Forum:Alternate vs. alternative timelines

In the thread Alternative timeline individuals, a side issue came up about whether the Whoniverse has "alternate timelines" or "alternative timelines".

Our main article on the topic is Alternate timeline; Alternative timeline is a redirect to that page, and the word "alternative" doesn't appear anywhere in the text. However, there are other articles on the wiki that use the word "alternative". I'm not sure which is more common, but that doesn't seem too important.

CzechOut's argued that (at least according to one reference book), "alternative" is the more common UK usage for this sense, and I believe he's right.

However, I think there's a much better way to decide in this case: which is more commonly used in the Whoniverse? I can't begin to guess off the top of my head, but I do have most of the subtitles for the new series, dozens of subtitles for the classic series, and dozens of fully-scanned novels and samples of other novels that I can grep through when I get home. (I'm not putting forth TV and novels as more important than comics and audios, just a lot easier to search.) --70.36.140.19 08:06, September 18, 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm afraid this is an issue like Artifacts or Artefacts of Rassilon? or K9. Truth is, you're going to find it sometimes one way in DWU fiction, and sometimes another.  As I said in the thread that spawned this one, we just need to make a brute-force decision, one way or the other.  The reason we need to do this is because it's important, from a purely technical standpoint, that all articles having to do with the subject of "alternative realities" use a consistent spelling of the word.  Otherwise, it makes it hard for:
 * Bots
 * DPL calls
 * Humans trying to use a search bar
 * Any seraches which begin with "alternative" will obviously miss any categories or titles beginning with "alternate". This isn't a case where necessarily one way is right and the other is clearly wrong.  It's more a case of just deciding something so that searches can reliably be made on one term or the other.  In other words, this is a "librarian's debate", not on that has much traction beyond those who care about structure.  The only reason I'm leaning towards alternative' is because more categories are already using that word.  Yes, it's likely to have more traction in British usage.  But since alternate is perfectly understandable by Britons, and you can find such usage in the DWU, one could argue that alternate'' is the most universally comprehensible word to use.


 * Again, it makes me no never mind, except that we need to decide on something as the preferred term for page and category titles. 01:47: Mon 19 Sep 2011


 * "Truth is, you're going to find it sometimes one way in DWU fiction, and sometimes another." I'm not sure that's true in this case. "Alternate timeline" and "alternate history" are standard terms used in SF in general; there's a whole subgenre of SF that everyone calls "alternate history". And partly this is to avoid confusion with "alternative history", which is a synonym for "counterfactual history", something historians rather than SF writers do. Of course not every Doctor Who writer is steeped in SF tradition, but most of them are, so I suspect that most of them would find it odd to type "alternative history". If I'm right, we'll see writers who follow the UK usage in all kinds of similar cases, but not these two—they might even use "alternative past" and "alternate history" as synonyms. --70.36.140.19 03:47, September 19, 2011 (UTC)


 * OK, I don't have my whole collection with me—or, more importantly, my PDF-searching tools—until I get home, but I do have a PDF of No Future, and guess what: alternative universe, alternative reality, alternate history.


 * Assuming that distinction carries across more than just one novel, you could argue for "alternate" only for timelines and histories, "alternative" for everything else, but I think it would be simpler to just use "alternate" for everything, or to use "alternative" for everything but make sure to title the pages and categories so avoid the word "timeline" or "history". --70.36.140.19 03:50, September 19, 2011 (UTC)