Forum:Infoboxes accounting for multi-Doc sources with no "main" Doctor

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Sometimes, every Doctor is equal.

The creation of the 2024 annual story First Day of the Doctor provides a pretty solid case in point as to how our current infobox format fails to account for a specific type of Multi-Doctor story; the type where all featured Doctors are "equal".

Story infoboxes are currently formatted so that only one Doctor can be entered into the "Doctor" field, with any other Doctors that may appear having to go into the supporting character field. For the majority of stories, this makes perfect sense; for The Three Doctors, the First and Second Doctors settle for supporting status while Three gets top billing. It works in this context because this is an episode from the Third Doctor's era of the show, and it effectively follows events from his point of view. Even non-TV stories that aren't anchored to a specific era can have what can be considered a "main" Doctor; Doctors Assemble stars Doctors One through Thirteen, but Four gets top billing because he could be seen as the incarnation who instigates the encounter.

But what about MD stories where none of the featured Doctors are more prominent than the rest? The annual story highlighted above is a collection of diary entries from different incarnations; no individual incarnation's entry overshadows the other… so what in the heck makes Seven so special? Because his entry comes first? WaltK ☎ 22:15, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

What I did on The Doctors.

Well, yes, I put Seven as the main Doctor as he came first. That is my only reasoning. To be honest, I'm not sure why I formatted First Day of the Doctor like that, as on the page for The Doctors, which contains every "main" Doctor, I just put the Doctor in the field and left the other Doctors out of the infobox.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

22:23, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree. I’d say we should allow more Doctors in the |doctor= column. We could even extend this to other columns like |child=, |parent=, |sibling= etc. rather than have 5 different columns only differentiated by numbers 2, 3, 4 and so on. It would also shorten the infoboxes in the "editor". Danniesen ☎ 22:28, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

The "Main character(s)" field is used in cases like this, though I'm not opposed if we want to come up with a more specific solution. Borisashton ☎ 22:40, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

It should be very possible to make the field accept a comma separated list which it automatically formats and adds SMW to, if that is desired. Bongo50 ☎ 16:39, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Conclusion

This thread was pretty uncontroversial and so I've gone ahead and extended the |doctor= field so that it can now accept a coma-separated list of Doctors, as desired. Note that this is inconsistent with |featuring= (which does not use a coma-separated list but instead numbered fields), and I may change |featuring= over to a coma-separated list in the future. Also note that I've only done this to {{Infobox Story SMW}}, not {{Infobox Story}}, as the plan is to phase {{Infobox Story}} out eventually. Bongo50 ☎ 17:29, 17 December 2023 (UTC)