Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-188432-20130109195104

When they first were implemented on the site, the connections to other media franchises categories were for series that really had a significant impact on Doctor Who. For instance, Worked on All Creatures Great and Small matters because there's a pretty big connection betwen All Creatures and Doctor Who, thanks to the centrality of the JNT/Johnny Byrne/Peter Davison creative triangle. You just wouldn't have gotten the Davison era without the working relationships established on All Creatures. Similarly worked on Sea of Souls and worked on Born and Bred described working relationships of direct relevance to the shape of series 1. Likewise Worked in the Life on Mars franchise has a huge relevance to the Moffat era.

But Worked on The Bill? Actors who appeared in the Young Ones? Worked on Where Eagles Dare? These describe co-incidences of employment.

It's quite clear to me that category bloat has well and truly set in.

Categories are not meant to be substitutes for writing the body of articles. We should not be allowing the category section to be much, much longer than the body of the articles themselves.

Bernard Kay is the poster child for this phenomenon. It's clear that the editors have simply abandoned any attempt to write a good article, in favour of using the category system as a way to just list this actor's C.V.   What's especially unforgivable here is the fact that DWU material has been fobbed off to a category. The categories include Big Finish Doctor Who voice actors — but no attempt is made in the article to explain what roles Bernard Kay had in Big Finish.

I think the time has come to look hard at the list of categories under connections to other media franchises and decide which are truly important and which are not. The time is definitely upon us to stop the creation of new categories in that part of the category tree.

In addition to deciding which of the current categories should be destroyed, we should also make it a rule that you cannot add any of these categories without mentioning the role they had in that franchise within the body of the article. It leaves readers hanging to just say, "Oh yeah, they were in Press Gang without also saying what their role was.  