User talk:Tybort: Difference between revisions

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Infobox images

Oh, it's all still very much in progress. In fact, the bot is in category:organisations right now. But if you see something that looks weird, please do ask, because this is one hell of a big project, with lots of stages.

BTW, what did you mean by your cryptic statement in the forum about The Dæmons?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  17:35: Thu 01 Mar 2012

Mentions

Just did a random diff check on Jamie McCrimmon and noticed that you actively removed the "dead" mentions field. I've been reluctant to go that far, simply because my decision to make it inactive was an "emergency" move in reaction to a technical change on Wikia's part. Technically, the question of what to do about mentions is still open at Forum:"Mentions" field being deactivated.

I'm not outright saying you can't remove them, but I think it might be wise for you to specifically use the word mentions in your edit summary when you take them away. That way, if interest in that thread reignites, and someone comes up with a clever way of reintegrating mentions, it'll be easy to find in the history.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  17:41: Tue 06 Mar 2012

p.s. Thanks for helping with {{you may}} and {{dab page}}. It's not something I can easily fix with the bot. Should've thought about putting it on a template years ago — or at least before the last six months, where there's been an explosion of disambiguative editing.

Infoboxes

Yeah, the bot and I are fully engaged. The problems of bulletised lists in infobox has been an unexpected "joy". It's probably best for the weekeend if you just send me notes on problems you find, instead of attempting to fix them yourself. The bot is having to make several individualised runs over the stories, which means you might trip up the bot if you decide to focus your editing on stories. I'm not saying "don't edit story pages", though. If you can improve the pages by adding new content, fine. But don't focus your energies on the infoboxes, and don't edit several infoboxes in a row, until Monday.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  23:54: Fri 09 Mar 2012

Answering your questions about {{Infobox Story}}

All great questions! Here are the answers, in the order you asked:

The definition of a "main setting" is surely subjective, but maybe if I give a few examples it'll make sense. It's the same variable that it's always been, just with a different label. By changing the label, I was hoping to encourage a reduction in clutter a bit. A lot of these pages had ridiculous detail ("London, England, UK, Earth" when "London" is just fine). To answer your question directly, I would say it's best to keep it to just a single, broad location, unless the action really is split. With Closing Time, for instance, It's really just Colchester. The bit at the university doesn't warrant the additional space that mentioning it would take up. What people have to remember with infoboxes is that the more info they contain, the longer the infobox is, and the more the pics on the page are going to get screwed up. They're not meant to house every single detail of the production. There should be just enough to jog the memory or otherwise merely identify the programme. The article is where the details should be. If the action is truly split 50/50 between two locations, maybe it's okay to put them both down. But, y'know, The Five Doctors happens on Gallifrey, period. There's no need to say, "some of it's in the Citadel, some of it's in the Death Zone, some of it's in the Tomb of Rassilon, and a wee bit of it is back on Earth". And The Doctor Dances happens in London during the Blitz". There are smallish scenes which happen elsewhere, but "London during the Blitz" is more than enough. I guess what I'm saying is that an infobox should be about economy. Find the fewest amount of words to indicate the truest sense of the episode, and you've solved the riddle.
Double-banked episodes aren't actually completely double-banked. In every case, one of them always enters production first. For instance, the first shot for Blink was 7 November 2006. It's just the main part of the shoot that happens around the latter part of the month, when Human Nature was also in production. I'm not aware of a case where two episodes started production on exactly the same date. If I don't get around to adding in all this production order myself, just trust Shannon Sullivan's site. He's researched this stuff quite thoroughly and has things production ordered as correctly as possible, based on the evidence available. I've independently checked him versus the Virgin Handbook series, and some DWM products. While I have very occasionally found errors in some of his facts, I've never seen an error on any production ordering.
I would say that Dreamland is not a part of the production before/next chain, but it is a part of the broadcast chain. I personally would consider the previous/next chain to go WOM, Dreamland, EOT. But I'm open to persuasion, if you've got a compelling argument.
{{Infobox Story}} is already in place on K9, SJA and TW pages, and appears to be handling things quite well. It will soon be on every type of story page. I don't see any good reason why we need all these different infoboxes with all these different variables. It should be possible for editors to reliable know that they can use "name" for the name of any story, regardless of medium, for instance. Ultimately, this template will be the only one you need for writing story pages.
I haven't looked at EOT specifically yet. I'm not aware of any particular issue, though, since both {{{confidential}}} and {{{story number}}} will accommodate multiple responses. Could you be more specific about your concerns?

If you have further questions, of course feel free to ask them.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  01:59: Sat 10 Mar 2012

Images by comic stories

Hmmm, I'm not sure what went wrong there. I'm guessing these few categories got shortchanged when I had a power failure that occurred while I was AFK. Glad you caught it. I'll, um, put it on the list of things to correct.

I'm guessing btw, that The Unheard Voice and Doomcloud confusion in particular, came from the fact that a user has been obsessed with confusingly putting these "stories with disputed Doctors" into both categories, instead of just focussing on the original printing. So yeah, if I had to take a guess at the bot error, it was that they got picked up on the TVC run and then weren't added to PHS/TVA categories because the bot had already made it through.

