Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Doctor Who/Archive 12

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This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

This archive page covers approximately the dates between 31 January 2007 and 30 April 2007. Please add more discussions to this archive until the 30 April date is reached.

Post replies to the main talk page, copying or summarizing the section you are replying to if necessary.

Archives

Archive index 5 April 2005 – 26 May 2005 21 May 2005 – 23 September 2005 17 September 2005 – 27 December 2005 31 December 2005 – 20 January 2006 19 January 2006 – 27 February 2006 27 February 2006 - 16 April 2006 16 April 2006 – 9 July 2006 6 July 2006 – 5 August 2006 9 July 2006 – 24 October 2006 23 October 2006 – 30 December 2006 30 December 2006 – 30 January 2007 31 January 2007 – 30 April 2007

Contents 1 Lengthy plot summaries 2 CFD notice 3 Seasons articles 4 Templates 4.1 See Also 5 Return of Daleks in the Chronology 6 CFD notice 7 Help 8 Doctor Who Box 9 Time Lord article nomination for Good Article

Lengthy plot summaries

I noticed that a lot of Doctor Who episode articles have some pretty needlessly in-depth plot summaries, and I plan to condense a lot of these, but I have only seen the Eccleston and Tennant series. Anyone else interested in working on this? --Chris Griswold (☎☓) 04:30, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Needlessly is a POV, they are far from too long imo - (oh and I invoke Sir Not'a'Lot's law - you can't quote/etc to WP:NOT) thanks/Fenton, Matthew Lexic Dark 52278 Alpha 771 04:35, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't really understand your Wikipedia jargon, but just looking at The Empty Child, the plost synopsis is a beat-by-beat rundown of every single scene in the episode. That's excessive. --Chris Griswold (☎☓) 05:16, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

You think that's bad? Check out City of Death -- and mind that I shortened the first episode description by two-thirds. (compare the history, before and after!) --Aderack 03:42, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

I take your point, Chris; referencing every scene and its outcome is not necessary to convey the plot. In particular, anything unnecessary to the plot but still of note should go in a trivia section (continuity, references, production, etc) and not in the summary. I don't have the time to focus on that, but I think you have the right idea. Best of luck. Radagast 16:05, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

We've been through this before, and the general feeling was that the lengthier summaries, within reason, are preferred. Check the archives. --khaosworks (talk • contribs) 16:14, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Khaos, just a note that length summaries are appreciated by some people (especially me) - I find a good decent plot summary improves an article ten fold, so from me to you, thanks! thanks/Fenton, Matthew Lexic Dark 52278 Alpha 771 16:38, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps it's best to throw up a rough definition of what a "lengthy" summary means? Approximately how many words per episode, for instance? It seems reasonable to have an upper wall. City of Death, before I chopped a (very) little out of it, was 6314 words long. That's well over 1500 words per episode. Yikes. If the entire summary were 1500 words, it would seem on the long end of acceptable.

I'm thinking a ratio of something like ten words per minute. Therefore a 25-minute episode would be 250 words; a 45-minute episode would be 450. A four-episode-long serial would be 1000 words; a six-parter would be 1500. Does this seem reasonable? --Aderack 03:45, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

It certainly seems reasonable to me. We do not want to infringe on the owner's copyright, which is a real concern with situations like this. Summaries should be just that: summaries, and not abridgements of episodes. They shouldn't in any way be a substitute for watching the epsisode. I am very impressed with the organization and level of detail with these articles (other than the summaries, of course), but we should keep in mind that this is a general-use encyclopedia and not a Doctor Who Guide. --Chris Griswold (☎☓) 07:03, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

If may offer my opinion? Both City of Death and The Empty Child are largely dialogue-driven stories; it would make sense that the plots are larger than a more action-orientated one (eg. An Unearthly Child) or a story which no-one wants to go near (The Twin Dilemma - with good reason!!). Perhaps we could just leave them as they are - to trim a story so full of twists and turns as, say, The Doctor Dances could prove detrimental, rather than beneficial. - NP Chilla 08:42, 31 January 2007 (UTCr

It is possible to paraphrase. The purpose of these summaries should be to illustrate story content; not to bullet point every exchange of dialogue. If a person wants to know every detail, that's what the actual episodes are for. For reference purposes, generalities win over specifics unless there's a specific purpose to the specifics. Too much clutter gets in the way of communication.--Aderack 09:51, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

If I may quote the page on fair dealing, "Some higher education institutions in the UK interpret 'reasonable proportion' as... An extract from a book amounting to 5% of the whole or a complete chapter." An average 45-minute television script will be 45 pages, with a lot of whitespace so about 200 words per page, totalling about 9,000 words in the script. 5% of that would be 450 words, roughly. That's not a legal opinion, just an extrapolation of a guideline used by some British institutions on what would normally constitute fair dealing. For the sake of discussion, I won't question the notability of individual episodes, but I would think that any text beyond that 450-word guideline would be contextual information, not just descriptive, i.e. talking about characters, perhaps locations (either in-story or filming), story arc references or significance, other production details, etc. (I'm also hazy on the 45-minute-per-episode thing, it might be 50 or 60 minutes for some of these.)Avt tor 17:04, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Right; that fits the "ten words per minute" rule of thumb I was thinking about. Honestly, that seems like the most reasonable ratio to me -- roughly measured, of course. Any more input?--Aderack 09:59, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

