Ghostbusters Wiki
Ghostbusters Wiki

"Series"[]

Should the word "series" really be in a page's title if it's not actually in the title of a series? - VaderFan01 (talk) 22:36, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Please wait for a response from someone in the staff before you perform a move. Mrmichaelt (talk) 23:20, 26 February 2021 (UTC)
Waiting on Paul's input as this is his section. I'd say while I don't view this as earth shattering (this is Ghostbusters Wiki and not Doctor Who Wiki) I'd suggest going with "Franchise" whenever there is more than one series.  Devilmanozzy (Talk Page)  00:28, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
Agreed and in addition it would also cover spin offs and what not in the future. So we wouldn't have to deal with a name change again.Mrmichaelt (talk) 01:05, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Paul emailed the following:
There are two issues at play here. The first, is whether all articles need to use the *exact* title of a thing, or if there should be some leeway for a little bit of descriptive text. A good example of this is this 10+ year old article:
The official title of the box set is "The Real Ghostbusters: Complete Collection". Do we retitle the article to that? Do we go with a more descriptive "The Real Ghostbusters: Complete Collection TimeLife DVD Box Set" or something to that effect? How do we distinguish this from any future DVD box sets?
Related to that box set is this article:
Do we remove "DVD Box Set" from this article since that phrase isn't, technically, in the title of the thing; though it's related to the TimeLife set?
And then, thanks to me, we have the use of the word "Series" in this article about the SERIES OF DVDS Sony released in 2016 and 2017:
The official title of the DVD series is "The Real Ghostbusters: The Animated Series", but that doesn't work for the purposes of the Wiki. If we called the page "The Real Ghostbusters: The Animated Series DVD Series", visitors would think it was about all DVD releases of the show. So, when I created the page, I went with a descriptive title that included the studio and release year. Also, I used "Series" (based on its previous usage in the references section) since there was no need to make TEN individual articles for all 10 DVDs in that line.

The second issue is the use of "Series" in the references section.

For starters, the use of "series" predates my time on the references section. I have no idea who first started using it. At first I didn't understand it, but then I realized that whoever added it meant it as a way to say "these are all of the references in the ENTIRE SERIES", instead of just one single episode.
As far as I see it, VaderFan's line of thinking - Should the word "series" really be in a page's title if it's not actually in the title of a series? - is irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether "series" is in the title or not. The first issue I brought up, with the DVD box sets, shows that a word doesn't need to be in the official title of a thing in order to permit it's usage in an article title. Though, again, we may want to rename some of those DVD articles... but that's a discussion for another day.

So, the issue here is how should we title individual reference articles.
For references in a single episode, we have these:
The formatting there is "show title: episode title", which is a commonplace standard that I, personally, picked up in my "travels".
We could definitely drop "series" from titles, as VaderFan already did for these:
But there would be instances where we need a descriptive word. As an example, these two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles articles that include "series" and a year to distinguish one from the other:
So, I guess, as long as it's understandable that the article is about all references in a TV series, it's okay to drop "series" from the title.
And there you have it.  Devilmanozzy (Talk Page)  01:52, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

In the grand scheme of things the term "Series" isn't all that important. Maybe this matters to the fans of the said "franchise" as it were, but all I see here is a lot of work just to be a bit more in line with something that isn't all that important to begin with. We could change things, but why? Fair question. How much time do I have to re-write the wrongs of the world. Not enough.  Devilmanozzy (Talk Page)  02:01, 27 February 2021 (UTC)