User talk:Tybort/Archive 1

	This page is an archive. Please do not make any edits here. Edit the active conversation only.

Wales crew

Hello and welcome to our community! I assume you're the IP editor who requested some changes made to [[tl|Wales crew}} a few weeks back. I wanted to hold off making changes to it, because I rather suspect I'm going to have to make a ton of changes due to the differing styles necessary for Miracle Day. I did want to assure you that it's on my radar to change, but I wanted to do a lot of changes at once, rather than nickle and diming it. I also wanted to take some time to review the credits on UK transmission as opposed to those on US transmission of MIracle Day.

So my plan, at present, is this. I'm going to wait until the end of July. by that time, I'll have copies of a few episodes of Torchwood from both transmissions. I'll then be able to have a fairly representative slice of series 4 credits and be able to figure out a decent way to code the thing. I may well have to make a completely different template, anyway, because New World credits were pretty radically different than anything else so far.

Until a further announcement, please don't use {{wales crew}} on Miracle Day episodes. You may see me making an attempt to use it, but this is just for testing, and doesn't signal that it's okay to proceed generally with the template.

Thanks — and it's great to have another user dedicated to getting the credits right on our story pages!
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 00:44:41 Thu 14 Jul 2011 

Cool. I don't want this to stop your work on other seasons of other series, though. It's so awesome to have someone else who wants to do this work! Please just keep doing what you're doing. When you run across a credit that doesn't yet exist as a variable, pick a variable name, assign the person to that new variable, and write the variable at template talk:Wales crew. I promise I'll get to it. And if you have any suggestions about how to make the thing work better, let me hear those too. Thanks :)
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 00:58:01 Thu 14 Jul 2011 

Yep, not only are your new variables in, I've begun the process of Miracle Day-ing the template. You'll find that the latest episode, Dead of Night, has the MD version of {{Wales crew}} already installed. You may certainly feel free to populate the form with the credits after 2300 EST today. I haven't quite worked out all the formatting, but that doesn't matter. I've filled out the details on The New World, but haven't quite gotten to Rendition just yet. Important thing at this stage is simply to have the data in the form; I'll be tweaking things this weekend to get it all displaying properly. The blank form is in a special Miracle Day section over at {{Wales crew}}. Please note that I have detected very slight differences between the Starz and BBC One versions' credits on ep 1, thought I'm not sure that'll necessarily be the case in other episodes. Still, it'd be helpful to me if, when you're filling in things, you noted which version your info comes from, so that I know that I need to verify it against the other version.

Thanks, as always, for your help with this stuff.

Oh, you may have noticed that I took some of the rigid column structure away from the top box. This should help SJA and TW pages, which don't necessarily have all 12 main credits, to have "neater" headline credits. I'm still going to be playing around with the basic formatting, because honestly it all's looking a bit tired. But, anyway, for the moment, I hope you'll find it's improved a bit for non-DW episodes.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 22:51:41 Fri 22 Jul 2011 

Yeah, you're prolly gonna find glitches from time to time over the next few days. It's mindnumbingly painstaking work, and sometimes I "drop a stitch", as it were. Oh, and minor thing, but could you please put a link to this talk page in your signature? It helps with communication — and it's da law. :)
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 23:13:03 Fri 22 Jul 2011 

Okay, I think the template has now been fixed to handle Miracle Day. I left you Rendition (TV story) to try the new template on. Just remember to cut and paste the T:MD form from {{Wales crew}}, and you should find that it'll take you at most five minutes to enter the variables. There is one remaining problem that I see, and it's that the "costume" section appears as empty. This is because headings are turned off or on on the basis of either the page name or by testing to see whether a variable that always appears in that section is present. The costume department it weird, because there is no single credit which has always appeared in all three programmes, so there's nothing to test for. I think ultimately I'll just have to test for the ten episode names, but my mind's a li'l tired of looking at this very detailed coding.

