Forum:Introduction of Portal Pages

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The main subject of this thread was not adopted. However, this thread does contain, at the bottom, the stirrings of a policy declaration by user:Tangerineduel about whether cover images are allowed to illustrate in-universe articles. This thread therefore has some implications for tardis:image use policy.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 22:59:19 Sun 22 May 2011 

It was also the earliest stirrings of the idea that became the 2013 main page redesign, which included the introduction of Transmats (our local word for Portals), such as Transmat:Doctor Who.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  17:00: Fri 18 Oct 2013

Introduction of topic

This issue has come up a new times before but I think it should be brought up again. Portal pages could make this wiki much easier to navigate and more new-viewer/causal-viewer friendly. A lot of fans will not know the name of all the characters in the show, for example Astrid Peth is commonly known as Kylie Minogue due to the actress being more famous than the character and a picture of the character would show viewers that the character is played by Kylie. An example page can be seen here and the colour-coding is optional. I have included a table of positives and negatives of introducing this feature, feel free to add to it.

Positives	Negatives
Easier to navigate	Will take time to introduce
Gets rid of "list" pages	Not al characters have pictures
More new-user friendly	Pictures have to be edited in size
More users = more editors	Biased towards TV shows
Brightens up the Wiki
Easier for visitors who can not remember character names
Can colour-code characters by dead/alive, type of media (tv/audio) ect.
Less white-space on the right of the pages
Used sucsessfully elsewhere (Lostpedia, Heroeswiki, Mass Effect Wiki)

--SquirrelBoy 15:29, May 4, 2010 (UTC)

An initial objection

To see the discussions already taken place on subjects similar to this see: Forum:Proposal for character portals and Forum:Feedback on a new idea wanted!.

The focus of this wiki isn't just the TV series, it's all of the Doctor Who universe and all the different media that is produced. It I think is a mistake to think people are coming here just because of the current TV series and know things just from pictorial representations of characters.

Your Astrid Peth point is debatable (and depends on what exposure an individual viewer has to popular music/popular culture throughout the 80s and 90s).

To explore this further: the First Doctor's companions were: William Russell, Jaqueline Hill, Carol Ann-Ford, Maureen O'Brien, Peter Purves, Jackie Lane, Anneke Wills, Michael Craze. Alternatively the First Doctor's companions were; Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright, Susan Foreman, Vicki, Steven Taylor, Dodo Chaplet, Ben Jackon Polly Wright.

Plenty of fans/new people coming to the site know the characters of the show but not the actors.

As I said over at Talk:Portal:Companions the examples there are broken up by sources, so that will mean in order to cover everything, TV, prose, audio, comics, short stories each image will need to be repeated at least four times, making for a very long page. Additionally there's the issue that not every companion has an image, meaning elements of this poral would always be incomplete. Also as I said over on the talk page, the examples given are all very visual based things they're all TV series' or video games, they're all visual sources (with plenty of places to grab images from), but the Doctor Who canon isn't, it covers a wide range of sources, many of which don't have pictures (and some of which images no longer exist). --Tangerineduel 16:04, May 4, 2010 (UTC)

Initial debate

Let me give an argument in favor of the idea. An acquaintance of mine came to this wiki to find "that companion of Tom Baker who ran around in skimpy clothes, spoke oddly, and waved a knife around". He had to go through all of the companions of the 4th Doctor one by one until he found Leela, or give up and ask me who he was thinking of (which is what he ended up doing). A picture would have gotten him straight there. (BTW, SquirrelBoy, Astrid wasn't the best example--if you're looking for "the one played by Kylie Minogue", you can go right to Kylie's page and follow the obvious link....)

I don't think such a portal should _replace_ the list, but I don't see why it can't be a supplement.

And, if it's used that way, it makes perfect sense for only TV (and maybe comics) companions to be listed visually. Even though most of the novel and audio companions do have pictures (from the covers, etc.), nobody looking for Benny will be looking for her by picture--not to mention that people who read the novels inherently have more tolerance for large chunks of text without pretty pictures.

The tricky part is how you guide people looking for a visual portal to the visual portal, without obscuring the fact that the TV (and comics) companions aren't the only ones.

