User talk:Tangerineduel/Archive 4

	This page is an archive. Please do not make any edits here. Edit the active conversation only.

Geoffrey Sax

Hey, since you've researched the production of the TV movie fairly carefully, is there any chance you could help me finish the Geoffrey Sax article expansion by filling in Geoffrey Sax#A new Doctor? That'll be the section concentrating on Sax' contribution to the TVM. Thanks.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 08:53:15 Wed 20 Jul 2011

Loss of edit button

Yeah, just checked it out a bit. Don't know why it's happening, but the edit dropdown is gone on both the user and user talk namespaces. It's nothing to do with the archive tool, though, cause a) it's happening to people who've never touched archive tool, and it's not happening on regular talk pages where archive tool has been used. It's also happened recently, as the message above was left via the edit dropdown. Seems like a wikia glitch to me. I'll check community central to see if there's any chatter about it.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:45:28 Wed 20 Jul 2011

And, like magic, it's back again. Didn't do anything. It's just . . . back. Yeah, that seems like a typical Wikia-generated problem.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:55:26 Wed 20 Jul 2011

Updating a single file with the cover of the latest issue of a magazine

Didn't notice BroadcastCorp. was up to this. I'll have a word with him. It's a bad idea. Load times are an issue, but the more convincing is that eventually it won't work. He'll do an update and the pic just won't change, because of MediaWiki caching issues. I'm sure you've seen this before. You change a pic and it takes days for it to update. That's maybe acceptable on a regular article page, but the front page is meant to be "newsy". We want those pics to immediately update. Only way to ensure that is to just use the actual file at, say File:Dwm-issue-373.jpg, rather than uploading that pic to another file named file:Dwm.jpg
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 17:12:11 Fri 22 Jul 2011

Featured articles

I'm not working on an NA one. I'm pleased you approve of the new version of the nomination page; I was going to ask your opinion, but noticed you haven't been around lately. Feature Article policy (now obsoleted) will need to be rewritten when the time comes, but other than that, I'm ready to begin the changeover when you want. Just give us a shout if you have any feedback or criticisms that need attention. Thanks--Skittles the hog - talk 16:07, July 29, 2011 (UTC)

So from that, I take it, I'm free to implement the new version? Yeah, the only part of the policy in need of (major) attention is the section on voting.--Skittles the hog - talk 16:32, July 29, 2011 (UTC)

Right, I've rewritten the policy and put it in this sandbox (ignore the template at the bottom). Could you take a look if you have a min as it's not... that great.--Skittles the hog - talk 17:12, July 29, 2011 (UTC)

Okay, both the policy and nomination pages are up and {{inuse}} Thanks for helping--Skittles the hog - talk 17:49, July 29, 2011 (UTC)

Sounds great. Do you need me to do anything?--Skittles the hog - talk 18:13, July 29, 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, that wasn't very clear at all. Definitely a sub page. I never thought of that. On a side note, I'm off to the lakes for a week, so I'm handing all responsibility for this project over to you :) --Skittles the hog - talk 18:22, July 29, 2011 (UTC)

Chat feature

Thank you. You have been more persuasive than User:Skittles the hog has ever been. At least someone gives a reason! :) BroadcastCorp 17:17, July 29, 2011 (UTC)

Re:Why create talk pages?

Why not? --MrThermomanPreacher 13:18, August 3, 2011 (UTC)

Oh, I see. --MrThermomanPreacher 13:22, August 3, 2011 (UTC)

I only did it as I was on the Wanted Pages, and there were dozen and dozen of links to them. So it was easier to just add the talk template and clear out the wanted pages. Also it stops Users from using the template talk page as a way of using general discussion (i.e "I really liked the Daleks in this series"). MM/Want to talk? 14:19, August 7, 2011 (UTC)

Category:Templates

I'm not experiencing the same problem as you reported. All things directly under category:templates are either in the category or template namespaces. Nothing within the article namespace at all. Here's a dynamic listing of current contents:

I don't see anything there that shouldn't be there. If you saw a random selection of articles, then it most likely was a glitch. Problems resulting from user changes (as opposed to Wikia-based glitches) typically aren't random.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:37:36 Sun 07 Aug 2011

Well, as it turns out, there was some damage done to {{real world}} last week. Boblipton inexplicably blanked the whole "business end" of the template, leaving behind only usage instructions. I guess that would have meant that every page which carried {{real world}} would have then carried the usage instructions. This was somewhat fixed by 23skidoo, but oddly he didn't do just a simple "undo". He then went to another revision, fixing a problem of his own making, and then Mini-mitch got in on the act the following day. I've now gone back and simply reverted to the last known good version, since none of the intervening versions added anything useful to the template.

Anyway, all this does provide an explanation. See, when Bob blanked it we were left with this:

==Usage==
{{real world}}
This should be the first "word" of an article, unless the article has an infobox.  If the article has an infobox, then it should be typed immeidately after the closing curled bracket of the infobox, without spaces or linebraks.  The first word of the article proper should then come immediately afterwords, without line breaks or spaces.  Hence:
|}{{real world}}The '''article name''' is a thing the Doctor ...
The reason for the difference with infoboxes is that infobox code interferes with this template, and the closest you can get the template to the top of the page is to put it directly underneath the infobox.

[[Category:Templates]]</noinclude>

As you can see, he snipped the opening <noinclude>, leaving only the closing command behind. This meant that everything bearing {{tl|real world]] was suddenly put in category:templates.

Two very quick revisions by 23Skidoo almost certainly caused confusion in the cache. This meant that when you saw the category, the MediaWiki cache was still struggling to catch up with contradictory revisions. Some of the real world pages were still heading towards the Boblipton revision, while others were speeding towards Skidoo's first revision, and others towards his second. As a result, there was apparent "random"ness of pages in the category.

Sadly I still don't know what Boblipton was originally trying to accomplish, since he left no revision note.

As for the dynamic category stuff (DPL), no, it's not terribly new. It's kinda what's behind other somewhat obscure functions like #categorytree. And it's at the heart of the forum software. Well, I say "forum software", but really "forums", such as they are, are just a very slightly specialised usage of DPL. In fact, because the forum version of DPL has a category limitation which regular DPL doesn't, the Panopticon archives use a mixture of forum and pure DPL coding to get around forum limitations. I suppose I just got stronger at using it in the wake of redoing and categorising all the forums.

Another point is that it was the original impetus for re-organizing our category tree last year. You may remember what a mess it was before that. DPL would have been quite difficult to use in those original conditions. And, yes, there are still limbs of the category tree which need pruning, but, on the whole, we're finally "DPL-ready" in most categories. It took me forever, for instance, to straighten category:timeline, which is why Doug's deletion of most of the structure has been so very disappointing.

Categories are the heart and soul of a wiki. Hopefully the next year will really start to show that off.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 16:16:17 Sun 07 Aug 2011

{{BFA}} (or is it BFAMonthlly?)

It's such an arbitrary question you're asking, if I'm understanding it. I'd say, though, that you should go strict, rather than broad, on this one. Featuring only those stories which were in the numbered, monthly range makes the template logically unassailable. You start letting specials in and you're on a slippery slope. Yes, The Four Doctors is a bonus to subscribers of the monthly range, but No Place Like Home and Cuddlesome aren't. Your navbox is for the range, not the Doctor. The fact that you've arranged by Doctor doesn't mean that you have to then let in every BF story done with each Doctor. If it did, you'd have to put in Companion Chronicles and Short Trips and technically some Gallifrey stories. Your sanity — and readers' comprehension — will be improved by going for purely numbered, monthly releases. I'd advise, however, that you do include a little note at the bottom of the navbox explaining your position.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 20:36:46 Sun 07 Aug 2011

Your input is needed!

You are invited to join the discussion at Forum:Alienation of new and IP users. MM/Want to talk? 20:34, August 9, 2011 (UTC)

Genesis of the Daleks and I, Davros date

REF: Doctor Who: The Dalek Handbook states that the Thousand Year War began in 450 and ended in 1450.

GusF 14:22, August 13, 2011 (UTC)

Doctor Who 63

Please allow me some time to perform an independent audit of User:Doctor Who 63's contributions, and I'll get back to you.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 17:22:37 Sat 13 Aug 2011

Okay, I've checked his contributions, and I see why you're frustrated. However, my inkling is that he's not doing it deliberately. Please see Attack of the Cybermen#DVD release. You will see there an incongruous picture of the cover to The Resurrection of Mars. I put up this picture, file:Testytesttest.jpg, using the "add a picture to this gallery button". You will note that it doesn't have a license. That's because this button triggers a series of pages — none of which allow for the placement of an image license. You can't even manually type in a template call anywhere. It just gets posted directly to the gallery and you never see the page in the file namespace.

Looking at this user's contributions, they're all things in galleries. My guess is that Doctor Who 63 has only used this "add to gallery" button to upload pics. Well, almost only — we know that he's uploaded new versions of an image, so he knows what a file: page is. But still, my money is on the fact that he's not doing anything malicious, and that he's not responding to you because he likely doesn't quite understand what you're talking about.

So that leaves us with a quandry. It's possible to use a feature of the wiki, in exactly the way Wikia intends it to be, and to fall foul of our own policies. I think we can safely rule out stern measures against this user. But we do need to figure out how we're going to close this loophole. Do we want to try to disable this button altogether? Do you want to try to keep the feature, but modify it, like we did with the "add a photo" button on the right rail of pages? Do you want me to look around for a solution, or do you want to handle it? Let me know how you want to play it, and we'll move forward from there.

Also, on the question of uploading dissimilar pictures as new versions, well, ya may have come across a bit harsh there by threatening a ban. After all, the history of the file, if you just looked at the series of images there, isn't very clear as to what is the file's true nature. It's not the most forthright name, either. You've helped things by moving it to a different name, but when this user encountered it, it was 1.jpg, and it had three very different images in its history. He probably didn't know what to make of that, and so thought nothing of adding yet a fourth image to the file history. Now,I know you were consistent by telling one of the other users who put up a dissimilar image that they shouldn't have done that, but it takes research to see that even-handedness. Just going off the immediate evidence, file:1.jpg wasn't really about anything specific. I'm not sure it's really vandalism, what's gone on with this file, because he did give another DWU image. It's not like he replaced it with the image of someone's ass or something.

What we really should be worried about is banning the use of purely numeric, or "jibberish" alphanumeric, filenames for pics. That makes it much easier to understand what a picture is meant to be, and then judging whether the picture is an appropriate representation of that thing. file:1.jpg should only be a pic of the number 1 or, and this is unlikely, the year 1. An image of Sarah Jane is just as nonsensical as an image of an Andrew Skilleter image of the five Doctors.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 18:12:15 Sat 13 Aug 2011

Rollback rights

User:CzechOut asked me to contact you about me having rollback rights. Do you think I will be able to? BroadcastCorp (talk | contribs) 17:30, August 14, 2011 (UTC)

Talk:Master refers to it, but doesn't advocate removal of image

You should tell that to User:Skittles the hog, as that's what he said when he removed the Doctor image. BroadcastCorp (talk | contribs) 17:54, August 14, 2011 (UTC)

I would contest that talk:The Master does not specify "the Doctor" to be in need of attention. In fact, it mentions it to be in the same boat and it clearly is. I assume you reintroduced the image because there isn't currently a discussion about that at talk:The Doctor and no replacement is available. If this isn't the case, why is it back?--Skittles the hog - talk 18:11, August 14, 2011 (UTC)

Well, I think the Doctor image is the only one in need of major attention. Perhaps Rassilon as well, but Romana is just a two-piece split and that look pretty nice as it is. A similar discussion at talk:The Doctor would probably do the job.--Skittles the hog - talk 15:30, August 15, 2011 (UTC)

Don't worry, I didn't know either :) --Skittles the hog - talk 15:39, August 15, 2011 (UTC)

Vandalism policy

I've given tardis:vandalism policy a major structural overhaul, but haven't changed that much of the substance of what it says. The major excpetion to this is that I've deliberately changed what you said about user talk pages. In my view, it is actually vandalism to remove what other people have written on "your" talk page, as you have no reasonable expectation of ownership of the page. Wikia owns the page, and at any point, they can kick any of us out. Bigger point, though, is that all discussions on user pages are as public as a forum page.