Point is, it's ready for use with MD, and it should be working better with other series. Let me know if you notice problems with it.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 00:24:46 Tue 26 Jul 2011 

Forum:Story pages should have reception sections

The above-named forum thread got additional formatting after you posted your thoughts. I wasn't quite clear which of the two sections best represented your views. Please return to the thread to confirm that your thoughs are under the appropriate heading. Thanks.  :)
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:27:42 Fri 15 Jul 2011 

Tooth and Claw

So there's a couple hundred links to Tooth and Claw. Are we certain these should all be moved to Tooth and Claw (TV story)?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 13:55:30 Sat 23 Jul 2011 

You misunderstand my question. Obviously our disambiguation policy calls for the move. I've been kinda waiting to see how long it would take someone to notice. It's kinda amused me that no one has noticed, and yet we've had fierce battles of The End of Time, a much later story. (The answer, by the way, is: five years, three months). The question I had for you is whether anyone involved here — you, Mini-mitch or Skittles — has actually checked the list of links to Tooth and Claw to verify that they all are meant to be links to the TV episode. The bot can take care of the re-linking in a matter of minutes, but it can't contextualise anything. It has no idea whether a particular link is meant to be for the comic strip or the TV story. So what's needed here is for someone to just check to make sure that anything currently linking to Tooth and Claw is meant to be pointing towards the TV story. Once that's verified, the actual changeover is a snap.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 14:15:29 Sat 23 Jul 2011 

(Oh, and thanks for making an attempt to comply with tardis:signature policy, but you're not quite there yet. There must be a link both to user:Tybort and user talk:Tybort in your sig.)

Hey, I notice you're hand-editing link moves to Tooth and Claw (TV story). You know you don't have to do that, right? All I'm looking for is that you or Skittles or Mini-Mitch or someone verifies that each one of the links to Tooth and Claw is meant to be to the TV story. Once that happens, it's a matter of minutes before everything gets changed over. It's kind of a waste of your time to physically make the changes to Tooth and Claw (TV story) yourself.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 17:40:36 Sat 23 Jul 2011 

Okay. Well, I don't have time today to look at each and every link to make sure it's liking to the TV Story. So I'm going off Skittles the hog's word that it's okay to proceed with the bot. The bot is therefore running. Pleas do not hand-edit any Tooth and Claw links for the rest of the day, just to be on the safe side.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 19:32:37 Sat 23 Jul 2011 

Changeover complete. There were like 6 highly random serials which claimed a link to Tooth and Claw, but when I went to the page and actually did a search for the word "tooth" in edit mode, I came up with nothing. So I have no idea what the link is. Maybe it's a template, but damned if I know what the link is between The Mysterious Planet, [[The Invasion of Time and Tooth and Claw. The page Tooth and Claw has now been deleted, as we need 3 pages for a disambig, and because keeping it around will only encourage more improper linkage. In a day or so, when the MediaWiki software clears its cache and "catches up", the two Tooth and Claws, and only those two, will present themselves on autosuggest, and people will start to "get" how to link to these stories.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 23:43:50 Sat 23 Jul 2011 

Doctor image

Not sure how you missed it. After spin-off media was proven to be as much a part of the image as any other image, the discussion moved onto layout.

An image with all the Master on was created and introduced, but subsequently removed per the discussion as the layout was under scrutiny. This does take up about half the argument so I'm really not sure why you're confused.

Anyway, until a layout for both images is decided upon, the field should remain blank.--Skittles the hog - talk 14:34, July 26, 2011 (UTC)

Best practices for categories being moved

Hi :) If you notice that pages are being moved from one category to another, please don't flag it with {{delete}}. This prevents the bot from automatically deleting the old category. Thanks :)
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 20:12:56 Sun 14 Aug 2011 

Your input is needed!

You are invited to join the discussion at Forum:A second look at wiki achivements.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 17:03:06 Mon 22 Aug 2011 

Incarnations of River

Please don't create categories for River's incarnation as there is or is going to be a discussion as to whether we have incarnation pages for her or not. Thanks. --Revan\Talk 14:43, August 28, 2011 (UTC)

The Met

Thanks for sorting out the Metropolitan Police Service chaps into the category. I completely forgot about unnamed characters, so at least someone's on the ball.--Skittles the hog - talk 19:17, August 31, 2011 (UTC)

Wales crew

Phew. I think I'm done with the current "to do" list on variable names at template talk:Wales crew. The only one I haven't put in is the simple "designer" credit, cause I need to do some research on that to figure out what kind of designer it's most likely to be.

