Forum:Temporary forums/Subpage policy

Draft 0.05, cobbled together from miscellaneous talk pages without regard for tonal consistency.

Topics: subpages; page length; relevancy; spoilers

Introduction
For a long time, I've had a "Policy" section on my user page listing a broad array of concerns and suggestions that I have. It's taken me a long time to realize, but many of these could be addressed by a singular policy: the establishment of a proper use of subpages on this wiki.

I do not believe forums are necessary to enact this policy! Tardis:Changing policy specifies that the forums – which we have been without since November 2020 – are required for changing policy. However, rather than changing how we do things (besides renaming some purely marginal pages such as lists of appearances to take full advantage of wiki formatting), this proposal merely clarifies another, existing option: the longstanding precedent of Doctor Who Magazine/1985. It will bring us closer to FANDOM best practices and our goal of serving readers without detracting anything from any current policies or practices.

Prior art

 * "Short and long pages on Fandom"
 * "Articles on Fandom"
 * "Categories and Navigation on Fandom"
 * "Articles on Fandom"
 * "Categories and Navigation on Fandom"
 * "Categories and Navigation on Fandom"

Proposal
When a page grows too big, consider splitting it into multiple pages or subpages!

Subpages
Subpages are usually only meant to be linked to from their root page and navigation templates. For instance, Twelfth Doctor - list of appearances is only linked to from Twelfth Doctor and, making it an obvious candidate for a subpage. This is the  method.

Subpages should be named after top-level sections, which have headings formatted with ==, such as "Biography" or "Plot". There should never be in-universe subpages: for instance, if the section Twelfth Doctor were deemed too big, we would move it to Twelfth Doctor/Biography, not Twelfth Doctor/Continued adventures with Clara.

Alternately, FishTank suggests, "A character's narrative in a television season could be placed into &quot;Character/Season 1&quot; with detailed plot points and spoilers in that article." There's an appealing logic to this as well, and it lines up with our current use of subpages at Doctor Who Magazine/1985 et al.

Separate pages
Since subpages are meant to be primarily linked to from their parent page, if you want to move material off of a page and think it might be relevant to or linkable from other pages as well, consider whether it would be possible to split without using subpages. This is an art, not a science, and experienced users should use their best judgment to decide how to group content together into logical topics.

For instance, I created The Doctor's early life and The Master's early life to cover conflicting accounts of their origins when First Doctor and The Master became too unwieldy. Other examples include pages for broadly-defined eras in the Doctor's life, such as Exile on Earth, and pages for specific events, like Operation Mannequin for the events of Rose.

Following this principle, the solution to the length of The Master is to split it into pages for incarnations, not simply to hide material in The Master/Biography or "incarnation subpages" like The Master/War Master.

Summaries
After creating a subpage, link to it from the root page with and replace the copied text with a shorter summary of the information, emphasising details which are most likely notable to the not we. In practice, this usually means TV information, although it can also include especially notable content from other media.

Fandom's Editor Experience team suggests, "The base article could then replace a long section with a spoiler-free summary with the most important points."

Leads
In the same way that the  method involves writing a summary of the subpage, a lead paragraph should be a summary of the page's contents. It should contain all the information most relevant to casual audiences.

As an example of a lead done right, the other night I wanted a quick refresher on Stanley Kubrick, and by skimming the first few paragraphs of on my phone, it was trivially easy to find his death date and most notable works within seconds.

As a random example of a lead done wrong, right now you can't answer the question "what episode did the Twelfth Doctor regenerate in?" without scrolling 277 paragraphs down Twelfth Doctor!

Similarly, the leads on many pages shoehorn in every once-used alternate name for the topic. (A chief offender in this way is Chris Cwej's Superiors.) These names do belong in the article, but the place for them is a "Name" section, such as we see on almost every Wikipedia page; the actual lead paragraph should only mention the two or three more prominent names at most.

Subpage-like pages
Many articles on this wiki are already written like subpages. Our 1000+ lists of appearances are perfect examples of subpages in both purpose and execution: The only problem is that … well, they're not actually subpages! We've been using a dash instead of a slash for no reason. Twelfth Doctor - list of appearances, to name of one of many, should be moved to Twelfth Doctor/List of appearances.
 * 1) when a page section (the infobox list of appearances) grows too large and unwieldy, it's moved to a separate page;
 * 2) the new page is titled in reference to the core page (Character name - list of appearances); and
 * 3) the core page retains a summary of the most important information (first mention, first appearance).

You might ask, "Why would subpages be better than the status quo? What are subpages, anyway?" Well, you're on one! Because of the slashes I've built into the title of this page, it's a subpage of both User:NateBumber and User:NateBumber/Sandbox, and as a result there are links to those pages at the top of this one, just below the title. This is great for navigation. Fandom's Editor Experience team explains, "Google understands that subpages have a distinct parent relationship with the base page. […] These subpages have a natural method to get back to the base article: they're linked from the top of the page!"