Let's imagine you'd put the statement, "I'm not in favour of changing tardis:manual of style" on my user page. Under the way you had written the vandalism policy, there was nothing to stop me from editing your comments so that they read, "I'm in favour of changing tardis:manual of style", and thereby completely changing the meaning of your statement. Just take a look at any lengthy discussion you have in your talk page archives and imagine the impact of removing one entire comment from that discussion. It could well change the course of the discussion, or at the very least, the way that a person reading it later might understand that conversation.

So I've definitely, substantively changed that part of the policy. Aside from that, though, I think the current revision maintains the basic sense of your original concept. Could you take a look at it and advise as to any problems you have with it? Thanks.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:33:07 Tue 16 Aug 2011

Okay, I've edited according to your notes. However, I should say that the article did already note an exception on user talk pages for archiving the page. Now, though, that's strengthened a bit by including a link to the archiving policy. Tell me if you see anything else you want changed. Or, y'know, just change it yourself :)
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 16:14:39 Tue 16 Aug 2011

Nope, a critique's exactly what I wanted. Just didn't want to imply that you couldn't do the changes on your own :). Hey, so I've now gone to tardis:archiving policy and given that one a bit of a spruce up. I notice there, too, you had the explicit allowance that people could just blank or edit their talk pages as they see fit. Again, I don't think that's right. So I've brought that language into harmony with my revision of the vandalism policy. Allowing people to delete or blank their talk pages is a recipe for madness, I think. Cause if you commit a revision to the wastelands of the page history, you make it an act of positive research to figure out the original shape of a discussion. And, y'know, it's no big deal to look at a history if you're talking about a recent revision. But if you're trying to figure out whether a person with an active talk page substantively altered a discussion to make it appear that another user swore two weeks ago, that can be quite a chore. So we've got to make it clearly forbidden to change one's own talk page, to protect the interests and reputations of the people who post on user talk pages. If I know that a particular user is inclined to change or delete my edits of his talk page, I'm not going to be terribly inclined to post on that page. We've got to make sure that all users are confident that they can spend their time responding to another user without the danger that the recipient will disrespect the sender. Otherwise, the whole system of discussion breaks down.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 16:48:30 Tue 16 Aug 2011

I don't think any policy says you have to archive. Archiving policy currently says that if you want to remove things from your talk page, you can only do so by archiving. But I don't think it can be reasonably interpreted as saying, "Okay Doug86 — just to pick a reluctant archiver — the time has come that you MUST now archive your page."

I think it's awfully important to prevent users from selectively destroying a discussion page. There is no difference, from a technical standpoint, between a user page and a forum page. They're both completely public conversations. The fact that most people carry out conversations across multiple user talk pages, means that third parties wishing to trace a conversation already have to do some detective work. In order to follow this conversation, people would have to go to my page as well as this one, and check the timestamps to make sure they're following it all sequentially. If we say to people, "Do what you want, it's your page. Delete or blank it as you see fit because it's all in the history", then you're just handing people the ability to distort, change or obscure facts at will. They could take out one comment, one word or a whole page — all of which would be equally devastating to understanding what's actually gone down on a user talk page.

Here are just a few situations that would be complicated by having no ban on talk page deletion/editing:

It would be completely allowable to edit my statements on an issue so as to support the completely opposing view. You could then direct other people to "my" comments on your page, and, by the time I'd figured out what had happened, your alteration of "my" opinion would have become entrenched in other users' minds, and I would have a devil of a time convincing them otherwise. In other words, character assassination would be made simple.
A user offends, say, tardis:image use policy. You give them a warning on their talk page, but they think it makes them "look bad", so they remove it. They then commit the same offence again, but I notice it this time. So I go to their user page and, seeing no record of a previous offence, I give them another warning. They sweep it under the carpet again, and then Mini-mitch finds them in violation for a third time, but he finds a blank page. So the editor gets away with it again. I don't know about you, but I don't check a user talk page history before I begin posting on it. I look at what's there and expect it to be the sum of what's gone on with them. If we're to enforce the rules fairly, we need to ensure that we have a clear, obvious record of user warnings — not stuff buried in a hitory. Users want, and largely deserve, warnings before we block them. What's the point of saying in various policies that we will try to warn them if we allow them to just delete the warnings? The onus should not be on us to investigate a page history to see if we're taking the appropriate response to a rules violation.
Let's say that I was talking to Ausir about editing some Torchwood-related thing. And we went a few rounds on it, but then figured out that maybe we should open up a forum discussion on it to get more opinions. When we do this, we say, "Hey check out our discussions on our talk page" for an understanding of the background of this argument. The conversation goes cold, until a year from now when someone searches the forum for the topic, finds a thread, and tries to piece it all together. They go back to the links on our talk pages and . . . Ausir has now blanked his page. It's not there in an archive; it's only in the hisotry. But a year has passed. It's an awful lot of history, and as is typical on talk pages, there's not a revision note in sight in the history. At this point, the investigating editor stops, cause it's frustrating. All he has is the half of the conversation on my page, and the promise of possibly finding the rest of it, if he decides he can be bothered to look through Ausir's history. In other words, blanking a page only technically preserves a conversation in the history. For all practical purposes, it buries the conversation beyond the reach of most people's wiki-searching abilities.

Those are just three examples, but I think each one of them is reason enough to directly prohibit the alteration of user talk pages. Look, most people aren't going to need this rule. Most people are simply too lazy with their talk pages to bother altering it. But we need a clear prohibition in policy so that we have something we can use when get a clear case of "page tampering" — just as I had yesterday with BroadcastCorp, who has taken to removing whole conversations from both my and his talk pages, and as has happened with Special:Contributions/90.215.45.50, whose subtle edits to a user talk page (maybe yours?) made it appear that I was signing my name to something I never wrote.

It's interesting that you point out [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines#Editing comments|]], because I think that policy is essentially what I'm saying. It says clearly:

The basic rule — with some exceptions outlined below — is that you should not edit or delete the comments of other editors without their permission.

Never edit or move someone's comment to change its meaning, even on your own talk page.

Now, I know that one of the "exceptions outlined below" is the user talk page, and it does say that "deletion of others' comments on your talk page is permitted". But to me, that's not a reasonable exception, but an irreconcilable contradiction with the main rule. Deletion of a comment, especially of a portion of a comment — which this exception would allow – fundamentally changes the meaning of of someone's comment. Even if you do delete the whole comment, you're changing the meaning of the conversation as a whole, because all that remains is the half the conversation that remains on the other correspondent's talk page. I just don't see how this exemption could, in practice, work. So I do strongly disagree with this stated exception to wikipedia policy, and would prefer that the "basic rule" for all talk pages simply apply to user talk pages.

There's just no good rationale for user talk pages to fall under a different rule set than other talk pages. A talk page is a talk page is a talk page.

As for the archive tool itself, yes, that's open to general use. The reason you're not seeing it at w:c:harrypotter is simply cause they've not installed it in their javascript.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:15:23 Wed 17 Aug 2011

Oh, and I should point out, too, that Wikipedia doesn't have ArchiveTool, or anything like it, as a standard feature of the average user's site experience. (You can add it, but I'd wager the majority of people don't.) Given how easy it is to archive on our site — seriously, it's five seconds outta your life — there is no reason we can't demand removal of comments only by archiving. Seriously, you can archive a page here faster than you can type out a link to Raxacoricofallapatorius, so why not require it?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:27:39 Wed 17 Aug 2011

Well, it's certainly not just BroadcastCorp's shenanigans that are triggering this. Indeed, I'd point out that while we might be discussing what you can do to your own talk page, there's absolutely no question that BC's tampering with my page was unambiguously wrong. But as I say, he's just one in a train of incidents,. The little war that earlier this year went on between Mini-mitch and Bold Cone was damnably difficult for an objective third party to follow. Both of them have this stated "thing" on their page that warns that rude comments will be removed, and they were both considering the other's comments rude. If, in your administrative capacity, you're trying to figure out if someone's crossing the "no personal attack" line in such an environment, it can be awfully difficult, because they're both just zapping the other's comments.

Also, in making rewrites to the manual of style based on archiving forum threads, I've been on more than a few talk pages trying to track down the origins of certain discussions, in an effort to represent those precedent discussions in the policy as well — only to be severely frustrated by the number of dead ends I hit. And, yes, I know you blank your page from time to time as I've gone to look for things I remembered being there only to find that they're not there, or in your archives, any more.

Now, of course, I understand why all that has happened in the past. After all, archiving has been a bit of a mystery up to now. A lot of users don't know anything about subpages, so they didn't know how else to "wipe the slate clean". But with it made so easy, I just don't see a legitimate reason not to do it. There is no difference in the number of clicks needed to archive, versus those needed to blank. And both functions are started from the same drop-down menu.

As for a disconnect that might be caused by two users archiving at different times, sure, that will almost certainly happen. But it's still much easier to click a few times through an archive than it is to unearth a point buried deep in a revision history — especially given that almost no one leaves revision notes for their own talk page.

I just can't get away from the fact that we need to preserve discussions. I know that you were just playing devil's advocate in your last post, but I would genuinely like to know how you respond to the three cases I outlined last time.

Shouldn't it be obvious when someone has been cautioned? Do we as admin have an added burden of responsibility to search through a user talk page history just to see if they've been warned about something before, but are now hiding that earlier warning?
How do we protect an editor from having his meaning changed on another user talk page except by banning the editing or blanking of a talk page?
How do we help editors researching a topic from having to dig through a revision history, unless we say, "You must archive if you want to clear your page"?

Again, I know you're playing devil's advocate, so you may personally be in agreement with me, but just to run through this whole "your user page isn't yours" thing, well, it's wikia policy. If you look at w:c:community:project:Central user pages, you see that Wikia basically defers to wikipedia:wikipedia:user pages, which makes very clear:

Note: "Your" in this context means associated with you, not belonging to you

I can appreciate that the word "steward" may need a rethink. But it's a long-held philosophy of wiki editing that a user page isn't owned by the user. This is the concept which allows for them to be regulated at all. (it's also the reason you don't want to use your user page for creative expression, because a user page is governed by the same license as other pages; i.e. you give up copyright by writing your original story on your user page.) So maybe "steward" isn't a great word, but the concept of non-ownership is definitely there, as is made even more explicit by wikipedia:Wikipedia:UP#OWN.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:28:08 Thu 18 Aug 2011

New user masthead: founder?