I haven't yet added these new variables into template:wales crew/doc. I may do that today; I may not. It's incredibly tedious work and I'm feeling like a little less strenuous editing.

The biggest current issue with the template is that the UK crew stuff on Miracle Day isn't working as expected. So you may experience the absence of that section from the few pages that have it. Otherwise, do take a look around and notify me of any errors you find.

As always, thanks so much for helping with this project.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 20:33:09 Thu 01 Sep 2011 

Cyber-ship vs Cyber Ship

Thanks for attempting to sort out the Cyber-ship. As you cleanup tag says, some clarity is needed over the differences between the two, but without a clear indication of who the Cybermen in The Pandoica Opens and A Good Man Goes to War are, we're pretty much stumped. The fact that article is a tip doesn't help, it seems to be in need of Contingency Plan A. Thanks again--Skittles the hog - talk 12:37, September 5, 2011 (UTC)

Racist vandalism at Chloe Webber

Oh yeah, I'm the right guy for that kinda thing. Anytime you see obvious racist remarks send me or any active admin the bat signal. You can gimme a jingle if there's simple foul language, at your leisure — but racism I definitely want to know about immediately. So thanks for the heads up! The IP is blocked forever, but that doesn't mean the user won't just sprout a new IP and return.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 00:47:19 Wed 07 Sep 2011 

Terserus out of the box

Done.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 02:11:50 Thu 08 Sep 2011 

Torchwood cats

I have left a message on Redranger241's page explaining the necessity of edit summaries, and the presence of an active discussion about ths substantive issues surrounding those particular categories' names. However, I wouldn't get too worked up abut these Torchwood categories at the present time. My guess is that they won't remain as they are, anyway. If we ultimately do decide to move the history of Torchwood on to the one page — so that it's all just Torchwood — then any allies/enemies categories are going to be folded into category:Torchwood enemies or cateogory:Torchwood allies, anyway. Technically, there's no real distinction. It's not like enemies of Torchwood 3 aren't enemies of the Torchwood Institute. I mean, if you offend one part of a chartered organisation, you offend the organisation entire. Likewise, if you're a friend of Torchwood Three, you're a friend of Torchwood, period. We would have to have a category like "21st centry Torchwood Three allies' before we could get a distinction between Torchwood Three's interests and the Torchwood Institute's. It's Jack's reaction against Torchwood's stance at Canary Wharf that starts to make the distinction between T3 and Torchwood as a whole. So it's not even 21st century Torchwood Three, nor is it even Torchwood Three under Jack, because we know he takes over Torchwood Three on Jan 1 2000. The split doesn't happen until the summer of 2007, at Canary Wharf. The Doctor, for example, is an official enemy of Torchwood Three for many decades while Jack is working there, as we learn in Fragments.

So what I'm saying is simple. At the end of the day, there are category:Torchwood enemies and category:Torchwood allies — and that's it. Any other distinction we make is kinda "wobbly".

The only specifically Torchwood Three cat that is logically arguable is Torchwood Three personnel, because you can say that Yvonne is a member of Torchwood but not Torchwood Three. Personally, though, I think it's silly for our organisational structure to be based on a throwaway line that many people won't even remember at this point. It was a big deal in series 1, but how long has it been since we've even heard the term "Torchwood Three"? A long damn time, I think. Long enough that the average user of the site won't be thinking that's how the info should be categorised. But, like I said, I can see that the personnel category is arguable.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 19:39: Mon 19 Sep 2011 

Nintendo

I dont think the pae nintendo is relevent. – The preceding unsigned comment was added by CharmeRuler (talk • contribs) .