- Isaac Fischer

Additionally, a subpage can also be linked to from its parent page via only partial urls: if you're on Twelfth Doctor, the link /List of appearances will take you to Twelfth Doctor/List of appearances. It's even more powerful than the pipe trick!

Our lists of appearances aren't our only subpage-like pages. We also have almost 100 "galleries", most of which are already linked to from story or series pages with. BBC New Series Adventures covers should be moved to BBC New Series Adventures/Covers without hesitation. I'm willing to bet that there are more examples, too. These are low-hanging fruit when it comes to integrating subpages onto the wiki.

Story summaries
Tardis Wiki is notorious for our lack of plot descriptions. A vast majority of story pages have plot sections that say to be added. This is understandable: few editors actively enjoy typing out lengthy plot descriptions, and those who do often hold themselves to extreme standards of detail. But these to be added tags, many of them 15 years old or older, are a problem: according to Fandom's Editor Experience team, "Stubs do provide a bad experience because the readers and search engines that encounter them are left wanting more and an incomplete page (even if it is marked incomplete) has not been proven to "attract editors from the reader base to add to or expand the page" as was once assumed. Every day that a stub exists and remains incomplete is a day that bad experience persists."

- Isaac Fischer

Subpages offer us a way out. Rather than marking thousands of story pages as stubs just because they lack lengthy plot breakdowns, we should put these breakdowns (when we have them) on "Plot" subpages. This wouldn't even require a change to our preload templates! It would look something like this:

Summary
A brief, non-spoilery teaser that someone could use to check if they're interested in a story. If a publisher's summary is provided, this is where it would go, in which case the section is called "Publisher's summary".

Plot
A short synopsis that someone could use to get a gist of a story or remind themselves of the plot. For an example, see Silver-Tongued Liars (short story). Unlike full plot descriptions, which tend to provide enough detail that one could experience the story without actually experiencing it (!), these shorter plot synopses could be written from memory without any editors needing to pause or relisten to take notes on every aspect of a story. Not only would synopses make our pages less likely to appear unfinished, their length would also make it easier for readers to scroll and access other sections on the page. All the while, readers interested in nitty gritty plot details would still be able to easily access that information when available by clicking to the subpage via.

Biographies and leads
In Thread:264489, Shambala108 ruled that the biography sections on pages of "highly-recurring characters" should only have 2-3 sentences per story. This ruling was widely ignored – I do not think it has been enforced on any page anywhere – and I believe that many, myself included, did not understand it at the time. But I have come to see the wisdom in Shambala's approach.

To cite the Editor Experience team a final time, "There's no one ideal length of an article; it should cover all the important and noteworthy points without being so lengthy that readers lose attention. While there is both clear and unclear research on the topic, an informational article should likely take about 7 minutes to read, and be somewhere between 1000 and 2500 words (not bytes). There are legitimate reasons for individual articles with 4000 - 5000 words of prose if they engage the reader and stay on-topic; beyond 5000 words, contributors should review a body of text for opportunities to summarize and break out potentially independent text into new articles."

- Isaac Fischer

Here on Tardis Wiki we fall epically, hilariously short of this standard. Our page Tenth Doctor and Eleventh Doctor are both over 60,000 words long, requiring (according to WordCounter.net) over 3 hours of reading time each – and it would be hard to argue that their prose is especially engaging. No person is sitting down and reading either of these pages in their entirety. No one. (Don't even mention The Master to me.)

If Shambala's decision was implemented properly, we would see a dramatic reduction of these page lengths, but two problems would remain:
 * 1) Firstly, the matter of what to do with all the material we'd be removing; and
 * 2) Secondly, the fact that such a reduction would be nowhere near enough!

We can use Twelfth Doctor/Biography to cover the character's biography in maximum detail while Twelfth Doctor gives a briefer overview focusing on major appearances.

Our purpose as a wiki is to cover DWU-related stories and concepts as they exist, in whatever way will best serve DWU fans: the not we, who are often browsing on mobile, without Ctrl+F or familiarity with our citation formatting, and for a limited period of time. The reason we have rules like T:NPOV is because long ago we judged they were the best way to serve DWU fans as a wiki, not because promoting non-TV content was one of our priorities. T:NPOV does and should not prevent us from serving our readers based on a realistic assessment of what information is most relevant.

Peter Capaldi's difficulty in finding relevant information on our wiki invites us to rethink our method for writing leads. Realistically, TV information should be surfaced in, such as at The Beatles and Musée d'Orsay; by the same principle, much of the non-TV information in sections like Tenth Doctor should be relegated to subpages.

