Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-188432-20130406191339/@comment-188432-20130412122346

Well, no, we can't have uniformity. Say what you want about Doctor Who being one show narratively. It's definitely not a single show from a production standpoint. They're two completely different shows from that standpoint.

The template used to give credits to the BBC Wales era cannot be used or even easily adapted for use for the old series. Yes, we need to have something different for the old series, but it would require a wholly separate template. I mean just look at the top line of the template on a typical BBC Wales story and see how many of those fields wouldn't exist for a London-made serial.
 * No exec producer, save season 18
 * Producer and script editor would be the top-line credit
 * Script editor is called "story editor" for much of the 1960s
 * No casting director, ever.
 * No editors until well into the run, and then not credited often
 * No production designer, just "designer"
 * No costume designer, just "costumes"
 * Music not credited every serial
 * VFX and SFX are generally same department, if credited at all

And once you start getting deeper into the crew, the variability between credits in the 1960s versus the 1980s makes the task of designing a template comparable to formidable.

It's not impossible, and it is on the radar of things that needs to be done. But will it ever be uniform with the current version of Doctor Who? No. It can't be.

As for collapsibility, there are no current plans to allow that. I personally think it's disrespectful to the people who worked on the show to make it easy for us to bypass their names. I think it also discourages writing of articles about them if people can pass by and never see the red links.

has led to an absolute revolution in our level of coverage of the people who make Doctor Who. The productive response to being confronted by a sea of red names is something that should be encouraged, not prevented by collapsibility.