Per your request, a message was left on user talk:CharmeRuler, with a view towards explaining the distinction between "real world" and "from the real world", as practised on this wiki. The addition of {{real world}} was reverted by me, with clear edit summary given. In chat today, however, he still seemed intrigued by this particular article.

Because your read of the situation is unassailably correct, I am deputising you as an administrator with respect to the protection of Nintendo. Should you find that he is continuing to put {{real world}} on it, or if you find that he is trying to move the page to a name which would logically displace it from its in-universe status, you may revert however many times is necessary to keep Nintendo an in-universe article with the name "Nintendo".

You may not be accused of edit warring for any actions deemed necessary to the pursuit of the above goal.

Thanks for your concern for the integrity of "from the real world" pages.

czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 20:08: Thu 22 Sep 2011 

Your input is needed!

You are invited to join the discussion at Forum:Page Creation time. MM/Want to talk? 22:25, October 1, 2011 (UTC)

News anchors

I've reverted you at News anchor (The Wedding of River Song), and here's why. Common titles should always be dab-ed, because we simply can't assert that "there's not another news anchor (or secretary, or nurse, or waiter, or bartender or whatever)" out there. And indeed, there are at least two other credited news anchors out there, in the shape of the KKBE News Anchors from the TVM. This means there should be a page at news anchor which describes what the job is, and gives a bit of dab help to people find the right one. It's probably a good idea to never assume that any person credited by their job is the only one doing that job in the DWU, or the only one that will ever do that job.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 02:11: Tue 04 Oct 2011 

2009

I found the quote, "You find it all so difficult. GCSEs and Judoon. Your parents and Sarah Jane Smith." Is that the only reference? 'Cause it wouldn't rule out that she already took a GCSE in the summer. The wikipedia page for "General Certificate of Secondary Education" says they're taken by students aged 14-16. -- Noneofyourbusiness ^{talk to me} 21:44, October 11, 2011 (UTC)

On the other hand, Sarah Jane says that Luke is 15 in "The Gift", and going by the Wikipedia article "Education in England", he would have to turn 16 before starting Lower Sixth. Correct? -- Noneofyourbusiness ^{talk to me} 23:14, October 11, 2011 (UTC)

Aha! Clyde takes GCSE Biology in "The Gift". But, although specific results are maddeningly elusive, my Google search does seem to say that there are GCSE's in autumn as well as summer. And it seems strange that there could be enough time for "The Mad Woman in the Attic", "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith" (including two weeks and a few days before the actual wedding), "The Eternity Trap", "Mona Lisa's Revenge" and "The Gift" after June 23 (when Samuel Lloyd turned 15) and before mid-July (when summer term ends, according to wikipedia:Academic_term#United_Kingdom). Your thoughts would be appreciated. -- Noneofyourbusiness ^{talk to me} 00:14, October 12, 2011 (UTC)

And there are no regular American exams in the summer (for Maria to be taking). American schools offer summer courses only for remedial purposes or extra subjects of interest. Though that could be down to ignorance on the part of the writer. -- Noneofyourbusiness ^{talk to me} 02:55, October 12, 2011 (UTC)

Actually, it occurs to me that it was Sarah Jane who said Sam Lloyd was 15 in "Mad Woman", and that was before Mr. Smith said his birthdate, so she was approximating and (based on the time that would have to elapse between this episode and the mid-July end of term over the course of Series 3) it probably wasn't June 23 yet. It's still odd that Sarah Jane says "Clyde's got exams coming up". Unless it's a subject-based thing (like art) or Clyde is somehow in a younger year than Luke (which would also make Series 5 autumn instead of summer), in defiance of the normal laws of time. -- Noneofyourbusiness ^{talk to me} 14:10, October 12, 2011 (UTC)

Ah, odd no longer. I had only been able to find a transcript, but now I've reviewed the scene in question. It makes sense for Sarah Jane to only mention Clyde, because Luke wasn't onboard and Rani had stepped out of the room for the moment. -- Noneofyourbusiness ^{talk to me} 15:06, October 12, 2011 (UTC)

City of the Daleks and bot theory

Hey, you likely wouldn't know anything about the details of bot operation, so understand that I'm not angry at all. I'd much rather have slightly incorrect attempts at disambiguation than no-one caring at all.