You may have noticed that the new user masthead gives admin, staff and blocked users a flag. It doesn't differentiate between bureaucrats and admin, by deliberate Wikia choice. However, it does identify the "founder" of the wiki from all other admin. And here there's a real oddity. It's calling Mantrid the founder, rather than Freethinker1of1. This doesn't make much sense to me because a) Freethinker certainly seems to think he's the guy who started it on his profile page and b) Freethinker has an earlier join date than Mantrid. So I've sent in a tech support question to Wikia to see if they can explain this minor anomaly.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 17:00:37 Fri 19 Aug 2011

So Wikia have responded and they say that Mantrid was indeed the founder, on 11 November 2004 but he didn't make an edit for about five months. Freethinker appears to have an earlier join date because he edited before Mantrid. Sp. what this means is that "date joined" on a user masthead actually means "date of first edit". Still seems strange to me that Mantrid would have founded the wiki but not done even a single edit for five months. I've changed the start date of the wiki on the front page to reflect this new, earlier-than-expected date of 11 Nov 2004.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 04:39:44 Sat 20 Aug 2011

Knock-on effects of new user masthead. You'll love this one.

Okay, so right in the middle of our discussion about how incredibly easy it is to archive a user talk page — Wikia pulled the rug out from under that point. Somehow the new user masthead has screwed with the dropdown available on user talk pages, and all our custom options, including "archive" are gone. This issue doesn't affect any other "talk" namespace. It's probably something simple, like they called the button a different name or something. But for the moment, archiving is down on user talk pages. Poetic justice, really. I think I can fix it on my own, but just in case, I've put out a feeler to the developer of ArchiveTool. Worst case scenario: it'll be down until mid-September when he returns from vacation.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 17:20:11 Fri 19 Aug 2011

Well, no, ArchiveTool has been around for almost 3 years now, and is supported on Wikia's official development wiki (W:c:dev). It's been resilient through several modifications of the base wikia code. There's nothing terribly "sensitive" about the code that argues against relying on it — except for that really random bug in the core MediaWiki software that prevented me and a handful of other users from using it without a workaround. Which reminds me, I suppose I should eliminate the possibility that it's a problem with the workaround that only I'm using. So, is archive tool there for you or not?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 17:46:54 Fri 19 Aug 2011

Safari and the site

To the extent that you use Safari to browse the site, do you ever notice that the site, in the Wikia skin, creates random blank pages? And no matter how many times you refresh, you keep getting a blank page? This happens to me a lot, in Safari, especially when I'm reloading a page that's been directed to a particular section. What this effectively means is that when I finish editing a section, the page will be unable to load successfully because it's trying to load an address that points to the section I just edited. I never have this in other browsers, nor in Wikia on other wikis, so it's something in the code. But nobody seems to be complaining about it, so I dunno if it's just something affecting my older version of Safari, or what. So if you're getting any odd behavior from Safari, please advise.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 21:34:08 Sat 20 Aug 2011

User image policy update

When you can, cast your eye over latest revision of tardis:user image policy.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 21:34:08 Sat 20 Aug 2011

Avatars

In the unlikely event that someone should be confused about what's happened to user avatars because of this latest user page fix, you may now direct them to Help:Avatars. I think most people can probably get it without help, but there are some details there about file format and size that may interest people.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 23:07:09 Sat 20 Aug 2011

Your input is needed!

You are invited to join the discussion at Forum:A second look at wiki achivements.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 16:57:30 Mon 22 Aug 2011

The Gallery and the licences.

With the small problem we had of Users upload images via the Gallery, which meant no licenses were add to the image, User:CzechOut and I have decide to contact wikia about it.

We decide it was best to ask if we could have the license drop down menu added to the "add a photo" window that pops up by pressing that button on the Gallery.

This is just to inform you of what we are doing in regards to this problem. MM/Want to talk? 22:32, August 24, 2011 (UTC)

Acheivements

Achievements began within an hour of the BBC One broadcast of Let's Kill Hitler, so as to catch any new people who might have wanted to edit with us in the wake of the new episode. The basic infrastructure was all laid down today, but there are a number of editing tracks which I've prepared at c:tardistest which still have to be brought over here. As an admin at tardistest, you would of course be privy to those plans, should you desire to see them before implementation. Help:Achievements and Tardis:Achievements policy have been put in place, but we probably still need some sort of mechanism like Quote of the Week nominations, for people who wish to suggest an awards group.

If you wish to check out the latest standings and the general level of activity alredy generated, you may click Special:Leaderboard.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 02:01:38 Sun 28 Aug 2011

Achievements. part two (because I'm too lazy to put this under the old section heading)

Glad you like the direction things are going. I'm sure that as we go on a part of your fears expressed on the forums will be justified, however. Don't forget, I wasn't that big on the idea until Ausir, another reluctant adopter, said that they'd really helped on c:fallout. It's completely obvious to me that some people will always try to game the system. I had a blatant case just today. But I think if we just hold our fire and gently point them in the direction of the achievements policy, this won't have more abuse than any other feature of the wiki.

I'm already noticing an unexpected side benefit to the feature, in that the Leaderboard effectively gives you a snapshot of the people who are editing in the main article space. Edits elsewhere don't generally count for the game — I for instance have only 5 edits in the game, despite having well over 100 edits today, because I've been editing in Special, Help and Project namespaces most of the day. But it's very useful to see what people are doing on the site in an easy, graphical way. Just judging from the range of people who got the entry level edit awards, it does look like we had a bigger range of people editing today than on any other day of the week. This is altogether natural, of course, since a new ep of DW went out today. But it's still cool to actually see it without having to go to Special:wikistats.

aS for what the name of the thing is, I totally wish we could brand it on our own. Is there any more perfect name than "The Game of Rassilon"? As it is we're stuck with what Wikia call it. I think the actual, formal name is just Achievements. I've thrown in the "Wikia" just to sort of emphasise that it's a game ultimately run by Wikia itself. We can skin it here at Tardis, but we can't really alter much about the rules, the points, or much of anything else about its core functionality. So I just threw in Wikia to absolve us partially of things that go wrong with it. It's such an awkward name though. I hate singular objects which are in the plural. I guess the deal is that they've not actually named the game so much as the prizes. Very weird.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 07:26:00 Sun 28 Aug 2011

DWM categories

Seeing as you organised many issue of Doctor Who Magazine by year, do you think it would be a good idea to categorise them in the same way? For example, there would be a category for "1980 DWM Issues". At the moment they're all in together at Category:DWM issues, so a new system would be beneficial in dividing them up. Thoughts?--Skittles the hog - talk 08:02, August 29, 2011 (UTC)

This fairly radical and major innovation to categories really didn't get the kind of discussion and thought it deserved. And I don't think Skittles really explained to you what he was going to do. He didn't just add a cat like category 1980 DWM issues. He actively removed the category:DWM issues. This "broke" the Achievements editing track. It should also be pointed out that there were several utilities to having all the issues in one category, beyond Achievements. It makes bot runs faster, and it makes the entire list of issues accessible to DPL coding.

I don't particularly see the uutility of by-year categories for issues of publications, especially since we don't do this for any other kind of publication. But, Skittles really seemed to want it. So I've done a deal with him.

First, I've put all the issues back into category:DWM issues so that the Achievements track will work. Out of fairness to our editors, it'll look pretty bad that Skittles and Revan got the awards in the category by . . . ensuring that no one else could win the awards. Day 2 of this game cannot be seen as "the day when a couple of admins totally cheated the game". Besides, of the two goals — categorising by year and getting people to edit DWM issue pages — it's pretty clear which one is more vital.

Second, he has assured me that he's committed to overseeing the pr:oject to do this "by publication or media, by year" category structure across all ranges, so that it's at least consistent. Towards that end, he's announced the opening of the project at Forum:New paradigm for categorising publications and stories. This new categorisation scheme must not interfere with the categories that are already present, but it can add another layer on top of what's there.

Obviously, you couldn't have known he was going to delete category:DWM issues from pages. That possibility wasn't proposed in his statement to you. But with achievements now enabled, with the bot often running around the clock, and with the growing use of DPL, it's important to carefully consider the possible knock-on effects of major pruning of branches of the category tree.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 05:32:27 Tue 30 Aug 2011

Update

Hi remember when I told you about how I got ripped off with bootleg Doctor Who DVDS?

You agreed they probably were.

Well, I uploaded a photo of one of the DVD's... you have to see this.

It's so pathetic it's just ridiculous.

http://dartpaw86.deviantart.com/#/d48h1qj

Moogleknight24 01:34, September 1, 2011 (UTC)Moogleknight24

Thanks... I am rufus 16:53, September 2, 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I changed my mind and deleted it. Sorry for wasting your time.

Moogleknight24 23:51, September 2, 2011 (UTC)Moogleknight24

Chat ban

User:CzechOut was very hostile towards me and kicked me of chatting. This is unfair. I simply forgot about the whole "not talking about it" scenario. He said he would block me if I complain. That is bad. Why? It's like arresting a protestor. Please sort this out. He acted very cold and bitter, and I had the impression he didn't like me. And that's true. He hates me. He doesn't want me anywhere near him. What's your assessment, TD, are you more sympathetic? BroadcastCorp (talk | contribs) 17:07, September 2, 2011 (UTC)

He was very scary and intimidating. The chat ban for a week. Are you sure? But how do you know he doesn't doesn't like me? BroadcastCorp (talk | contribs) 17:32, September 2, 2011 (UTC)

I don't want to be chat-banned. I just won't use it. But I never swore at him, I never hurt him, In never abused him in anyway. And he treats me like I've done that. Why? BroadcastCorp (talk | contribs) 17:39, September 2, 2011 (UTC)

Yes, but I didn't know I'd be a member of a little gorup called BannedFromChat. It's bad for my image. I just won't use the service. Un chat ban me, and I won't use it. But anyway, it's like arresting a personal who protest. It's a free country, we complain if we need to. BroadcastCorp (talk | contribs) 17:45, September 2, 2011 (UTC)

I am. How am I not. Although I would like to recieve an apology from CzechOut, he really offended me. BroadcastCorp (talk | contribs) 17:50, September 2, 2011 (UTC)

But he offended me! He hurt my feelings! BroadcastCorp (talk | contribs) 17:55, September 2, 2011 (UTC)

He was not calm. I am not a liar. He was very intimidating. BroadcastCorp (talk | contribs) 18:05, September 2, 2011 (UTC)

Rollback and inactive sysops revisted

You said earlier that you'd be happy with keeping user:Solar Dragon and user:The Thirteenth Doctor at rollback, but not adding any more in the future. I got to thinking about that, and decided that SD's rights really had to be stripped. He's not really monitoring his account much anymore, Wikia wide, so it's a bit of a security risk to have him account with additional rights enabled. So I stripped him of rollback rights.

Frankly, I'd like to do so with 13D, simply because we've decided to eliminate that position from our own hierarchy. However, as you made a specific invitation to him, and he's edited as late as today, I've got no security concerns about him. So I'll let you make the determination about whether to keep this one straggling rollback-only person here.

I think we should also consider, for security purposes only, whether it might be wise to at least block admin who haven't edited or even logged in more than a year. Again this a purely protective move, and is no way meant to suggest disrespect for our emiritus staff. Blocking them would prevent the misuse of accounts long disused. And I'm talking the the mildest form of blocking, too — the one in which we check none of the boxes. So they could still create another account or talk to us or in some way alert us that they've come back.

