Forum:Thumbnails

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Do thumbnail captions need to be in universe? If so do they need episode links e.g (DW: Example)--Skittles the hog 12:25, September 18, 2010 (UTC)

• They should be in-universe on in-universe articles, but can be in the present tense as they show something happening. But yes, on in-universe articles they should all have the (DW: Example). --The Thirteenth Doctor 12:32, September 18, 2010 (UTC)

What about links? For example to a character page if they are mentioned in the thumbnail but also previously in the article?--Skittles the hog 19:40, September 25, 2010 (UTC)

If a character is mentioned in the caption I think it could be useful to wikilink them, as the reader's eye is often drawn to a photo and its caption before the main text it accompanies. Rob T Firefly 11:35, September 26, 2010 (UTC)

I would disagree that captions always need to have a source, it depends on how they're worded. For instance, if your caption on, say, a character page is, "Nyssa and Tegan in the city of Castrovalva", do you really need to waste space by typing, "Nyssa and Tegan in the city of Castrovalva (DW: Castrovalva)"? I think the answer is no. However, if you're on the Third Doctor's page, and your caption is, "The Doctor faces off against the Daleks", you might need an attribution because the Third Doctor did that on more than one occasion. Of course, the far better solution is just to reword the caption so that it makes the source unmistakable — as in, "The Doctor faces off against the Daleks on Spiridon".

I also think there's a question of proximity. If your picture is illustrating a relatively short section, and the serial is linked in the body of the text, you risk running foul of Tardis:Manual of Style#Links by over-wikifying. There are some sections of some articles where the section only talks about one story. If you put a pic on that section, it's pretty redundant to cite the story in both the caption and the paragraph. Indeed, this is the case for many, many short articles. I don't think it's necessary to source the pics on Royal Leadworth Hospital (or any of the hospital pages) for instance.

Overall, I think it's far more important to link to other articles of interest than a story page. If you wikilink to a planet or alien or object or something that's clear in the picture, you'll get readers to go onto pages that don't get as much traffic as the story page. And that's what's important: keeping readers here a bit longer and channeling them to other pages. I'd rather get one more click out of users too impatient to read the article, than to spoon-feed them the answer to the question, "Where does that come from?"

Finally, I should point out that the MOS doesn't actually give us a specific format for captions, so anything I or the respondents above have said is a matter of opinion rather than actual wiki policy. We should probably therefore keep talking about it for a bit. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 18:23, December 7, 2010 (UTC)