As you might have imagined, I've moved on with the bot, so this corrective run might be a few days away. If things don't change by this time next week, remind me please.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  00:46: Sun 11 Mar 2012

Trickster

Speaking of reminders, there's something from the top of my talk page that I preserved when I archived, and I still don't know the answer to it. You asked what we should do with the Trickster. And I dunno. Apparently there's yet a third Trickster running around out there, cause there's one in Love and War. So we've got the Trickster, Trickster (Kinda) and Trickster (Love and War). I was listening to the DW Book Club Podcast about Love and War, though, and they're of the opinion that nothing prevents the Love and War Trickster from being the SJA Trickster. So at this point, I'd say, ask the question at the forums and hope that someone has a better idea than me.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  00:46: Sun 11 Mar 2012

You'd think so, but the thing is that if you can't definitively separate them, then maybe they're the same character. Yanno what I mean? I mean, I'm sure Gareth Roberts read Love and War. He had to. This isn't like three guys all named "John Brown" or something. It's more akin to the situation of Gorgon. We currently have two pages, but there's absolutely nothing, AFAIK, which prevents us putting the SJA Gorgons and the TVC Gorgons on the same page, like we do with the Pied Piper. The Trickster is an archetypal, mythological character. I think we need definitive proof, first, that the characters are demonstrably different before we put them on different pages.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  07:07: Sun 11 Mar 2012

Yeah, don't bother manually deleting {{bp}}. I'm just going to change what it does. A lot more efficient. Might take me a bit of time to get around to it, but it's a simple fix.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  07:07: Sun 11 Mar 2012

{{bp}} has been neutered now. As for raw HTML, it's easily removed through a couple of bot processes. I'm behind schedule, so it's probably now more likes next week when I'll have all this done. But the bot runs were refined yesterday and seem to be working well enough.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  18:29: Sun 11 Mar 2012

Hmmmm, sorry if that was vague. The "above code you mentioned" is "raw HTML". So, yes, I'll take care of fixing all things about the infoboxes. Please move on to other things except the infoboxes for a while, if you would. Keep notifying me if you see strange things, of course. But I'll take care of both the {{bp}} and HTML ways of creating bulleted lists. It'll be fine :)
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  19:26: Sun 11 Mar 2012

Vehicle images

Well I hadn't really thought one way or the other about interior images. I'd guess there's nothing wrong with interior images, but I had not envisioned there being too many of those. What did you have in mind? Something like shots of people strolling on the decks of the SS Bernice? Shots of Torchwood in the SUV?

I guess the way I'd use the category is that if it's a useful shot of the interior, then I'd count it. If it's not, I wouldn't. Like, if you can see the dashboard of the SUV, that's prolly a good vehicle shot. If it's a close shot from behind the windshield, just looking at the people in the SUV/helicopter/whatever, then I personally wouldn't call that a vehicle shot, so much as a shot of the people involved.

Almost any TARDIS interior, for instance is useful to identify as a TARDIS interior, cause you get something from the backgrounds you can see. But shots of people in cars, eh, I dunno — unless you can see some instrumentation or a significant part of the body.

Broadly speaking, though, I'm not gonna be doing a hell of a lot of correction of people on these image categories. Categorisation is almost always better than non-categorisation, even if the categorisation is iffy. If you can justify it in your own mind, I can prolly live with it.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  18:29: Sun 11 Mar 2012

I'd prolly say yay to the Titanic's nuclear storm drive. But then I could see that most VOTD and Midnight shots would be fine. I'd probably go the extent of creating a separate subcat for each ("Titanic spaceship images" and "whatever-that-thing-is-called images") just because there'd be more than three images from each.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  19:31: Sun 11 Mar 2012

Place of origin

Do you really think it's necessary to put 'Cardiff, Wales' as someone's place of origin, when 'Cardiff' would suffice? In my opinion, it's not really needed, it like someone putting Cardiff, Wales, UK, Earth in the setting section - it just unneeded, extra info. MM/Want to talk? 20:33, March 11, 2012 (UTC)

That's a good questions, we can't really put [place], [country] for some, and just [place] for others. I would, personally, just put [place]. People can easily click on the link to find out where it is, and it will be the article anyway. The infobox should be a summary, not exact. MM/Want to talk? 20:49, March 11, 2012 (UTC)

Right now, it should be left till Czechout is done with the infobox. Ideally it would be good to have the same patter running through all the story infoboxes ([place]). However, we should wait and see what happens and whatever is easier. Your idea for putting it in for smaller places that people may not know, does sound reasonable. MM/Want to talk? 21:01, March 11, 2012 (UTC)

As MM is saying go specific, go succinct. To reiterate a point I made earlier on the page:

I guess what I'm saying is that an infobox should be about economy. Find the fewest amount of words to indicate the truest sense of the episode, and you've solved the riddle.