Other realities
The authors of the Doctor Who universe are notorious for their inconsistent treatment of time travel mechanics, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the cases of parallel universes and alternate timelines. What do these terms mean in Doctor Who? There are as many definitions as there are fans, and each one has a counterexample among our valid sources. Despite this, the wiki persists in different treatment of different types of different realities. T:MERGE semi-arbitrarily proclaims that "Continuity of consciousness is key", meaning that in cases of ongoing stories like Doctor of War, editors are left in limbo for months or years until they can see how the timeline resolves. These policies have led to nitpicky and counterproductive distinctions, such as the idea that Moira (The Pilot) wasn't a recurring character in series 10 because it was technically Moira (Shadow World) who appeared in Extremis. And all the while, the proliferation of split pages with strange dab terms means that many articles now bear below their infoboxes, increasing the glut of obscure material which readers must now scroll past to find a page's actual contents.

To our admins' credit, many of the more creative page splits – for example, Third Doctor (He Jests at Scars…) – have been diligently merged back into their originals, and Talk:Susan Foreman (Prologue: The First Doctor) provided a much-needed clarification that not all versions of characters from other realities deserve separate pages: "As a rule of thumb (there are exceptions, of course), if there's no more to say on the separate page than what can already be stated on the prime version's "Alternate timelines" subsection, it's not worth creating a separate page for the alternate-timeline version."

- Scrooge MacDuck

Scrooge's explanation hints at part of the reason we began splitting these pages in the first place: a page covering all of a major character's appearances in all realities (main and other) would simply be very lengthy!

Tenth Doctor/Other realities – not /Alternate timelines, as the section is currently called, but a name that's also inclusive of parallel universes and pocket realities – would give the space. It would have room for separate sections discussing the character's appearances in alternate timelines, parallel universes, and other alternative constructs. It would also provide a more suitable home for specialized templates like.

Subpages might not be the silver bullet that solves this problem once and for all, but they do offer a more consistent path for addressing the issue.

Other validities
The Doctor Who webcast Death Comes to Time, which is currently invalid, depicts an alternative fate of the Seventh Doctor and Ace following Survival. We're meant to recognise these names: within this story, Ace is the same characters who we met in Dragonfire, and her actions are shaped by her experience in The Curse of Fenric and other stories. This background is assumed as understood.

Now read our article for Ace (Death Comes to Time). There's no mention of her shared roots with regular Ace; in fact, there's no citation of any story besides Death Comes to Time itself. If you read the page in a vacuum, you could come away thinking she was one of Dan Freeman's original characters! To an extent, this is understandable: it would be very silly to duplicate half of Ace on two pages. But there's a better way.

Many pages for characters and concepts which appear very briefly in invalid stories, like George W. Bush, feature a "Behind the scenes" subsection called "Information from invalid sources". This is better than the Ace (Death Comes to Time) approach, since it establishes a clear link between the valid and invalid topics, but we understandably haven't chosen this route when it comes to major characters from invalid stories, since it would be cumbersome to cover that much material in a behind-the-scenes section.

You should know what's coming by now: in this case, Ace/Invalid sources, decorated by a helpful new template: A journal of impossible things. . . This subpage documents information about  Ace from invalid sources. It complements the main page and assumes familiarity with the valid appearances.

In Ace, a subsection called "Information from invalid sources" briefly will list or recap Ace's more prominent invalid appearances, with a link to the subpage covering Ace-related material in these invalid sources in maximum detail.

For those who dare to dream, this template-based approach would also unlock a new solution to another old problem: our coverage of concepts that originate in invalid stories but are referenced in valid ones. Right now we either shove most of these pages' material in their "Behind the scenes" sections, like on Canisian, or we jam our fingers in our ears and pretend we don't understand the obvious connection, like on Man with a bent nose. Using the above template on "invalid-first" pages like these – not on a subpage, but on the original thing! – would enable much better coverage of not just the Minister of Chance and friends but also crossover concepts like the Vivaldi inheritance from and Sandra Mitchell from.

Comments
If you have any feedback on this proposal, please feel free to add comments here or embed them in the text above with  '' tags. I reserve the right to incorporate, reject, and/or remove anything added to this page. – n8 (☎) 15:41, 19 September 2022 (UTC)''

I really, really like this proposal. It makes a lot of sense and seems like it would improve the experience both for the editor and the reader. I hope to see it implemented at some point soon. Bongo50  ☎  16:21, 20 September 2022 (UTC)


 * Thank you, and thank you for pointing out that ~ doesn't work in tags! I've updated my instructions here accordingly and fixed the typo you noted. – n8 (☎) 14:33, 21 September 2022 (UTC)


 * I think it might be worth deciding whether or not the first letter after the "/" should be capitalised because it does matter: User:NateBumber/Sandbox =/= User:NateBumber/sandbox. I think this should come down to where the slash trick will be used most often: places where the first letter should be capitalised, or places where it shouldn't. Do you have any thoughts? Bongo50   ☎  15:30, 21 September 2022 (UTC)


 * That's a great point. I'm tempted to say we should capitalize it, since most often I think these will be linked with rather than in-line. But it could go either way. – n8 (☎) 15:15, 29 September 2022 (UTC)