The people I'm thinking of are:

User:***Stardizzy*** (As I recall discussion from a couple of years ago, Stardizzy scrambled his own password so that he couldn't log in anymore. This means that he is not in control of this account. This one is definitely a security risk.)
user:Freethinker1of1 (I know what you're thinking. It's painful to think about blocking the major guiding force of the early days. But he's often claimed periods of internet outage, and we can't assume he's in full control of his account. He's not even dropped by this year.)
user:GingerM (whose stats are REALLY weird and indicate some kind of previously compromised account)
user:OncomingStorm (whose stats are similarly weird)

I think there are a few admin that never deserved to be admin — much less bureaucrats — and we should pursue Wikia's help in de-opping them. Their names have been repeatedly mentioned to me when I've told users they need to get in a few more edits before they can be an admin. And it's hard to argue to someone that 500 edits isn't really sufficient to be an admin, and that they need to work harder to become an admin, when we've got these examples to the contrary sitting around. These bizarre anomalies include:

user:Nhprman — Yes, I know he's logged in somewhat recently, but he hasn't edited since 2006 and even then, he's had only 9 total edits here, 2975 wikia wide, almost all of it in the main namespace. Never written on anyone's user talk page. Ever. We'd never allow this guy to be an admin today with stats like that.
user:Sean-Black, Like Nhprman, this guy is a full-on bureaucrat, and he's had exactly 72 edits here, 135 wikia wide
user:Wikia-Jaster. Seriously. What's this about? 79 edits here, 984 wikia wide, never logged in since 2007. Total security risk.
user:Joker1138 just doesn't have enough edits to have ever qualified as an admin, much less bureaucrat. 365 edits here, 1,871 in total. More well rounded editing than the others on this list, but still, nothing about his work indicates why he'd be an admin.
[I would not include user:Josiah Rowe here for de-opping, despite his low numbers. As you likely know, he's one of the main organisers of wikipedia's DW project, and he's fairly active elsewhere on Wikia. Besides he's edited here in the last 30 days.]

I know you're like me and are therefore reluctant to prune the past. But there is an actual technical threat posed by inactive accounts, and we should protect ourselves against account hijack, however unlikely that might be.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 23:40:38 Sat 03 Sep 2011
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 23:40:38 Sat 03 Sep 2011 23:40, September 3, 2011 (UTC)

Master merger

Thanks for that, at least on of us knows what we're doing. I'll just put the finishing touches to it later and it'll be up in a few hours or so.--Skittles the hog - talk 15:13, September 7, 2011 (UTC)

CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0

He< i notice you've added the above template to MediaWiki:Licenses. I don't know for absolute sure, but I don't think you can do that at Wikia. I'm not sure if SA 3.0 is legally compatible with NC-ND 2.0. You might want to ask a question with Special:Contact to get a quickish answer whether we can offer that other license. If ya already have, and they've said yes, disregard this message :)
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 23:18:01 Wed 07 Sep 2011

New editor

Well, the new editor was foisted on us today, and it's instantly created about a thousand things I neede to fix— not the least of which is a total redesign of all the newarticletext templates. And I was just enjoying being a normal editor working on, y'know, articles 'n' stuff.

Oh well.

If you see things that concern you about the new edit page, do let me know. I can't promise when I'll get to it, but at least if I know where there's a problem, I can start to rationalise my time.

The big, honkin' disaster of a thing at the moment is that all those "convenient" little icons under "add features and media" completely allow uers to bypass adding licenses. At this point, all I can think to do about that is just fire off a report to Special:Contact. So if you want to add your voice of complaint to mine and MM's, feel free.

During this period of transition, if you do happen to be wading through the forums at community central, and you notice anything that looks like an interesting custom fix to a problem posed by this new editor, please do send me a link.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 23:24:58 Wed 07 Sep 2011

My head is pounding. Literally. I don't even know where to begin with this new editor. I've retreated to monobook just to be able to do something. I've spent a good portion of the day firing off various bug reports and having conversations at http://community.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Sarah_Manley/New_Editor_Scheduled_for_Sitewide_Release, a central collection thread for complaints about the new editor.

I'm unsure of how to proceed in terms of how to communicate to our user base. There are so many bugs. I'm not talking about changes. I mean outright bugs, where the features aren't working even as the developers want. We need to say something to our users, but I don't know what, exactly, or how.

This thing is not getting reversed. We need, therefore, to remain positive about it. And it's clear that wikia are taking complaints seriously at this point. I am seeing staff taking user comments seriously.

But what do we do here? Do we give users a list of things we know aren't working? Do we direct them towards community central discussions of relevance? Do we tell them to submit Special:contact forms when they run into problems? Do we tell them to retreat to monobook for a week or so while the major bugs are being fixed? If we do that, our users can't actually get to grips with the new editor and submit error reports, which helps develop the product to a usable level. If we don't tell them to go to monobook, a lot of them are going to get frustrated with wikia editing.

I think ultimately wikia will get this thing working much better than it does today, but I feel like we need to do something to warn/help/advise our local user base, and I have no idea what the right tone is, because the Windows side of me is saying "test the bastard and send in bug reports", while the Mac side of me is saying "this is one of the worst and most obviously illogical interfaces I've ever seen".

I need you to help me figure out a way of handling the user fallout while I search for whatever I can find on the technical front that will improve the experience.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 06:21:20 Fri 09 Sep 2011

Delete BroadcastCorp

User:BroadcastCorp who you apparently blocked for five years, wants his talk page and profile page wiped out. And as he is disabled he wants to be unblocked as well, just so he can move on. Thanks. 90.192.93.15 07:13, September 9, 2011 (UTC)

As this IP user is a likely sockpuppet of BC himself, the address has been blocked, and a note left of the user talk page to explain that we can't comply with the request.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 13:58:40 Fri 09 Sep 2011

Very quick reply

I haven't even finished reading your message yet, but I did want to fire back with a request: please don't leave over this issue. Just use monobook until the storm of this thing passes. I'm going to be skinning monobook this weekend. You don't really need to see the site in wikia in order to enjoy it.

As much as I don't like the editor, they will get it to something more usable. In the meantime, enjoy some retro-editing – at new lightning fast speeds! — in monobook.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 13:49:13 Fri 09 Sep 2011

Uncategorized files

The licensing of all images in Special:UncategorizedFiles has been completed. To the extent that there are images left there, they are most likely simply waiting for a cache update to whisk them off the page. By no later than Wednesday the caching will have cleared away any remaining stragglers.

I have taken some time to manually (well, semi-automatically, let's say) affix the proper licenses to a great many of the pictures that used to be there. From Wednesday forward, all pictures discovered in UncatFiles will be subject to completely automatic deletion. A number of warnings have been placed on the wiki to this effect. You may direct users to Help:Files should they come to you with the question, "What happened to my file?"

I plan to implement an automatic run more or less when I feel like, but on a weekly basis when any of our shows are in season; at least monthly when not.

user:Doctor Who 63, far and away the biggest offender, has now been put on what I would call a "final warning". If he uploads even a single new picture without a license, there are certainly adequate grounds to block him. I would suggest a block of no more than a week at first, just to let him or her that we are completely serious about needing image licenses. His latest offense comes from 4 September, well and truly after two or three warnings from you, so I think we're beyond the patience I urged in the past. If he had ever acknowledged you in the past, to let us know that he was having problems understanding what to do, the case would probably be different. But he's been asked several times, and yet continues to do break the rule. Yes, his behavior is being aided by the "add a photo to this gallery" bug, but since he/she won't respond we're left with only the option of taking some overt action. Again, you'll be looking for any uploads after 11 Sept without a license. Thanks.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 23:06:39 Sun 11 Sep 2011

Sock puppetry confirmed

User:DomeSeven was absolutely a sock puppet of user:BroadcastCorp, according to a Wikia Central report. He is thus banned on both accounts forever, without the ability to send mail or write on his own talk page. Read more...
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 21:20:52 Mon 12 Sep 2011

Achievements now "the Game of Rassilon"

Please note that "Achievements" has now been totally rebranded the "Game of Rassilon" on this site. For those editors who only edit here, it will probably be confusing to make reference to "Achievements", as the word has all but been scrubbed from public view. Help and rules files are now Help:Game of Rassilon and tardis:Game of Rassilon rules.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 13:33:04 Tue 13 Sep 2011

Image discussion

Your input is needed!

You are invited to join the discussion at Forum:Image appropriateness issue. — Rob T Firefly - Δ ∇ - 13:43, September 14, 2011 (UTC)

how do u make templatees

Notable Aliases

Hey, Tangerineduel. Af forum: Notable Aliases, general conscensus has been to remove some of the more ridiculous names that have been appearing in new series characters Also Called section. It was decided that we should remove some of the really bad ones from Aliases of the Doctor, so I did this, noting the names that I removed on the talk page and pointing to the forum discussion and the talk page in my edit summary. Mini-mitch, however, has simply reverted the edits even though myself and Rob T Firefly both tried to keep the page at my version. Not wishing to start an edit war, I left a message on Mini-mitch's talk page, as did 70.36.140.19 and Boblipton. Is there anything that you can do to get mini-mitch to either join the discussion or allow us to make the changes? Thanks-Icecreamdif 02:04, September 19, 2011 (UTC)

Welcome message

The welcome message left behind by user:Wikia is going to be a bit wonky for about a week. There's a bug in that whole system which I appear to have finally nailed down for Wikia. However, it has to be left in a kind of "buggy" state for about a week so that the devs can look at it. For the time being, it won't be displaying our custom welcome message, because the error is in the hierarchy of welcome messages. For some reason, if the welcome message ends in -staff it overides other messages that don't end in -staff. So MediaWiki:Welcome-message-user-staff trumps MediaWiki:Welcome-message-user. At the moment the -staff thingy is overriding our non-staff message, so he welcomes are a bit blah. It'll be corrected in a week, or when I get the all-clear from Wikia, whichever is sooner.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:50: Wed 21 Sep 2011

By the way, this is working again. Not through a Wikia fix, but through ours. If you check user:wikia's recent changes, you'll see both IPs and registered users being welcomed with the sig of the admin who's most recently edited the wiki, and all the little $variables being filled in correctly. If you wish to make changes to the text displayed, you must currently go to MediaWiki:Welcome-message-anon-staff and MediaWiki:Welcome-message-user-staff. Changes within the template namespace do nothing, except on those pages where an individual user physically placed {{Welcome}}. These days, it's doubtful that a user would actually be able to "beat the bot" and place the welcome message before it did. You'd basically have to place the welcome message before the new user made an edit to defeat the bot.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 14:57: Sat 08 Oct 2011

Firefox issues

Nope, that's my doing. The picture thing on templates I knew about, and had to leave for a bit. But I didn't know about the Firefox thing. It's probably something simple, but I gotta run it to ground. Sorry for the incovenience. And it's not just that the infoboxen have lost their formatting; it's everything on a wikia page. The only successful formatting coming through is the font. Probably have it fixed up in a few hours, at most.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 16:00: Fri 23 Sep 2011

Just a note about my editing style. Firefox is now my least-used browser. I used to use FF all the time, but I've found that lately it's just damn slow and aborts for no reason, no matter the website I'm on. And it's also the most finicky. Safari will accept some syntactical leeway with CSS that FF won't tolerate. So it's possible to be cruisin' along in Safari without understanding that FF is balking at something. I do check Firefox, but not on a daily basis. I was taking a few days' break from CSS/JS because I was going a bit round the bend. But I see now that FF is having some problems that need to be addressed. Will look into it over the weekend. Please don't wait in future if you see issues in FF, as I won't pick up on them immediately.

