User talk:Josiah Rowe

I like to keep conversations together. If you leave me a note here, I'll usually respond here. If I've started a conversation on your talk page, I'll usually check your talk page for a reply. (There may be exceptions, but that's the general pattern.) If a conversation jumps between pages, I'll often copy it over so that the whole thing appears on one page.

Featured article system
Hey Josiah! I notice you've stopped by recently, so I'm gonna try leaving a message here before going to.

Since you have experience both on Wikipedia and Wikia, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on how we could best implement some sort of featured article "process" here. Would a straight import of the Wikipedia system — with and all that — be advisable? Or is that system overly ambitious for a Wikia wiki, due to its smaller userbase? I've looked at what Wookieepedia and MemAlpha do, and there are lessons to be learned there. But I'm kind of hoping that since you're a Wikipedia leader with experience over here, you might have some thoughts on how to get smaller communities to build articles in a more cooperative and purposeful way. 21:29: Sat 14 Apr 2012
 * I'm honored that you'd ask for my input, but I'm afraid that I'm really not very knowledgeable about "process" matters like this. ("I know so very little about telebiogenesis.") In fact, I've severely cut back on my Wikipedia contributions in part because I don't have the time or the inclination to fight through all the red tape over there (not to mention real-life stuff, like the birth of my daughter).


 * That said, my gut feeling is that there's no need for the FA process here to be as formal and stultifying as it is at Wikipedia. The key is to establish a core group of reviewers, who can determine appropriate criteria and apply them to candidate articles. Once that's in place, there could be incentives like the Triple Crown over at Wikipedia to encourage users to bring articles to FA status... but I think that has to come later.


 * I hope that's helpful. Wish I could chip in more myself, but for the foreseeable future I'm afraid my contributions both here and at Wikipedia will be limited to fixing the occasional typo. —Josiah Rowe talk to me 04:11, April 22, 2012 (UTC)
 * That's good advice! Thanks for taking the time to give it.  Congratulations on fatherhood!  And whatever edits you can give here between feedings will be gratefully accepted.  Remember: you're still an admin here — whether you like it or not!   21:32: Mon 23 Apr 2012
 * I wasn't even sure I still had the admin bit here. "So many parts! And hardly used!" —Josiah Rowe talk to me 11:22, April 24, 2012 (UTC)

Active admin
I'm glad that you are back editing here at TARDIS. Just to let you know, if you are staying, which I hope that you are, you might want to change your status from inactive to active here; at the list of administrators. Thanks. MM/ Want to talk? 00:27, April 25, 2012 (UTC)
 * I honestly don't know whether I'll be sticking around or not. If you look at my contribution history, you'll see that my pattern of editing is not what you'd call consistent — partly due to my erratic work commitments, and partly due to my general lack of responsibility. (Bit like the Doctor, really.) I sort of feel like if I list myself as an active admin, I'm liable to disappear for another 5 years, whereas if I stay on the inactive list I might actually stick around for a while and help. :)
 * Tell you what— if I'm still editing here in a week, I'll change my status. :) —Josiah Rowe talk to me 01:42, April 25, 2012 (UTC)
 * Oh, who am I kidding — I'm active. Changed the page. —Josiah Rowe talk to me 03:24, April 29, 2012 (UTC)

infinity doctors
I offer my apologies for my lack of careful writing that have given you offense. I have no opinion on whether The Infinity Doctors should be canonical -- I cannot, since I have not examined the text. I have no issue with people who think it should be canonical or should not be canonical. I do take issue with the reasoning that it should be "semi-canonical" or that a "According to some sources" label" is not a clear warning sign that a piece may have severe continuity issues that may render it non-canonical.

If you feel that an apology in the discussion, let me know and I will make my apology there too. Boblipton talk to me 16:04, April 25, 2012 (UTC)
 * No need — the apology here is both appreciated and sufficient.


