User talk:SOTO

To save you the trouble, just call me SOTO. Also, please sign your messages. Thanks.

SmallerOnTheOutside

First Strax Field Report
So what's your rationale for starting an article about something that contains a spoiler, however mild, about the 50th anniversary? 00:34: Fri 31 May 2013
 * The only time limit on addressing violations of T:SPOIL is the point when the story is released in full. So if this were 24 November, you'd have a point.  As it's not, you don't.


 * People ask all the time, "Why didn't you say something at the time?" The answer is extraordinarily simple. It's a big wiki, there's a lot going on, and there's no way that any automated process could have possibly detected this kind of policy violation.  I had to simply happen across it.  Which I did today.  If someone went to an obscure page and rewrote it to contain plausible — but 100 percent false — information, it's quite possible that it wouldn't be found for months.  Elapsed time doesn't make the action "okay".


 * This thing is an advertisement for a future story containing behind the scenes footage which mildly spoils the fiftieth anniversary story. And in the same way that trailers about future stories or interviews which contain info about future stories are not allowed, neither is this. The very location around which the report centres is a spoiler. So, it's going bye-bye, and I'm probably going to scrub all references to the name of thing, too. And I'll be locking down Strax Field Report, too. This little series has actually been quite detrimental to those wanting to keep themselves away from all spoilers.  I can think of at least two pieces of information it gave out about future stories: the name of episode 14 and a location in episode 15.  Well no more. It's an advert, pure and simple, and it's not eroding the surprises of the fiftieth any further on this wiki.  01:40: Fri 31 May 2013

David Melbourne page error
SOTO, I fixed that for you.  should've been.

Rhenborg
Thank you for cleaning the article up for me. Would it be ok to include the article in the websites category too, considering that the article is kind of about his website as well? or not

Thank you from brand new user Paul8McGann ☎  22:57, June 1, 2013 (UTC)

Pipes in infoboes
As stated at Thread:133001, please don't manually correct missing/additional pipes in infoboxes, as you recently did at Just War. I'm literally running the bot right now to correct all that. 00:15: Tue 04 Jun 2013

Religion
I think you need stop and bring it to the forum whether we want to start going down the road of religious classification of individuals. Category:Leaders of the early Christian church is one thing, because that's actually a cat about an organisation. Actually identifying people by their religion is getting into a sensitive territory. Yes, we do have some stories that deal with Catholic/Protestant conflicts, but how finely do we want to take it? Does the fact that there's a wedding in a Christian church in Father's Day mean those people are Christians? I think I'd be more comfortable if we kept the category away from the general area of belief and more towards people who were officially a part of a church (or the heads of church-dominated states). I think Category:Protestants could swiftly become a matter of great speculation, and thereby fall foul of T:CAT NAME. Don't forget, too, that a lot of people fought on the Catholic or Protestant side not because it was their actual religious preference, but because the style of government a particular leader represented was to their liking. And, yanno, whatcha gonna call Henry VIII, since he "converted" (to be super-generous to him) mid-life? 16:24: Wed 05 Jun 2013
 * I'd still prefer this as a community discussion rather than notes on user pages. It's fairly complicated and maybe others will have useful input.  18:03: Wed 05 Jun 2013

Wikipedia
T:NOT WP, T:EVIL TWIN, and T:SPOIL ALLOW all combine to say that you shouldn't create a link to a spoiler, however mild, in the user talk namespace. Forget about the merits of your discussion—you shouldn't even have asked the question on my user talk page. Please be careful in future that you don't ask questions which themselves contain or link to spoilers.

On the merits of the question, nothing is changed by what WP:DW are doing. We're not going to be having a space that allows for spoilers for the 50th. Surely you've by now seen the clear message at, amongst other places, MediaWiki:Community-corner. 17:37: Thu 06 Jun 2013
 * I don't want to be shown it. I'm not sure why you're so insistent on having a page that's going to attract spoilers within the context of our "spoil the 50th anniversary and you'll be infinitely blocked" thing. But I'd urge you to please move on, rather than flogging dead horses.


 * There is no interpretation of T:SPOIL ALLOW that will give you what you seek here. The specials are genuinely specials.  Given what we know now, it/they is/are like The Five Doctors. It/they form their own production block and appear to be separately contracted from either series 7 or series 8.  Now, hey, maybe when we get the DWMSE review of series 8, we'll discover that actually it/they is/are a part of series 8.  But nothing suggests that right now.  At all. In the slightest. It's not a part of a series, so therefore there is no series page, so therefore there is no spoiler-allowed space.  That's why a temporary policy about the 50th anniversary was required, which is where there are several prominent messages saying "no spoilers anywhere about the 50th".


