Forum:(SPOILER: The start of RtD2) Quickstart Guides

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Index → The Panopticon → (SPOILER: The start of RtD2) Quickstart Guides

Spoilers are strongly policed here.
If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.

- Yes they are cool here, stop telling me what to do, nerd. -

Opening Post

For the spoiler averse, so long as you're caught up on the BBC press releases for the RtD2 era, you know, the really obvious stuff, nothing in my post should be an issue. I'd like to limit the scope of spoiler discussion in this post to the current (as of posting) BBC press releases for the show's cast and crew, so nobody is surprised.

Moving on.

The basic premise behind this post is that while I was thinking about how to update the wiki for the 60th and beyond, I realized pretty quickly that there were going to be a lot of returning viewers who hadn't seen the show in some years. Either since Tennant1, or Smith, or just fell out somewhere in Capaldi or Whittaker because it wasn't on constantly. I suspect that the 60th and S14 with Gatwa will be a soft reset, minimizing the need to watch what people have missed, but it would behoove us to make the show as accessible as we can for returning viewers. And, let's face it, the show can be intimidating for new viewers as well. (Even in the new series we're on S14. That's not something most genre shows get to. If people start thinking about Classic Who as well... They're pretty likely to be put off and just not start.)

Especially with the Disney+ move there's going to be more eyes on the show and the wiki than ever, so I think making sure that there's a clean way to onboard new viewers is imperative. (I also think that cleaning up our policies is pretty important, for the same reason. :P) As the wiki, we're one of the first places new viewers will go in order to look up information for the series, especially given FANDOM's SEO. We're in a unique position to write up introductions to various parts of the franchise, likely better than anyone else but the BBC.

What do we write, where do we put it, how do we write it?

All of these, are, of course, wildly up for discussion. But I'd like to begin with noting that whatever else is decided I think there should be a link to the Quickstart guides on our mainpage for at least the next two years. As stated, there will be many new and returning viewers, and providing them with a prominent way to slot into the current story with minimal disruption will be incredibly helpful.

Next up, and I expect this to have some level of discussion, I don't think editing the public facing version of the guides should be open to everyone. The admins and the regular editors aren't on all of the time, we can't revert vandalism constantly, and even those of us who do revert vandalism when it happens, well, a determined vandal will keep doing it, especially on our most public pages. Admins can't be on constantly to ban vandals. So however the technical issues are sorted out, I think that the public facing versions of these pages should be only editable by admins or however we define the namespaceprotection. (I absolutely do not trust "autoconfirmed users" as a protection level. I've seen far too many vandals have 4 day old accounts and edit pages that are supposed to be protected.)

I think this should be done with a new section in the Theory namespace, similar to Timelines or Discontinuity, the namespace was designed for essays, after all, (see Thread:117238 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I - other options for the name were floated such as "thesis") but lock every page involved. Lock the index for Quickstart guides (which would be linked to both on the main page and on the theory index). Lock each individual guide. Have sandbox versions somewhere (perhaps also linked on the theory index page - so it's Timelines, Discontinuity, Quickstart, Quickstart Sandbox), and when you want to push a change to the public facing version version of the guide you talk to an admin. If you want to make a new guide you go through the same process.

Now, in what style do we write these guides? What might a potential guide look like? I think an answer to this has to be more of an art than a science. For instance, a "bare minimum" guide for the new series might explain the basic premise of the show and give you jumping on points, Rose, Eleventh Hour, Pilot, Woman Who Fell to Earth. I might suggest that a "Crashcourse" guide would explain the basics some behind the scenes issues, like actors and show runners changing, noting that occurring when it happens, and then giving plot descriptions for the various seasons along with highlighting important / well received episodes from each seasons for understanding the overall show. (EG: You could theoretically suggest they watch Rose, Dalek, Empty Child/Doctor Dances, Bad Wolf, Parting of the Ways for S1. Cuts out some stuff, but if they also read a summary explaining the plot points they missed they'll get the gist.) I might also suggest a "background information" guide, which basically just summarizes the entire plot that you might need to know up until a specific plotline. (My guess is that this will be most applicable to audios.)