 * As for the "according to some sources" phrasing, I think it may be a necessary evil. Ultimately, the game we're playing here ("let's try to make 49 years' worth of Doctor Who fit into a single, coherent narrative") is futile, since there are so many contradictions even in undisputedly canonical material (who was responsible for the destruction of Atlantis? When are the UNIT stories really set?). All we can do is present the evidence to the reader and let him or her decide what to "count". Sometimes, we throw up our hands and say, "OK, there's just no way to make this fit." But that should be a last resort, and I think that "according to some sources" is an acceptable step short of declaring a story non-canonical. You are, of course, free to disagree, but I hope that you can see that the argument in favor of the "some accounts" wording isn't just "I like this and want to include it." —Josiah Rowe talk to me 17:15, April 25, 2012 (UTC)

Comic images
Sorry, you and Tybort must've posted at roughly the same time. I kinda missed that you'd asked me several times about the Griffen thing. Here's the deal with comic images. People can get widescreen or 4:3 images 8/10ths of the time, so I'll tend to just reject an image that's not widescreen until they come back and say, "Actually, there really is nothing better." The widescreen thing is not quite so stringently enforced for comics, but at the same time it's mportant to occasionally tell people to try, or else we end up with some horribly long shots.

Better than me gabbin' is for you to check out Tardis:Guide to images, where you'll see a number of different shots compared and contrasted.

Also, I went through an extensive tutorial with user:OttselSpy25, which I think is now on his latest archived talk page. You might find some of the descriptions there instructive, but I think he changed some of the pictures so they don't demonstrate the flaws as clearly. Still, you might want to take a gander at user talk:OttselSpy25/Archive 1.

As pertains this particular image we're talking about, I'd go for http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v478/josiahrowe/Griffen1.jpg, but with modification. I'd get rid of the word balloon, which is super easy with monochromatic stuff like this. Just set your paint to the paper color and paint it out. Then I'd crop it back a bit so it wasn't quite so wide. (We do allow limited photo manipulation with comics to get rid of paper yellowing and to remove the entirety of word balloons.)

Hope that was helpful! 01:11: Fri 04 May 2012
 * Thanks for the pointers — but unfortunately my Photoshop skills are more or less nonexistent. (Actually, I don't even have Photoshop on my computer.) I cropped and resized the scan in Preview on my Mac, which is about the sum of my image manipulation ability.


 * But looking at your discussion with OS25, I'm seeing another problem — I don't have the source material for that strip myself. I've only read scans that were (illegally) put up on the web, and that's where I got the image from. So technically, I suppose I don't have the ability to make an image for Griffen at all. (Those Alan Moore "Black Sun" strips haven't been reprinted, have they? His other two have been, but I don't recall seeing his three Gallifrey stories reprinted — which is a pity.)


 * Anyway, it looks like I'd better let somebody else handle the images for this one. (I only made the article because I remembered the character's name when I was making the disambiguation page Griffin.) —Josiah Rowe talk to me 01:32, May 4, 2012 (UTC)

DWTV
Thanks for the fixes on the DWTV template! I also noticed that Robots of Death is misnamed as Robots of Evil, Nightmare of Eden is misspelled as "Nightmare of Ede," and Warrior's Gate lacks an apostrophe. Could you fix these as well? Memnarc talk to me 09:01, May 4, 2012 (UTC)
 * Fixed. —Josiah Rowe talk to me 15:45, May 4, 2012 (UTC)

Atkinson
Well, I'm not arguing for the immutability of the text. Indeed, it wasn't something I gave acres of thought to. I was just shocked that the article was still alleging that Atkinson was the regenerated form of McGann. But I do think the word "overwhelmingly" isn't hyperbole. There was only 1 respondent who argued the thing was canonical. And there were, what, over 10 against the idea? I mean, "overwhelming" is a word that admits of a lot of hyperbole, but rarely have we had debates that ended so convincingly. Sure, there was nuance amongst the opinions, but as a general and simple explanation of the discussion, it's accurate to say that COFD was overwhelmingly rejected by the community.