 * Oh, and spoiling in chat isn't allowed either, yanno, as made very clear by the chat welcome message. 19:26: Thu 06 Jun 2013


 * SOTO, seriously. Flogging. Dead Horse. You are.  The policy on the 50th anniversary special(s) is very clear, and repeated in several places.  Nothing.  Anywhere.  Period. But I will make it even clearer at the series 8 page.   16:33: Fri 07 Jun 2013

Speedy
Please don't use speedy rename if you're suggesting a fundamental name change. You've suggested, for instance, a change from Girl Technician to Female technician (Day of the Daleks) and I don't know the reason why. There's no other Female Technician in the database, so I'm not getting the reason for the dab term, and I don't really know why you're changing from Girl to Female? Which issue of the story is allowing you to make that suggestion?

speedy rename is only for a completely indisputable name change. 02:22: Sat 08 Jun 2013

Dates
DWU days will be fully reopened in about 2 minutes. Except of course for 1 June. 23:00: Thu 13 Jun 2013
 * Special:Chat, please. 23:05: Thu 13 Jun 2013

Complying to Help You Out
Yeah, that occurred to me earlier. I had that sneaky suspicion you were going to ask me to jump over to a preferred section of the dates so I didn't smudge up your efforts to get the work done. It's all part of the sorting process. So now that you have requested me to move, I will. We all know the badges are enjoyable "brownie points", but I'm a certified Eagle Scout and I like things spic and span around the high-caliber wikis. Speaking of badges, I'm quietly waiting for the day we can have doctors 9 and onward up in the badge list, but that will have to take a number XD. --Thunderush ☎  02:59, June 15, 2013 (UTC)


 * Caught me just in time for the heads-up. So begins the long editing grind. --Thunderush ☎  03:12, June 15, 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm going to stop once I bump up my badge at or near to the 100 mark and rest. That's around 20-30 pages, give or take 3 or 4 edits required per day to move info. --Thunderush ☎  03:26, June 15, 2013 (UTC)


 * Understood. I'm copy-pasting from Notepad and checking for braces around multiple instances of years to keep them in order. --Thunderush ☎  03:37, June 15, 2013 (UTC)


 * I completed January and used it as a good stopping place. For now, just a few edits around the main Years pages and I'm signing off for the night. 1 February is the next one to change. --Thunderush ☎  06:17, June 15, 2013 (UTC)

Date pages
Please don't overwrite comic story release entries. Since all media are equal, you shouldn't be giving more apparent attention to the comic stories than you do the televised ones. Note the following diff: Thanks! 23:22: Mon 17 Jun 2013
 * http://tardis.wikia.com/index.php?title=3_October_%28releases%29&diff=1495991&oldid=1495989

Not a problem
Sure! I don't mind going back to the days that need splitting. These previous days were a short and necessary reprieve from editing to avoid eyestrain. Let's ease the burden, shall we? --Thunderush ☎  22:33, June 18, 2013 (UTC)


 * Ha ha ha. Do I detect a hint of exhaustion? No worries. I've got the Discovery Channel and Torchwood radio dramas to keep me going. --Thunderush ☎  22:51, June 18, 2013 (UTC)


 * Understandable. It's just numbers. I wish we could add pictures to liven the dates up, but they'd certainly get in the way. 21 October, huh?

Well, that's to be expected. Sometimes you break an egg when you're trying to organize the contents of a fridge, so to speak. Only this is a repository of all the dates. I'll sharpen my attention so it doesn't (hopefully) happen again. I agree wholeheartedly on researching DW episodes. I'm almost done with Tennant's era and I went back to Pertwee for the classic experience. I'd check Hartnell and Troughton some more... if they weren't potholed to kingdom come by the missing episodes. --Thunderush ☎  23:03, June 18, 2013 (UTC)

PA vs AFM
The reason you're getting confused by some of our terminology pages is that they tend to be biased towards the new series. The production assistant page is almost certainly using a definition more applicable to BBC WAles than BBC Television Centre.