So: "London", not "London, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Europe, Earth". Or "Paris", not "Paris, France" (but Paris, New Mexico, because that won't be expected). Or New York City or State of New York, because New York is too vague. Equally, I understand the distinction some people make when they link to things like Kingdom of France instead of just France, or the Colony of Virginia instead of just Virginia, but it's really not necessary for the infobox. Remember, we're trying to limit the vertical size of the infobox. I mean, I love Wookieepedia, but some of their infoboxes are truly out of control, and they make mobile viewing a sheer misery. A big part of this exercise is not just achieving a standard look to infoboxes but also to make them consumable in a matter of seconds. So, choose the right word or two, remember that our users can click on links so they don't need to be spoonfed every bit of detail, and all will be well.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  22:56: Sun 11 Mar 2012

Please don't edit infoboxes

I feel like I've answered this question three times today. Maybe I'm not being blunt enough. Please stop editing infoboxes at all, except to the extent that you are starting new articles. Plenty of other things to edit on the wiki.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  20:56: Sun 11 Mar 2012

Voice actor

Yanno, I think this is just voice actors in general, inasmuch as those actors are different from the actor specified at {{{actor}}}. So Tom Baker isn't the voice actor listed at Fourth Doctor.

As this is literally a brand new article, I've not had time to think about whether the language should read a little differently. And we have time to rejigger this, because it doesn't exist on most pages yet. So there's plenty of wiggle room on these variables. I set {{{other actor}}} to read "Other TV actors". I was gonna make {{{actor}}} read "Main TV actor", but then I remembered the infobox would be used for the Dalek films characters, where TV wouldn't apply. Maybe I should make it so that, for those few film characters, there's a different variable, like Template:Film actor}. Kick it around with MM, who requested the variable, and see what you guys come up with. I do think the labels of Main TV actor, Other TV actor, Voice actor makes sense. K9's a conundrum for me, because there is no other actor involved. So why wouldn't you just put him down as {{{actor}}}? On the other hand, characters like Alpha Centauri and Judoon captain (Smith and Jones) clearly have a physical actor and a voice actor. So we probably do need to have {{{physical actor}}}.

I dunno — this part of the infobox isn't set in stone yet. Why don't you guys start talking about in on forum:New infoboxes and you and maybe we'll come to a good conclusion over time. It all can be added and fixed relatively easily later, because, again, these variables are brand new.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  22:56: Sun 11 Mar 2012

Help!

And, finally, speaking of that forum thread, could I get you to do a huge favor for me? I really need to get back to hardcore editing and infobox implementation. But I don't want to leave the community behind. Would you consider cutting and pasting these infobox conversations that I've had here, user talk:Gousha, user talk:Tangerineduel and user talk:Mini-mitch to forum:New infoboxes and you? If you can, please put them into neatly titled sections so that new readers can understand what's going on and what's already been debated. It would really help to get all this stuff onto one page, so that we are all on one page about infoboxes. It doesn't have to be an exact cut and paste. If editing it will provide quicker comprehension of the basic points, do that. But it's clear to me we need some sort of single discussion resource, and I just don't have the time to do it.

Actually, here's a better idea. Create several different, clearly labelled threads. One for each aspect covered. So Forum:Infobox:Actor variables, Forum:Infobox: Place of origin variable, Forum:Infobox:Affiliation variable, etc. Put them all into Category:Infobox discussions Then, just add the following code to forum:New infoboxes and you:

<dpl>
allowcachedresults=true
columns=3
shownamespace=false
category=Infobox discussions
</dpl>

Yeah, that's probably a better idea if you can possibly spare some time to do it. (Pretty please with a chocolate Romana I on top?)
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  22:56: Sun 11 Mar 2012

Sorry for the delay. Lost in thought over a tricky little bit of regex. As long as you've created the forum thread properly (i.e., by going to forum:panoopticon and using the new thread input box, it will automatically be in category:panopticon. If you tried to do a shortcut by using a "new page" button somewhere then you have to manually add

{{forumheader|Panopticon}}

at the very top of the page. In other words, don't just put it in cat:panop, but actually use {{forumheader}} to do it.

Oh, and here's a bit of infobox-related cleanup work you can do. Apparently, the bot went a little wild on a few TV story pages and changed the first link in the lead paragraph, rather than the last link in the infobox. So if you want to quickly scour the first paragraph of each TV story page, beginning with AUC and going through to Wardrobe, that'd be cool. The error's easy to spot. There's just a totally random (comic story) or {TV story) next to something that should be linked but isn't — like maybe Series 2 (Doctor Who) | Series 2 (TV story).

I think the error was limited to just DW TV story pages, not all TV story pages in general.

At the same time, if you want to put in proper {{{made prev}}}/{{{made next}}} for all stories, based on Shannon Sullivan's site, that shouldn't interrupt the bot. I've done a little stretch as an example, from The Invisible Enemy to Warriors' Gate. It's a good mix because one of the seasons was filmed as broadcast, but the others are seriously screwed up. It shows when made prev/next are necessary and when they aren't.