That said, I certainly welcome your improvements. Obviously, you've greatly enhancced the lead. But the word overwhelming, or something equally superlative, should stay. Overly complicated, nuanced language at that article will allow some people to thin that there's some kind of wiggle room. At the end of the day, all that really matters is that we simply state that the guy isn't a part of the DWU, and that there's a community discussion which overwhelmingly decided that we would adopt that stance. So, yeah, go to town and change the wording, but please don't introduce doubt or nuance on for a discussion that went 90& in one direction. 05:22: Sun 13 May 2012
 * Works for me :) 06:05: Sun 13 May 2012

Typo in Stories template
Hello. I just wanted to point out that on the Stories template, Let's Kill Hitler is misspelled as "Let's Killer Hitler". I was just wondering if you could fix it, since editing it is locked. Thanks. --Frohman Talk 18:07, May 21, 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for spotting that! It's fixed now. —Josiah Rowe talk to me 18:10, May 21, 2012 (UTC)

River Song
Dear Josiah,

looks like we're a the point of getting into a p***ing match, so I thought it would be best to take it to a discussion here.... perhaps we should take it to the talk section of River Song. If you think so, please let me know by leaving me a message on my talk page. Email alerts of page changes haven't been getting through for several months.

I have been removing the matter of River's bisexuality because it does not exceed the level of speculation. The standards here are very strict: it needs to appear in a narrative source. Given the lies that Mr. Moffatt provides to keep the surprises actual surprises, he would not be a valid source even if twitter feeds were a generally accepted source. You've been in an argument with Czechout over The Infinity Doctors, in no small part to sustain it as a source of information about Gallifrey.

Given these issues I don't think River's sexuality has been established in any way, especially given the way people in general lie about sex in general. I am not going to change it back immediately. I intend to wait a day or two. If you can offer something more substantial than the information at hand or a better line of argument than is possible in a title line, please do. Boblipton talk to me 21:59, May 21, 2012 (UTC)

FP
Yep, definitely going to be coming back through and delinking with a bot. Fortunately, fairly flexible logs are kept of page imports, so it'll be fairly easy to identify the pages that need to be de-linked at a later date. However, the priority over the next week or so is on completing the basic infrastructure of w:c:factionparadox. We can live with a few redlinks in the interim.

By the way, I'm not opening up w:c:factionparadox to new admin until I get the "train tracks laid". But you seem to have a fairly good interest in/knowledge of FP. Would you be interested in admin status there, too? Wouldn't really be expecting you to do anything according to any kind of schedule, but one of the reasons the place died on its previous two attempts is that on both occasions the lone bureaucrat failed to add admin. Thus, when the bureaucrat's interest waned, there was no one left around with the power to do anything. Having additional admin would at least ensure that new users — if any ever come — could have multiple avenues of contact with those nominally in charge. 15:14: Thu 24 May 2012
 * Yeah, it would just be a backup thing in the event that a user — and let's be honest, there haven't been other users there for years — couldn't get in touch with other admin, and they really needed to get a page deleted or something.


 * By the way, I've made you an admin at w:c:tardistest, which is just pro forma for all active admins here.  16:17: Thu 24 May 2012

FP deletions
Yes, of course. Sorry. I knew the FP Wiki was there when I deleted it, it didn't even cross my mind to check the pages were the same (oops). Thanks for reminding me. --Tangerineduel / talk 17:23, June 10, 2012 (UTC)

Ebooks
Hey, we did discuss it, indeed you even agreed with me. See Forum:How should we deal with link rot?. I did as I suggested on the thread, I removed the link and added a text only version to the Notes section. --Tangerineduel / talk 07:34, June 19, 2012 (UTC)


 * So I did. How embarrassing. Please to ignore my idiocy. —Josiah Rowe talk to me 15:23, June 19, 2012 (UTC)

HiFi
HiFi may not be Panda, but he is a stuffed panda. As the Doctor said, "That is the dematerializing control. And that, over yonder, is the horizontal hold. Up there is the scanner, those are the doors, that is a chair with a panda on it. Sheer poetry, dear boy! Now please stop bothering me." As such, I think that a mention of HiFi on the Panda page isn't completely out of line. —Josiah Rowe talk to me 02:47, June 20, 2012 (UTC)


 * Fair enough; the dab tophat can go back on Panda. But am I similarly wrong to think that a list of HiFi's appeearances is out of place on Panda - List of Appearances?  03:06: Wed 20 Jun 2012