CFD notice

Seasons articles

Someone has created Doctor Who: Season One through Doctor Who: Season Six, in the past there have been a few of these and they have been redirected to the list of serials, but I think it ought to be raised and discussed to see what people think. Tim! 10:32, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

I really don't think these are necessary. Given that we already have individual articles for every serial/episode, we don't need a season by season breakdown with synopses, not to mention screenshots (which he's left a space for). Given that we've had this discussion before, I'm going to go ahead and turn these into redirects before he makes more. (I'll probably try and find the old discussion in the archive first, so I can point to it on his talk page. If somebody beats me to it, feel free!) --Brian Olsen 17:36, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Ok, scratch that - I can't actually find anywhere where this has been discussed before. The closest I could find was at the talk page for the serials list, but it doesn't look like any consensus was ever reached. I hate to just redirect a bunch of pages somebody created without at least being able to point to somewhere that says that we think it's a bad idea... --Brian Olsen 17:54, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Ehh, really not necessary seeing since we've already have a list covering all the seasons (though, I'd rather it be details on the season {i.e. production} itself than the episodes therein). DrWho42 19:20, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree — there might be an argument for having articles on the production details of Doctor Who seasons, but there's no need for these lists. Between List of Doctor Who serials and the episode articles, they're redundant. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 19:55, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

I've turned these into redirects to List of Doctor Who serials. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 17:48, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Templates

I believe I've standardized the various story templates (example) to the same look and format. They look a bit tidier now. There are a couple of issues, though. One, stories like The Five Doctors are becoming ridiculous; it seems to me there must be some other way of displaying the template information. Alternatively, perhaps articles that fall in the "minor references" category of a template shouldn't contain that template. Or maybe the "minor references" section is extraneous? I recall some debate about this a while back.

I'm also wondering about the brand new (Gallifrey) template — which felt like a good idea, as I often have trouble keeping track of which stories deal with Time Lord affairs. Also, these stories do trace a rough sort of a story arc, with the Eye of Harmony/Omega/Rassilon business, the Doctor's presidency, and the two trials. To make this template completely match the others, I can see a "minor references" section fitting in — though I'm not sure what a person might throw in there. What "minor Gallifrey references" might be worth listing? (Dialogue alone doesn't count, so no Runaway Bride or Time Warrior.)

Last thing: did I get all the templates? I don't know, as there doesn't appear to be a central resource for them. Are there any others besides Daleks, Cybermen, the Master, UNIT, and Gallifrey?--Aderack 11:25, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

I think that for stories with more than two or three templates we should just link to the templates, sort of like

See Also

Gallifrey Stories

Master Stories

Cybermen Stories

Dalek Stories

Unit Stories

DonQuixote 19:19, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

That seems functional.--Aderack 04:54, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

I see that Percy Snoodle has now made these templates collapsible, which I think is a good move. I don't have much (read: "any") knowledge of template syntax, but I've seen some templates where the default seems to be to have the template collapsed. This might be good to apply in these cases. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 00:33, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

That seems to solve the problem. DonQuixote 15:43, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Indeed. I knew there had to be something more elegant in the wings.--Aderack 09:29, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Return of Daleks in the Chronology

Couldn't (Shouldn't) "Return of the Daleks" be put in the 7th Doctor's Chronology? It can hand in hand with "The Veiled Leopard", since he is companionless and they are Doctorless? Should it be placed in release order with the rest of the Ace/Hex adventures? The Core-Man 16:09, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

But the Doctor says that Ace and Hex are "all gone now". I think it's set later in his personal timeline. Of course, what you or I think is really irrelevant, because unless we can find a reliable source any placement is original research. Best to keep it as "placement unknown", I think. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 17:43, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

CFD notice

Help

does anyone know where i can get a clip off the internet of the 2006 intro (the part where it shows the TARDIS in the vortex, "David Tennant" and then "Doctor Who") to put on powerpoint. it's for a project. plz reply on my user talk page. thx --I.W 22:00, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

I really wouldn't put it past YouTube on having it. I'd say: once you find the clip/intro uploaded there, just ask the whoever uploaded it to send your way. DrWho42 06:34, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Doctor Who Box

The doctorwhobox on the right hand side of story pages contains various facts, but I wonder if the IMDB external link. Would this be better placed under External Links instead or, given that the link provides little or no additional information, should it be removed altogether? --The Missing Hour 00:10, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

I think that the IMDb link is pretty common for television and film articles: it's in {{Infobox Television}} and a lot of other templates in Category:Television infobox templates. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 06:41, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Time Lord article nomination for Good Article

Please go to the Time Lord article and see its talk page as this article has been nominated for a GA status. However, the nomination is currently on hold and some changes have been suggested; please see the articles talk page! Smomo 14:11, 18 February 2007 (UTC)