Obviously, you don't have to do any of this, but it's definitely a thing that the bot wouldn't be efficient at doing.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  02:19: Mon 12 Mar 2012

Re {{{mentions}}}, that puppy's dead. Since then I've just decided to whack it. Deleting a variable and its contents is super easy, and I can mark it with an edit summary, so that it can be found later if necessary. It doesn't need to be archived, because there's already a thread in the tech notes section about it. I'll just add a little note there later. But removing a dummy variable is sorta low on the list of the things the bot needs to do.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  02:24: Mon 12 Mar 2012

Questions 12 March (early)

Images separated only by capitalisation: both should absolutely be flagged. Actually, if you see pics that have anything but all lower case versions of file extensions, or .jpeg instead of .jpg, these should be flagged. T:ICC gives the exact form of file extensions, and they are .jpg .png .svg, period.
For the moment, let's keep Dreamland only on the prev/next story axis. It shouldn't be on the made prev/made next axis. It's the opposite case of Shada. I think we probably could find a start date somewhere, maybe in the DWMSE relative to the last year of Ten. But that's research work that's, to my mind, of secondary importance right now. Always easily changeable later.
While you're fixin' Dreamland, don't forget that we now have {{{network}}} and that variable should be BBC Red Button for Dreamland.
And just to pre-answer your next question, since the vote in Forum:Attack of the Graske: tv or video game seems to be going video game more than TV, it's not a part of the prev/next chain on TV stories, but video games.
And just to pre-answer your next next question, The Infinite Quest is in the previous/next broadcast chain, between The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords, since both the first broadcast of the final part and the first broadcast of the entire thing was on the day before LOTL. Remember, previous and next are about whatever is in the range variable (I may in fact pull the range down to navigation to make that clearer). And the range here is "DW TV stories". The fact that Quest isn't officially part of series 3 is quite beside the point that the navigation is trying to achieve.
Billy Wilkins unusually had a pipe trick in the image declaration, which the bot wasn't at all expecting, because pipe tricks achieve nothing in the context of an infobox.
Revelation of the Daleks had a previous injury done by another user. The box was in fact collapsed before the bot's last few touches of it.
Kymbra Chimera also had a weird image declaration.
user:Americanwhofan asked about Hath Gable, but you should know about this specific type of problem too. Because I wasn't expecting people to put infoboxes all on one line — an approach that technically works, but isn't at all recommended or suggested — I didn't program the bot to expect that. Consequently, the bot may have destroyed a few pages along the way. If you see pages that are now effectively empty, the solution, which must be done manually, is to undo the bot edit (or go to the last version of the page before it was destroyed, restore it, and then manually edit the infobox to the new standard. Or you can just send me a link to the page. Now that I know I have to expect the odd page that's done this way, I'm universally changing my programming to guard against this kind of destruction. But I'm guessing there must be similar damage on less than 1% of pages.

That's it for this round of questions. Short stories and comic stories will be converted in a few minutes. Hopefully, I can get through the main conversion of all story infoboxes today.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  15:26: Mon 12 Mar 2012

Um, what tweaks do you need to do to prev/next on TV stories? You shouldn't be seeing syntactical errors there, with TV stories. There may be the odd factual change necessary (like, the wrong story entirely is in one of the variables). Those are fine to change. But if you are seeing things like extraneous brackets or non-italicisation, I need to know where, please. I thought I was about ready to release those variables to you, but the fact that you're suggesting a need for tweaks is slightly concerning. (Prev/next are still absolutely off limits with all other story types.)
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  15:52: Mon 12 Mar 2012

Yes, if you're seeing "lots" still on television pages, I need to know what they are.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  16:00: Mon 12 Mar 2012

Okay, I've just rerun the bot, and the only prev/next errors I picked up on was at Timelash, at least as far as DW was concerned. There's also the bit with those stories where people tried to put more than one preceding story, but that's not a bot error. I think I can safely release prev story/next story on television pages only to you in one hour from the timestamp of this message. (There are, to be sure other errors on television pages that I need to look at, particularly why Attack of the Cybermen is resistant to the post-bullet-removal clean.)
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  16:17: Mon 12 Mar 2012

Ohhhhhh. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you appear to be talking about something that doesn't actually display, right? You're talking about the extra "name (TV story)" that happens on stories which actually need the disambuation term, like The End of Time and Castrovalva. Yeah, in a strict sense it "shouldn't be there". In another sense, though, it's harmless. I can get rid of those through a bot run, but that's super low priority because it has no effect on the way the box displays. If you're talking about something else let me know.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  19:17: Mon 12 Mar 2012

One hour halt on all TV story editing

Please stop editing TV story pages for one hour from 19:17, March 12, 2012 (UTC) so that I can quickly get the name situation fixed. At the end of that hour, you may recommence, and the previous/next story variables will be open to your editing pleasure. Please introduce the variables {{{previous note}}} and {{{next note}}} for those two special situations like AUC and TDTWATW to indicate where there is no prev or next. I'll drop it in the template shortly, but it may not display immediately. Previous/next note will actually be of more use in other media.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  19:17: Mon 12 Mar 2012

Prev/next update

Can't remember where I put info about what to do when there's no prev/next item. But I just wanted to give you a heads up that I changed my programming motif on this one. Before I'd said I'd do something with {{{previous note}}}/{{{next note}}}. This has now been abandoned. Instead, simply enter none in the prev/next field. This seems much easier for users than having a whole different variable. You can see it working at An Unearthly Child.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  20:19: Fri 16 Mar 2012

Thanks!

