User talk:Mini-mitch/Archive Talk

Welcome to the

• Mini-mitch •

Thanks for your recent edits! I'm Jimbo, your robot wiki representative! We hope you'll keep on editing with us. This is actually a great time to have joined, because we're now fully independent, and working on a host of new features!

We've got a couple of important quirks for a fan written 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 use another form of English, 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:

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 an admin.

Discontinuity

It's a direction we could go, but I think much like the current discontinuity section it would be hard to decide what is a 'major' discontinuity and to stop the page from becoming a huge article of arguments. Looking at the page as it is we'd likely either need to make several pages for each Doctor or have that 'Discontinuity in Doctor Who' page with several sub-pages spun off it. Also as the title stands it could refer to all of Doctor Who (TV, book, audios, comics etc), while in theory this isn't a bad thing (as I'm sure editors could find a bit of discontinuity for every single story) it presents an issue of too much information which may turn into just one large discussion.

Having it all in one place would also probably make editing harder, because people could just go through the page responding to every single thing in one edit (rather than the 500 or so they'd need to do otherwise).

On a side note, the semi-protect tag is just that, it's a tag and doesn't do anything, it's to alert people that a page has been semi-protected, but an admin actually needs to protect the page first. --Tangerineduel 15:43, March 21, 2010 (UTC)

User Changing Stuff

I've seen it. I will go through and hit 'rollback' on his edits, but I do want to give the user a chance to continue the discussion on the forum page as after this (and a warning) my only options will be to block the user (and I'd rather go the diplomatic route first). Thanks for leaving me a message. --Tangerineduel 16:03, March 26, 2010 (UTC)

That would have the effect of just moving the discussions (not a huge problem on the classic series pages) but on the new series pages it'd likely have the result of encouraging people to go to town with the debating. --Tangerineduel 16:16, March 26, 2010 (UTC)

Forum:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes

I wanted to get this page up and ready by the time The Eleventh Hour was broadcast. It's not pretty (probably it should eventually go to a tabular format one of these days), but every story (and episode, if you wanna be picky about the BBC Wales era) now has an appropriate redlink just waiting for information to be dumped onto it from the mainspace article page. Though uglier, I decided to make the backslash visible in the links so as to visually confirm for people that they'd be creating an article at the right place. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 00:55, April 3, 2010 (UTC)

Production Error Stuff

Thanks for your help in switching over to production error paradigm, but please see Talk:Lost Souls#Production error removal. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 21:07, March 29, 2010 (UTC)

Is There Something I'm Missing?

Are "Production Errors" not the same thing as "Discontinuity, Plot Holes, Errors", 'cos I thought they were? I must admit I agree with removing the rebuttals. Every single plot hole was given a rebuttal, a lot of which were a little far-fetched... The b-Unit's167th Drophyd 12:19, April 5, 2010 (UTC)

Well that's not what "Tangerineduel" said, 'cos according to him it's been simplified to Production Errors. Anyway, it's good that they've been removed... The b-Unit's167th Drophyd 13:00, April 5, 2010 (UTC)

Actors Pages

Thank you very much for your efforts to create pages for several Doctor Who guest actors. There are a few things that the three or so pages you've most recently created lack that would help them be even more useful. I know you've already made about 3000 edits, and therefore you're one of our more senior editors, but I nevertheless encourage you to read (or, possibly, re-read) our Manual of style at some point in the near future. It'll give you some pointers about how to format articles. However, here are some key things that you might want to keep in mind for the future.

All actor pages should be flagged as an "article about the real world" as near the top of the page as possible, the name of the person must be bolded, and you should link as many words as can be linked to articles on this wiki. So, the article David Ajala should begin:

{{real world}}'''David Ajala''' played [[Peter]] . . .

All pages, related to actors or not, should be put into a category when the article is first created. This can be accomplished several ways, but the easiest is just to click "Add category" and start typing. The software will match your text as you type it, so you don't even have to type out the whole category. The category for Doctor Who guest actors is exactly that: Doctor Who guest actors. By the time you've typed "Doctor Who g", the software will already be presenting you with that category, so click on its suggestion, press enter, and you're done. Again, I'm probably telling you something you already know, but as none of your recently-created articles are categorized, I just wanted to be sure you knew how to do it.
All articles about people should ideally be sorted in categories by the last name of the person. The recommended way of making this happen is to use a thing called "DEFAULTSORT". (DEFAULTSORT is preferred over adding a manual sort key to each category, because pages sometimes later get put into automatically-applied categories. Without a DEFAULTSORT, auto-cats will not properly alphabetize people's names.) Add the following to the bottom of your articles, and the system will tidy away the article without you having to think about it:

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ajala, David}}

Actors pages should have an external link to the relevant IMdb page, which can be accomplished easily through the use of one of two templates.

{{imdb|name/nm2916966/|David Ajala}}

or 

{{imdb name|id=2916966|name=David Ajala}}

As regards this specific article, you might want to note that Peter is a huge disambig page, and not a specific link to the character in question. Generally first-name-only links are discouraged, because it's very likely there will be other articles that could potentially have that name. Very common English language first names, like Peter and Mandy, should almost never be used to title an article, because there will be other people, both in-universe and out-, who will share the same first name.

Again, I know you're one of our more experienced editors, so I hope you don't take offense at these suggestions. It just worried me to see three articles with the same basic editing errors. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 15:03, April 9, 2010 (UTC)

Section Headers

I note on your user page that you seem to be on a campaign to change sectional headers from "Sentence case" to "Title Case". Please note that this violates Tardis:Manual of style#Headings. We have elected to use sentence case for headings (that is, only the first letter of the first word capitalized, unless further words are proper nouns or acronyms). This isn't, as you seem to suggest, a matter of "proper grammar", but a stylistic choice. Of course, this choice was not specified when the site was first started, so you will still see a number of instances of Title Case in headings. These will soon be reverted by bot, however, to comply with the MOS. It is the usual British standard to use sentence case for the titling of articles and sub-heads, and it's perfectly proper. Please do not continue reverting subheads to title case. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 15:03, April 9, 2010 (UTC)

Rumours

Done. I have kept my edit and mixed it with yours. -- Michael Downey 14:46, April 23, 2010 (UTC).

What the hell is your problem, I did exactly what you said to keep both of us happy and you have just gone against your own saying and just removed the whole of it. If you remove again admins will get involved which could lead up to a two week ban for you if you carry on vandalising. -- Michael Downey 14:58, April 23, 2010 (UTC)

That is fine, what you have done is now more suitable and acceptable. I did not remove rumours that I didn't like I removed rumours that had no sources and had been there for a long time giving people a chance to source them but evidently not. If we ran our wiki like this I could make my own rumours up for example saying 'The Doctor will die and the end of the series' therefore we need to make sure we have proper sources for a rumour let alone it being fact. -- Michael Downey 15:07, April 23, 2010 (UTC)

Unsourced Rumours

Just to wade into this debate, unsourced rumours should either be removed (or if they're really necessary) go in Forum:The Howling, discussion on an article's page should (I know it often isn't) be restricted to discussing the content and format of the page.

Unsourced rumours shouldn't be on the main article pages, only stuff that can be sourced should be on the article pages. --Tangerineduel 15:33, April 23, 2010 (UTC)

Quotes

Are the quotes for the whole article or just the topThe mysterious 18:31, May 10, 2010 (UTC)