Forum:Page Creation time

Do we actually have something set in stone for page creation? I looked through the spoiler policy and the manual of style and haven't found anything. Now that the current series of Doctor Who has aired, and with the new series of SJA airing next week, we should decide on when we can create pages and have something physically written in our manual of style.

Looking through the past discussion, especially at Forum:When can we create "The Impossible Astronaut" page?, we have, currently, two options. We can create page after broadcast or we can create pages with (TV story) at the end of it. (The last would be rolled out across all formats, e.g. (audio story) etc)

If we do go for (TV story), I would also suggest that we can create the page before broadcast - either a week, five days or 24 hours before broadcast. The page would then be locked until after broadcast. I also feel that we should not protect the story pages after broadcast, and just open them up so anyone can edit them. This was done on trail during the autumn half of Doctor Who, and in my opinion was overall successful (barring the slight hiccup we had after TWORS aired).

You should also know why we may want to add (TV story) or (comic story) or (audio story) to page titles. It is because we have been caught out in the past with the name of the episode or comic title appearing in the episode or comic. A famous example of this is The Pandorica Opens (TV story), which was created as The Pandorica Opens. We were caught by surprise when the later, which linked to the episode was the name of a painting and we had to spend time fixing the all the links.

However, if we wait till after broadcast, we know the correct title of the episode. A classic case of this was with The Vampires of Venice, which had been incorrectly named Vampires in Venice by the media and was the cause of much confusion.

So we need to decide if we want to wait till after broadcast or add (TV story) to the title meaning we could created before broadcast, and have the barebones of the article waiting till after broadcast. What does everyone else think/want? MM/ Want to talk? 22:23, October 1, 2011 (UTC)


 * My view is that we should wait until after broadcast of the relevant episode so as to avoid the sorts of problems that you mentioned. In the case of The Pandorica Opens though, I'd have kept the episode title as was and styled the page for the painting of the same name as "'The Pandorica Opens (painting)" but maybe that's just me. GusF talk to me 22:29, October 1, 2011 (UTC)
 * Indeed, that's the Wikipedia way of doing it. Preference for the un-disambiguated name is given to the thing perceived to be the item of that name which most people will look for.  And certainly more people will look for the episode than the painting.  But our preference has always been for in-universe over out-of-universe. I really wouldn't want to go down this road now, because we'd have to undo a lot of stuff.    23:26: Sat 01 Oct 2011


 * I think we should create pages before broadcast, on the day of airing. It's extremely rare that the media does incorrectly title episodes, and so that problem is almost non-existant. Also, if the addition of (TV story) to all titles went ahead, there'd be no need to wait.


 * On the topic of protecting pages, I feel that they should only be allowed to be edited by registered users after immediate broadcast. It minimises the risk of vandalism.


 * I added two headings -- "After broadcast" and "Before broadcast" -- to make things clearer. Feel free to edit or remove them. 22:44 Sat 10 Oct 2011
 * I concur with MM on when to lift protection. I think it should be as close to the moment the ep concludes broadcast, and I think it should be done automatically.  Though it took me a while to figure out, it's actually dead easy to set the system to lift protection at an appropriate time following broadcast.  And at that point, I'm in favor of complete access.  Yes, we'll occasionally get nutters, like we did earlier today, but we've stopped people from editing for sometimes months.  There's not a reason in the world to delay editing more than a second necessary.  The more poeople editing on an article means that our profile grows higher at Wiki central, which means more people can find us.  We've done amazingly well with our stats this last six weeks, and I want that trend to continue, even if it means we have occasional bouts of vandalism.  Vandalism is undesirable in one way, but it tends also to rally the troops.  Vandalism is usually met by high quality edits, because people will resist vandalism if they can.


 * On the actual subect of the thread, when to create, I think if we change disambig policy to allow all story pages to be auto-disambiguated with their media type, then creation time could be any time from the moment of an official announcement from the BBC. Not something from DWM, mind you — because it's actually more wrong than people think — but actually from an official BBC press release or the Radio Times.  Thing is, though, story pages would still have to be completely locked down until the moment intial transmission ended.  So I'm not entirely sure what good it would do the average user to create the article early.  But it would allow admin the flexibility of starting the article as and when they had time to do it, rather than chaining them to the day of broadcast.  23:26: Sat 01 Oct 2011


 * I agree protection should lifted after it's been broadcast and it should be editable by all users, registered or IP.
 * If we get significant vandalism edits or edit wars going on then we can restrict editing access to registered users.
 * I agree with creating the page once we've got official confirmation from the BBC, is the Radio Times always right?/always a reliable source? Also, the BBC wouldn't ever do anything like Big Finish did with Death and the Daleks (who promoted it as The Axis of Evil)? Which is the only scenario I can think of that would mess up this system of when to create. --Tangerineduel / talk 15:18, October 2, 2011 (UTC)