Forum:"Companions of the Nth Doctor" Templates

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From what I understand, there was a user called Retsinif that was causing a lot of problems for the wiki. One of those problems involved the templates for the Doctors' companions, and as a result, all of them were protected. This was back on February 10, 2012. Since then, Retsinif has been blocked for a year and his ban's expiring on April 22, 2013, so is there still a point to keeping the protection status on the templates? At the very least, they can remain semi-protected, i.e. only new and unregistered users are blocked from editing them, but since the primary reason for them being protected has been taken care of, why still keep them fully protected? Reversinator ☎ 22:46, October 30, 2012 (UTC)

Because it wasn't just one user. We've had li'l "tugs-o-war" about companions for years on the wiki. And templates should not be changed frivolously, since they force the system to change a number of different pages. These will remain locked. If you'd like to propose changes, please do so here at the forums. Your requests will be heard and deliberated.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  03:24: Wed 31 Oct 2012

Like I said, it was only from what I understood. Anyways, the only change I actually want to do is the addition of several companions to the Companions of the Eleventh Doctor template, such as Canton Delaware, Jo Grant, Craig Owens, and other characters that are on the Eleventh Doctor companions category but not the template. Reversinator ☎ 00:41, November 1, 2012 (UTC)

I've added most of these, but Forum:SJA and companions of the Doctor makes clear that the Eleventh Doctor's appearance on SJA makes it at least as likely to call him a companion of SJS. The case for Jo as a companion of Eleven is therefore tenuous in my mind.

I should point out as well that "because they're in category:xth Doctor companions" is not a positive reason to put them on template:companions of the xth Doctor. The population of the category ebbs and flows over time, whereas there's gotta be a lively discussion to move the needle on the template. That's as it should be. The template is far more prominent than the category list, and therefore it should be more resistant to change.

Another thing to remember is that neither the category or the template is a "definitive statement" on who is a companion. As companion#Behind the scenes makes clear, we've tried several times to hash out a definition of the word, with little success. The fact that a person is not included in the template doesn't necessarily mean that they're not a companion. But it probably means that their inclusion would be at least somewhat controversial, since we've been dealing with the first ten Doctors for ages now. Eleven is a bit of an outlier, obviously, since we don't know how his era is going to turn out. Thus we hold back on a number of people to see how they play out.

I think we may have held out a bit too long on some of these, but you can hardly blame us for being cautious about people like Canton Delaware, Vastra and Kevin the robot, since it wasn't awfully clear how they fit into the Doctor's life.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  07:50: Thu 01 Nov 2012