Talk:List of Radiolab episodes

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Formatting[edit]

The table format on this article doesn't suit its content. I realize that this is a standard Wikipedia format for listing season episodes (cf: 30 Rock (season 1)). Would be better to format this as a list of episodes article (cf: List of 30 Rock episodes). Will someone please fix this? Morganfitzp (talk) 02:34, 25 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

My thought is that the current format is preferable as it allows for a sentence or two describing each episode. --Bensin (talk) 07:56, 19 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Good point. I think that's possible while tightening up the amount of table's space so that this article is easier to navigate. I did a little by widening the broadcast date column. —Morganfitzp (talk) 19:05, 20 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

...Still, it's hard to sift through. Might want to look at the This American Life episode list article: List of This American Life episodes. Much easier to follow than the unwieldy table format currently used here for Radiolab. Morganfitzp (talk) 18:39, 19 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Completeness[edit]

I'm not sure if this list is complete, despite being comprehensive. For example, this episode from 14 December 2009 does not appear on the list for some reason. SabreWolfy (talk) 15:40, 19 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The article only lists full-length episodes, not the Radiolab Shorts that appear twice every six weeks as a podcast. Some of the Shorts get compiled into an episode at the end of each season. Morganfitzp (talk) 02:03, 22 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Update: Oneforfortytwo has updated the article to include all of the shorts. Some episodes listed here contain synopses, but most do not. Next step for the article is to create an evenness in content, either by beefing the whole thing up, or by paring it down. Morganfitzp (talk) 19:10, 30 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The website changed for the Radiolab Shorts. Here is an example of the new URL: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/172693-death-mask — Preceding unsigned comment added by Justinjoneswbl (talk • contribs) 13:06, 30 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Collapsible tables?[edit]

How do folks feel about the tables in this article being collapsed? Morganfitzp (talk) 20:37, 25 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Morganfitzp - first: Thank you for being the main contributor to this article. I was surprised to find this list here. Are you asking if it would be an improvement to collapse part of the tables? Let's look at this question from the point of the intended audience. What is the intended audience for this article? Radiolab already has a website; what reasons can we thing of for a reader to read our article instead of going directly to the source? Might it be that we are presenting the information all in one place? If that is indeed a main use for our article, then I agree that they would gain from collapsing. Actually, is there even a need for the long descriptions? Currently, the wording is often copied verbatim, which is not appropriate for an encyclopedia. Example:

"Patient Zero - Updated"

The greatest mysteries have a shadowy figure at the center—someone who sets things in motion and holds the key to how the story unfolds—Patient Zero. This hour, Radiolab hunts for Patient Zeroes of all kinds and considers the course of an ongoing outbreak.
We start with the story of perhaps the most iconic Patient Zero of all time: Typhoid Mary. Then, we dive into a molecular detective story to pinpoint the beginning of the AIDS, and we re-imagine the moment the virus that caused the global pandemic sprang to life. After that, we update the show with a quick look at the very current Ebola outbreak in west Africa. In the end, we're left wondering if you can trace the spread of an idea the way you can trace the spread of a disease and find ourselves faced with competing claims about the origin of the high five.

I think we can significantly shorten this, e.g. to something like the below. I am also inserting links, since I believe that another reason why readers might prefer this article could be the convenience of having such links:

"Patient Zero"

Contains the following episodes about Patient Zeroes: Typhoid Mary, the beginning of AIDS, Ebola outbreak in west Africa, and origin of the high five as an example for the spread of an idea.

If we can shorten all descriptions to about that length, then we can fit all information about each episode in one row in the table. The "External Link" could be under the title, and the date could be in short format, so that the description column should have enough room to allow for all text in 3 lines or less. — Sebastian 01:47, 29 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Sebastian, and thanks for this insightful response. Good question about intended audience. Right now this article does things that the Radiolab website doesn't: it lists early broadcasts that are no longer in the Radiolab archive, it tells which full-length episodes are compilations of previously released shorter podcasts, and it puts everything on one page, which is something that radiolab.org does not do. I like your formatting proposals and have already adopted them for the start of Season 14: External link, no line break, shorter description, and Wikilinks. Going through and doing that to the rest will ease the article's navigation and integrate it better into the rest of Wikipedia. Morganfitzp (talk) 14:17, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the nice explanation and for adopting my suggestion about the text. As for the format, what do you think of the following:

#	Title	Short Summary	Original air date
1	Music Lab	Compiled from earlier Radiolab podcast shorts: "Juana Molina" (May 2009), "John Luther Adams" (Oct 2014), and "Unraveling Bolero" (Jun 2012).	12/2015

For this mock·up, I've circumvented the templates, but that was just to keep it simple for the moment; if you prefer using templates that's still an option. ("Sortable" is probably not very useful; it only makes conceivable sense for the Title. I just added it as another gimmick that's not on the official website.) If you like it, I could make the change for all using a sequence of global replace actions.

Back to your original question, I wonder if it is possible to collapse the whole "Description" column; that would beautifully solve the space problem. I could ask at the Village Pump. — Sebastian 21:36, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Time and space episodes should be under 2004[edit]

Since the two episodes time and space were originally aired in 2004 they should be under the 2004 category. They could stay in their respective positions in seasons one and two as well since there are a lot of rebroadcast listed here. 2603:7080:402:E394:3034:254A:521A:4B08 (talk) 11:59, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]