Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (television)

We have a variety of ways of disambiguating television series: Bottom (television), V (television series), Hercules (TV series), Jeremiah (series). I'd like to standardise this a bit. My preference, after discussion on Talk:Enterprise (series) is to use "series" as the disambiguator. Any objections before I go ahead and move some pages? -- sannse 21:21 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I'd prefer "TV series", since otherwise it could be interpreted as a book series, comic book series etc. --Eloquence 21:32 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

"TV series" seems the best. -- Wshun

I vote for "TV series" too. That's how IMDB does it as well ;-) -- Timwi 21:55 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Call me BBC, but I prefer "television series". Also, there are tens of series that have been both on the radio and on television (Dead Ringers, Goodness Gracious Me, Dad's Army...), how will "series" disambiguate these? CGS 22:08 22 Jun 2003 (UTC).

Well, this Yank prefers "television series" too. -- John Owens 22:42 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I agree; TV is, after all, ambiguous (though not in any sensible way in the context). However, I prefer "television series" over "TV series"; probably because I'm somewhat averse to too much slang... Oh, and, also, it involves less shift-typing, which is a Bad Thing for wrists. Umm. ;-) James F. 10:33 25 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I think "television" is unnecessarily long. "TV" is a pretty much universally recognised abbrev. -- Timwi 22:50 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

"TV" or "television" would be fine with me, but I think I'd prefer "television" for no really good reason. Even just plain (television) might make just as much sense (since television has more than just series - it has programs, commercials, etc., which could be disambiguated in the same way). -- Wapcaplet 01:13 23 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Something about this on one of the disamb or naming convention pages recently. needs to be cross-linked-- Tarquin 09:43 23 Jun 2003 (UTC)

That was on Talk:Enterprise (series), I'll link there to here too.

mav said on that page (arguing for ... (series)[?]): "We only add enough disambiguation text to distinguish one thing from another. That is why we only add the year to parens of movies when there are more than one movie with the same name. Thus we have Titanic (1997 movie) since there were more than one but we have Platoon (movie) since there was only one movie by that title. And we don't have parenthetical disambiguation at all for unique movie titles, such as You Can't Take it With You."

Which makes a lot of sense to me. -- sannse 19:13 23 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Why add "TV" or "television" to the disambiguating text when there is only one thing by a particular name that could be a series? If there is a book, a movie and a series that all have the same name then (book), (movie) and (series) would be used as disambiguating text. There is no need for having extra information in (series) unless there were also two different types of series - such as a radio series. Then and only then does it make sense to have (television series) and (radio series). --mav 01:14 24 Jun 2003 (UTC)

In that case, I'd vote to use just plain (television) then (since "series" could itself be, at least as far as interpretation on behalf of the user goes, ambiguous; is the article about a TV, book, comic series, etc.) That way, the title itself tells us a bit more about what the article is about. -- Wapcaplet 02:04 24 Jun 2003 (UTC)

That is not what disambiguation is for. You are trying to use disambiguating text to input meta data when disambiguations only goal is to distinguish one thing from another when they share the same name. The book, movie, series example above are disambiguated by type and a TV series is not a television. --mav

Does anyone have objections to "series" strong enough to ask me not to do the change? If so I'll drop it (I don't have very strong feelings about this, I'd just like to make things a little more consistant) -- sannse 19:26 24 Jun 2003 (UTC)

"Series" is definitely ambiguous for most fiction: Could be books, TV, radio, etc. The Barchester Chronicles is all three. "Books", "TV" and "Radio" disambiguate better; don't need the word "series". Will there ever ba a need to distinguish between single and series TV programmes of the same name? I don't think so. Andy G 19:53 24 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I agree "Series" is too ambiguous, for brevity surely TV Series is far more suitable and also memorable for wikipedians on the go. JasonM 17:20 30 Jun 2003 (GMT)