One minor quibble: a reduced version of the picture from the article page isn't always the best idea. Someone looking for the main character of the Sarah Jane Adventures doesn't need a picture; someone looking for that reporter companion of the 3rd Doctor might not recognize a picture taken 30+ years later. The shadows obscure Ian's face much worse in a tiny thumbnail. Barbara would be much more recognizable if you first cropped her to a square before scaling. And so on. But I realize that this was just a proof of concept, not a finished work, and overall, it was well done. --Falcotron 16:21, May 4, 2010 (UTC)

Taking the Fourth Doctor example, the most likely course of action were they looking would be to put Tom Baker into the search box, or Fourth Doctor, on the Fourth Doctor page less than a third of the way down is a thumbnail with this image (which has the caption 'The Doctor and Leela).

Also just to test a word search; skimpy brings up two results Asird Peth and Companions (the specific wording under the companions result is "Leela, her usually skimpy attire notwithstanding, was depicted as a deadly...", knife brings up a few pages; life knife, sonic knife, Everything Changes and Leela.

On the Companion page it has a image within the infobox of all the companions (faces) and a list of links below it detailing them.

I am against something like this (for the reasons above) and because we treat all forms of Doctor Who canon equally and this is quite clearly, just by its design going to favour one over the other, there by giving new editors/readers a biased view of the Doctor Who universe and this wiki. --Tangerineduel 16:40, May 4, 2010 (UTC)

Yes, and if you enter "Tom Baker companion skimpy knife" into Google, the first hit is Leela's page on Wikipedia, and nearly every other hit on the first page is about Leela--in fact, you could get the answer just from Google's summaries.

But I suspect that you're better at searching than most people. You normally don't think of it as a skill, but most people are really bad at figuring out what to type into the search box--and their lack of confidence in their ability (or in Internet searches) is even more limiting, because it means they don't even try. There's a reason letmegooglethatforyou.com exists--because most people don't think to type in the "obvious" searches. My mother actually called me yesterday to ask me what the website is for Barnes and Noble

That being said, I understand your point about this favoring TV over other media. (And including comics would actually make it worse, because then a less-knowledgeable person would almost surely think they were seeing all the companions there ever were....) As I said, it would be tricky to come up with a way to offer the visual portal for people looking for TV companions without implying anything beyond what's intended.

If someone can come up with a way to do that, I think it would definitely be worth it. If not, I agree with you that the negatives outweigh the positives. --Falcotron 17:11, May 4, 2010 (UTC)

I'm not opposed to the idea of portals, but the particular implementation shown at Portal:Companions isn't viable. The argument in the table, above, that it could be like portals on other wikis fails to recognize that Doctor Who is actually primarily an audio and prose franchise. Yes, the TV series has greater public prominence, but by volume, most DW stories aren't told visually. So that's a stumbling block.

That said, the portal concept is a good one, and I do think we should have them. But I think they should be a mixture of prose and pictures. We could have, for instance, a section for each Doctor, plus, I guess, one for non-canonical Doctors (as a group). Then we could have a little template thingie that would produce a colored background. Onto that we could put transparent images of the various visual companions. Not this square box thing seen at Portal:Companions, but actual, fully transparent pictures of these most prominent companions. The pictures could then link to the appropriate page. In the text in each section we could have a prose description of various other companions. This would, of course, require work, because you'd have to actually take the time to create transparencies, which can be a bit laborious. But it would look far more interesting than the design seen at Portal:Companions currently.

An argument has been advanced, above, that this preferences television companions. Well, yes and no. First of all, I wouldn't suggest it be limited to just TV companions. You can do transparencies of comic companions, as well. But secondly, there's no shame in not having a picture of a person who was never visually captured. It's not expressing a preference, in my mind, so much as using what's available. As long as the paragraphs which surround the row of pics give us links to all the non-visual companions, I'm not sure there's a real problem of balance.

Also, we really do have to abandon the notion of "status". As Tangerineduel quite correctly points out, our point of view policy clearly indicates our in-universe articles are written from the perspective of a scholar who exists at a time when everything in the DWU has died. We are observers from another dimension — or, if you like, a parallel universe. As TD said, everyone is dead.