Don't think I ever formally thanked you for setting up all the stuff at the forum. I think that's been extremely helpful to people because I've heard zero grumbling about these changes. Questions, comments and helpful suggestions, yes — but no actual bitchin'. Which means, I think, that you've created a system that helps people feel engaged in the process. And that means, of course, that your work was not just swift but valuable.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  20:19: Fri 16 Mar 2012

Companion cat

Yeah, people have gone crazy with companions lately. An easy bot fix, though, which is why I've not been terribly quick to correct it. A list from you would be helpful though, as it would serve as the basis for a more permanent, automated fix, as opposed to one I'd have to manage by hand.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  21:52: Sat 24 Mar 2012

Companions

Hey, is it okay to argue that David Campbell and H. G. Wells are companions? David travelled with the Doctor for almost all of Legacy of the Daleks, and Herbert stowed away aboard the TARDIS hoping to see the universe, similar to Zoe... And does The Time Machination suggest they Futher travelled? I think I read that somewhere... What do you think? [[OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 01:15, March 25, 2012 (UTC)]]

Okay, I've stripped most of these guys of their companion status. There might have been one or two I missed just because the first run needed to be done manually. Later runs, done as part of regular maintenance, will be more automatic.

Coupla points I'd disagree with you on, Tybort, only because we've had preceding arguments on the wiki.

Biggest one is Canton Delaware. He's fully a companion as it's implied there are months between Astronaut and Moon. Plus, he gets a blue envelope not for nothin.' And he's in three eps, not just a two parter. And he's obviously been on a few TARDIS rides. By every traditional fan measurement, he's a companion.
Jackie Tyler is a companion. Largely cause I say so. :) No, but seriously, she does all the traditional things. Multiple TARDIS journeys. Defends the Doctor. (Love & Monsters FTW). Nurses a Doctor post-regeneratively. Known in multiple dimensions. The Doctor even spent Christmas dinner with her. She's really quite different to any of the companion mothers that followed. It's really hard to find an argument against her being a companion.
K9 Mark IV does count. Multiple adventures. Journey's End and Wedding.
K9 III I don't have a particular problem with under Tenth Doctor companions. I mean he gave his life for the Tenth Doctor. It's a border case but I'm not really going to fight the fight on that one, cause people will always just put it back. I don't really know off the top of my head what the Six connection is, but I'm leaving it for the time being. The contentious one is actually Fourth Doctor. You're right to cite the annuals, as that's the most likely explanation. But we don't really have any narrative proof of that. An alternate explanation is that the K9/Adric stories merely take place when Romana is sleeping. At least I assume that works. Been a while since I've looked at that annual. In any case I think the category asserts something we don't know is true. Again, though, I'm leaving it in place until more study can be done.

Aside from those, there are a few which I went ahead and removed, but are questionable.

Like OS says, David Campbell is right on the border because of Legacy, but I'm not particularly convinced. It's much more like a one-off case, like H. G. Wells. A trip in the TARDIS doesn't generally count for most fans, so it's counter-intuitive to assert Wells as a companion.

user:Tangerineduel is, I think, of the impression that Jason Kane probably doesn't count either, but I've left that alone for now.

Lynda Moss I've removed but honestly I don't know that I'll police it. She basically is acting, like Astrid, as a companion on her first adventure, but then she gets killed before she can enter the TARDIS. She accepted his invitation to travel with him so she's probably a companion. To be honest with you, I was moving quickly with the manual deletion and I deleted her before I fully thought about it, and can't be bothered to undo the change!

Some people are gonna cry foul on Jago and Litefoot, but such people can suck it. Just because you get a Companion Chronicle doesn't actually make you a companion.

I dunno that Lily Arwell counts. If anyone, the companion is Madge. In the modern era we go with billing, if the narrative gives us no indication of true companion status.

