Talk:List of The Nature of Things episodes

Reference resources

Resources useful for finding broadcast dates, program titles, program descriptions, and reviews.

Newspaper archives	Issues	Date Range	Notes
The Montreal Gazette	24,895	Jan 1, 1878 - Nov 20, 2006	"TV Times" on Saturdays; full week listings
Ottawa Citizen	15,925	Jul 30, 1820 - Nov 2, 1990
The Leader-Post (Regina, Saskatchewan)	15,637	May 1, 1930 - Jan 31, 1987
The Calgary Herald	11,686	May 1, 1929 - Jan 10, 1987	"TV Times" on Fridays; full week listings
Saskatoon Star-Phoenix	11,048	Jul 4, 1851 - May 31, 1967
The Vancouver Sun	5,010	May 1, 1920 - Feb 28, 1987	"TV Week" on Fridays; full week listings
Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph	4,480	Mar 29, 1935 - Dec 31, 1970
Edmonton Journal	3,820	Jan 1, 1913 - Dec 20, 1986	"TV Times" on Fridays; full week listings
Cape Breton Post	462	Mar 28, 1901 - Apr 28, 1973
The Windsor Star	205	May 16, 1981 - Nov 15, 1986
The Chilliwack Progress		Apr 16, 1891 - Dec 31, 2007	TV Listings Wednesdays
Detroit Free Press		January 1970 - March 2000	TV Listings for CBET Windsor, Ontario
The Ottawa Journal		December 1885 - August 1980	Full week TV listings on Saturdays
The Brandon Sun		July 3, 1961 - December 31, 1977	"TV Week" on Fridays, starting 1973-01-19
The Peninsula Times (Sechelt, B.C.)		December 4, 1963 - December 26, 1979
The Pioneer (Bemidji, Minnesota)		1969 - 1977	TV Listings for CBWT, Winnipeg, Manitoba
Bangor Daily News (Bangor, Maine)		October 1, 1970 - December 31, 2008	TV Listings for CHSJ, St. John, N.B.
Port Huron Times Herald (Michigan)		1910 - Present	TV Listings for CKLW-TV, Windsor, Ontario
CBC Times		1948 - 1970	TV Listings and in-depth program info

• Current and upcoming episodes at CBC (lists repeats during the off-season)
• The Nature of Things at IMDb.com
• The Nature of Things episode guide at tvarchive.ca
• The Nature of Things Season Schedule at archive.org
• The Nature of Things at TheTVDB.com
• List of newspapers in Canada (Wikipedia)
• List of Canadian Newspapers (Onlinenewspapers.com)
• Directory of Television Series, hosted at Queen's University (PDF) The Nature of Things section starts on page 340. Lists start and end dates and broadcast times for regular and repeat seasons from 1960 to 1983, and provides some history of the show.

Standards

Please use the following conventions when editing this list:

• Repeat episodes outside of a regular season do not get listed.
• Repeat episodes which are within a regular season but not on the regular broadcast day of the week, do not get listed.
• Repeat episodes which fall within a regular season and on the regular broadcast day of the week get listed, but do not receive an episode number. Instead, the word "repeat" is placed in the "Episode" column. This way, we have a record of what filled that weekly time slot, and we won't waste time searching for missing episodes which are actually repeats.
• Specials are included in chronological sequence with regular season episodes, but do not receive an episode number. Instead, the word "special" is placed in the "Episode" column. Specials usually stand out by being on a different day of the week from the usual weekly broadcast day.
• Episode numbers are manually assigned corresponding to chronological sequence. If any episodes are inserted or removed within a season, other episode numbers within that season may need to be adjusted to maintain the sequence. As far as I am aware, there are no "official" episode numbers available to the public from the CBC for this series, although if such numbers ever did become available, they would likely be incorporated into the article.
• At this time, the mm/dd/yyyy date format is being used. Use leading zeroes when needed to maintain the two-digit format for month and day. Follow each date with the day of the week, abbreviated to three letters and in parenthesis. Example: 04/24/2016 (Sun)
• Notes which do not need to appear in the article, but which may be useful for research and construction, can be placed within HTML comment tags.
  Example: <!-- This comment will be visible when editing, but will not be visible when viewing the article. -->
• Referenced sources should be "reliable"; meaning mainstream media or other entities which are likely to have accurate data. Sources such as user-created lists or blogs may be useful for finding clues, but are usually not reliable enough to serve as references.
• If reliable sources indicate that the program was broadcast on the regular broadcast day of the week during a known season, but the title of that episode can not be found, use "(Placeholder)" for the title. Record the URL for the source which indicates that the broadcast occurred, using either <ref> tags or comment tags. An episode number can be assigned even if the title is not yet known, as long as the source is "reliable"; e.g. a newspaper or mainstream media source.
• The CBC provides episode information for recent episodes, and this can be used for reference if no other reliable reference is available. (Independent reliable sources are preferred.) However, broadcast dates in the CBC listings should be regarded with caution. The dates presented are very frequently the dates of repeat broadcasts, which are not what we want for this list — this list uses the first broadcast date for each episode. If the CBC is used as a reference, always include a link to an archived copy of the page which shows the first broadcast date. The earliest available archived page is usually the best to use, and is usually available from archive.org.
• Short summaries should always be indented with a colon ":". This helps to make the list easier to read.