So please don't detect the slightest hint of disappointment when I say: please just alert me to a disambiguation that needs to be done. Please don't even rename the article, when there already exists another title of the same name. It makes it considerably harder to use the bot. Also, never hand-edit any links to a new name. It's a waste of your time. The bot can do these things in one swift run, so long as you touch nothing and just ask for help.

Also, don't create a disambig page for just two titles. I know you will still find examples of this elsewhere on the wiki, but that habit came, I guess, from a time when autosuggestion wasn't a major feature of Wikia architecture. Nowadays, the minimum required is three, because it's sufficient to put a dab note on top of each article and be done with it. In fact, it's really not even necessary to put a dab note when both terms are dab-ed, because the search and autosuggest features will show you (when the cache catches up) that there is a thing called City of the Dalks video game) and City of the Daleks (comic story).

And that brings us to a matter of dab theory. Disambiguation of real world items should be done using the same dab terms. This is a relatively new concept so even I will have been "guilty" of creating City of the Daleks (comic strip). The dab term is merely a standard name for the medium. So (The Adventure Games) and (comic strip) are wrong; (video game) and (comic story) are correct. Readers (and bots!) must be able to expect that disambiguation happens in a regular, predictable way, or they'll get lost. Imagine if we sometimes dab-ed by (television), (TV), (TV story) and (TV Story). It'd be chaos. Because people tend to care more about TV stories, the standard dab of (TV story) has stuck there, without incident, for years. But we've been slower to standardise non-TV stories. So both your and my confusion is understandable. But that period of confusion is ending.

The bot process will be finished within a matter of minutes. If you are currently hand-editing any links over to COTD (The Adventure Games), please stop now, as this will cause unnecessary edit conflicts, and thereby delay the cleanup process. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

As to another of our projects, I have not forgotten about my duties on {{Wales crew}}. I did just want to hit the end of SJA before I made my next round of adjustments. So please keep noting what's gone wrong, as you have in the past. It'll all get revamped by the end of the month, at the latest.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 19:30: Thu 13 Oct 2011 

Wish You Were Here

Oh, you've just reminded me! There was a kind of unresolved disambig case study about this particular situation, because it's quite unusual. Forum:Disambiguation case study: Wish You Were Here predates your involvement on the wiki, I think, so if you wanna swing by there and give some thoughts, that'd be good.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 23:21: Thu 13 Oct 2011 

More bot theory

If you tell me "disambiguate Borrowed Time to Borrowed Time (comic story)", then I'm going to assume that all current links to Borrowed Time are for the comic story. It is therefore preferred that you manually move any links to Borrowed Time that should be for Borrowed Time (novel). However, if you absolutely can't do that, I will accept a list of which links should go where. That will at least serve as a guide to help me properly disambiguate.

In other words, yes, please do move the links meant for Borrowed Time (novel).

As for Judgement Day, what a mess. The only thing we can do about it now is to check both WhatLinksHere lists carefully to make sure that the lists are wholly linking to the proper page. Then, and only then, can we do a switch to (PREFIX audio story). Let me know if you can take care of this checking, or if I need to do it. This one is the higher priority of the two disambigs you've brought to me today, as the names will obviously create the most confusion.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:54: Sat 15 Oct 2011 

Your input is needed!

You are invited to join the discussion at Forum:What makes a rumour?. MM/Want to talk? 17:42, October 28, 2011 (UTC)

Shug, Magda

Actually, you're lucky in these cases.

There's a third Shug that should be on the list Monektoni Shug, so Shug should certainly be a dab page. (Shug (species) should be moved to Shug (Walking to Babylon), but I'll take care of that).

Likewise, there's a third Magda out there from the 7th Doctor Key2Time crossover Companion Chronicle. I can't remember if she's ever given a last name, but she's the wife of a character named Zinc. So let's provisionally call her Magda (The Prisoner's Dilemma).

