The TV IV:Proposals/Unnamed Episodes

American Idol is fast-approaching and I noticed that we don't really have a hard-and-fast policy on how to name Unnamed Episodes. Many shows have episodes that aren't named, such as The Real World and the aforementioned American Idol. How should we go about naming and then linking them? Should the link just be the date [ie: American Idol/January 16, 2006], or the production number [noting that American Idol usually has a convoluted production number or none at all], the episode shortform [ie: American Idol/601 for the first episode of the sixth season], or something different? --Wizardryo | ✎ 18:12, 23 Dec 2005 (EST)

I ran into something similar when I was working on Surface, which didn't have clearly defined episode names and the best stab at it turned out to be SEE digits, which one digit for season and two digits for episode (which is your episode shortform). It later turned out to be their internal naming scheme for Surface anyway, so go figure. I think this is beneficial for almost all unnamed shows because it provides you a clue as to the season and approximate placement in the season whereas date and/or production number or production id might not.--Ape Agitator 09:28, 26 Dec 2005 (EST)

Personally I believe that due to the large amount of episodes of American Idol, I think it would benifit the people searching for a specific episode more if you have the date that it aired in the title. However, with tv shows that are in the more traditional season format, I think that Ape's idea would work fine.--Edutainment 14:05, 27 Dec 2005 (EST)

Will most people looking for an episode know the approximate spot in the season or the air date? Perhaps a better fix is to name them with the SEE convention but make more specific names for the season listing, like how many people are left or how many are being eliminated or something (I've never watched the show, so I don't know how it works.) I'd say for now, SEE is the best bet and we can always change it later on. --aenematron 17:34, 28 Dec 2005 (EST)

Comments

Dates or episode numbers work fine for me... Another idea would be to use the show topic as the name, like when they have a special judge (my fav was Quentin Tarantino), or theme show (all songs by a specific songwritter).--Drkstrm 14:11, 29 Dec 2005 (EST)

Quite a number of British shows don't have episode names and the official sites just use Episode N. We have gone along with this scheme (e.g. Life on Mars/Season One, Hotel Babylon/Season One), but some of these shows are going to get a second season, and apparently the official episode numbering is restarted at 1 (see the BBC homepage for Hustle). How are we going to handle this?

1. Life on Mars/Episode 2.1
2. Life on Mars/Season Two/Episode 1
3. …

Should we use a better scheme in the future? —Naddy 18:10, 30 July 2006 (EDT)

Are the official titles Episode N? Because we can always do something like Episode 201, which would stand for Season 2, Episode 1 if that isn't the case, or put a disclaimer if it is.. --Wizardryo\^talk 18:20, 30 July 2006 (EDT)

• I'd just go with whatever the show's official website calls them. Of there is no official episode list then i'd just go with whatever works best for the individual show. I don't think they all need to be the same in this regard. --MateoP 13:06, 8 August 2006 (EDT)

• While this is something that probably should have been agreed upon earlier, at this point, so many different formats have been used for so many different shows which have hundreds to thousands of episodes each that it would frankly be a royal pain to try to go back and standardize them all now. As much as that would certainly help for people plugging in actor credits for shows which are not yet filled in, or for people trying to fill in future shows, the barn door is kind of open on this one, it seems. JCaesar 07:06, 10 August 2006 (EDT)