of this "month before" business. Episode and character pages shouldn't be created until the credits roll on BBC One, or whatever the home network is. Vampires is an example enough of how things can change right up to the moment of broadcast. And Ambrose Northover is an example of a character whose proper name could only have been divined from watching the episode. What is the point to creating that article ahead of broadcast, when broadcast only meant that someone had to go back and change all links from Ambrose to Ambrose Northover. It's been argued that it's not that big a deal to make these changes. But when you multiply them out and look at all the changes that have been necessitated out of simple impatience, the work load is not acceptable. We shouldn't be cleaning up messes that needn't have been made.


 * Additionally, once the admin lock is in place, I think admin who choose to use their powers to get around the lock should be strongly censured, perhaps even with the threat of having their powers removed. The benefits of waiting and creating the right article simply outweigh any other considerations. We are not a news organization.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 18:24, June 30, 2010 (UTC)


 * That can be our motto. "We are not a news organization. We are an encyclopaedia which documents that which has happened, not that which will." I mean, I know it won't, but SJA could be cancelled tomorrow. The episodes could not air, then we'd be left with 6 pages of emptiness. We are supposed to document what does happen, not what is supposed to or going to happen. It's like an animal documentary saying that all the salmon will go up river, but it's just not true, some of them will die on the way. A dim analogy, but you get the picture. --The Thirteenth Doctor 20:57, June 30, 2010 (UTC)