The Hide/Show thing is a problem in all browsers. It works sometimes and not at others. I haven't really been able to figure out why, but I think it has to do with importing the script, rather than having the script natively on the site. It's about the order in which the various scripts are loading, and I think this would probably go away if I just had the native script directly on our site.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:32: Fri 07 Oct 2011

To keep you abreast of things, this Firefox business is at the top of my priority list. And the problem has been definitively narrowed down to some kind of (probably niggly) syntax error in MediaWiki:Common.css. Problem is that common.css is a stubborn cuss. Sometimes changes you make there are immediately reflected, and sometimes it takes hours. As of yesterday afternoon, it was taking hours — which is not the responsiveness you need when you're tracking down a syntax error. Hopefully it won't take longer than today to find, but I can't make promises on how long it'll take the wiki's cache to play nice. I'll let you know as soon as I get to a revision that I think is working. Sorry for the problems.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 14:51: Sat 08 Oct 2011

Clear your Firefox cache, please. You should find that the site looks much improved. The CSS issue was found. I'm still having some problems with Hide/Show, but these are javascript-, and not Firefox-, specific.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 05:00: Mon 10 Oct 2011

Doug87 Undefeated

You cannot stop me by blocking anon users at random.. Doug87 15:28, September 27, 2011 (UTC)

Your input is needed!

You are invited to join the discussion at Forum:Page Creation time. MM/Want to talk? 22:27, October 1, 2011 (UTC)

in-universe material from official reference sources

Hi Tangerineduel, I would like to have your input on an argument that me and User:CzechOut have been involved in regards to the use of in-universe information from official reference sources.

The argument started when I created an article about the Dalek Language called "Dalekese" which is mentioned in the book The Dalek Pocketbook and Space Travellers Guide. The section of the book expands on the Doctor Who universe from an in-universe point of view and in particular Dalek culture (this is of course pre-Genesis Dalek history). Anyway, cause it's mentioned in a reference source and not in a story ie. tv episode, novel, comic, or audio, he believes it doesn't count even if it's told in an in-universe perspective. He says that all reference material is out-of-universe meaning that it's behind the scenes, however none of the mentioned material I used talks about the show from a real world perspective. Of course there have been some reference sources in the past which talk about the show from a real world view like for example Doctor Who Confidential, however there are reference sources like Monster Files which is presented by Captain Jack which is an example of in-universe reference sources which in one episode talked about the history of the Raxacoricofallapatorian race which hadn't been talked in previous episodes, books or comics.

When talking about expanding a particular topic, in the show it's been mentioned that the inside of the TARDIS exists in another dimension, however this has never been fully explained. In Doctor Who: The Visual Dictionary, it shows how the inside of the TARDIS exists with what is called the Time Sceptre which I've created an article as you can see, again another example of information from an in-universe perspective.

His reason to not agreeing to this is from what I've read is based on opinion which he mentioned some reference material is crap, which in other words not that well written even though it may be fact. Of course in the past reference material has made few mistakes or spelling errors, but that doesn't mean those few mistakes may be acknowledged when they could simply be ignored and made a note somewhere in the behind-the-scenes section. I suggested a compromise where if something in a narrative might conflict with already existing canon then obviously the two can exist with a reasonable explanation provided. However if an in-universe reference source states something which conflicts with already existing canon, then clearly that's an error that shouldn't be counted.

Using another wiki for an example, the Star wars universe features heaps of characters, places and items which don't appear or are mentioned in a narrative but in an in-universe reference source. So of course the Star Wars wiki has allowed articles detailing how those things fit into the universe from an in-universe perspective. This can be the same said for wikis based on other series.

So I would like your input on this subject and hopefully a reasonable solution can be made, preferably a way to allow in-universe reference sources to be used for in-universe perspective articles.. --Victory93 ^{talk to me} 10:12, October 10, 2011 (UTC)

Alright I see. But to just to say, isn't a wiki supposed to cover everything on a particular subject?

I mean what if we were to cover everything. I have a large majority of new and old source material as I could source check between reference materail if nobody else would. --Victory93 ^{talk to me} 23:47, October 10, 2011 (UTC)

User warnings

Hey, so the basic structure of the preset user hint/warning system, requested by forum:Alienation of new and IP users, is nearing completion. The basic styles of the messages are now available for viewing at help:user warnings.

When complete, the system will allow us to type a keyword, followed by a number, to call forth the appropriate message. So

{{subst:pic name1|~~~|Pic names need to be meaningful}}

will (as soon as template:pic name1 is created) bring up a green "here's a helpful hint" box, populate it with a little two- or three-sentence note about naming files, with a section name of "Pic names need to be meaningul", signed by you. Hand-in-hand with this new user warning system is the newly instituted {{shortcut}} system. Shorcuts will greatly assist in linking directly to a part of the MOS, or other policy, in order to highlight that one little snippet. For instance, if we want to draw attention to the fact that we don't allow fan fiction, we can now just type

[[T:NO FANFIC]]

rather than the very awkward

[[Tardis:What the TARDIS Index File is not#Not for fan fiction]]

All the templates will need to be substitued, as opposed to just called, in order for several features to work. A table of messages will be created to keep track, similar to what's found on the wikipedia page linked at help:user warnings.

czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 14:59: Sat 15 Oct 2011

Eighth Doctor timeline

Heya, I've just noticed that you are sandboxing a new version of the Eighth Doctor timeline page. As you have probably noticed, I am quite, quite obsessed with the Eighth Doctor and would appreciate it if you would let me help out a bit with the sandboxing.

I've been having a bit of trouble managint to find somewhere to place Shada, obviously it comes after Mary's Story as the Doctor mentions travelling with Mary Shelley in Shada. Yet it is almost impossible to place the story before Storm Warning because Shelley travels with the Doctor during the Samson and Gemma period, and the Terror Firma flashback where Samson and Gemma leave the Doctor leads directly into Storm Warning, leaving no gap in which Shada could possibly take place.

On the prospect of the Charley audios taking place during the EDA's I would just like to point towards a line in Mary's Story, where the Doctor mentions a list of companions that seem to be in order: Ssard, Trix, (from EDA/RT lines) Charley, Lucie, Alex, before mentioning unheard of companions. This kinda suggests that all the Big Finish stuff comes after the EDA's, but also contradicts the fact that Romana II is president after she had already regenerated (does that make sense? It does in my head, so ask me to clarify if you need to).

The list of short trips stories here:

All of these stories follow a theme where the Doctor is much older (greying hair in "NiMBY" and knowing he will regenerate soon in "the End" and "Museum Peace", he also has the Ninth Doctor's LED sonic screwdriver in "Osskah" and makes references to a "storm in heaven", which giving the late placement in his timeline, is suggested to be the Time War. I hope that clears up that part of the uncertain chronology section.

Also, "The Sorrows of Vienna" has to be set almost directly after "The Girl Who Never Was", as the Doctor is drowning his sorrows after loosing Charely and C'rizz.

Right, thats all I can think of at the moment, if I can help in any other way please let me know, I'm here to make the Eighth Doctor's chronology as accurate as I can. ----Revan\Talk 15:32, October 18, 2011 (UTC)

Focus color

Nope, not trying to make a point; just trying to find a color you'll like. I'm committed to us having a focus color. If you have multiple edit windows open, it's important to clearly see which one you're currently editing. But I don't much care what that color is, so long as it's a shade of blue that plays nice with New Tardis Blue, or its compliment. This mustard is the precise compliment of NTB. But if you don't like it, that's cool. I'm happy for you to just find a color — broadly in the blue-purple spectrum, or the orange-tan spectrum — and tell me to plug it in.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:56: Fri 21 Oct 2011

Need a proofreader

Could I have your comments on T:GAL please? Thanks.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 19:15: Mon 24 Oct 2011

Bot already sent; you shouldn't be able to find a gallery add button anywhere in main/user/user talk anymore. The big thing that still needs to be corrected is the proliferation of one-pic-galleries. Don't know why people started doing this. But it's a hand-edit job, I'm afraid.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:13: Wed 26 Oct 2011

Wiki Activity

Why is your name Purple and in bold writing on Here Ehh is it becouse your an admin ? CharmeRuler • Talk • Contrib 15:31, October 28, 2011 (UTC)

Ok Thankx CharmeRuler • Talk • Contrib 15:33, October 28, 2011 (UTC)

Your input is needed!

You are invited to join the discussion at Forum:What makes a rumour?. MM/Want to talk? 17:42, October 28, 2011 (UTC)

T:ITAL

I've now tried to codify the italics/quotation marks debate in the MOS. Please see T:ITAL and see if it fairly represents the discussion of 2010.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 20:21: Tue 01 Nov 2011

Image rules cheat card

I'm noticing more and more instances of people uploading pictures which are, according to agreed practises, flawed in some way. I'm thinking that part of the reason might be that we haven't put it all together on one page, so I've created T:ICC, or Help:Image cheat card. It's kind of in the vein of the Help:Spelling cheat card — just a quick run-through of the big points about image usage. Let me know if you think it could be improved.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 05:37: Fri 11 Nov 2011

Deletion of page and "suppression of redirects"

I'm a former longtime editor of this Wiki who no longer contributes under a user name due to conflicts with a few certain users. And for reasons such as this: CzechOut deleted the longstanding article Doctor Who Adventures comic strip stories in favor of DWA comic stories, citing "standard nomenclature". It doesn't make sense to me, but OK. But what annoys me is this is a longstanding article and a redirect is not being allowed. It says right on the edit summary - redirect suppressed. Why? Has a decision been made to make this wiki difficult to navigate? Not everyone uses DWA to abbreviate the magazine. I have left the query on this user's talk page, but having dealt with this person in "my past life" I know from experience that having a third party involved is probably a good idea. I have no objection- silly as I may find it personally at times - to the moving of articles. I object to taking articles that have in some cases been bookmarked they've been around so long (and I've contributed to the one in question as well) and not allowing a simple redirect. It's as senseless as, say, someone moving the Martha Jones article to Martha Smith Jones and then not allowing a redirect at Martha Jones. Also, note that the DWA comics article hasn't been moved -- it's been deleted and a new article created, so does that mean the article's edit history is toast, too? At Wikipedia articles are moved, never "deleted" for this reason. 68.146.80.110 15:06, November 15, 2011 (UTC)

Dates

Um, wow. Yah, I'll get on the restoration process. I wonder if he actually changed all the links away from the -th versions. He coudln't have, right? He's a fast editor, but he's not that fast.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 16:30: Tue 15 Nov 2011

Bot restoration now underway. Please don't attempt manual restoration, as this will derail the bot fix. I am assuming the last affected date is 9th April. If you discover later dates, please let me know and I'll apply a fix to those later dates, too. I guess I could just look for myself right now, but honestly, this isn't the kind of work I wanted to be doing right now.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 17:01: Tue 15 Nov 2011

Ahhh, cool. Well, actually, there was a simple page that had been deleted which lets us keep track of the date redirects. Tardis:DateRedirects shows you the linked status of all date redirects. And they're now all blue again.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 17:14: Tue 15 Nov 2011

Unneccesary blocking

Hello, I am - different IP address again - the person who has been masquerading, across many IP addresses, as the completely Anti-Doug86 user, Doug87, and once, when I, of another IP address which I cannot remember, was once masquerading as Doug87 and linked it up to the admin Menmarc's page, and got blocked for it, and that was a ccomplete accident because the editing results were being wierd as per usual, so you had no right whatsoever to go and block me. How would you like it if I wasan admin and you were an anon user and you accidentally linked something to the wrong thing and I blocked you? Sorry for linking to Menmarc, I'll concentrate when linking in future, but anyway, just think before you block someone for incorrect linking in future, OK? No hard feelings, from 94.1.136.90 21:46, November 29, 2011 (UTC)

OK then, thanks

Ok. Thanks for the info....Metardis ^{talk to me} 16:34, December 2, 2011 (UTC)

More concerns

I'm the IP who lodged a complaint over the suppression of redirects by a user a few threads above. Please also see The End of Time (direct URL: [1]) for another example of what I'm going to start seeing as misuse of authority. By deleting a disambiguation page CzechOut has made it difficult to find the TV story article and impossible to find the article on the novel. I just created a disambiguation page for Judgement Day which I now expect to see deleted in which case we might as well delete the two articles. Who runs this wiki? 68.146.80.110 20:34, December 2, 2011 (UTC)

Cool, thanks. Good to learn! MankaCat ^{talk to me} 15:52, December 13, 2011 (UTC)

Speech balloons

Better to cut off the portion of the frame at the top here.