Wildbear (talk) 04:27, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Repeats and episode numbers

It is apparently convention at Wikipedia to not assign episode numbers to repeat broadcasts. This presumably has a practical reason: anyone who is collecting episodes in the series can do so in numeric sequence without having duplicates. Others have expressed to me a preference for not having episode numbers on repeats, so I am removing episode numbers from repeats and replacing them with the designation "repeat". By leaving the repeat episodes in the list, it will be possible to see what filled the weekly time slot (which makes constructing and completing this list easier), but no episode number will be assigned. Wildbear (talk) 16:36, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Alternate titles for episodes are being observed and noted

Variations in episode titles in the newspaper listings suggest that the CBC may have made it common practice to rename episodes for this series on repeat broadcasts; especially during the 1960s and 1970s. Alternate titles are being recorded in the title line when they are found, for the historical record and so that repeats of previously broadcast episodes will be more clearly evident. For example, in The Ottawa Journal for January 3, 1972, the episode is clearly titled "The Harp Seal". The same episode is titled "Ice Lovers" in The Ottawa Journal on January 29, 1973. Wildbear (talk) 07:48, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

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Wildbear (talk) 23:13, 26 February 2017 (UTC)

I'd suggest breaking the list down by decade or something similar; so there would be List of The Nature of Things episodes (1960s) etc. At over 400k bytes it is difficult to edit and slow to open on my computer. That would probably solve the problem above too. (As an aside; this sounds like a great program that I wish I had access to.) Keep up the good work.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  01:16, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Hi SchreiberBike,

Yes, dividing it by decade would seem an intuitive way to break it down into smaller parts. I'm hesitating to do this, because it would mean that searching for something within the entire series (which I do quite often) would require searching six articles instead of one (ouch). I can understand the motivation for having it in smaller pieces - it's slow to load and edit on my computer too. Although this should become less of an issue over time as computers and network connections become faster. It's only a small text file - if it were video, it would typically be 10,000 times larger. I'll go slow and allow others time to give their input. For me, it would be worth sacrificing visible references and speed in exchange for keeping it in one piece (and awaiting the day when Wikipedia bumps up the allowed memory usage). But the article belongs to the world, and whatever works best for the greatest number is how it should be organized. Wildbear (talk) 05:08, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

 Fixed by invoking Lua modules directly. – wbm1058 (talk) 21:17, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

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Splitting proposal

Noticed this article in the long pages special page, so I propose splitting this article into a separate article for each season of The Nature of Things, with this article then becoming a much shorter list that links to each of the 56 seasons, possibly titled List of The Nature of Things seasons. Each season would be titled List of The Nature of Things episodes, season 1, [...].
Friendly tag(s): SMcCandlish, Trialpears -- Doug Mehus T·C 07:39, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Even if this were expanded with descriptions for episodes presently lacking one, I think it would still be well within the technical length limits. We do often split out season articles, but only when there's a real article – plot summary, cast changes, production and reception, etc. Doesn't really apply to a docu series. I don't feel strongly about it either way, though.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:38, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Have to agree with this. There may be a possibility to split, after all it's quite cumbersome to use, but splitting it into 56 sub-articles really isn't viable since that would worsen navigation instead of improving it. Perhaps splitting it by host or something may be more viable? ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 12:47, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Trialpears, What about a template, to improve the navigation within the seasons? Doug Mehus T·C 20:28, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

SMcCandlish and Trialpears, Host is a possibility, but since David Suzuki hosts most of them, I'm not sure it's viable. It sounds like we're in agreement a split is necessary given the WP:ARTICLELENGTH issues here (it ranks as one of the highest in article size, I believe). Not quite sure what the best way to split it is... Doug Mehus T·C 20:27, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia talk:Lists of lists#Should a stand-alone list that's been split into multiple articles due to size be considered a list of lists?, a thread opened today which coincidentally raises some relevant matters.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:43, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, Yeah, the more I think about it, I think the original proposal is best. At List of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes, while that article includes all seven seasons' worth of episodes as article length is not terrible, each season still forms a separate article. Thus, I think splitting each season's worth of documentaries into a separate page and having a main article that links to each of the seasons is the best way to go. I don't think it matters whether one series is a documentary and one is a fictional TV drama; broadly speaking, it's the same thing so we'd be consistent with the WP:MOS.

I think maybe being bold favours us here. After all, once we've split this into 56 articles, who is going to want to revert that? ;) Doug Mehus T·C 02:36, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

I'm instead going to suggest splitting it by decade. We don't need 56 micro-lists. ST:TNG is exactly the kind of case I outlined that is different: each season list has a lot of non-list content in it, and the episode descriptions are themselves richer than the ones for TNoT are ever likely to be. "There's more there there", to misquote an old poem. But breaking this up into 7 decade lists is quite reasonable. PS: If this series ended in 2017, as seems to be the case from our ep. list, then its main article should say so. PS: List of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes is also a poor model in that it's using sectional transcludes to port in just the episode lists per se to make a nice searchable total episode list (which I and many others appreciate) but which would be exactly as long in this case as not splitting the list at all. That is, the rationale for splitting is List of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes is the need to have a lot of in-depth material about each season itself, while the rationale to split List of The Nature of Thing episodes is that the just the list itself is supposedly too long for one page.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:51, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

Episodes need naming

I came here via a link from another Wik article. The link did not take me to a particular episode. There is no practical way for me to find the episode using this page - It is not reasonable to expect people to click through the list just to find the subject matter or name. Kdammers (talk) 19:44, 5 April 2024 (UTC)