User talk:Skittles the hog

Changes
These aren't changes to the infobox, and they aren't major. It's simply positioning the table of contents. I can't really see the effect unless I examine it "live". These huge tables of content have to be conrolled in some way, because they create huge ugly blocks of whitespace. Patience, please, while I examine the effects. It might take a bit of time. It's all incredibly easily reverted.

From my preliminary look around, I think what you're seeing as "horrible" though are the inherent faults in some articles. If an article doesn't have a lead, this is going to look "weird". But the answer is to write a lead, not to abandon this idea. Also, there are many pages on which pictures have been placed incorrectly, or sized inappropriately. Again, the answer there is to fix the pictures.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 17:46, January 1, 2011 (UTC)
 * With respect, there is no way you could possibly have given it enough time or enough of an examination to determine that it looked horrible on every page, or what was causing it to look bad on some pages, whereas it looked good on others. Please, I know you like to jump in and edit after me really quickly, but give it some time, okay? :) Surely you agree that several inches of empty white space in articles is not desirable? Let's find a way to make the articles look cleaner and neater — not immediately react against changes.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 17:53, January 1, 2011 (UTC)
 * Okay, now let's this examine this in some detail. Look at New Earth (TV story). Do you think that it looks bad? Cause this is the most basic kinda page. There's a lead, and all the sections are filled in, but there are few pics.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 17:59, January 1, 2011 (UTC)
 * Okay, so New Earth isn't bad. I'd go further than that and say it's actually an improvement on what was before, but I'll take "not bad" right now. What you're looking at is old series things. But you're selectively chosing those that have a particular layout. That is, ones that have a "right-left-right-left" picture-per-episode layout, which is not (and never can be, thanks to missing eps) the way that all old series articles are written. Look at Planet of Giants, The Rescue, The Romans, Galaxy 4 (TV story). Do you think the TOC being on the right is hurting those articles?  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 18:08, January 1, 2011 (UTC)
 * It's premature to put it up for discussion. Got to kick the tires a bit, first. As you've admitted, it's something that is appearing to behave differently on different pages. Until I can suggest best practices that work on all pages, there's really no recommendation to put up for discussion. I suspect it's because the pages themselves have formatting defects — that is, they lack adequate leads or synopses, there's random white space for no good reason, or the pics are somehow wrongly placed. I don't think it's anything really to do with putting the TOC on the right side, which is objectively quite an incidental thing to do. Certainly, I'm not noticing problems with new series pages at quite the same level as old series ones. I don't think it's something that can be "optional". In the first place, that would be a massive manual chore. Why have templates like infoboxes unless you're going to leverage their power? In the second, we don't want to have just some of the story pages with the TOC to the right. It should be in a predictable place.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 19:11, January 1, 2011 (UTC)
 * Hi. No offense, but you're really kinda impatient aren't you? What part of "I'm testing this thing that has a different effect on different pages" did you not understand? I do not intend to change it back for at least the next 72 hours. You are seriously exaggerating the negative effects this is currently having and underestimating its positive benefits. Yes, the classic series is where it's causing the most problems. All that has to be examined on a page-by-page basis. But for the new series and Torchwood pages, it's largely working just fine. 19:17, January 1, 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not seeing how this is hampering anyone's ability to edit. They can make whatever changes they want to while this is going on. And of course had it been possible to have done a sandbox thing, I would've. But this isn't a template. This is using the actual data that is on each page as it stands. I can't fake that on a sandbox. I have to be able to see what it's doing on each individual page to make this work. 19:29, January 1, 2011 (UTC)
 * Heh, I promise I"m not being deliberately difficult. This isn't a template. It's activated by template, but the behavior isn't controllable like a template is. Every page's table of contents is different, and every page has a different amount of text and pictures. As you yourself have discovered this thing therefore looks different on every page. It's not something that can just be faked on a sandbox. Really, it isn't. I'm sorry you feel I'm impinging on your ability to edit, but a) I'm not and b) there isn't a way to check this thing and be sure how it looks on live pages.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 20:00, January 1, 2011 (UTC)
 * Take a look at The Invasion of Time, please. Tell me if you think the loss of one picture for episode 1 is an acceptable compromise.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 20:10, January 1, 2011 (UTC)
 * Heh, if we're going to be talking every five minutes, any chance you could include a link to your talk page on your signature? Anyway, it works on the NewTV pages, and on several old TV pages, because they don't have pictures up and down the page. You're saying it's standard that each episode has a picture, and I'm saying that's simply not true. That's what you've done in your editing. But that's certainly not a standard thing. And it never can be, because there are several dozen eps for which we don't have pics. Anyway, as you can tell, the TOC itself isn't causing the problem, it's the infobox.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 20:20, January 1, 2011 (UTC)
 * Okay, this isn't a "design". It's simply moving the contents over to the right. I'm not trying to prevent anything except for the nasty whitespace that unmodified TOC's bring. I'm really not trying to rain on your parade. I get your objections. Take a look at The Ribos Operation and tell me if you have a problem with the pic for the episode appearing in the body of the ep 1 text as opposed to the very top of it.