 * Yeah, the "list of appearances" might be taking things a bit too far. I think that part of the conceit of Panda is the possibility that he might, somehow, be HiFi (perhaps given intelligence and a drinking problem some time after his time with Steven), but it's nothing more than a possibility, and I don't think that there's enough to support it in Iris Wildthyme stories (at least the ones I've heard/read) to justify listing HiFi's appearances in Panda - List of Appearances. I'll put the hatnote back on Panda, though. —Josiah Rowe talk to me 03:10, June 20, 2012 (UTC)


 * Oh, I never thought he was a panda. I mean I know the Doctor says that, but I thought he was just sorta generalising.  It doesn't particularly look like a panda.  Besides, why would a guy from centuries in the future have a panda stuffed animal?  Pandas will be extinct then, surely.  03:21: Wed 20 Jun 2012


 * My daughter has a stuffed dinosaur. And HiFi looks as much like a panda as your standard teddy looks like ursus arctos. I always assumed he was a stuffed panda bear (with the obligatory caveat that pandas aren't actually bears). —Josiah Rowe talk to me 03:37, June 20, 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah. good point. I guess we do have stuffed dinosaurs. Still, it just never occurred to me HiFi was a panda.  I've lost my DVD drive, but when my replacement comes in, I'll give Meddler a freeze-frame look.  Until then, if you want to redact the doubt from the, you, um, may.  23:05: Thu 21 Jun 2012
 * Yeah, I think I will. I just checked the novelisation of The Time Meddler, in which Nigel Robinson refers to Steven's "panda bear mascot" on the first page. I reckon that's conclusive enough for our purposes. (Though John Peel seems to have excised HiFi from his novelisation of The Chase altogether, the spoilsport.) —Josiah Rowe talk to me 23:24, June 21, 2012 (UTC)
 * As promised, I've gone back and looked at "The Watcher", now that my system has been restored to health, and yeah, there is one shot where it's clearly a panda. Most of the time it's held parallel to the floor, such that it looks more like a regular teddy bear than anything.  The tricky bit, for me, is that, like a teddy, there's no real girth to the doll, so it's flat when held parallel to the floor.  I guess I expect pandas to be a bit rounder, plumper, than a standard teddy bear.  But when Vicki hands the thing to Steven such that it stays face-front long enough to get a good look.  And it's pretty obviously got panda-like coloring.   03:47: Tue 17 Jul 2012
 * Well, he may have lost some stuffing after all that time on Mechanus. :) —Josiah Rowe talk to me 04:35, July 17, 2012 (UTC)

Faction Paradox
Hey. I probably did, when I first came to this wiki (I seem to remember writing something like that). Back then I hadn't really studied all the EDAs with intensity that I have further along. Now though with others having written more detailed articles than I have followed their leads. Don't worry about edit warring, the most I'd do is leave a note on your talk page. --Tangerineduel / talk 16:05, July 14, 2012 (UTC)

Fifth Doctor
I took a swipe at the introduction and yes, I can do a lot. I want the "Stand well clear, Jo" heading put up while I work. I think it will take about a week in all to knock it down to size and get it in a better order. Since I don't know the tag's name, would you hang it for me? Boblipton ☎  02:22, July 20, 2012 (UTC)

I've done a basic rewrite of things through "Travels with Nyssa" and it's 11:30 here, so I'm going to go to sleep and see if I'm up to tackling more of it tomorrow. So far it's a polish job for grammar with a few cuts for speed -- not every two-sentence comic story gets a paragraph to itself and some of the details that were originally phrased so coyly as to be meaningless have been deleted. I still don't see any precise form to the story of the fifth doctor. If you have any insights, please let me know. For the moment, about a third of the way through, I've knocked off about a tenth of the byte count. I expect the final size to be a bit north of 30k. Boblipton ☎  03:37, July 20, 2012 (UTC)

I've completed the first round of editing -- just in time for the market opening and some real work -- and need to put it aside to get some perspective for the next swipe, which I will essay some time before Sunday midnight EDT. In the meantime, I would appreciate it if you took a look at the changes, let me know if they are at least approximately what you had in mind and let me know any insights you have. Boblipton ☎  13:16, July 20, 2012 (UTC)