Obviously this will work itself out through judicious application of informal consensus, but candidates for guides are perhaps tweaking Nate's wonderful FP guides, or guides to Big Finish - I know people that are interested in certain storylines (Divergent Universe, for instance) but are intimidated by the sheer amount of content that exists prior to it that they're not sure if they need to listen to first. We probably have some of the only people on earth who have read the Cwej series, why not put a guide together for that? I know nothing about Erimem or The Candy Jar stuff, but I'm open to learning. And I'm sure Epsilon is one of the better qualified people in the world to write a guide for Iris Wildthyme. Hell, there could be guides for Who literary criticism or the very basics of the wider fan ecosystem if we really wanted to do that. (I'm not saying this one is a good idea. But it's possible.) I think there's a lot of opportunity here, especially given the upcoming events. Najawin ☎ 04:02, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

Just as a note, I wasn't even sure if this would post since perms are kinda weird on Special:ListGroupRights and technically users can only read the forums, it was as much a test as anything else. An admin can feel free to delete it until we figure out what we're doing. Or we can just use it? I dunno, do whatever. Wasn't trying to jump in line or anything. Figured my test should actually have an OP in case it worked though. Najawin ☎ 04:08, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for this note — yeah, let's stick with the Tardis:Temporary forums setup until the transition to Archives is finished, and a new setup for the Forum: namespace is complete. For one thing, keeping the "proposals that get voted up for a limited number of slots at a time" system going on a permanent basis, instead of sticking with the free-for-all, is definitely something we admins have discussed in the past as regards what we'd do with the definitive New Forums, although that's not definitive. So all in all, significant amounts of work yet to be done before new Forum: threads are permitted.

Sorry about the confusion, though; we quite understand this was just a test!

I'm just going to admin-protect this to freeze it until it can be done properly. If you'd rather have it moved back to a sandbox so that it can be handled as a T:TF slot in the brief lifespan that system has left, let me know. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 11:05, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Right! W're properly back now, so go ahead! Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:16, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

I feel very weird about this proposal. I think, at the end of the day, I have three major issues with the idea.

My first thing, if I am to be blunt, is that this sort of sounds like another toy that we'll fiddle with for a few weeks and then completely abandon. Let me give you a great example: the landing page transmats. No, not the pngs linking to the transmats - the actual landing pages. One glance at things such as Transmat:Species shows that these haven't been properly looked at by editors in years. One part of this page currently reads:

Sometimes, our category names are kinda long

Sometimes, our category names get very specific so that they're clearly worded. A nice, wordy category is the surprisingly helpful Species influential to Earth's past

If you go to the talk page for Species influential to Earth's past and its logs, you'll find it has since been deleted for not being worded clearly enough. So, basically, I can't imagine us being dedicated to yet another "space" which is designed exclusively to explain the site to new readers.

Secondly, I am strongly against any wiki content on this website which can only be edited by admins. We've actually done this before, as The Master's page once had huge sections, designed as templates, which only could be written and edited by admins. These were infamous and often got outdated. See Template:After Cheetahs.

If we are going to do something like this, it must be accessible to all registered users at minimum.

Thirdly - and this will be the most "political" of these three - I think that we are currently in a weird situation where this idea has been pitched by more than one person at the same time.

User:NateBumber has recently and consistently pitched an "out-of-universe lead" which would go on articles before the infobox. These would list less than a paragraph of basic Wikipedia-level info. "The Tenth Doctor was played by David Tennant and was the main Doctor from 2005 to 2010." That kind of thing.

At the same time, I have been slowly ramping up my belief that we should simply create an OOU subpage, perhaps /Behind the scenes or /Real world. Basically, this would be a version of the page written with the same diligence and allegiance to all media but written OOU, which many people prefer.

Now, out of these three ideas - Najawin's Quickstart Guides, Nate's OOU lead, and my OOU subpage - I think only one can realistically pass, as they all serve very similar purposes. And I am just not 100% sure that I view the Quickstart proposal as the best of the three. OS25🤙☎️ 20:01, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

I fail to see how an OOU lead or an OOU subpage is similar to a helpful guide to people who might be interested in the DWU, but aren't sure where to start. I think that this proposal would be incredibly helpful to new viewers. (I might have misinterpreted what a Quickstart Guide is, I'm not entirely sure).

As to how to structure them, I would propose that there be one to outline NuWho, one to outline the classic series, and one to outline the wider franchise.

I also think that yes, these should be available to all registered users at minimum. Aquanafrahudy ☎ 20:15, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Well I was going to wait another week, but... Once more into the breach...

I can be talked around to autoverified users, though I think it's a bad idea.

I'm not entirely sure what some of this criticism is though, this is a bad idea because, well, we might forget about it and just stop doing it? We might not! There, criticism refuted! :P Look, the transmats (as they currently stand), afaik, were Czech's baby.