In DOC: So What Do You Do Exactly?, Graeme Harper helpfully gives equivalencies between 1963 and 2005 terms:

Now, Harper doesn't define an AFM in this piece — he does elsewhere, but honestly I've forgotten quite where. But we do see production paperwork here (and all over the classic section of the Doctor Who website). Consistently, the PA is listed above the AFM. And if you stop to think about it for a second, that makes sense. The AFM is someone who is only present on recording days. The PM, as the 1st AD, is there for the whole of pre-production, location filming, and studio recording. In other words, the title means, "I'm the director's assistant for the whole of production." Hope that helps! 03:27: Wed 19 Jun 2013

You're welcome!
It most certainly did help to gloss up all those pages! I nabbed a 1,500 edit badge along with the Graham Norton 250 edit award. Bumped me 10 points shy of #19, which wasn't hard to attain. Hey, I know the leaderboard looks like all fluff, but it's an attention-getter. You never know if someone special might show up on TARDIS wiki and strike a conversation. I'm an aspiring comic writer just now beginning to pen the first chapter of my story. Maybe it will help me prove my merits one day. And this show is wicked good inspiration. --Thunderush ☎  18:40, June 19, 2013 (UTC)

Update on days
Very good progress indeed! On comics, you're not supposed to "know". You're supposed to just calculate. I think you'll find a comprehensive list at a couple of places around the net, though. Altered Vistas and comicbookdb.com. The comicbookdb.com list is probably the simplest to use for this particular task, since it neatly lays out every comic story by cover date.

Oh and if you hadn't cottoned on to it, Empire of Death is a date-based novel, where each of its seven chapters correspond to each one of the days between 14 and 21 February. Therefore what I've put down so far is essentially just place holding text — a massive simplification of things. If you get access to this novel, these pages will need to be given better copy. 01:31: Sun 23 Jun 2013
 * Seriously, the work at comicbookdb.com is absolutely meticulous on that score. I strongly urge you to use that as your basis for everything from The Klepton Parasites all the way to at least the beginning of the BBC Wales era at DWM.  01:40: Sun 23 Jun 2013
 * Not sure what you're talking about. You don't need more than "Countdown" or "TV Action".  Brevity is what matters on date pages.  Besides, the indicia on Countdown remains Countdown/TV Action (or some very close variation thereof) throughout the entire run.  That is, the words "Countdown" "TV" and "Action" always appear in the indicia, regardless of the issue number, or what's going on with the cover. The cover goes through three major stages though: first Countdown then Countdown/TV Action, then TV Action.  Use the one appropriate to the story at hand.  Don't go all crazy with the exact cover; it honestly doesn't matter to this wiki. (Well, it matters on the page Countdown (magazine), but that's it.)  01:53: Sun 23 Jun 2013
 * Yeah, you're going a bit long on some of your lines. Please note this diff.  For the most part, just get a year, the name of the actual release, and the company who released it. We can't really start doing issue numbers at this level, because we'd then have an imbalance between the Polystyle stuff — where we don't have individual issue pages — and the other stuff, where we do.  Best just to avoid the apparent imbalance by leaving it at "published in TV Comic" or "published in Doctor Who Magazine". also, each line should have only one release.  So it's not "the script of The Power of the Daleks (TV story)"; it's "The Power of the Daleks (script)".  Remember, our watch word here is simplify.  Cut it back to the absolute barebones.  02:35: Sun 23 Jun 2013
 * Oh, and in that vein, let's just say that if the cover of the mag has "TV Action" in it, the strip "was published in TV Action". If it has Countdown alone on the cover, then it's from Countdown.  02:37: Sun 23 Jun 2013
 * 18 March (releases) looks good, though I don't really think we need "by Target Books" after every novelisation. The presumption is Target, surely, with those handful that aren't Target getting the specific publisher?  If you really strongly feel that having Target Books is actually necessary, go ahead, but my instinct is that it's largely superfluous info.  Also, I kinda dig inverting the usual sentence structure on entries.  It doesn't always have to be:
 * was published in /by
 * I think we can say things like "Part one of the TV Comic story was published". I think if we have a standard for each media, then when we assemble pages with all different media, we'll have ensured sentence structure variety. I mean, if we do all the comic stories one way, and all the TV stories another way, when you put em together on a single page, there's variance in the sentence structure.  03:18: Sun 23 Jun 2013

Vetoing "books by genre" cat
I'm shutting down your "books by genre" notion before you go too far with it. It's going to require wayyyyyy too much speculation. Many in-universe books are merely mentioned; it'll take too much T:NO RW creep to then define a genre. 17:40: Sun 23 Jun 2013
 * Nah, Category:Non-fiction books is fine. That's easy to tell.  It's when you try to place Great Expectations into, I dunno, "historical drama" or some other genre classification that things get dicey.  18:48: Sun 23 Jun 2013

Can you join chat? 04:43, June 24, 2013 (UTC)

EP1 messages
If you're getting an "Emergency Protocol One" error, you're getting an error which is dressed up to look like it's coming from this wiki, but is in fact a Wikia-wide "database error". In other words, there's nothing we can do about it. They do happen from time to time, but they aren't being caused by any local issue. You'd get them (albeit with a different message) whether you were editing here or anywhere else on the Wikia network. They tend to be extremely intermittent and short-lived, though, so I can't promise you that you'd get one here, then be able to go to another wiki and immediately trip the message there.