I would disagree with a comment above that suggests the portal should not replace the List of companions. I absolutely think it should, if it's done well. This place is seriously, depressingly, bone-wearyingly list happy. We should be actively looking for ways to reduce the total number of lists, or to make the lists impart more than just a list. Every single page on this wiki should strive to inform and surprise our readers, not just provide the same old information in the same old way that it can be found on a dozen other sites. List of companions is an embarrassment, frankly, so I'd like to see SquirrelBoy continue right along with developing this idea further. He's absolutely right on the money suggesting that the more we can brighten up the place, the more people will be attracted the site. The concept of what he's trying to do here isn't flawed; it's just that we need to realize Doctor Who is a unique franchise, and the things that work on wikis supporting other franchises won't work without modification here. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 22:21, May 8, 2010 (UTC)

OK, I like everything you say (and you can do transparencies of some of the novel and BFA companions too; Benny and C'rizz, for example, have photographic from their respective covers that should be usable). But I think you might be underestimating the problem of balance, at least in one case.

Imagine the 8th Doctor section. You can easily have transparencies for Grace, Chang Lee (if he counts as a companion), and Benny, each of whom had one adventure with the Doctor. You're not going to have a transparency for Sam, who's probably the most prominent companion--and, even if you do, it's not going to help anyone recognize the character. And the same goes for Fitz.

Still, I think you're right that it's worth putting in the effort to see if it can be done in a way that preserves the balance, instead of just assuming it can't be done. --Falcotron 08:43, May 9, 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps using tag cloud

A different thought on the design. (Please bear in mind that I've been told I'm "not bad at design, for a programmer," which is much like being "not bad looking, for a fat guy" or "not that nerdy, for a Doctor Who fan," so even if I could faithfully translate the images in my head, they would still be full of suck. So instead, I'll try to get the idea across so someone more visual can get the idea and either shoot it down or run with it.)

A while ago, I was playing with this experiment tag cloud extension in Flash. (Sadly, I don't have a link, or even remember the name.) It added two features.

• Descriptions. It googled Wikipedia for the tag and used the snippets from the search page. The larger the tag is, the more room for snippets.
• Images. It google-imaged the tag along with the Wikipedia text; the higher the relevance of the top image search hit, the more the image dominated the tag.

Of course the actual implementation was horrible. The example, for browser technologies, represented Adobe Flash as red text over a red image of the DC character Flash; the snippets said "Adobe Flash" "(formerly Macromedia" "is used to add"; etc. And the layout was even worse. But I'm not suggesting using this thing; I'm suggesting pretending that an ideal version of it existed and faking the results.

So, the biggest tag in the 8th Doctor section might be Sam. She'd be huge, but her image would be either small or low-opacity and washed out, and she'd have text saying "Sam" "Sam Jones" "first EDA novel companion... nice little paradox... two timelines". Fitz would be similar, but a little smaller, and his picture would be more prominent, so there'd be less text. Grace would be even smaller, and even more picture-heavy, so it would just say "Grace Holloway" "TV movie... Doctor's first kiss". And so on.

Oh, and of course instead of sorting the tags alphabetically, they'd be in the same order as the current list.

Anyway, does that get the idea across? If so, is it horrid or a useful starting point that a real designer but be able to turn into something spiffy? --Falcotron 08:53, May 9, 2010 (UTC)

Debate continues

Sorry for the late reply. With a lot of the discussion on Doctor Who being over many non-visual platforms, maybe one of the spin-offs (Torchwood or SJA) would be a better start to introduce portal pages? And in the meanwhile, I do believe it is a good idea to look at different types of portals, as poeple have been doing. SquirrelBoy 11:49, May 9, 2010 (UTC)

Well, if nothing else, it would be a whole lot less work to list all the companions of Sarah Jane than of the Doctor--especially if you're going to do it a variety of different ways.... --Falcotron 13:18, May 9, 2010 (UTC)

I agree with the inform, and surprise to a point, but not dazzle not for the sake of being glitzy.

The List of companions does what it says in the title, it's a list, it's not meant to be dazzling, it's meant to provide information in a straight forward easy to navigate manner.

As far as the amount of work that will need to be done, if this gets rolled out it'll likely get rolled out across the main bits of the site.

But if you're looking at developing the idea, Torchwood would likely be an easy platform to develop for as their main character diminish as the series went on, SJA changes here and there.