And on your side note, what stuff is incorrectly alphabetised? Check first to make sure that {{NameSort}} isn't being overriden. If not, then I'd be interested in seeing a few examples. I can then determine if there's a way to program some new way around the particular problem.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  01:47: Sun 25 Mar 2012

Update and cleanup templates

Hey, could you please do me a favor and read the fine print on {{update}} and {{cleanup}}? You're not really using them as intended. They're meant to be for major problems on the page. For instance, you've put {{update}} on Planet of Giants just because of a problem with the home video release. That does not rise to the level of problem that the template anticipates, e.g. "omissions so great that the article's factual accuracy has been compromised." The article as a whole is hardly compromised by inaccuracies as to the Region 2 release! What you're really looking for are {{section stub}} and {{section cleanup}}, not the full-on "this article sucks" top-of-page banners. Planet of Giants is actually comparatively complete as far as our televised story articles go.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  03:13: Mon 26 Mar 2012

Species pics

Yeah, for sure, infobox pics are always best if widescreen, acceptable if 4:3-ish, allowable at other dimensions if covers. Species, as an in-universe thing, would need to be 4:3 at a minimum, 16:9 preferably, for the infobox. I think now that you've mentioned it, I maybe do need to revisit the guide and make it clearer that it doesn't apply just to people. I think maybe, too, that I should make it somehow clearer that there are times where it's appropriate to have a longer-than-wide shot, as long as the page has enough text to accept it. I can quite see, for instance, why you might want to have a full body shot of a Cyberman or whatever.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  14:14: Tue 10 Apr 2012

Rose Tyler

To answer your question, we don not cover deleted scenes. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 02:54, April 11, 2012 (UTC)

Procedure for vandalism

No specific "procedure" per se. Just alert an admin.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  17:12: Sun 15 Apr 2012 Huh? Are you just reporting again what you've already reported (User:MrThermomanPreacher), or is this a new report?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  17:42: Sun 15 Apr 2012

Archive this page

Could I ask that you please consider archiving this page. It has grown so large that its length is affecting page load time. You don't have to, of course, but it would be helpful. Just pull down the edit button on this page to "archive" and it'll take all of about 15 seconds.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  17:12: Mon 16 Apr 2012

Ratings

Tardis:Format for television stories#Ratings is essentially unchanged since it was originally written back in 2006 — before SJA, TW or K9 even existed, and before the iPlayer made such a massive difference in the way that ratings were calculated.

Its reliance upon Shannon Sullivan's site is obviously outdated. I think better sources would be the DWMSEs actually. DWMSE 14, for instance has well and truly final, final numbers, along with numbers for later broadcasts on BBC Three.

Although almost none of our TV Story pages actually have a citation, to me it's vital that they all do have citations.

As to format, I'm not quite sure what you're asking. Gimme the options you're looking at. Maybe I can make up a handy little template that will ensure the ratings are delivered the same way on each page. This area of the wiki hasn't been particularly well looked-after, so let's work together to come up with something that we can use in every situation.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  17:12: Mon 16 Apr 2012

Um, I never said anything remotely like that. There are all sorts of metrics for ratings. Since you're studying this problem right now, how 'bout coming up with various pemutations, and we can build a template that houses all of them. British overnights are increasingly important, and they should be noted. But overnights weren't even calculated for the classic series, and in 2006, when tardis:Format for television stories was written, they were relatively insignificant. It's only really been roughly since the Matt Smith era began that the distinction between overnights and final have been profound enough to matter.

What I'm saying is that we need to reconsider how we do ratings. The guidelines set forth in the format page are clearly inadequate.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  18:19: Mon 16 Apr 2012

Archiving

Try again.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  21:08: Fri 20 Apr 2012

T:CAN

The rewriting of T:CAN was in fact started some time ago, but it's been delayed by, frankly, the need to restyle and rewrite everything else. Now that monobook and wikia skins have finally been completed with the introduction of uniform infoboxes, I can return to the rewrite. As you can see on user talk:Tangerineduel, it's on the list of priorities that I'll be completing over the next few weeks. The original attempt can be seen at user:CzechOut/Sandbox8, but the re-re-re-write will be talking place at User:CzechOut/This wiki's scope. You are of course at liberty to comment about anything you see as the project moves to its conclusion over the next week or so. Indeed, I actively welcome your notes.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  21:32: Sat 28 Apr 2012

Timeline pages

You should really direct questions about content to Tangerineduel and/or Revanvolatrelundar. On this particular project, I'm strictly the technical administrator. My relationship to forum:Timey-wimey detector ended a few minutes ago once I got it set up and deleted all the references to the old pages. I've had very little input into the writing of the example page, Forum:Timeline - Eighth Doctor, so you'd be better off talking to one of those two guys. I did have a lot to do with the actual discussion that pushed these things into the forum namespace, but I was actually pushing for their complete deletion, and am sorta accepting this namespace thing as a compromise.

The "time essay" part of the forum is something that was requested, but which I must admit I've not investigated to any great detail. Again, I'm really just the guy layin' the track; you want one of the conductors on the train.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  21:40: Thu 03 May 2012

Timeline / Timey wimey forum

The "time essays" would be things like the old Dalek history page before I cut it down (this edit shows it as it was). It was mentioned in the Forum:Timeline pages

Broadly speaking I think the Timeline - Eighth Doctor is a good outline and guide for the other pages. An intro, define the "Limiting factors" for each Timeline and layout the "Series basics" and then go for the timeline.

I think more information is always better than less, so go for overkill, because we can't rely on logic for something like this. The reasoning for the placement of each story will need to be there.

