Forum:Proposal for character portals

From Tardis Wiki, the free Doctor Who reference
Revision as of 14:26, 24 July 2009 by Raukodraug (talk | contribs)
IndexPanopticon → Proposal for character portals
Spoilers are strongly policed here.
If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.


Hi everyone, I've created a user sub-page User:Mr. Garrison/Portal:Characters to illistrate a character portal, something which I'd like to see applied across the wiki. It would occur for every episode, with characters appearing been shown in one portal while the cast are shown in the other. Characters can be marked as deceased by adding 'deceased=true' to their portal box which indicates which characters have died during the course of the story in question, i.e., Ianto Jones would only be marked as deceased in the Day Four character portal, but not in any other prior portal featuring his appearance. However we would need to re-upload images to fit in portal boxes, something which I have done (in poor MS Paint quality) as a trial. Thoughts? Mr. Garrison 15:38, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

I don't really see the point of this. The cast and crew for the episodes work fine already; I don't see why we want to make a lot of work for ourselves if it's not a significant improvement. -<Azes13 15:55, 21 July 2009 (UTC)
If this was to be applied across the wiki, images for; novels, novellas, audio dramas, short stories and comics would be lacking and we'd end up with a lot of blank boxes.
There would also be an issue of in/out of universe articles, the deceased tag wouldn't work (as all in-universe article are written from a past tense point of view).
Additionally this looks like a lot of duplication throughout the wiki.
Given the enormity of this potential project I am relatively sure it would stall (if not stop). If you just consider the number of stories there are 150 or so classic stories (depending on how you count) 63 or so new series episodes, 129 audio dramas in the main line, and a lot of books, novellas, short stories and comics that's a lot of images to find, especially considering we don't currently have images for a lot of the above. (this isn't counting all the Torchwood, Sarah Jane Adventures, Bernice Summerfield, Big Finish's other spin-off stuff, other spinoffs (like Auton, Mindgame etc)). --Tangerineduel 17:12, 21 July 2009 (UTC)
a nay vote, sorry. one, it would make it substantially longer for the relevant pages to load. two, though I know this Wiki has spoilers anyway, it would provide "spoilers at a glance". you'd know who'd live and die without even having read the article. --Stardizzy2 17:44, 21 July 2009 (UTC)


I like the way the individual character portals look, but when I look at the underlying code I see a bit of an issue. The line of code to implement a single character portal works out to {{User:Mr. Garrison/Template:PortalCharacter|image=Donnanoblefacepic.jpg|link=Donna Noble|text=Donna<br>Noble}} and is based off of the Template:PortalCharacter template. That means for each episode, the editor would need to know the correct image to use for that character's portal. To make this work easily, there would almost need to be a template created for each character along the lines of {{Template:PortalDonnaNoble}} that would contain the image, link, and text. So while I definitely think it would really spruce up and improve the visual pop of the articles (while, yes, adding a bit to the load time), implementation would be a serious pain in the tush. --Raukodraug 21:32, 21 July 2009 (UTC)


It also looks seriously weird in Firefox - when I mouse-over any of the image, stray blue lines show up. I'm not in favor. Monkey with a Gun 01:35, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
Good catch. It looks like the lines are the same color as the link (blue for non-visited, purple for visited). --Raukodraug 14:26, 24 July 2009 (UTC)