User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-1296654-20190726133841/@comment-5918438-20190804013121

I lost my whole response to this, so I'll keep this one short. I would love to hear a more informed view on this than mine, but here's my understanding of the et al. situation:
 * Yes, by convention (but by no means in all circumstances), the preferred use of et al. is for people. Indeed, it is most commonly used in lists of people.
 * However, I would like to highlight one little nuance that I think might take precedence here. While et al. means "and others" in the unabbreviated Latin, indicating that an exhaustive list would contain more items, etc. translates more as "and the rest" or "and so on". In other words, etc. is used only when it is quite plain to the reader which items should follow, or what class of items should follow, when it's obvious enough what might come next in the sequence, when you'd have a general sense of what is contained in that "etc.": "all else that (logically) follows".
 * Bringing this into the realm of citing stories, I do not think that most cases of our use of et al. here would jive well with this understanding of etc. I can think of exceptions, of course.  might indicate that the information cited can be found in most if not all Torchwood stories, so Everything Changes "and so on", "and all else that follows". The same would go for citing, say, An Unearthly Child, or talking about the Doctor's exile on Earth from Spearhead onward. But in so many cases here, the sources given are in different media, published in different time periods, and released as part of different ranges or series even within a medium. I do not believe that etc. lends itself particularly well when what we're citing are disparate sources which all agree on a fact, "and others".
 * For instance, the first source given on our Time Lord article is . The preceding statement concerns their invention and subsequent attempts at total control over time travel technology. I can personally think of so many sources just within Big Finish's output that could go into this citation, but nothing about   would clarify for me, as a reader, which stories might come next in the series. A 1989 Death's Head comic, a 1973 TV story, a 1993 Virgin Missing Adventures novel, and then...? What follows? Here, there is no list of similar or sequential items, so et al., which means to us "and other stories", still seems more appropriate.