Except for the usual typos and thinkos I won't be able to see until I've cleared the article from my mind in a month, I think I've done all I can do at the moment. If you disagree, please let me know.Boblipton ☎  21:34, July 20, 2012 (UTC)

Now let's see how long it lasts. Let me know if there are any other distressful articles, Boblipton ☎  11:26, July 21, 2012 (UTC)

You may have a point
While I still think that there's grounds for calling them Mutter's Spiral species/planets (etc), as it still is the Milky Way galaxy as you said, I can also see how it being a parallel universe (is that confirmed yet?) might affect the categorisation. A discussion is probably in order. Memnarc ☎  05:35, July 22, 2012 (UTC)

Help with vandals
The page List of BBC DVD releases is repeatedly being mucked about by vandals who mess with the information on the page. Is there anyway to hamper their ability to do this?Gallicus ☎  03:36, July 25, 2012 (UTC)

Non-English versions of this wiki
Hey Josiah :) I've had to openly contradict your advice to a user in a forum, and I wanted to tell you why.  I don't generally like to interfere when another admin is advising users, but in this case, I felt that you were advising without having all the facts to hand.

I've been working with the admin staff of the various international versions to establish a consistent nomenclature, so that, no matter where you edit Doctor Who articles, you know how to make a link to pages in another language. This will greatly simplify the creation of templates globally, and it makes all the Doctor Who sites much easier to find.

The nomenclature for all sites is:

w:c:languagecode.doctorwho

This is because we, behind the scenes, are actually w:c:doctorwho. The whole w:c:tardis schtick is just a fancy redirect done to save keystrokes.

Because Wikia (well, MediaWiki) allow us to link to only one site per language, this also settles disputes in languages where there's more than one site. If there were w:c:fi.tardis and w:c:fi.doctorwho, we'd only recognize w:c:fi.doctorwho. Currently, for instance, there's a dispute between two German sites over which one we should link. The active community is actually at w:c:de.doctorwhotorchwood, but we won't recognize them until they take over the dead site at w:c:de.doctorwho. This will helpfully force a cleanup of the deadwood in the de.wikia fold.

Also, given the high percentage of non-English sites that go belly-up after a week or two, we're no longer linking to sites with fewer than 30 pages. Just because a person creates a site in another language doesn't mean we march off to Wikia and request linkage. They've got to prove that they've got some kind of momentum. Clearly the French site is fully viable, and the Spanish site has really taken off the last couple of months, but the Italian, Hebrew and Polish sites got as far as one page and then stopped.

So, again, I'm sorry for stepping on your tutorial, but in this one instance, mainly for what are very technical reasons, I hope you can understand why I felt it necessary to breach the inter-admin trust. 02:00: Tue 07 Aug 2012


 * Oh, absolutely. There are no hard feelings. I probably shouldn't have answered at all, but I didn't want to dampen User:Kozov0's enthusiasm. I thought I'd looked up the relevant info, but didn't realize that the naming was an issue. I'm happy to step back now that you're engaged with him. —Josiah Rowe ☎  02:03, August 7, 2012 (UTC)

Front page
Yeah, if you see what's called the "right skyscraper" or "right rail" creeping into the front page, that's a Wikia thing. We have no power locally to make anything like that happen, nor to fix it once it does happen. It means that the page has temporarily lost its "main page" flag, or that the skyscraper has lost its "don't put me on the front page" flag. Luckily, it seems to have resolved — but if you see it happening again, and it persists even after emptying your cache, do please file a Special:Contact/bug report. 19:52: Fri 10 Aug 2012

Italicising titles
You stated at Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon? how to italicise titles. Please see. 21:50: Mon 20 Aug 2012


 * Ah! Thanks. —Josiah Rowe ☎  03:10, August 21, 2012 (UTC)

Hope we haven't run ya off
Hey, you've not been around for a week or two, so I thought I'd drop by. I hope all is well and that we haven't run you off. 23:45: Thu 30 Aug 2012
 * No, everything's fine! My daughter just started crawling, and I haven't had much time for online activities, that's all. I'll be around when I figure out how to keep up with her. :) —Josiah Rowe ☎  02:29, September 1, 2012 (UTC)