 * And incidentally, no, not every episode of DW has telesnaps. You won't find something for every ep of Galaxy 4 for instance. Basically, John Wiles fired John Cura, so for a lot of season 3, there's not an actual image from each ep. He was re-engaged by Innes Lloyd at The Gunfighters, but wasn't around for episode 4 of "The Enemy of the World". By The Invasion, he was gone for good, so therefore there's nothing from The Space Pirates, apart from the lone surviving ep. Technically, we shouldn't have any pics on the pages for Mission to the Unknown, The Myth Makers or The Massacre, either, cause any images that survive are merely publicity stills, and therefore against our image policy. And there's nothing for episodes of DMP, The Celestial Toymaker, and The Regin of Terror which no longer exist.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 20:46, January 1, 2011 (UTC)
 * Heh, I'm still testing things. (Remember the 72 hours thing, O Impatient One? :) ) If I can't, in fact, make pictures float to the left of the infobox, the better solution is to simply improve the lead and synopsis sections so that the initial and never-illustrated text extends below the bottom of the infobox. That said, even before this change, the first picture should always have been put to the left, to visually balance the infobox. So if you're really itchin' for something to do, you could go and make the first pic in the body of each article justify left. On a typical four parter, with one pic per part, it should go "left-right-left-right", but on many pages it weirdly goes "right-left-right-left". And, in truth, the pics shouldn't actually be immediately under the episode subhead, but buried in the meat of the section, as at The Seeds of Doom.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 15:33, January 2, 2011 (UTC)

 Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 20:54, January 3, 2011 (UTC)

Expanision
Thanks :) Glad you like the expanded leads. They're fun to write.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 22:28, January 3, 2011 (UTC)

Blockings
Just leave a message on Tangerineduels talk page, he gets to it when hes online. Revanvolatrelundar 17:20, January 4, 2011 (UTC)

Blocking
According to the wiki's blocking policy, a block is deserved if: The only thing you could accuse me of is bad-faith edits. And they are "edits made with the intent to lower the quality of the wiki or disrupt the functioning of the community" I was not making the edits to lower the quality of the wiki; I was trying to improve the wiki's quality, by removing a small page. -- Bold  Clone  17:27, January 4, 2011 (UTC)
 * There are bad-faith edits
 * Spam edits
 * Move vandalism
 * Inappropriate account naming
 * Plagiarism
 * Fanon or fan fiction
 * Personal attacks

Defense
All right, as you said, I'm moving the arguing to your page. Shall we continue? -- Bold  Clone  17:45, January 4, 2011 (UTC)

Trod pic
Hey, can you see the picture ive uploaded on the Trod article? It's not showing up on my PC. Revanvolatrelundar 18:14, January 4, 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, im just testing to see if this shows up on the activity board, may come useful in future if it doesnt. Revanvolatrelundar 19:58, January 4, 2011 (UTC)