So, in both cases you scrape by with just enough for a dab page. Well done!
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 20:29: Fri 11 Nov 2011 

To answer your latest query, if there were just two, you'd do exactly what you said. Put

:''You may be looking for [[whatever|the other character of the same name]].''

or language to that effect. You'd generally want to put a tiny two or three word bit of language in there to distinguish the other page. So something like, "You may be looking for the director of the same name," or "You may be looking for the Third Doctor's companion of the same name", or whatever.

But, again, in these two cases, we need a disambig page, so you just have to add the third character to the pages you've already created.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 20:34: Fri 11 Nov 2011 

Constantine

Tricky one, this. These are the things I know:

• Constantine should definitely be a disambig page. There's
  • Emperor Constantine, who's perhaps more prominent in The Council of Nicaea than Shadowmind.
  • Dr Constantine (The Empty Child) (which I've just moved)
  • Susannah Constantine
  • Constantine Ethelred Gurney.
  • Constantine (The Parliament of Rats)
  • King Constantine (The Shadows of Avalon)

So that's more than enough to call for a disambig page.

So what should we call an historical figure like Emperor Constantine?

Honestly, I don't have a great answer for you. I don't think the normal disambig rules apply, because it's not really like a character that starts in one story and continues through several others. The appearances in Council and Shadowmind aren't terribly related. In truth we probably should hammer out some kind of policy on real life royalty, because we're not terribly consistent on that. The only real analogue is Victoria, who's another un-numbered royal that's been in several unrelated stories. And I guess that's how I'd handle it for the time being until a policy can be hammered out. Changing over the links later, if a community discussion reveals a different nomenclature, is easy. As a placeholder Constantine (Emperor) works well enough.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 23:49: Fri 11 Nov 2011 

Arc categorisation

I don't know what you're talking about, so I don't really have an opinion about it. I'm not really inclined to sift through his talk page to figure it all out. I notice you haven't left a message on his talk page. If it concerns you, you might consider talking to him directly about it.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 23:55: Tue 15 Nov 2011 

Prev/next field

Please note that the previous/next fields are relative to the series line. Really, the two fields should be next to each other so that this is clear (and in the upcoming redesign of all infoboxes, they are). They should allow for navigation between annuals in the same way that we have navigation between the last episode of one series and the first ep of the next.

That said, it could and should be made clearer, I feel, to avoid the sort of confusion you've just experienced. With Dalek annuals, I've recently made it quite explicit. See, for example, The Brain Tappers and The Dalek Trap. It'd probably be a good idea to add that language to the DW annual stories as well.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 22:06: Sat 19 Nov 2011 

Whoa. I've just noticed that you appear to have been editing a pattern which is destroying the navigational premise of the annual series. "Previous" and "next" fields are for the previous and next story in the annual, regardless of their format. I don't really fancy going line by line through your contribution history to undo what you've done. Since you know best how you've edited today, it'd be really helpful if you could go back and undo all the changes that you've made to infobox navigation. Thanks.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 22:31: Sat 19 Nov 2011 

Yeah, I haven't quite finished the logical splitting of the Doctor Who annual page. But there is a plan in place. Certainly DWY is separate from DWAN. That's already been agreed by forum discussion, as has the fact that DWS is a distinct entity. The only real wrinkle is what to do about the fact that the first modern annual is by a different publisher, and of a different tone, to the ones that BBC Books started in 2007. So basically I think it might go something like this:

• Doctor Who annuals (World Distributors)

Doctor Who Yearbooks

• Doctor Who annuals (BBC Wales) glues the 2006-12 annuals together as a series. Disambiging to (BBC Wales) de-emphasises the 2006 aberration.

• Doctor Who Storybooks
• Brilliant Books — though there's not really much in the way of narrative material in the BBs

Brief Encounter is indeed a series unto itself, and the list currently at Brief Encounter encapsulates the entirety of that series, as confirmed by visual inspection of each and every story.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 05:04: Sun 20 Nov 2011 

A New Life

And now, for your original question. A New Life is a unique case. Not only are they both short stories, both are in annuals, both have the same Doctor, and the same (primary) companion. The closest thing to this in the history of DW fiction is, I think, The Metal Eaters/The Metal-Eaters, two Third Doctor TVC comics. Difference there is that we're saved from dab by a single little hyphen.

