Forum:Prefix simplification

Do you know how many prefixes we have on our wiki? 90. Nine-zero. And rising. In order to make sense of our article citation system, you have to wade through some seriously thick alphabet soup.

This whole prefixing "thing" came from early administrators' (well, okay, Freethinker1of1's) love of w:c:memoryalpha. It's all there in the early forum archives. But the thing is, MemAlpha is much simpler. They have seven prefixes, by my count: TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT and MOV. So there's no great barrier to understanding. Even newbies know within their first day of using the site what all the prefixes are.

And, yanno, back in 2005/6 when this system emerged, there were much fewer lines to worry about. More than MemAlpha deals with, but much less than today. Big Finish have created tons of new lines since 2006. We've got a thriving new series book line now; we've had the explosion of new comic lines, and — let's not forget — we've had three televised spin-offs since the prefixing system started.

I think we've reached the point of critical mass. Casual readers shouldn't be made to feel like they need a cheat sheet just to read an article.

Prefixes should be something that people can pick up almost intuitively. They really shouldn't have to go to a scorecard to figure them out.

Call this a last-minute "think about a way to make it simpler for the newbies that will be arriving once the new series start" moment. But we've got to simplify this mess.

What if reduced all the prefixes to the bare minimum? What if we concentrated on medium rather than range? Now I realise that most of the people who respond to this thread are going to be long-time editors. So you're all used to the system we have now. But imagine you're someone who's discovered us because you just watched one of the brand new Matt Smith episodes a couple of weeks from now. Is the need to become familiar with 90 prefixes gonna retain your interest or hamper it? Even though I've done a lot to build the current system, I have to say that I think it's gonna turn you off.

If you're one of the thousands of people who come here every day just to read our articles, it's probably more than sufficient to know that a factoid derives from "a comic strip", "a book" or "a television episode". You don't need to know, if you're reading, say, Martha Jones, that the fact comes from a DWM strip versus a DWBIT strip versus an IDW strip. A comic is a comic is a comic. If you want greater details, you'd click on the name of the comic strip and quickly scan the infobox.

By site policy, MAs are not more authoritative than PDAs, and DWBIT stories aren't more valid than IHP ones. So why should we continue to make these trivial distinctions within the body of our articles?

I think we should consider carefully the advantages of going with something like this:

Fiction
 * PROS — any prose story — novel, novella, novelisation or short story from any range
 * COM — any comic strip from any range
 * TV — any TV story from any programme
 * AUD – any audio from any range

Non-fiction
 * REF — used as now
 * INFO — used as now
 * PCOM — used as now
 * DCOM — used as now
 * DOC — used as now
 * CON — used as now

And that's it.

Changeover is incredibly simple with a bot. The entire wiki could be converted in probably 72 hours. Thus "oh my God, this is an impossible task" is not a valid reason not to adopt this change.

However, you may have other good arguments for why I'm not thinking straight in this instance. If so — or if you actually agree with me, or have a counter-proposal — please put your comments below. 03:05: Tue 21 Aug 2012