Well, I checked through the archives and I guess we've never had a specific conversation about whether the removal of speech balloons constitutes a fundamental alteration of a comic image. I would have thought it non-controversial, though, as we want often want comic images to display just the thing of interest. A lot of comic panels, particularly in the 1960s and 70s have very irregular shapes, so there's no way to take a rectangle without getting a little snippet of another frame. The Duel of the Daleks image we're playing with is a good example, but the one at right illustrates the problem of irregularity even better.

Cutting off the speech balloon, so long as it can be done cleanly and completely, is akin, I think, to removing the audio — which we're obviously doing every time we take a screenshot. If we do it by tight cropping, as at John and Gillian.jpg, or by actually pushing the balloon to an alpha channel, it's the same manipulation.

Note here that the crops here simply take away parts of the frame, but the speech bubbles are nevertheless entirely preserved.

The basic goal, as I see it, is to honour the artist by returning the work to its state before he or she handed it over the letterer. As long as we're maintaining the colors used by the artist — as has happened with Zeg and the Emperor tighter.jpg — we're not in any way materially changing the image.

Frankly, though, when people chop an image crudely, and include only a balloon tail or a portion of the speech balloon, that is manipulating the image in a deleterious way. The rule should be that either the balloon is all the way in or all the way out, because those two states are true to the comic creation process.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 13:05: Fri 16 Dec 2011

Code leak

Did you use the visual editor to leave that comment? Looks like it to me. Hence Forum:Can we disable visual editor please?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 14:53: Mon 19 Dec 2011

Visual editor discussion

As you discovered last year, Wikia want the discussion about shutting down the RTE/vis. ed. to be as broad as possible. Toward that end every single user talk page, including IPs, are getting invitations to the discussion, just in time for the busiest editing weekend we'll have before late 2012. This might prove a stupid idea, but at least it won;t be possible to say we're doing this in secret.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 21:23: Mon 19 Dec 2011

hey there =) regarding the fact that articles concerning the BBV no longer belong here, i agree with that but still think that we should still keep the Iris Wyldtime ones, and the Dalek Chronicles.

I've also made a wikia specifically built to store the stuff from the BBV

11:51, December 20, 2011 (UTC)

Your input is needed!

You are invited to join the discussion at Forum:Can we disable visual editor please?.

czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 00:18: Wed 21 Dec 2011

RE BBV monthly

o ok then Sclera1 ^{talk to me} 05:16, December 21, 2011 (UTC)

Hello, sir

Please excuse my use of American English, sir. I am well aware and apreciate your beautiful designs you have in your wiki, and I am wondering a query: how did you establish to add a calender/clock on the corner of your wiki atop of the Recent Activities button? With your permission, sir, I plan to use one very much like those on my very own wiki. Thank you for reading my message, sir. Anakin Skyobiliviator (talk) 08:20, December 22, 2011 (UTC)

Adminship?

Hello, just too be straight-forward, I would like too be an Admin? Metardis ^{talk to me} 14:34, December 26, 2011 (UTC)

OK then!

OK then. I was just moving this sort of thing: ...went into N-space in (TV: ''A Episode'') to: ...went into N-space. (TV: ''A Episode'') Metardis ^{talk to me} 16:07, December 26, 2011 (UTC)

Oh, sorry. It's gone. The article was Colin Prockter :) Metardis ^{talk to me} 17:10, December 26, 2011 (UTC)

Admin

Hi :)

May I become an Admin please? Thanks Layton4 ^{talk to me} 20:58, December 27, 2011 (UTC)

Doctor Who writers list

I didn't intentionally skip your discussion. I didn't see your contribution to talk:List of Doctor Who writers until I'd already begun the process of copying over from Wikipedia. The topic of the discussion, at the time I made my original contribution, was whether the article should be deleted. I think you'll agree that's a fairly non-controversial "no". Precedence for the existence of the article clearly exists, so my goal then became making the article a worthwhile retention. The quickest and easiest way to do that was to take what I had already completed, and what I nominally do have copyright interest in, and quickly putting it up. I mean, fine, in a super technical sense, I suppose I should have taken my last revision of the article, but 95% of the article is comprised of my own words. I don't think there's anything controversial about that, even if it does "take from wikipedia". It's one thing to take from an article to which you've never contributed. It's quite another to take from that which you've basically entirely written.

We can still legitmately claim that taking from Wikipedia is "heavily discouraged" and have this one instance of copying. It's a real world article, which is an allowed exception, and more importantly one of our editors wrote it. The only reason I ever did it on Wikipedia instead of here is because at the time we didn't have the version of MediaWiki that allowed sortable tables that worked in the same way, and because there's a mess of templates working on it.

Indeed, this latter reason is why I was quick to post the copy, because I need to start copying all the little templates that make the thing work, and it's easier to see when I've finished the work if the page actually exists on our site.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 16:42: Wed 28 Dec 2011

Yeah, I suppose I just viewed the discussion as being one primarily about deletion. I didn't remove the deletion tag itself, and I don't see it as a violation of tardis:deletion policy to modify the article while its existence is being debated. I mean, it's possible to save some articles which would, in their initial form, have been reasonable deletions — such as when you can save a "blank" timeline page by providing a solid, in-narrative source.

The way in which I chose to modify the article is a separate issue, and, sure, if you want to have a community discussion about the appropriateness of a wikipedia author porting his or her content over here, that's certainly a reasonable topic for the Panopticon.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 17:05: Wed 28 Dec 2011

It may be worth having the discussion just to solidify the distinction between straight out "(legal) theft" and the transferral of material to which you, as an author, have a perfect moral and legal right to do. It may also be good to mention the need to rewrite your work for this wiki, because I'm finding I have quite a lot of site-specific tailoring to do:

Story names are often different here than they are on Wikipedia
The point of view is quite different because our readership doesn't need to have things spelled out quite so much
A wikipedia article will often have links to articles that don't exist at all, so you have to re-edit your own work, line by line, to determine whether it's worth linking to the wikipedia article, or just removing the link altogether.

So either we need to have a discussion with the broader community about the conditions under which transference of your own wikipedia material can take place or we need to just add in greater details to T:WIKIPEDIA.

I'm honestly not sure how much interest a discussion on a pretty dry patch of technicality will draw, but on the other hand, putting the thing up for discussion ensures less difficulty later. Maybe we should just put up the general question, "Is it okay to copy your own work from Wikipedia to Tardis?" and then, if that passes, amplify the technicalities later?

All that said, I leave it entirely up to you how you want to proceed. In the meantime, I, like you, will assume this isn't going to happen very often and there's just enough wiggle room in the word of T:WIKIPEDIA to cover it.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:26: Thu 29 Dec 2011

a reply

Hi, in your recent reply to my question on being an admin, just for the record I would like to say that when you pointed out [[K9 Mark II|K9 Mark II]] that was because of the visual editor; when I hit the sugestion, I had to type K9 Mark ll in the 'text to diplay' box, and the same with the Hush. !MetardiS! 15:50, December 29, 2011 (UTC) yeah, about that. The answer to that question is that I didn't really bother. <:) !MetardiS! 16:14, December 29, 2011 (UTC) The first one. !MetardiS! 17:03, December 29, 2011 (UTC)

I have a question, would it be cool if I made a quote and sayings part for all the Doctors and maybe the companions? I noticed they don;t have one and the closest we get to it is a breif sentance telling us about a saying that they had (I.E. tenth doctor loved saying allons-y). I was wondering if that would be alright. – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Thebirdman432 (talk • contribs) . – The preceding unsigned comment was added by [[User:{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]] ([[User talk:{{{1}}}|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/{{{1}}}|contribs]]) .

Moving of Speculation

Hello, I thought i got it wrong (re:http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:The_Ending_of_The_Doctor%3F) but i am now having trouble finding the move piece, could you direct me there please? You said it was there but there was no link to press. or not on my screen anyhow.

Thanks

HumanRejection ^{talk to me} 12:53, January 2, 2012 (UTC)

12:50, January 2, 2012 (UTC)

Okay....but forums were made for discussion and speculation. Was it not? Why am I not allowed to, where would i put my input in such circumstances? HumanRejection ^{talk to me} 13:54, January 2, 2012 (UTC)

Re: my own - or can i put it in my blog? although blogs are for references nonetheless is this more fitting than the forum? HumanRejection ^{talk to me} 14:00, January 2, 2012 (UTC)

Action Figure Background

Who put the action figures in the background and why? Action figures are totally non-canon and are completely unimportant to the content of this wiki. They are toys.2.120.134.92^{talk to me} 22:30, January 2, 2012 (UTC)

Sure, you can suggest it. But you're a lil late to the party. It's been in the system for something more than a year, and it's gone through two makeovers already. Wonder why it's only just now bugging you? Guess you didn't see it in operation elsewhere. In any case, I have no objections to making it collapsible, though this would require CSS and JS changes for maximum efficacy. I'll add it to the list of things to do, since there are other cases where we'd need an easy way to add collapsibility to infoboxes. However, the whole Project Lazarus thing is incidental to what I'm engaged in at the moment, so {{Wrongname}} is even more on the periphery.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:52: Thu 05 Jan 2012

Sinefirt

I'm not done with the review, but please do help with the clean-up. It's kinda complicated. Maybe you could then note on his/her page the things that you have encountered, and I can note what I have come across.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:07: Sun 08 Jan 2012

Your input is needed!