In a sense, this case is so unusual we're free to come up with our own rules. I think I actually like the dab where it is, because it gives the only dab term of relevance: the year. If there were a story in another medium, I'd say you'd have to change these to (<year> short story), but that's as much dab as it'll ever need. Maybe when I get around to dab-ing every story title, that's what I'll do, but for the moment, the year alone is a reasonable dab term.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 22:47: Sat 19 Nov 2011 

Various and sundry

• Conundrum done.
• Yes, The Radio Waves is the end of the line for World Distributors annuals.
• Yes, Junkyard Demon II is the end of the line for DWY.
• Yes, that was weird navigation at The Rival Robots. I just reverted your revision to what was there before; wasn't really expecting that the previous revision was also factually wrong.
• It is simplest to consider the modern DW annuals as beginning with 2006. Don't link the first story in 2006 with any previous series. It's the start of the line. Link the last story in 2006 with the first story in the 2007 annual. (Another defensible position would be to link the 2006 DWAN to 2007 DWS, but I don't think most readers would actually understand that. The more "reader friendly" thinkg to do is just to link everything published in Britain' with the name "Doctor Who Annual 20zz".)
• Either you're overthinking DWY or I'm not understanding your problem. The BE stories still are a part of the prev/next order, just like TV21 Dalek reprints are a part of the prev/next order of Dalek annuals. For prev/next "Brief Encounter" status means nothing. Prev/Next simply means, "What are the stories that surround this one?" I know that I eliminated a lot of mislabelling of "BE stories that weren't BE stories" in the past, but I'm not getting how it affects navigation. Navigation is just putting stories in page order. Please provide examples of how false BE status affects this. (Am I right to suspect you're finding this difficult because you don't actually have access to the Yearbooks, and so can't consult their TOCs? If so, lemme know and I'll give you simple story orders direct from the actual books.)
  czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 06:26: Mon 21 Nov 2011 

Series

Looking at the Yearbook mess, I see that you have got the wrong end of the stick as to what the "series" variable means. You've tripled the number of things put into this variable.

Every single series variable should have one and only one link in it. I think it might be the fact that you've tried to put additional links into the variable that has confused you as to what comes before and after. If you've got Seventh Doctor comic stories, First Doctor comic stories and Doctor Who Yearbooks at A Religious Experience, it's no wonder that it's not clear what comes before and after. The series is Doctor Who Yearbooks, period.

Of course, I understand that you're not the first to do this sort of thing, and that you might well have been copying from elsewhere. But it's important not to confuse the role of the category with that of the series variable. Yes, A Religious Experience is a 1st and 7th Doctor comic story, but that's a category. There's no such thing as a "Seventh Doctor comic story series". He's just a character in the broader DWM, DWY and IHP series. Without a firm grasp of what the series is, you, or anyone else, can't possibly do proper series navigation.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 17:52: Mon 21 Nov 2011 

Nope, I know. There was clear confusion in that article before you even touched it. And I have to take some responsibility for not coming on quickly enough with the infobox redesign. There are just so many design fires to put out! The thing is, the series should be right down at the bottom, in between the previous and next story. That way it would be completely unambigiuous what was meant by "previous" and "next".

And the thing is there are some stories which in fact — despite what I've said above — are exceptions and are legitimately part of two series. The Brief Encounters are a perfect example. The ones in the 93 annual are both a part of the BE series and the DWY series. This can only be clearly reflected so long as we have a clear navigational box at the bottom of the infobox, which is indeed a part of the next design phase. In gneral, though, there aren't that many stories which are legitimately a part of two different series in the same publication.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 18:14: Mon 21 Nov 2011 

More questions

As you see things that you have questions about, like IDW one-shots, please make a note of them on my user page. I may or may not have time to answer each one individually. However, alerting me to the apparent inconsistency will place them on my to do list, and they will be dealt with accordingly. Please do not attempt to mess with the series line yourself, as this may make it harder for the bot to do an easy correction.