But more than that I think there are levers in place to make this concern misplaced. The transmats were neglected insofar as they were created in 2013 and largely weren't updated after that. Part of this is that they used templates to randomize text, which can be off-putting to some editors. These templates just won't be used in my proposal, at least, they shouldn't be - I can't see a reason for it. So a minor issue is removed there. But more importantly, this will be a subsection of the Theory namespace. People use the Theory namespace. To this day people use the SJA and TW discontinuity indexes, as they do the DW one. (Okay, sure, they don't use the K9 and Class ones, but who would?) And, of course, the Timeline pages as a whole see quite frequent use. It merely being part of the Theory namespace would encourage some level of editing, perhaps not a lot, but some. And even still, the fact that new guides can be created and constantly edited - think about how many aspects of DW there are to explain to people in varying levels of the fandom who know or don't know all the things you know - that should encourage people to be in this particular area of the Theory namespace as well. Perhaps ultimately nobody will use it! But there's so much that can be done with it that it has the potential to do a lot of good, and even draw in editors specifically who work in that section, similar to timeline pages.

Similar to Aqua, I don't see how OOU ledes or subpages can serve as onboarding guides for new users. You'd need to string together a large chain of these OOU ledes/subpages and the new users would have to understand what bits are more or less relevant to Doctor Who as they're trying to experience it, it would just be a mess. Najawin ☎ 21:30, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

I quite like this idea; I think these things have the potential to be, simply put, what the Transmats wanted to be but never really were. I would agree with Aqua and Najawin that such "introductory summaries" seem like a very different matter from bespoke BTS looks at specific topics; an introduction to NuWho in general does not have as much overlap as all that with a potential Rose Tyler/Behind the scenes. (Although, contra Aqua, I do think we should have more than two or three of these. Beginner's guides to "Big Finish", "the Wilderness Years", "Faction Paradox" all come to mind; I'm not sure how granular we want to go — I wouldn't want every last series and subseries of DWU media to have its own Quickstart — but I can't imagine us getting by on less than a dozen or so at least, at a glance.)

One thing I'm not at all sure about is putting them in the Theory namespace. This just feels like a square-peg-round-hole affair to me. A quickstart guide is not a "theory": it is, in fact, a guide. (It's certainly not a theory in the vernacular geeky sense, but I also don't think it's really "theory" in the more academic sense of the term; indeed, the framing of these as "guides" makes them sound, if anything, eminently practical, aiming to give people actual entry-points and advice on how to engage with the works, rather than the uncompromisingly absolute view in which regular pages must deal.) If anything I would see more sense in putting these in the [[Tardis:]] namespace: Tardis:Quickstart Guides with subdivisions, either via further colons or subpages, e.g. Tardis:Quickstart Guides/The Classic Series or Tardis:Quickstart Guides: The Classic Series.

In any case I would like to hear User:Najawin elaborate on ths idea that allowing all (autoverified) users to edit these would be "a bad idea". This seems to me to be one of the most contentious and non-obvious elements of the proposal, and our default really should be that anyone can edit them unless a specific rationale otherwise is presented. At a guess, there is perhaps a sentiment that such "important" pages, among the first that readers will read, and which are intended to shape their entire engagement with a given area of the franchise. Yes. Sure. But The Doctor, Doctor Who, Dalek, etc. are not locked to admins only, and yet, give or take the occasional quickly-reverted vandalism, this has worked out for the best. We can trust the community with these kinds of responsibilities; extending that trust is the whole basis of this Wiki.

I don't mean to sound as though I, an admin, am shirking the task — but systems which call upon admins to review proposed changes to locked pages have a bad track record. Updates to the "Companions of X" navboxes, and Tardis:Video recommendations, both come to mind as being constantly out of date despite the team's best efforts. It turns what should be the bread and butter of the Wiki — quick, direct response when a necessary change occurs to somebody — into a chore, something to be vetted and implemented at a time-delay. There may be some side of the issue that I haven't thought of at all — but from the available information I truly think the Quickstart Guides will work better if they are open to all users, or at least all registered users. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 04:49, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

I'll note that I did consider asking for a new namespace entirely! You can see some of my theorizing on this issue on User talk:Spongebob456. But I ultimately figured that this was a bad idea, especially as I did my historical dive through the wiki, I became convinced that our Theory namespace originally had a much broader remit and it was just being under utilized. (One of the proposals on the temp forums is to bring back the "Dalek History" page, which was suggested to be moved to an "essay" namespace before ultimately being deleted. Restoring it to the Theory namespace is just the best solution imo.)

