Forum:The original Panopticon

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Things to Do

Hey, Stardizzy and Freethinker! It looks like it's the three of us for the moment. I assume we'd like to get the structure of the site somewhat settled, and have a few important articles as examples before we try to get more people interested and involved (by plugging the site on Outpost Gallifrey's forum, for example). To that end, there are a few things we (as a group) should figure out:

• We should figure out what the "encyclopedia"'s point of view should be. As it is now, most of our articles take a "real-world" perspective: that is, they refer explicitly to Doctor Who stories as TV stories or novels. We should consider whether we want to keep that, or if we want articles about things in the "Doctor Who" universe to be treated as if they were written by and for someone in that universe. That is, should an article on the Master talk about Roger Delgado's untimely death in the body of the article, or should production information be separated in italics, the way they do it at Memory Alpha? (I'm not advocating either choice, but we should know what we're doing.)

• We should talk about what TARDIS Index File's canon policy is going to be. Doctor Who canon tends to be a bit more flexible than Star Trek's, since the BBC has never set out rules about what "counts" and what doesn't, the way that Paramount has about Star Trek. Therefore, I don't think that we need to be as strict as MA is about what we let in and what we keep out, but we should develop a policy about how we distinguish information from the television series, the novels, the audios, the comics, et cetera.

• We should work on the Manual of Style. We've already got conflicting usages on TV story citations in articles: should we refer to The Caves of Androzani or "The Caves of Androzani"? If we set some clear policies now it will save us a lot of time editing later. Similarly, we should figure out some article naming conventions: we've already got List of television stories and List of Audio Stories, which is inconsistent. Since Wiki links are case-sensitive, we should decide whether such articles should have capital letters or not. (Moving a page is easy, but changing everything it links to is a nuisance.)

• My project for the next week or so is to learn how to do tables in wiki formatting, so that we can develop a template for the story pages. (See Talk:Suggested Format for Television Story Entries).

• Finally, do either of you have any graphics ability? It would be great to have a TARDIS Index File logo to replace the WikiCities one in the upper left-hand corner of each page. Unfortunately, I'm not very graphically talented at all.

I think this project has great potential, and it's fun to be here building the foundation. Let's get to work! :) --Josiah Rowe 23:11, 16 Mar 2005 (EST)