You are invited to join the discussion at Forum:Bayldon Copper?.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 16:01: Mon 09 Jan 2012

Wacky Wednesday: extra vertical space

And the effects of today's Wikia Wacky Wednesday's update is . . . bizarre extra vertical space in certain areas. I've managed to calm down the crazy extra space in tables of content and lists, but there's still the honkin' huge top margin in sectional headlines. Don't quite know why my adjustments aren't taking hold there, so I'm kinda guessing they may have introduced a new CSS element name. In any case, they're getting some quick negative response at http://community.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Dopp/Technical_Update:_January_10,_2012 I'm guessing it was an unintentional change on their part because it's so random. It's only affecting the h2 headlines, as far as I can see. And I can't think of any logical reason why you'd want to put an extra top margin on that headline (the one created with == Hello ==) but not the others. So I'm not gonna waste my time just yet trying to correct that one any further. I'm thinkin' it'll "snap back" soon enough. If it's still there in a week, I'll get more aggressive.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 16:34: Wed 11 Jan 2012

Blah. I couldn't leave it alone. It's fixed, and if they wanna try it again, they can suck it, because now we've defined a margin. Actually, we were pretty insulated from this change because most every other line-height/margin-top was already defined. Some people are reporting far different and more wide-ranging effects than we experienced.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 16:49: Wed 11 Jan 2012

Ref works banner

I like the idea of that! I've been stalling doing a "prefixes" banner for a while, so I can just throw that one on the boil at the same time! :)
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 14:52: Fri 13 Jan 2012

Reply

OK. Thanks. !Ṃě ṭáṛ dIṢ 2024Thuatpm 14: 20^{Just William Wiki}

REF

Hey, if we're gonna have a Reference book template, (great idea, btw) then can we undelete those 5-ish pages that were deleted during our Brilliant Book 2012 clean-up? OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 20:11, January 13, 2012 (UTC)

Following the deleted

Bearing in mind that I do an awful lot of my deleting through the bot, or with this account in Monobook, where such options aren't seen, it seems to me that it's always presented a pre-ticked box for following in Wikia. And that's kinda reasonable to me, because it would alert you if someone tried to recreate the title you'd just deleted. I mean, you might not have an interest in following Sarah Jane Smythe — until you deleted it. Then it might be quite relevant to you if someone tried to recreate it.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:26: Sat 14 Jan 2012

It's very possible it did recently changed. As I said, it's pretty well off my radar. But I do know they recently overhauled Special:Preferences, in general, so they could have made some changes then. There probably is a way to turn it off, given you can turn it off for moving pages. Ya might ask at the admin tech help forum if it really annoys you.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:36: Sat 14 Jan 2012

Entertainment calendar

You'll have noticed the new entertainment calendar that has popped up in the top right of the right column. Something like it was on gaming wikis for the past few months, but now they've migrated it to our li'l wikia neighborhood. I've quickly restyled it so that it basically fits with other things over there, but there's still a question of basic equity. It advertises and provides links to what seem to be exclusively American shows. And fairly obscure ones, at that. (Or maybe it's just the time of year for shows we've never heard of.) In any case, I'v posted a question to try to figure out how items are selected for inclusion. I guess I don't mind losing the real-estate as long as we've got some way of putting our news into the hopper. Something that only takes editors away from us — without directing others toward tardis.wikia.com — doesn't strike me as a terribly fair trade-off for 2" of vertical space at the top of every page.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 20:30: Mon 16 Jan 2012

Keeping you in the loop —

Wikia emailed back and said, "Those are really good points; we'll bump it up to the development team." The next day, the calendar quietly disappeared. Although I briefly disabled it until I could style it for our wiki, it was and remains enabled by CSS. So they've yanked it, perhaps realising that it needs quite a bit more work to be relevant to specific communities within the wider Entertainment section.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:14: Sun 22 Jan 2012

Reply

Hi. I am going to sign the talk page as soon as posible. Thanks !Ṃě ṭáṛ dIṢ 2024Thuatpm 14: 20^{Just William Wiki}

Kay then. Thanks. !Ṃě ṭáṛ dIṢ 2024Thuatpm 14: 20^{Just William Wiki}

Novel/novelisations categories

Note left at user talk page and "Xth Doctor novels" categories now being stripped from novelisation pages. Thanks for the heads up.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 14:46: Thu 19 Jan 2012

Thanks for the offer, but the matter's already been cleared up. The bot had it all stripped away by about the time stamp of the above message. As for a note to prevent this in future, I'm not sure that it's all that necessary. This is the first time in the history of the wiki this has happened. I don't expect it to happen again. But I am thinking about doing a more generalised "how to" thing about best practises with categories.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 16:13: Thu 19 Jan 2012

Jibberish WARNING jibberish

I look upon the situation at Wirrn Isle, and all the pages in Category:Pages that violate spoiler policy, as a "happy accident". In much the same way that Shirley Coward discovered that she could create a cool regeneration effect in The Tenth Planet by using a slightly broken vision mixer, the jibberish you see at the top and tails of the "created too soon" warning is a mistake, but a regular and predictable one that, to my eyes, looks cool. Of course I was drinking when I did it, so your mileage my vary.

It's being caused by an error in the particular bot script I used to place that tag. I'd never used this particular method before, so had never seen there was a code leak before. If you'll notice, it's the same exact sequence of characters on each page in that category. That most likely means it's coming from me, not Wikia. Although it would be super easy to get rid of the jibberish — because it's the same sequence, the bot could take care of that in a flash — I left it because it suggested that there was writing here, but we just taped a note down over it.

I'm prolly crazy, of course, but I thought it was kinda cool. And, of course, since I've convinced myself that it looks vaguely intentional, I've saved myself the bother of trying to fix the code leak on my end. Bonus!
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:28: Sun 22 Jan 2012

Fair enough. Bot has now cleaned up its own mess throughout that category.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 16:04: Mon 23 Jan 2012

Reformed individuals

As you're the creator of category:reformed individuals, I thought I'd drop by and ask if you like how the category has turned out. I can't seem to get my head round it. I mean I get that you're saying that these people sorta redeemed themselves, but in whose eyes? The audience's, in which case it's actually an OOU cat? Their own, in which case the category is being used to speculate that some of these characters, like Wooden King, actually believed themselves "fallen" in some way. The Doctor? Also, I get a religious vibe out of the category name when I see it on a page. I keep thinking it means they've got a denominational stripe of some kind.

I'm tempted to just delete the category, but maybe it just needs a better focus to the name. What is it you were actually trying to accomplish with the category?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 05:47: Wed 25 Jan 2012

Okay category:reformed individuals and category:crossover characters are both gone. I remember having problems with the definition for crossover characters last year or whenever I wrote that. I couldn't think of anything better today. It's just not a very clear category. You'd think it would be as simple as "characters from other franchises", but then you get hung up on the word "from" (Josiah Dogbolter is actually from the DWU) or "franchises" (is Sherlock Holmes really a franchise?), and no better formulation comes to mind. You can't say "fictional", because Lestrade is a real character in the DWU. You can't say "character" because then it's a bad mix of in-universe/out-of-universe terms. You can't say they're from another universe, because from an in-universe perspective, they aren't. And you can't say "individuals who appear in other franchises" because, among other things, then you get into real life people, and that's not the object of the category. I mean, Abraham Lincoln has appeared in other franchises (memoryalpha:Abraham Lincoln), so you're screwed there too. In the end, it was only a 20 page category, so it's not doing that much. So we can but revert to rule 1 of categories: categories must be clear.

As for the LGBT thing, I agree with you. They should just go. But I think this should be done through the forums so we have a proper discussion to point to. People are going to want these categories, as is obvious by their continued presence. If I had to predict, I bet that people will want to keep the real world one, but will see the sense in the argument to get rid of the in-universe category. Just a hunch.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 23:23: Wed 25 Jan 2012

Quote of the week

As promised — though, admittedly, some time ago — the Quote of the Week feature has now been automated. Please see {{qotw}} for more. The Quote of the Week nominations page has been cleared. And the Tardis:Quote of the Week policy has been suspended. We're all full up until this time, next year, so I've not given too much thought to "rules" going forward. We'll want to keep collecting quotes throughout the year so that we can just plug them in next year in one fell swoop. But basically this process shouldn't be taking us more than about 4 or 5 hours a year.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 00:41: Fri 27 Jan 2012

Novels

Well, it was a snap to clear up the K9 stuff, and I went through the others in Category:Novels by featured characters to get rid of similar problems. Easy. I also removed category:Novelisations from category:Novels to as to distance the two. I'm considering adding a little template to the novels and novelisations categories that explains the difference between the two. That's all pretty straightforward.

The problem is in Category:Novels by year of release. And here I hit a philosophical snag more than a technological one. (Well, actually I hit it a long time ago, but I forgot about it until you reminded me.)

With the date of release categories, I don't actually know if it's better to strictly enforce the word "novel", or to just change them all to "publications". Because as it stands, almost every year, and not just the 1960s-1980s, have one sort of problem or another. For instance, the TNs are in the late 1990s-early 2000s. They're not strictly novels. And more recent years wholly separate categories for anthologies, like category:2010 anthologies, and I'm just not sure we want that level of separation. Maybe it be best, for date of release categories, to have our dividing lines be medium (so a split between comics and prose) and fiction/non-fiction, and leave it at that. You'd end up with something like:

category: 2010 prose releases (incl. novels, novellas, novelisations, anthologies)

category:2010 short stories (the only subcat of prose releases)

cateogry 2010 audio stories

category 2010 comic stories

category 2010 television stories

category 2010 non-fiction

The main alternative would likely be:

category:2010 prose releases

category 2010 novels

category:2010 novellas

category 2010 novelisations

category 2010 anthologies

category:audio stories

etc.

That's just a rough idea of the decision we need to make. My point at this stage is that we need to put the name of the category to one side and decide what the function of the category should be. Is it more useful to people to have novels by year split from novelisations by year and novellas by year? Or is it best just to through it all into prose by year, and maybe shunt short stories by year into the one subcategory? I've never been able to make up my mind on this, or it would have already been done. However we go will involve some work, because neither way is how we currently do it. I don't think it'll be hard work, but both require a good bit of editing — though of course aided by bot — since this part of the category tree has been neglected. Method B would possibly be the more laborious because it would require the creation of dozens of categories. But method A would have the challenge of eliminaing some caegories. So don't let work level be the determining factor. It's really the question of what will be most helpful to end users that matters.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 16:57: Fri 27 Jan 2012

Your input is needed!

You are invited to join the discussion at Forum:Married Companions#Proposed rule change.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 23:46: Fri 27 Jan 2012

Banners

category:reference books has now been populated with {{non-fiction}}, as per your request a few days ago. Also, all prefix pages now bear {{prefix header}}. In both cases, all other top-of-page templates have been removed, leaving behind only one template.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 16:13: Sat 28 Jan 2012

Allies and enemies

With the big adding and removal of X Doctor allies and X Doctor enemies by several different Users, would the best course of action not be to remove the categories completely from all the pages and have a forum discussion over what makes and ally and an enemy. This would also give the chance to bring up individuals who were are undecided over. MM/Want to talk? 15:16, January 30, 2012 (UTC)

Cite web

I entered the cite web parameters for Elisabeth Sladen to remove the Wikipedia stuff, but for some reason it's still not showing up properly, or to be more precise, it IS showing up in the footnotes, but next to some glitchy code about "Error on call to Template:Cite web". -- Tybort (talk page) 15:22, February 2, 2012 (UTC)

Can you please add reworded details of events in the books to the Doctor articles, please? Pluto2 ^{talk to me} 01:03, February 8, 2012 (UTC)

Image categories

Yeah, it's a massive project, but I just couldn't stand the lack of organisation anymore. Plus, I feel like we're losing a ton of great images simply because they've been temporarily removed from a page, making them temporarily orphaned, making some feel that they are not "useful". Hopefully by creating a genuine, searchable library of images, we'll be able to make images work better for us.

At this stage in the game, I'm just laying down the framework, really. Here's what I'm doing initially.

