User talk:SOTO

My Name
'''If you wish to contact me, simply write a message below (don't forget to include a title and a signature!). But, more importantly, if you wish me to respond, you must use my full name. That is:'''
 * The Doctor Detective Arch Architectural Bishop Baker Intern Inspector

If you do not address me by my full title, I may or may not respond to you.

After such a time that you've contacted me in at least two different situations, you may or may not choose to call me "The Dab," "SmallerOnTheOutside," "Smaller," or simply "SOTO."

Sincerely yours,


 * The Doctor Detective Arch Architectural Bishop Baker Intern Inspector

Helping out at the forums
I think it's great that you want to be so friendly at the forums. But I need you to curb your enthusiasm just a tad. You've only been here a few weeks, so it's probably best if you just answer questions directly, rather than opining about site philosophy or saying "if you have any questions, you can always contact me". Please holster that phrase a little while, until you've been here for a bit longer. It's probably best if you go through one season of Doctor Who with us before you offer yourself up as a "wiki helper".

It's also really important that you do not speak on behalf of admin, as you did when you said "We never revert edits just because people don't have accounts. Especially not admin." We absolutely do revert edits from IP editors. We also actively stop them editing some pages. Nothing that Mini-mitch did in the case described is inconsistent with normal admin behaviour. We do treat IP editors differently, because they are different — not least because IP editors are frequently not individuals, but a range of people using the same address. IP editors are, as is evident from Special:Userrights a different class of editor. We would much rather have people in registered accounts. You seemed to be going down the path of suggesting that all editors — IP and registered — are one big happy family, and it therefore doesn't matter whether you register an account. That's not true. There are a ton of benefits to registering an account. If these differences aren't stressed, fewer people will register. 03:17: Mon 21 Jan 2013

Dates and tenses
T:TENSES requires in-universe portion of articles to be in the past tense. 3 January is in the present tense. There's also no reason for the out-of-universe portion of these articles to be in the present tense, since they're obviously referring to events that have already happened. In other words, all these date articles need to be in the past tense in every sentence. 20:43: Fri 01 Feb 2013

WLH
And the fact that it took you less than one minute to Google is pretty much why I put it low on the priority list. But now that you've figured out one way to answer your own questions, I'll chip in a little more advanced knowledge for you.

One thing you'll want to do as you edit with us some more is to customise your MyTools bar. That's the footer at the bottom of the page in the Wikia skin. Here's what mine looks like

See how I've got "LINK" right there at the bottom left? It appears on every page, even on editing windows. That makes it easy to check what links to uncreated pages.

To add that to the MyTools bar, I just go to "Customise" on the far right. When I click it, a window comes up and I go to "Find a tool" and then open up the "Popular tools tab". then I drag "What links here" over into the left pane (Toolbar list), and then change the name to "Link". Easy.

At this point in your editing career with us, you may also want to become a little more familiar with Special:SpecialPages. It has all sorts of nifty reports on the order of WLH that will help you become a more savvy user of the site. 02:38: Sun 03 Feb 2013

Page deletion
I'm sorry you're upset by the deletion of one of your pages, but there are some pages that are so uncontroversially trivial, or so unworkable given our policies, that they don't require discussion. A list of appearances of ordinary cell phones is certainly such a page. Given our wiki's policy of treating all media equally, it's extremely unlikely that you or anyone else will be able to track down every use of cell phones in the DWU. It's such a tiny but ubiquitous part of most stories written since the BBC Wales revival that you're not gonna be able to even come close to providing a comprehensive answer.

When making an appearances page, it's very important to ask the question, "Am I going to be able to give a reasonably full list of most every usage in every DWU story?" If the answer is no, don't make the list. If the answer is, "Well, I can do all the television stories and let someone else take care of the other media", don't make the list. If the answer is, "I can do TV, some audio and some novels", don't make the list. If the answer is, "I can make a list that fully covers everything but comics", then you cango ahead and make the list.

Of course, with something like a list of cell phone usage, you've got something that is just too trivial to spend all that time tracking. And it's a list that immediately poses a question. Why track cell phone usage but not regular phone usage?

I'd urge you to see this as a learning experience. Just because infoboxes have an variable does not mean you have to use it. When it's such an ordinary item, it's fine to leave it blank. Do we need a list of appearances for brains or hearts? No, they're in every story. Do we have TARDIS - List of Appearances? Nah, it would be virtually impossible to make the list more useful than just not making the page and saying, "Eh, it's in almost every DW story".

Don't take it so hard; my list of deleted contributions is longer than your total contributions to date. It happens on a wiki. We've all created pages that got deleted. 08:03: Sun 03 Feb 2013

Deletion of your user images
It's not our usual policy to delete people's user page images. However, all images must still pass the "fair use" smell test. It's doubtful that an image from Gone with the Wind on a Doctor Who website can possibly be defended as "fair use". So that got deleted. And since you left no attribution for the other pictures, they got deleted too.

Again, nothin' personal — and I very much regret the damage it causes to your user page — but we've got to try to be responsible about our image use, even on user pages. 02:51: Mon 04 Feb 2013
 * Please carefully read, the license that you put onto the image. That license didn't apply to your GWTW image, because it's not fair use.  In other words, your picture didn't have a valid license, which made it immediately deletable under T:ICC, T:IUP, T:GTI or the warning at Special:Upload. Take your pick.

Remember that you really do have to tell where you get your images. If you don't, there's no way to make an assessment as to whether they're fair use, and they must therefore be summarily deleted.


 * On a separate matter, your signature is not strictly a violation of policy, but I would ask you to please consider shortening it. It adds three vertical spaces, which means it's really adding to overall vertical page height.  If you're wanting to have that much text, think about making it mouseover, rather than inline, text.  To figure out how to do this, look at User:CzechOut/Sig.  05:33: Mon 04 Feb 2013