Although, as it says at the start we have to assume stories take place in broadcast/published order unless there's a really good reason why not (like Ace's pin from Greatest Show turning up in whichever story it was before the broadcast of Greatest Show), then there may be a case. More information is better than less, we can edit down info but it's a lot harder puzzling out why something's been placed where it is.

All stories must also be on the Timeline page, even if they just sit in the Undated section. --Tangerineduel / talk 14:59, May 4, 2012 (UTC)

On things like the First Doctor I think just a covering statement that says from "From X story to Y story they each flow into the other and there are essentially no gaps between stories" or something to that effect.

It's a yes to every companion timeline page that was around before. But, do we need a timeline page for every companion? There used to be companion pages for Sarah Jane Smith and River Song. Do you think it'd be beneficial to have a page for every companion so that we can cover stuff like Companion Chronicles and short stories? Or is that too much of an overkill because only a handful of companions leave the Doctor and continue to have documented adventures. --Tangerineduel / talk 13:14, May 5, 2012 (UTC)

Yes, that's a yes to River Song's timeline, I'm sure that page will need notes to explain the how and whens of her timeline.

All of Sarah's stories should be on the page, because there's several short stories lurking out there that would sit between them.

Oh, sorry, I missed the point entirely about companions then! No, I don't think that should be noted unless it's relevant to the placement of the stories; like the gap in the early Eighth Doctor stories and the later 'Searching for Sam arc' are both related to when Sam Jones jumped ship.

So for instance it can be noted that post-Deadly Assassin the Doctor is travelling alone or that Rose departs in Doomsday leaving a gap where the Doctor is travelling alone. The information provided should be related to the subject of the article not just providing secondary info.

I think for now I'll say that all companions can have a timeline page. Based on some of the Companion Chronicles inserting several stories between others, and the short stories which while hard to place builds upon everything.

I'll also say that any character who has appeared across more than 2 mediums in more than 2 stories would need a timeline page this is for people like; the Brigadier, Bernice Summerfield, Davros, Irving Braxiatel all of whom have long and complicated timelines which would benefit from pages. --Tangerineduel / talk 15:41, May 5, 2012 (UTC)

It was a typo, it should have said The Smugglers.

I've reworded the paragraph concerning the statements on the novels to indicate that they should be placed between their indicated stories.

I'm not totally familiar with all of the First Doctor's chronology either, but I thought I'd get started on a Timeline page for it anyways. Get the basic layout down and place the stories I'm fairly certain of, and then others can come through and work in it more. --Tangerineduel / talk 13:58, May 7, 2012 (UTC)

Re:Addition/Subtraction

That's effectively what all the pages do say at the moment under 'limiting factors'.

Or do you mean to add an extra note within the Timeline itself? --Tangerineduel / talk 15:03, June 29, 2012 (UTC)

IDW

I think the reason you may be having problems with the annual thingy is that you're British. An annual, in the American sense, is, or at least was historically, just a subscriber bonus. Yanno how DWM changed from a monthly to a 13-a-year schedule? Well, same concept, except we "pretty up" the 13th issue and make it seem like a "deal" to subscribers.

Navigation is easy. All ya do is just make the series flow from whatever story preceded the annual (from memory, I think it's Don't Step on the Grass) to the first story of the annual, then through each story of the annual, then to the next regular issue. In other words, just forget it's called an annual, and treat it like a normal issue of the run that just happens to have an anthological format. In terms of the primary navigation, then, you ignore the thread and just make the navigation flow through the annual in table of contents order. I'm not sure there's whole lot of point to making a secondary navigation that ignores the stories in the annual that aren't directly linked to the narrative of the regular run. It would be like having a television navigation that ignored Night Terrors cause it's not all that related to the River Song stuff in series 6.

As for the one-shots, I suppose there are two ways to handle it. You could call the series "[[Through Time and Space]", cause that's the name of the trade paperback. However, this would only cover the six Tennant one-shots.

Personally, I think it would be much more helpful to call the series "IDW mini-series and one-shots". So the series could start with The Forgotten and continue on to A Fairytale Life and beyond. It wouldn't, I don't think, include Agent Provocateur, cause that's actually, according to indicia, Doctor Who (2008). It wasn't intended or even initially marketed as a mini-series; rather, it was an ongoing series they abruptly cancelled after the first storyline. This whole "Agent Provocateur" thing is a cover up.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  05:15: Sat 05 May 2012

Night and the Doctor

Night and the Doctor itself is not (TV story). Obviously, that's just an umbrella title/value for {{{series}}}. But the individual vignettes are indeed (TV story). IIRC, and without checking it, precedent for this position was set at Forum:Meanwhile in the TARDIS.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  13:42: Sun 06 May 2012

As I said, I hadn't gone back to the thread. I'm glad you sort of forced me to take a second look. It reminded me that I did need to categorise it, add archivist's notes, and take action upon Rob's at-the-time rhetorical ending question. You'll now find that DW and T:LOP have been changed to reflect the consensus of the thread. (I'd wholly disagree with you, btw, that the thread is any way significantly ambiguous or unsure of itself. There was clear unanimity that DW was the appropriate prefix, and there was never, as you said, a suggestion that we were looking for some better term to come around. The only question was Rob's final, rhetorical one in which he wondered whether the text at T:LOP needed to be changed for what was at the time the singular exception of Meanwhile in the TARDIS.)