Using the bot to check the pages of the characters and species, then dumping those photos directly into the appropriate character or species folder. So, I'm going to Dalek and saying to the bot, put all these images into category:Dalek images/
Using the bot to check the pages which begin with the character/species names and then putting them into the appropriate category. So, I'll look at any image that begins with "File:Dalek" and dump it in, too.

These two, simple bot runs will give us a starting point for the categories. But this approach tends to miss out on most images that are on story pages. This part requires hand editing (or, at least, very slow semi-automatic bot editing), and it's where you can definitely help out. I've done all the images on the Fourth Doctor televised stories so far, and I'll be doing the Davison television stories today. I've randomly done a few other stories so as to let me start other categories.

Although there's no harm in putting the same category twice on a page — it's extremely unlikely you'd screw up the bot by manually editing around my edits — it would obviously be a waste of time. If you want to pick a Doctor and meticulously go through each televised story in the era, categorising each picture on the page, that'd be helpful. For the moment, let's just say I'll take care of Docs 3, 4 and 5. If you wanna tell me which Docs you'll do, we might be able to coordinate our efforts better. You might also check user talk:Tybort as he seems keen to help. If we have three people working on the TV bit, it'll all be done within a day, tops. Just remember when you're doing them to add categories for every (main) guest character, recurring character or species in the pic.

Future (and I don't think far future) plans for this include categorisation by story. But that won't really require manual help, I don't think. By and large, the hard part about that is generating the master list of all episodes and putting it into a form that the bot will understand. Generating this list will finally let me bring standards to the naming of story articles, too. But the list, obviously, will be HUGE, running well into the thousands of entries, even if we're talking just visual stories (comics/TV).
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 18:26: Sat 11 Feb 2012

Image categories

I'm not sure if I completely understand the reason for File:Martha Jones TW Reset.jpg's indefinite lock from editing you placed back in August. Could you explain it? Either way, it needs image categorising. -- Tybort (talk page) 15:30, February 13, 2012 (UTC)

Oops!

I'm sorry! Don't know how I did that! :( OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 17:41, February 15, 2012 (UTC)

Images by story categories

Please be aware that images by televised story and images by comic story are now completely filled out with subcategories for each and every story of that type. So if you have an image from say, Thinktwice, you'll want to make sure that you put it in Category:Thinktwice comic story images. Or if you have something from The Mind of Evil, please ensure it gets into Category:The Mind of Evil TV story images.

These images by story categories are, of course, in addition to any other categories which may be appropriate, such as ones from Images by character, Images by object, or images by species.

Images by story will continue to grow over the coming weeks to include other media, but comics and TV were deemed the highest priority, since the vast majority of images will come from these two visual media.

Also, if you haven't noticed it for now, TV story pages now all have a little tab at the top left labelled "images". Clicking it takes you to the relevant category, so that you can quickly view our repository of images from that particular story All stories will eventually have this sort of link. Longer term, individual charactes might also have such a link.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 02:35: Mon 20 Feb 2012

New Image Policy

Hi there, I was discussing the new policy for categorising images with CzechItOut when I came across a situation concerning which he referred me to you. I found that the image for the First Doctor Handbook's cover (and, I think, the covers for the others) was/were filed under the image category pages of all of the 'classic' Doctors, because they were all on the cover, albeit as small thumbnails (only the First Doctor was prominent, as he was the main focus of the cover and had a bigger [icture). I'm unsure how the new rules concerning images work seeing as they're just being written so my question is, shouldn't images only be categorised under a certain character if they feature them predominantly? If the Doctor's arm or something was in the side of a picture of another person or object, then surely there'd be no point in filing it under 'Second Doctor pictures', for example? Thanks in advance for your help :) --Dalek194 ^{talk to me} 17:26, February 20, 2012 (UTC)

Amy's Choice

Thanks for catching that. The reason AC was ignored was because someone had removed it from Category:Doctor Who (2005) television stories. This category and Category:Doctor Who (1963) television stories are the two categories I use to generate a list of all DW television stories. It saves a bit of time over using category:Doctor Who television stories, which painfully loops around all the various subcategories which are redundant to creating a simple list of stories.

In my rush to move on to the more complicated novel, short story and comic story categories, I also forgot about the TVM, which will require an exception in the code of {{StoryImages}}.

Amy's Choice and Category:Amy's Choice TV story images are now all fixed, and the TVM exception patch will be coming through this weekend.

If you see any more problems, anywhere, please make a note of them on my talk page. This is obviously a big ol' project. While I expect that 99% of it will have gone through without a hitch, there are always going to be some outliers simply because it depends greatly on people categorising things properly.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 19:06: Fri 24 Feb 2012

Changing the little box at top right

You may notice a little change to the box at top right — the one with the Seal of Rassilon. The reason for taking the apparently redundant step of giving a link to MediaWiki:Community-corner is because IP users don't get the notification when the page is changed. A similar change has been made to the box as it appears in Monobook. People like Doug86, who edit exclusively in monobook, need to have a link to community corner in their sidebar. I shoulda caught this way earlier, but it never occurred to me that IP users didn't get notifications. (They also don't get a notification when you write something on their talk page, so editing something like User talk:12.106.51.72 is really just an exercise in getting something "on the record" with an IP editor. It's not done because you have any realistic expectation that they'll get the message. Basically, it works as a form of communication only when they leave you a message, and are therefore expecting a reply, which then motivates them to check their talk page.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 17:25: Fri 02 Mar 2012

Hi Tangerine,

i am a little concerned about the use of brackets in the aarticle name, i understand that articles like "The Lodger" is both the name of a comic story and an episode, but i don't really see why an article like "Spare Parts" needs to be "Spare Parts (Audio)", when there isn't any other article or story with the same name? Sclera1 ^{talk to me} 08:12, March 10, 2012 (UTC)

Infoboxes with complicated listings

My immediate priority is scrubbing the bulletising HTML. Whatever our ultimate solution, it cannot be bullets, as the indentation plus the bullet takes up at least 15 px, which we just don't have to spare in an area that's only ~130 pixels wide. Not to mention the fact that it's a direct violation of T:NO HTML.

For the moment, the bot is simply replacing all that with a comma and a space. In most cases this is totally fine, because people were using bullets for as few as two items. If there's much more than three, the case needs to be considered individually, anyway. It's at that point that people are trying to cram too much into the infobox and manual editing is required. So I think the way I'm looking at it is that the bot will serve up a "best case" rendering of the information. If it looks like crap, a human has to intervene and refactor it in some way.

That leaves us with what to do about {{bp}}. I dunno. I don't really want to do a bot run to redo it, cause the regex would actually be fairly complicated. So I'll probably just change it to work to insert commas and a space. That seems the easiest solution, and it doesn't invalidate people's previous work.

As for the concept here, I know what you mean about stories that have multiple locations. But I'm hoping this design forces people to be more economical. As you've pointed out before, infoboxes don't need to be huge repositories of information. We don't need n't need huge amounts of detail. For The Chase, I'm hugely tempted to say the answer is "various", but I know that won't fly. The major locations, though, are clearly "Aridius, Mechanus and Earth". I mean, look at the bloat in this one:

Aridius, Empire State Building, New York City; 1966, Mary Celeste, Atlantic Ocean; 1872, House of Horrors, Festival of Ghana; 1996, Mechanus; 23rd century, London; 1965

There's no way you need "New York City", "Empire State Building", "Atlantic Ocean", "House of Horrors", or "London 1965" for a start. These are all truly minor details. I think the years in general are pretty unnecessary. The longest this thing should be is:

Aridius, the Mary Celeste, the Festival of Ghana, and Mechanus"

Now, you'll notice I was quick to drop the time. But this brings to mind a crucial question that I'm still struggling with. I think I'm leaning toward believing it would be better to just have two variables, one for space, one for time. I think this is what the founding editors were intending when they started this business of the {{{year}}} variable. Year is such an odd word for setting. I think maybe they had in their minds that they were going to define the year with one variable and the spatial setting with another. I think there are a number of stories that are set in basically one time where it'd be helpful just to split things on a time/space axis. Like Logopolis is all 1981, regardless of what setting you're talking about. Or The Massacre or The Highlanders or The Romans. They're all one time. So you can say for Logopolis setting=Earth, Logopolis|time=1981. It'll read cleaner. In more complicated cases, you'd maybe want to use just the setting variable and go: setting=Location1 (time1), Location2 (time2)

Hope that makes some sense of your question.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 07:35: Sun 11 Mar 2012

p.s. You might also want to read comments at User talk:Tybort, section 67.

Okay, I've found a way forward on the list issue. Could I play with the CSS to make a special class for bullets as used in the infobox? Yes. Am I goonna do it? No. Even if you narrowed down the indentation below its standard level, you've still gotta have something there, and allow for the space of the bullet itself. It's a waste of space.

But I am mindful of the problem and will get around to something in time. The way forward is something like Template:Plainlist that wikipedia use in their infoboxes. That's why I've kept {{bp}}, but temporarily changed how its used. It'll be relatively easy to move that template on to a new and better use. And, because I'm converting the raw HTML lists in a standard way, which should make it pretty easy to take care of some sort of conversion for those in future. Manual edits of the infoboxes should be afvoided for the next week or so, because I'm intentionally editing things in a standard way so that it'll be a snap to use the bot for future changes.

Just to clarify the {{{year}}} and {{{setting}}} thing, we don't have both on any single infobox. It's that some of the story templates use {{{year}}} and some of them, {{{setting}}}, but both currently mean "setting". It'd require an easy, but time consuming bot run to change all the {{{year}}}s into {{{setting}}}s, at which time we'd want to introduce a new variable, prolly {{{time}}}, if we wanted to have one variable for location and one for time.

As for multiple setting and time variables, I'm not so keen. I think this is something that will be better solved by the introduction of something like a Template:Plainlist than by having multiple variables. I can't think of a reason we'd ever need to specifically manipulate a {{{setting3}}}, for instance. I can maybe understand a {{{major setting}}}/{{{minor setting}}} kinda deal.

Anyway, please take a look around wikipedia and other wikis, consider things you like about them, then bring those desires to my attention. I'll try to integrate them where possible. For the next week or so, my big focus is simply on getting the infoboxes installed and the HTML consistently removed. I'll definitely advise when we get to the point that the bot has done all it can. We're nowhere close to that yet, though.

As for the arrows, yeah I read ya loud and clear there. I'm still considering taking the literal right and left arrow symbols away and replacing them with a background image. I'd point out that Wikia's messing around heavily with its mobile skin. At the current time, tables doesn't displaying at all in mobile, so a literal link to the episodes definitely seems well advised. At some point I've got to tackle customisation of our mobile skin, if it's even possible.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 20:45: Sun 11 Mar 2012

Front page automation

If you had your choice — and, well, you do — would you prefer the spotlight article on the front page be monthly or weekly? Now that we've cracked automation, we could just do a direct copy of the weekly QOTW thingie, and get that whole right column changing more actively.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 21:47: Tue 13 Mar 2012

file in wrong category

Why did you add the category Boom Town TV story images to File:DW20051x13PartingOfWays1279.jpg? Americanwhofan ^{talk to me} 16:55, March 17, 2012 (UTC)

DWA

Yeah, sorry about that. Another case of "monkey see, monkey do." I usually just assume that I'm ignorant and blunder ahead until someone corrects me. Memnarc ^{talk to me} 09:19, April 2, 2012 (UTC)

TTN

Soryr, but I couldn't get my "Rename" button to appear, let alone work. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 15:20, April 4, 2012 (UTC)

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