User:Epsilon the Eternal/Opening posts/Untitled sources

This opening post is a WIP.

Opening post
Okay, so I don't expect this to be a controversial thread. My main goal is to establish a bit of policy surrounding untitled sources. This thread was originally proposed to tackle to Children in Need Special (TV story) to Born Again (TV story), but this rename has already been followed through; therefore, I expect this thread to codify that precedent in case of other such untitled sources.

I shan't beat around the bush. Untitled (series name medium) titles are suboptimal and we should strive not to use them. So, we need to find alternatives. In the best case scenario, we should use retroactive titles. So if a source is originally untitled, but then named later on a home media release or in a book about the series (e.g. the 2005 Children in Need minisode being later named Born Again) we should use that name. (For clarity, this would exclude Doctor Who (TV story), as "Doctor Who" is the title of the movie, even if it is also the title of the series too.)

In cases we don't have a retroactive name, we should create a better standard for naming untitled sources. In some rare situations, this Wiki covers an episode of another television programme that is a crossover with Doctor Who but doesn't have individual episode titles; in those instances, we could just name the page after the series it is a part of. So instead of Untitled (1986 TV story), we'd have Roland Rat: The Series (TV story). But I feel, as we can often pinpoint the exact episode of which we cover (this sounds weird, but sometimes precisely determining the exact episode number of a forty year old television programme isn't actually that easy, especially when little documentation exists) we should attempt to include the episode number.

Now this would necessitate a change to Tardis:Parts of a series without clear individual titles. That page tells us, that sources from a series without individual titles should be titled with acronyms. To the best of my knowledge, this has only really been applied to non-fiction series, as when the policy was created, we either didn't cover such fiction programmes, or if we did, we'd just call them "series name + special (medium dab)" even when there was never any indication that these sources, were in fact, specials. (More on this later.) Currently under this policy, that Roland Rat episode would be at something like RR:TS 15, and Chute! Episode 9 (TV story) should be at Chute! 9 (TV story) The policy page even implies a dab term is unnecessary, given that every single one of the Tardisodes omit them. To me, this is clunky. Where possible, we should use the full titles, not an abbreviation, plus we should use