User talk:Uknownada
UknownadaThanks for your edits at The Four Doctors (audio story)! We hope you'll keep on editing with us. This is a great time to have joined us, because now you can play the Game of Rassilon with us and win cool stuff! Well, okay, badges. That have no monetary value. And that largely only you can see. But still: they're cool!
We've got a couple of important quirks for a Wikia wiki, so let's get them out of the way first.
British English, please
We generally use British English round these parts, so if you're American, please be sure you set your spell checker to BrEng, and take a gander at our spelling cheat card.
Spoilers aren't cool
We have a strict definition of "spoiler" that you may find a bit unusual. Basically, a spoiler, to us, is anything that comes from a story which has not been released yet. So, even if you've got some info from a BBC press release or official trailer, it basically can't be referenced here. In other words, you gotta wait until the episode has finished its premiere broadcast to start editing about its contents. Please check the spoiler policy for more details.
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Remember that you should always sign your comments on talk and vote pages using four tildes like this:Thanks for becoming a member of the TARDIS crew! If you have any questions, see the Help pages, add a question to one of the Forums or ask on my talk page. -- Doug86 (Talk) 23:46, December 22, 2012
Infobox story
Hi there :) Yep, I'm the right guy for this sort of technical question, as I'm the wiki's IT admin, and the source of this issue.
But it's not an error. It's a conscious effort to force people to define the single incarnation who is the main Doctor of that story. For instance, the Third Doctor is the star of The Three Doctors. While it is true you will currently find a number of infoboxes that are a bit messed up, it is the goal to work through them and correct them so that the doctor field is populated by one and only one name.
The {{{featuring}}} field is where additional Doctors are meant to go, as you will see at a page like Time & Time Again.
The advantage of what might at first appear to be an error is that you can answer all sorts of nifty little questions with the box set up like this.
For instance, let's imagine we wanted to quickly settle a bar bet as to the number of comic stories there were in which the Ninth Doctor played the starring role. If we were to amend the template like you suggest, then the only way we could figure it out would be to physically count them. That's unsatisfying in 2013. We should be able to leverage the information of this wiki in a better way. So what we can do now is type:
{{#ask: [[Category:Doctor Who comic stories]] [[doctor::Ninth Doctor]]
|format=count
}}
we'll get the answer: 26
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's not just about numbers. We can figure out how many novels featuring a certain Doctor were written by a certain writer. Or how many audio stories featuring a particular Doctor were published in a particular year. This will help us out tremendously in keeping our pages — especially our list pages — up to date. With any luck, as we increase the use of SMW on the wiki, we'll be decreasing the number of pages that need to be manually maintained, and yet increasing the accuracy of our information.
If you'd like to help us with this bit of modernisation, we'd certainly welcome it. On every page you encounter where you see multiple Doctors, please fix it so that the main Doctor is at {{{doctor}}} and the "guests" are at {{{featuring}}}. If you encounter a story where it's really not clear which Doctor is the main one, then bring it up at Board:The Reference Desk. Thanks!
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 01:13: Sun 23 Dec 2012