They do tend to happen in the middle of the night in mainland US time zones, because that's morning in Poland, where Wikia's engineering team is located. 17:45: Mon 24 Jun 2013

More day matters
Yes, I would probably put the publisher on novelisations where it's not Target. Obviously, it's a little more vital on Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, Doctor Who and the Crusaders, and Doctor Who and the Zarbi, where you've got what we might consider truly different editions done by different publishers. I think in the case of these three books, we probably should note the first non-Target edition and then the subsequent first Target edition.

But I definitely don't think that, for the purposes of the day pages, that it's particularly noteworthy to indicate when the first Pinnacle or Virgin reprints are.

As for whether I'm doing ordinal redirects, well, it's not particularly high on my to-do list. Nominally, though, I suppose it's consistent with the original forum ruling that allowed us to switch to cardinal dating. So it probably will be coming. Ordinal dating is not a part of the way I use English so it never occurs to me write "the 21st December" — which probably explains why we don't already have the redirects. If it were me, the redirects would be at "the 21st of December", but that's not the way the community swung. 17:58: Mon 24 Jun 2013

July wordmark
Help me remember: did we settle on a Seven wordmark? 22:49: Tue 25 Jun 2013

More date stuff
Hey :) In some instances, I'm just going to drop a note on date talk pages, as with Talk:23 February. I don't always have the time to read and understand what's going on, but I will try to leave at least a note any time I find anything.

Also, I should tell you that I have given up on trying to make sense of The Time Travellers. That thing is full of specific dates, but I have no Idea what's happening there. I can't tell what's real or what's not real, so I guess I'll have to go back and read it from cover to cover and hope for the best. But I'm not too optimistic about everything making sense based on my own distant memories of the work, and the recent Doctor Who Book Club Podcast on the subject. 20:50: Thu 27 Jun 2013
 * Hmmm, I see your logic, but it doesn't quite work correctly in a cooperative environment. I'd rather the  message stay active (and indeed the page usefully categorised), until we actually have information on the page.  A blank page is less helpful than a nearly blank page with a tophat soliciting an editor's help.  Talk pages are, by tradition, the place for notes about how to edit the article, not hidden messages on the ns:0 page.  21:12: Thu 27 Jun 2013

Chat
Sidebar, m'lud. 13:38: Tue 02 Jul 2013
 * Weird, I thought you would like it. I take it from your quick sign off that's not the case? 19:18: Tue 02 Jul 2013

Year pages
Year pages are in, and most of the programming surrounding them has been completed. There's just a little kink left to fix on the front to make  appear on the pages with dab terms. Otherwise offers only alternatives that are sensible for the particular year (i.e., no (releases) in 1935, but (people) is allowed). Basic deal is that 1897 forward have (people) pages, except for a few scattered pages in the 1890s where there are no recorded births. 1960 forward have production pages, while 1963 forward have release dates. (Forward means "until and including 2013".) 18:44: Fri 05 Jul 2013

User pages
Hi! Please re-read Tardis:Vandalism policy. You are not to alter another user's page, no matter the circumstances. There are several things wrong with the recent edit you made to User:Snivystorm's user page. Thanks for reading this rather long post. Shambala108 ☎  14:11, July 13, 2013 (UTC)
 * You didn't contact an admin instead of doing it yourself. This is a violation of the vandalism policy. Contact an admin instead, and I'll go on record as saying I don't care enough about spoilers for the new series so I will be happy to take care of any spoiler violations.
 * Your edit summary clearly states that you know you're not supposed to do it but you're going to do it anyway. As a very prolific editor, new users will take their cue from people like you. Please try not to blatantly violate policies.
 * You left your reasoning in an edit summary, but edit summaries have a very short lifetime of being easy to find. It will soon be buried in the page history. Some new users don't even know that the "recent activity" page exists or how to find the reason for an edit. This new user may have no idea what policy he/she violated, and may continue to add the information until someone lets him/her know on their talk page why their user page was changed. When users, especially new ones, violate policy in their edits, I always let them know on their talk pages why their edits were changed.

Year pages
Year pages are unlocked, since I've now done as much as I can do with them via a bot. Feel free to tackle them, liaising with Cult Of Skaro. 02:50: Sun 14 Jul 2013
 * Nah, feel free to go full steam on year pages. The only reason they were locked was to ensure that bot processes wouldn't create/get stopped by edit conflicts.  Now that those are largely over, there's no reason to limit editing access.  12:28: Sun 14 Jul 2013