Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-88790-20130503164346

I've seen "et al" crop up in some citations such on the Vessica, Griffin, Tarnished Image (short story), Kennedy, Panda and Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS (TV story) pages.

It seems a very lazy way of citing a source, by just citing one and saying 'and others'.

But often doesn't actually help.

For example:
 * Vessica was the home planet of Majenta Pryce, who was a green humanoid. (COMIC: Hotel Historica etc al).

There are no other pages you can go to to find info about the planet from there. From that page your can find out about Majenta and the story she was in, but saying "et al" doesn't help the reader.

Over on the England page there's this:
 * English was also one of the principal languages of the human race. (TV: The End of the World, et al.)

Which if you navigate to English language you find different stories mentioned but not the story used as a source on the England article.

From the Dalek article there are these uses;


 * Dalek gunsticks could kill almost any sentient being (TV: The Daleks, et al)


 * Some models were able to hover, or fly under their own power like small spacecraft. (TV: Revelation of the Daleks, et al)

There's a lot of Dalek stories and here using 'et al' is only borderline helpful. These stories cited here do show the first example of these two things, though perhaps not the most obvious. Daleks is notable to the Daleks' first appearance and their using stun. The hover ability is more noticeably demonstrated in Remembrance.

I know "et al" is traditionally used when there's you have a citation that includes more than 4 or so authors, but that's usually in an essay and an essay has a Reference List/Bibliography at the end, so you can actually check what the citation is referring to, on our articles we don't have that.

I'm proposing we abolish and note that we don't use it in the T:CITE. 