Librarian: Sorry I keep forgeting!
New Year Resolution #13 Must try harder :) The Librarian 20:42, January 4, 2011 (UTC)
 * A higher rating resolution ( well #7 actually), is, to go back, fill in some of the gaps - there's loads and 'do a bit of tidying up' (the last bit isn't specifically wiki!) lol Happy New Year!! btw is it just me or does, by the look of the new trailers, seem a slightly different 'feel' to the new series .. even grander?! The Librarian 20:51, January 4, 2011 (UTC)

I'm loving his attention to detail though, and haven't yet been able to second guess his direction (and mis-direction), two questions are foremost though 'Who' are the Silence, and will we ever see the backside of a Dalek delivering (that sounds SO wrong I know!)The Librarian 21:03, January 4, 2011 (UTC)

150px
Hey, we've touched on this before, but only peripheral to the whole caption discussion. I've just done an edit of the main body of The Keys of Marinus and I noted that either you or someone sympathetic to your position put all the pics in the plot section at 150px. For the life of me, I can't understand why, because it's only fractionally smaller than the default. I"ve put them back to default size. Could you fill me in on why you think it important to take the additional step of defining a size other than the one Wikia prefers?  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 15:51, January 5, 2011 (UTC)
 * Cool. Thanks for the explanation. I thought I was missing something incredibly obvious. Still, I gotta press you a little bit here: why do you think it looks better than the default size? What about 150px is making you take the time to, in some cases, edit pages away from the default? I guess what I'm really getting at is that I have a valid technical reason for going for the default size. As skins change, wikia will have tested them for use with the default size. Thus the default size will change as either the user changes skin or wikia changes it on her. Specifically setting a size may not make for the best viewing in all skins. Do you have a rationale other than "it looks good in my browser on my computer using my current skin"?  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 17:39, January 5, 2011 (UTC)

...And therfore should be removed from this wikia for wasting peoples time with his one-sided and quite frankly stupidic approach that he is now taking to the wikia. Revanvolatrelundar 19:57, January 5, 2011 (UTC)

Cold star
I do it because it is useful to me. How is not having spaces at the end of the page usful? -- Bold  Clone  18:46, January 7, 2011 (UTC)

Mounting the Rescue
I don't think you have to bulletize the article, necessarily. I've rewritten a few paragraphs in a style I've found to work, leaving the rest for you to attempt to imitate. I think it's awfully helpful to use the past tense when writing even behind-the-scenes articles. Could be just a personal thing, but I think when you speak in the past tense it's easier to tell a story. I mean, that's how we're trained from childhood. Stories are often in past tense, so when you start talking or writing in past tense, you tend to find what's important or exciting about a topic. Or at least I do. So, give it a whirl and see if you can't spin a yarn out of the remaining points made in Mounting. Or, now that the text extends below the infobox, you could take the cheap and easy way out and say,


 * Amongst the other topics covered in the documentery were:
 * Point one
 * Point two

Hope that helped a bit. Feel free to drop by my talk page anytime, as usual.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍  15:31, January 8, 2011 (UTC)
 * Oh one other thing: please italicise your titles, dammit. It actually is the law.  :)

conjecture to Conjecture
Not such a big worry, this one. If you're using auto-complete functionality of Firefox and probably some other browsers, it will resolve a precedent capital letter. It's not so annoying with templates, but man is it creating a problem with page links. It's what's caused, I'm sure, this belief that it's right to type First Doctor instead of first Doctor. The "system" is suggesting I take the capital, so that's grammatically proper, right? Well, obviously not. And it's not just that, it's really any time you accept an auto-suggested link. It always captialises, which means we're getting a lot of capitalisation errors in the bodies of articles. These errors are gradually turning our use of English on this site into Something That Annoyingly Resembles German.

That said, if he's just going around and intentionally capitalising the conjecture call on a lot of different pages, it's a waste of effort. It doesn't hurt anything, but it's fairly silly.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍  15:04, January 9, 2011 (UTC)