Talk:Past Doctor Adventures

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Did the PDAs really start with The Eight Doctors? Devil Goblins from Neptune was published the same month. I generally consider The Eight Doctors to be the first EDA (although I can see how an argument could be made for it belonging in both ranges). Just not sure whether it needs to be in this article, or if it complicates things (a newbie might think the article self-contradictory, since the text suggests 8Docs was the first, and the table says DGfN). —Josiah Rowe 21:27, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

That para was copied from EDA, so you can change it if you want. --TimPope 22:00, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Contents 1 Future of PDA range? 2 Disambiguation 3 Blurbs 4 288 5 Including Covers to the List

[edit] Future of PDA range?

The latest DWM says that Atom Bomb Blues is the last PDA on the schedule for the time being, and adds that "the future of the [past Doctor] book series [is] distinctly uncertain". We should probably note this on the page — but does anyone know any more than that? Are the PDAs being cancelled for low sales, or so that the BBC can focus its branding on new series novels? (I suppose I could check the OG Forum, but if I do that's at least three hours of my day gone. :) ) —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 00:27, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

The PDAs aren't cancelled. At present no more have been announced and the BBC is considering whether to produce any more. Anyone who tells you any more than that is wrong: no decision has been made yet.

Snide Paul 15:59, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

The PDAs "aren't cancelled" in the same sense that the television show wasn't cancelled in 1989. It's been over a year since the last PDA was announced.[1] The BBC may one day decide to re-launch the PDAs, but not making a decision for over a year and not commissioning any new books for over a year seems like a cancellation to me. Bondegezou 14:44, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Disambiguation

Following Bondegezou's lead, I've removed unnecessary disambiguations from several more novel names. My rule of thumb was that if the first two screens in a Google search brought up only the Doctor Who novels, then there probably aren't any other subjects with a better claim to the page. (For example, it turns out that there's a short story by Ben Bova called Amorality Tale, so I kept the disambiguation on that one.) —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 16:48, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, hell. That blew that theory. I had intentionally put all those (Doctor Who)s in because I thought it would at least give consistency to their naming. Such that if you were writing some other article and you needed to reference a novel you would know to always add (Doctor Who) afterwards, instead of having to come back to this list, check the edit screen, and see what the wikiname of the book was.CzechOut 17:20, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, it would be easier if we did that, but unfortunately that's not what's recommended at Wikipedia:Disambiguation, which says:

"Ask yourself: When a reader enters this term and pushes "Go", what article would they realistically be expecting to view as a result? When there is no risk of confusion, do not disambiguate nor add a link to a disambiguation page."

The object is to make it easier for readers, not editors — anyone should be able to type the novel's name in the search box and reach the page within two clicks at the most.

Incidentally, this means that for pages which do need the disambiguation, the disambiguation-free version should have some pointer to the Doctor Who page. So The Face of the Enemy should either have a disambiguation link to The Face of the Enemy (Doctor Who) at the top, or the Babylon 5 episode should be moved to The Face of the Enemy (Babylon 5) and The Face of the Enemy should become a disambiguation page. (The latter is probably the best course, since there's also Face of the Enemy (TNG episode).)

Similarly, there are several other books called Dreams of Empire, but at the moment none of them have pages, so if we create a page for the Doctor Who novel it should be at Dreams of Empire (Doctor Who), and Dreams of Empire should probably be a redirect until someone makes a page for any of the other books with that title, at which point it can become a disambiguation page.

However, there's nothing else which has the name Zeta Major, so it's appropriate to have that article at Zeta Major. (Since redirects are cheap, we could also have a redirect at Zeta Major (Doctor Who) pointing towards Zeta Major.)

We've sort of had this discussion at the WikiProject, about the names of serials and episodes — see here. The conclusion we came to was that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". It's a bit more work for us, but I think it's the right way to do it. Hope that makes sense. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 17:47, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Blurbs

I've started adding the cover blurbs of the books that I have got. I've done Verdigris, Millennium Shock and The Time Travellers, and will do Divided Loyalties, The Hollow Men and World Game --Jawr256 17:21, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry - but blurbs are copyright violations and I'm going to remove them. --khaosworks (talk • contribs) 17:58, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, I'll stop --Jawr256 07:12, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 288

....That seems to be the most frequently seen number for me as I have been looking up the page number and other the details upon Amazon. This is not the actual case, is it? DrWho42 18:21, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Including Covers to the List

I'm wondering if including the covers (shrunk down, of course) to the 'List of Past Doctor Adventures' would be a good idea. Something akin to what lists of episodes generally do, i.e. List of Futurama episodes, although I'm s'posing that one might as well include a brief synopsis therein. DrWho42 03:51, 28 May 2006 (UTC)