My reasoning here is simple, I don't think that these things will need the sort of rapid responses we might in other areas - once a guide is created we can take a little longer to update it (updates can take place on the scale of a season, not on the scale of an episode, for instance), they might be heavily contested areas because they're somewhat opinion based and have pride of place (and similarly prone to vandalism), and they should have our highest editorial standards for this same reason. I think only 1.5 of these reasons apply to our most popular articles in our main namespaces. Again, ultimately if people decide otherwise it's fine. I think it's worse than the alternative, but it's better than not having the guides at all. I just think that there are specific nuances to these guides that mean we should be a little more careful with editing them than we would with even our most prominent articles. imo. Najawin ☎ 05:07, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

This is something that I've been increadibly excited about for a while: if Najawin hadn't made a thread about it, I would have. In my ideal scenario, guides would recieve their own namespace as they don't quite fit into Theory. Failing that, Theory will do for me. I feel that they should be editable by everything as a default with protection levels applied as required, just like regular pages. I can't see why vandalism would be more of a problem here than it is elsewhere. One type of guide that I would find useful and hence would like to see are those that answer the question "What prerequisites do I need to fully undertsand X?" This could help people work backwards to untangle the continuity threads that go into a given story. One idea I'd like to highlight here is the sort of thing being demonstrated at User:NateBumber/Sandbox/2#Series relationships: visual diagrams showing how different stories relate. I feel that there's a lot of potential here for conveying information visually in a much more intuitive and digestible maner than a paragraph or 2 of text can allow for. Explanatory text could, of course, be presented alongside to aid in conveying some of the nuances. Footnotes could be an effective way to tie this text to different parts of the diagram. Bongo50 ☎ 18:25, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

I agree with what Bongo said. Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 20:44, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

My response includes minor spoilers already publicised by the BBC. I support this idea, especially as we are going into the 60th anniversary. I feel right now such articles are needed as this is a good jumping on point, and if it doesn't get updated beyond the next couple of years then that doesn't really matter. We can always update them at the next change of Doctor or change of showrunner, as big changes tend to lead to new viewers. I think that it would also be good to have some background information on returning characters already announced by the BBC, and include some useful stories to get (re)acquainted with those characters. These could include stories such as Partners in Crime and The End of Time for Donna Noble, and The Power of Three and The Zygon Inversion/The Zygon Invasion or The Power of the Doctor for Kate Stewart. 66 Seconds ☎ 10:59, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Could there be some movement on this? It's been pretty dead even as D-Day creeps ever closer. I guess I could make a ruling on the namespace thing, but I'm loathe to close it without any forward movement actually on the table… Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 16:46, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

I actually started mocking some up at User:Najawin/Sandbox 9. I just haven't made a ton of progress because of IRL stuff. If anyone else would like to contribute, they can feel free. I absolutely plan on getting back to those, ideally, within a week or two anyhow. But it should be a group project anyhow. Najawin ☎ 16:50, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Ah good. Do you think this thread should stay open to coordinate, or…?… Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:03, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Could we do that for perhaps, say, 2-3 weeks? (I can go down to 1-2 if really pressed, but a week would be cutting it close.) If there's no progress by then just close it as failed, if we have movement we can ship what we have. Najawin ☎ 18:10, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Works for me! Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 20:20, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, so, User:Najawin/Sandbox 9 is like a really rough first draft. I don't feel comfortable writing up anything related to 13's era, since I dislike it so much, if someone else can write up a summary of that it would be nice, and I'm finding writer's block with writing for the RtD1 era summary. Aside from that I think I have a good first pass. Obviously other people looking at what I have and making modifications is really amazingly appreciated. It's a first draft. But I think we've got some stuff here that we can work with as a baseline. imo. Najawin ☎ 23:48, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

You know, looking at this, my immediate worries are stylistic. This just seems like a lot of unbroken text in a way that would intimidate me if I were a newbie. I truly think, if we want to be approachable, we should do away with the pretense of in-universeness, and allow ourselves to say things like "In the two-part finale Death in Heaven/Dark Water" and indeed "In the first episode of new showrunner Steven Moffat's tenure". I think that + illustrations would go a long way, and also allow a principled way to bring up non-TV information without drowning in it (we'd be able to clearly say "the War Doctor was, at this point, retconned into existence, which contradicted some stuff…" without having to go through the usual laundry-list of Have You Seen This Man et alt., things like that).

(Also, as a minor point, you seem to trend towards capitalising "The" before e.g. "Doctor" or "Master" even when it isn't the first word of the sentence, which is fairly abnormal for the Wiki, and Who-related publications in general. But easy enough to change on the whole, I suppose.)

Mind, I don't say any of this to diminish the work done so far! Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 05:57, 2 September 2023 (UTC)