User talk:Rachel Churcher
Rachel ChurcherThanks for your edits! 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.
Other useful stuff
Aside from those two things, we also have some pages that you should probably read when you get a chance, like:
- the listing of all our help, policy and guideline pages
- our Manual of Style
- our image use policy
- our user page policy
- a list of people whose job it is to help you
If you're brand new to wiki editing — and we all were, once! — you probably want to check out these tutorials at Wikipedia, the world's largest wiki:
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. Shambala108 ☎ 18:20, March 5, 2019 (UTC)
Mars Wilderness
Hi, another admin here. I saw your message to Shambala108 and would ask you for a bit of patience and trust in the process. Other writers may well have teams (on a side note, our policies strongly discourage any staff involved in the creation of a piece to edit related pages), but we also have a community. One of the reason I love Doctor Who is because I can see people making it supporting each other. It's a Doctor Who family more than industry. And while Obverse Books may seem like a distant relative, we do have active editors who are ardent supporters of Obverse, Iris, Magrs, Mars, etc.
So could you trust us, fans, to do you justice and wikify your story for you? If it is something that would make an actual difference, I'm confident we can find editors willing and able to provide a synopsis and all the necessary hooks placing your story within DWU. As someone who has to enforce the prohibition on you editing your own story, I feel responsible to ensure that edits do happen. Please know that we heard you and just need some time. I've already made some inquiries. Just sit back and enjoy. With respect, Amorkuz ☎ 15:15, March 6, 2019 (UTC)
Authors and their stories on the wiki
Hi there, Rachel. I'm popping in because I've seen what's been happening with you on the wiki, and have been contacted by another admin to see if I can help with the issue.
Firstly, I want to put forward my own beliefs on this subject, after taking on board what another admin said a few weeks ago relating to the subject. As an author, you will clearly know far more about the story than anyone who could read it and, quite frankly, that's amazing, and should be expressed so that others can read it. The problem with that comes from how it lands on the wiki. Our pages have to stick directly to what's in the story. For example, you may have laid down some intentions in your work where X refers to another work written by Y, but to an outside reader, they might not quite get that, and therefore gives an inaccurate depiction of what happens in the story when compared to the final released product.
I'd like to express another example, which relates to this subject: I have an upcoming short story that will be released in a future anthology (I'm not sure how much more I can say at the moment but that), and since its creation I've been eager to edit the page myself with the ins and outs of the story and how it relates to the wider Doctor Who world. What I've come to realise from recent developments here is that most of my intentions for the story were lost in the various edits of my drafts and the final product doesn't quite express the views I originally intended for the story. While that's not a bad thing for me - I'm pleased with the final product - it does mean that if I was to edit the article for my story and pages related to it, I'd have to be careful to stick to what exists in the final draft, and not what was cut out before I got there.
I'm not sure how much of that went off subject for you, and how much might help, but I hope from my words it will help you understand how the wiki works a little better. I'd like to state here that I find it amazing that an author wants to edit here on the wiki, and don't want anything to discourage that in any way. But of course, like I've outlined above, authors have swathes of extra knowledge that can't always be used on the wiki. I think if an author does want to edit a page, it should be absolutely fine for them to do so, provided that the information contained within the edit sticks to what actually appears on the page, and leaves the interpretation of the text open to the reader.
This whole concept of authors is very new to the wiki, and I think it will take some time before we establish a proper policy on it. Until then, your input and time would be most appreciated. I'd like to take the time to congratulate you on actually getting the story published in the first place. I hope my input here has helped you in regard to this subject. Thanks. --Revan\Talk 15:19, March 6, 2019 (UTC)