That thread is one of around 70 or so that I archived quickly, and without assigning a category or writing any "archivist's notes". I apologise for sending you to a thread that hadn't been fully "prettied up" for the archives.

As for the exact place where we've already done this dance about the "extra features narrative", you're looking for Forum:Story pages being moved. Looks like I directed you to the very same forum precedent, and that your questions are pretty much exactly as they've been this time around. I suppose that all this is motivated by the fact that only 2 of the 5 mini-eps was changed to (TV story) and you wanna know why. I don't have a good answer for you, just because it's not important enough for me to dig around. I can only speculate that not all of them were in the same categories at the time I made the switchover. This would have prevented the bot from running. It's definitely not that they were changed and then changed back, however. The bot just never made the name switch.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  17:09: Sun 06 May 2012

Prefixes and stuff

Well, in fairness, the main shortcut is T:PREFIX. The secondary is T:LOP because that's a literal acronym of its original name, Tardis:List of prefixes. And the prequels are a part of series 6, yes. I imagine you're asking in order for navigational purposes, so, yeah, it'd go A Christmas Carol, Prelude: TIA, TIA, DOTM, Prelude:TCOTBS, TCOTBS, etc.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  20:58: Sun 06 May 2012

New magic

Since you helped out so much with {{Wales crew}}, you should be the first to know that I'm now beginning the process of turning it into an actual database of information that we can leverage.

I'm still in preliminary stages of actually creating uses for the data, but the template itself has been fully converted into an SMW "engine".

Here's the entry level party trick. Let's say you wanted to know who was the 2nd AD on The Unicorn and the Wasp. You could go to the page and look for it. Or you could just type in {{show|The Unicorn and the Wasp|2AD}} and find out it's Jennie Fava. Or maybe you want to know the first appearance of Jilly Kitzinger. Easy — that's {{show|Jilly Kitzinger|first appearance}}, or: Rendition (TV story).

That, of course, is just the fun. It offers the potential for us to have fully, automatically updating tables of comparative complexity. But I've not gotten there yet. You will find on BBC America that we now have an updating list of original DWU content that debuts on that channel, or that it would be comparatively easy to replace our largely inaccurate "filmography" sections on just about everyone, with a simple structure like the one seen at T:SMW. Just food for thought.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  17:32: Sat 12 May 2012

i must protest about picture quality

tybort why...the jpeg pics are poor qualities to me, JPEG (Stands for: Joint Photographic Experts Group) are the compression rate decreasing typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality.

and png pics are great qualities to me, PNG (Stands for: Portable Network Group) supports palette-based images (with palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors), grayscale images (with or without alpha channel), and full-color non-palette-based RGB images (with or without alpha channel). PNG was designed for transferring images on the Internet, not for professional-quality print graphics, and therefore does not support non-RGB color spaces such as CMYK.

and everybody can use jpeg pics...but i don't i choose png pics.

--User:JarodMighty 17:20, May 17, 2012 (UTC)

Battles in Time sources

You are correct, sir. :) Things derived from the faux "articles" within BIT are NOT valid sources, because they're not stories. They're akin to information you'd find on the back of the playing cards, which is certainly not valid. Rule #1 of T:VALID is that it has to be a story. It's not enough to be an "illustrated opinion of an author" or a little sidebar column somewhere.

Of course, this information may be noted in "behind the scenes" sections.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  20:31: Wed 04 Jul 2012

Preloads

Do you think you'd be interested in going over all the standard preloads to make sure they're compliant with the new infobox standards? I've gotten to about a quarter of them, but I'm obviously juggling' a lot of tasks at the moment. I'd really like to get them absolutely set in stone by the time the new series starts, and you've previously expressed an interest in seeing them made right. Let me know, and I'll unlock them all.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  02:44: Tue 10 Jul 2012

Better still, can I just put your name in nomination for adminship?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  02:46: Tue 10 Jul 2012

@@ Line 310: / Line 310: @@
 == Preloads ==
 Do you think you'd be interested in going over all the standard preloads to make sure they're compliant with the new infobox standards?  I've gotten to about a quarter of them, but I'm obviously juggling' a lot of tasks at the moment.  I'd really like to get them absolutely set in stone by the time the new series starts, and you've previously expressed an interest in seeing them made right. Let me know, and I'll unlock them all.  {{user:CzechOut/Sig}}&nbsp;<span style="{{User:CzechOut/TimeFormat}}">02:44: Tue&nbsp;10 Jul 2012&nbsp;</span>
+:Better still, can I just put your name in nomination for [[admin]]ship?  {{user:CzechOut/Sig}}&nbsp;<span style="{{User:CzechOut/TimeFormat}}">02:46: Tue&nbsp;10 Jul 2012&nbsp;</span>

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