Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-188432-20121207092215/@comment-188432-20130107042814

Tardis1963 wrote: If we're going with DC or IS to avoid the non-narrative IF, then we have to go with the proper TARDIS, too. Wikia can call it what they like, but the logo etc. needs to be TARDIS Data Core.

"The term radar has since entered English and other languages as the common noun radar, losing all capitalization." Radar is a word in it's own right, whereas TARDIS, I believe, is not - it is only an acronym. Yeah, this is a common belief by a lot of fans, but even a tiny bit of research shows it to be wrong.

RADAR is an acronym (RAdio Detection And Ranging) which has passed into general English as a common noun (radar), but the acronymic meaning is still understood by those familiar with the underlying science. Similarly, Tardis is an acronym that is generally styled with (mostly) lowercase letters — unless you're a fan (of a certain age).

There's perhaps no easier proof for the "common" capitalisation than the Oxford Dictionary definition:

Tardis |ˈtɑːdɪs|
 * noun


 * 1) a time machine.
 * 2) a building or container that is larger inside than it appears to be from outside.
 * ORIGIN the name (said to be an acronym of time and relative dimensions in space) of a time machine which had the exterior of a police telephone box in the British TV science-fiction series Doctor Who, first broadcast in 1963.

This is why the British press almost always use that form of the word. It's also what the Radio Times have done since 1963.

Moreover, there are hundreds of officially licensed Doctor Who stories in which "Tardis" is the correct and invariable capitalisation. Tardis was the house style of World Distributors Doctor Who annuals, for instance.

So the truth is that either TARDIS or Tardis is defensibly "correct", which is why the arbitrary stylistic rule of T:TARDIS is required.

Note that the logo may well contain an uppercase TARDIS, just as it currently does. But the name given in ordinary text as at MediaWiki:Pagetitle should be Tardis. This incidentally, but not insignificantly, helps our SEO. And, of course, it reaches out to the not-so-hardcore fan, who see our name repeatedly in Google searches.