User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Tales from the Tardis/@comment-24894325-20171228112635

Our disambiguation policy T:DAB STORY requires that every story get a dab term and explains what that term should be depending on the media. It also explains the reason: there are too many stories for editors to check, for each story, whether there is something in- or out-of-universe that would demand the disambiguation or not.

There is a trend to extend this mandatory dab term policy to audio anthologies and audio series. I would like to caution everyone against this. First of all, this is NOT a policy. It is in no way mandated.

Secondly, it may create unnecessarily long and repetitive titles like UNIT: The New Series (audio series). As a general rule of thumb, please avoid dabbing series names unless there is a conflict with another page. A common example when such dabbing is necessary is The Diary of River Song (audio series), which conflicts with The Diary of River Song: Series One and The Diary of River Song: Series Two.

Thirdly, for many anthologies the use of the unnecessary dab term "audio anthology" is actually impeding the use of the pipe trick when editing. Let me explain.

You probably know that typing Twice Upon a Time (TV story) results in the following wiki code placed onto the page Twice Upon a Time which is, of course, rendered as Twice Upon a Time. In other words, adding the pipe symbol | allows you to get rid of the dab term, which in most cases should not be visible, by typing just one more symbol after the auto-suggested page title. If you did not know that, your editing life is going to improve significantly. You are welcome.

What is, perhaps, less well known is that the same pipe trick allows you to get rid of colon-separated prefixes. This is mainly to get rid of namespaces like "User:", but it does actually work in most cases. For instance, The Diary of River Song: Series Two is equivalent to Series Two and is rendered as Series Two, which is what you might want to use in tables or lists to avoid repeating The Diary of River Song two or three times in close proximity.

Why is it bad to have a dab term, like The Diary of River Song: Series Two (audio anthology)? For once, it is unnecessary. There is virtually no chance of having a conflict. But worse still, the pipe trick will again produce Series Two, which is still occasionally useful, but there is no easy way anymore to just drop the dab term to render The Diary of River Song: Series Two, which is the most common use of this link. In other words, adding "(audio anthology)" to the title forces every editor linking to this page to manually add |The Diary of River Song: Series Two almost every time the link is used. That is an awful waste of time and effort.

That is why, you are requested to follow the following two rules:
 * 1) for audio series: avoid using the dab term unless necessary due to a conflict;
 * 2) for audio anthologies that have "Series One", "Volume Two" and similar things in the title: use the colon to separate this numerical part from the title proper (which typically coincides with the name of the audio series) and do not use the dab term.

Fine print:
 * the colon should not be used in titles like Doom Coalition 4 (audio anthology) (the dab term is still unnecessary there);
 * the pipe trick may not work properly if the title proper has other punctuation marks used in the wiki markup. For instance, Classic Doctors, New Monsters: Volume Two becomes Classic Doctors, which is unhelpful, while Jago & Litefoot: Series Nine (audio anthology) becomes Jago & Litefoot: Series Nine, which is helpful.