To answer your question, though, the series would be an invented one, based upon marketing lnguage on IDW's website. I think they call it "Doctor Who one-shots and miniseries", but I'd have to doublecheck. IDW has definitely marketed them differently than the main title, though.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 18:27: Mon 21 Nov 2011 

I think I'm confusing you by mentioning future coding developments. As far as you are concerned at the moment:

• The "series" variable should contain the name of the series in which the story first appeared. (The DWY Brief Encounters are highly exceptional in that they were actually published in two series at once. They were both originally Brief Encounters and originally in DWY. Should you encounter other such cases, go with "series as published" over "series as labelled". So in this case, series=Doctor Who Yearbooks.)
• The "previous/next" fields should contain the stories that surround it in the series of first publication

Additional series navigation will be necessary in the future, in some limited cases — so, yes, some stories will have multiple navigation paths — but you shouldn't worry about that yet.

The important thing now is clean, consistent navigation on ONE series, and for that series to be the series of first publication.

As you encounter stories where series is unclear, note them on my talk page, and they'll eventually be addressed.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 00:56: Tue 22 Nov 2011 

BBC Books

The relationship between BBC Children's Books and Penguin is essentially one of publisher and distributor. The language you've encountered is literally ripped from the books themselves. BBC Children's Books has editorial control, Penguin physically publishes and distributes them. Stories from them would therefore be attributed to BBC Children's Books and not Penguin. As far as I'm aware, the BBC doesn't own any actual presses (anymore?), so every book bearing a BBC logo is actually physically published by someone else.

I'm growing a little concerned, however, that you seem to making a lot of edits to the structural elements of pages without consulting the actual source text. You've said before you don't actually have the annuals, so please consider the fact that you might be introducing false information, or info based on others' info. Even if you can find a scan of the table of contents online, that's better than using text from a fan site.

If you have this many questions in just a 36 hour period, it's possible that you don't actually have great enough access to the source material to edit this particular part of the wiki usefully. Don't read that as me telling you to stop editing or asking questions. It's just something to think about.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 23:28: Tue 22 Nov 2011 

Cool. That's all I'm saying. Just think about the value of consulting source material directly. As you've already discovered, a lot of the navigation on the wiki is screwed up already because people have been using, for instance, the Doctor Who Reference Guide, rather than cracking open a book and simply reading things.

Apart from the infoboxes, almost all timeline information is totally screwed because sometime in the past someone decided that the DWRG was authoritative — when quite clearly it's not. So if you actually click from one timeline link to another, it usually doesn't take more than 10 clicks to get completely derailed.

And I wouldn't worry too much about not knowing the BBC/Penguin relationship. I've had the 60s Dalek annuals for decades, and I still don't quite get who was actually in editorial control of those.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 00:26: Wed 23 Nov 2011 

Christmas cheer

Happy holidays!

As this fiftieth anniversary year comes to a close, we here at Tardis just want to thank you for being a part of our community — even if you haven't edited here in a while. If you have edited with us this year, then thanks for all your hard work.

This year has seen an impressive amount of growth. We've added about 11,000 pages this year, which is frankly incredible for a wiki this big. November was predictably one of the busiest months we've ever had: over 500 unique editors pitched in. It was the highest number of editors in wiki history for a year in which only one programme in the DWU was active. And our viewing stats have been through the roof. We've averaged well over 2 million page views each week for the last two months, with some weeks seeing over 4 million views!

We've received an unprecedented level of support from Wikia Staff, resulting in all sorts of new goodies and productive new relationships. And we've recently decided to lift almost every block we've ever made so as to allow most everyone a second chance to be part of our community.

2014 promises to build on this year's foundations, especially since we've got a full, unbroken series coming up — something that hasn't happened since 2011. We hope you'll stick with us — or return to the Tardis — so that you can be a part of the fun!