I'm still not convinced (it takes a bit to convince me as CzechOut can attest), but I'm fine with this being developed and trialled (I'll remove the prop delete from the page). I would though like to see it moved to either a sub-page of SquirrelBoy's user page or elsewhere out of the main-wiki space just so it's not perceived as an 'official' element of the the wiki

I'd agree with that, Tangerineduel: any development of this definitely needs to be on user pages, not any sort of mainspace page.

Just to go back to a slightly earlier point about balance between visual and non-visual companions, I really don't think you can include representations of non-visual companions seen on covers. Big Finsh/book covers are not, in themselves, in-universe. They are pictures being used to market a work, which is quite a different thing than an actual representation of an event in the DWU. Remember, all these photographic images of, say, the Fifth Doctor on BFA audios are photographs that date to the 1980s. They are scenes/publicity shots that are drawn from Davison's time on the television show. Thus, no matter how much they might be manipulated, they are not an actual representation of the character in that adventure. And things which are done with, say, Hex or whoever are specially-done publicity shots. They are the actor dressed up on a costume, which is a different than the character. In truth, we don't know what Lucie Miller looks like. She might look like Sheridan Smith; she might not. So, from a philosophical standpoint, I'm quite opposed to these sort of images being used on their character pages, much less on this proposed portal page. Usually, I'm the first guy up for using pictures and other visual elements to enhance a page, but putting up a picture of Lisa Bowerman as Benny is a no-no, in my book. Far as I can tell, the only legitimate pic of Benny is from a comic strip that once appeared in DWM.

But then you have a purely technical problem with these images. Good bloody luck getting a transparency out of an image on a cover. I'm not saying it's technically impossible, but these images are always on EXTREMELY complicated backgrounds. I've done a lot of transparencies, but I wouldn't touch most Big Finish/BBC Books covers to save my life.

As an idiom for the portal page, there's nothing wrong with having only televised and comic strip companions with transparencies while the audio/text companions exist purely as text links. As long as the page is consistent in the idiom it uses —that is, every Doctor's era being treated the same — people will easily get the gist of the information being presented. Thus they'll be able ot use it as a useful point of navigation –which is surely the goal. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 18:14, May 12, 2010 (UTC)

One little thing: "... putting up a picture of Lisa Bowerman as Benny is a no-no, in my book" But that's exactly what we have on Benny's page. And in fact many other BFA companions. If it's good enough for the article, why isn't it good enough for a portal?

But actually, I think that, for most of the companions, it's _not_ good enough for the article.

I think Benny is an exception--she's been described extensively in the later novels, she's been illustrated multiple times, and she looks like Lisa Bowerman--or at least as much like Lisa Bowerman as the picture of Captain Jack in The Doctor Dances looks like John Barrowman. (The fact that early on she was also described at least a little, and illustrated a few times, and looked very different--well, she also lived in the wrong century early on, if you're looking for continuity errors.)

But as I said, she's an exception. We really have very little clue what Lucie looks like. (And using Sheridan's picture in the article seems like a mistake to me--we can show it farther down, in the Behind the Scenes section, but in the infobox?) We know what Sam Jones looks like, but we don't have any good photos to match her with. And of course we know that Mary Shelley looked like real-life paintings and daguerros of Mary Shelley, not like the drawings of her on a BFA cover or DWM preview, much less like any Doctor Who actor.

So, that's why I suggested that TV companions should have photos, comics companions should have comic illustrations, and novel and audio companions should just have text. --Falcotron 11:07, May 18, 2010 (UTC)

As for your first paragraph, my response would be that it's not good enough for the article. There's a perfectly valid, in-universe picture of Benny from her comic strip appearance. That's the only indisputably in-universe picture we have, and it fits the prose descriptions too. Tardis:Manual of Style#Image use is currently inconsistent in that it allows audio covers but disallows promotional pictures, not, perhaps, considering that audio covers are promotional pictures. But I don't think there's any question but that an image from a comic strip, which is definitively in-universe, is superior to an audio cover, which, well, isn't. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 17:01, May 18, 2010 (UTC)

Suitably cropped covers are useful as they are often the only image that we're likely to get of some elements. The Missing and New Adventure covers have usable images, as do many of the audio covers, covers in general display elements from the stories. Even one or two Black Sheep covers (they're the company that did the EDAs/PDAs) which aren't that bad; Mad Dogs and Englishmen and The Ancestor Cell both have usable images. --Tangerineduel 17:19, May 18, 2010 (UTC)