Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-44988386-20200625144019/@comment-6032121-20200625151113

It was long-ago decided that we could use the citations of individual episode titles (when available) as a way to make citations more precise, and I don't see why we should get rid of this very nifty feature. I disagree that it "looks bad", and even if it did a little, it's more than outweighed by the usefulness of this policy.

For the longer serials like The Daleks' Master Plan, it allows us to tell our readers exactly in what episode Factoid X appears, as opposed to leaving them to wade through 6+ hours of content if they want to find the source again.

And we want it to stand out. We don't want to give people the impression that "The Expedition" is a TV story in its own right; it has to be obvious that it's an episode within a serial, to make the reader curious about which serial that is, and therefore click the page. Editing strategies which lead to readers visiting more of our pages are a good thing, it has repeatedly been pointed out.

It's also not a weird T:NPOV-breaking exception for the Hartnell era. The same policy has been used to e.g. cite individual installmets of The Time Lord Letters. The Doctor in Earth history would be a massively less useful page if it wasn't allowed to use the "quotations mark trick".