User talk:Skittles the hog

Saying "the n-th Doctor" is actually in-universe
Hey, I've noticed you've been occasionally changing my indications of particular incarnation numbers (third Doctor, for instance) into just "the Doctor". I know there was a time where that was encouraged around here, because people (rather erroneously) thought it was somehow out of universe. But now that The Lodger has actually had the Doctor referring to himself as "the eleventh", and Death to the Doctor has had the Doctor say "every Doctor, every me", it's pretty clear that the terms, "the second Doctor" or "the seventh Doctor" are actually perfectly valid, in-universe terms — even if your only frame of reference is the TV series. And it helps people who don't know as much about the DWU as we admins to actually include the incarnation number. If you've come to Doctor Who via the Matt Smith era, you won't know that it was the fifth Doctor who traveled with Nyssa and Tegan, for instance, so it's helpful to have that incarnation number in the visible text.

Why did people get bees in their bonnets about using the incarnation numbers in the first place? I don't really know. As far back as at least The Five Doctors, it was clear that the Doctor did think in terms of numbering himselves, though there the fifth and first Doctors were counting regenerations, as opposed to incarnations. And The Eight Doctors really must use the incarnation numbers to tell the story. I know a lot of people don't like The Eight Doctors, but it does at least enshrine the use of "nth Doctor" in canon. And that book was published long before this wiki ever started. So why we were ever tip-toeing around the use of the terminology is baffling to me.

Australia
Nah, it's a good enough temporary pic. No need for a re-upload of the the wider shot. I think my revision note referred to the fact that I was hoping that somewhere there was a better representation of the country than a deliberately aged photograph.

Named Hartnell episodes
Please do not change citations from specific Hartnell episodes to more generalized serial names. This is an insensible reduction of the accuracy of citations.


 * It's not a "system". It's accuracy.  Dodo's not in The Massacre; that's completely misleading.  She's in the last two minutes of "Bell of Doom".  Similarly, it would be completely wrong to say Donald Tosh wrote The Massacre, when he's only (apparently) credited on "Bell of Doom".  I've been citing specific episodes for a long time, so long as that information is specific to an episode.


 * Of course, there's not much information that is episode specific.  But the fact that "no one else does it" is hardly an argument for me to stop.  If every single thing around here depended upon "the majority", this place would be considerably less organized than it is.  The general level of spelling and grammar around here is fairly low, as I'm sure you've seen.  If we took a vote on narrow grammatical issues, I'm sure we'd find that some of the most basic English rules would be overturned by "the majority".  I know this is going to sound terribly posh and arrogant, but the majority doesn't always produce the best rules, especially when it comes to the narrow, technical issues that are the essential glue of the wiki.  As is one of the central tenets of Wikipedia, consensus is not the result of a majority vote.  Sure, there are some very arbitrary things where a vote is good enough, but by and large, majorities can't overrule good sense or established rules of grammar.  If twenty people logged in today and started the argument, "We should be able to call the First Doctor 'the Hartnell Doctor' in in-universe articles", would you allow their voice to change the MOS?  Would you allow a vote of 25 for to 3 against to change the name of Frontios to The One Where Turlough Teases Tegan?    Of course you wouldn't.  Likewise, I don't care what the vote is:  Dodo appeared in "Bell of Doom", and there's no reasonable cause for an encyclopedia, whose goal is accuracy, to say she was in The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve.


 * But back to this point, specifically. You'll find that the MOS allows for the use of episodic names, so long as they redirect to the serial (see tardis:Manual of Style, point 6).

Short story
According to my review of the history of the template, the infobox has never had the "enemy" field. No biggie though. It's been used on between 500-1000 pages and nobody's noticed this. Must indicate just how infrequently people fully write short story pages that no one in all this time has cared. I'd advise you just put in the field. It won't show up just yet, but I'm going to be collapsing all these infoboxes together anyway.

Handle
The text of the article makes the very point you just did. And it is a working door ... to the telephone, as we see functional in The Empty Child.
 * I understand your reluctance, but, not to put too fine a point on it, you are wrong. Here's the definition of "door" from the OAD:
 * a hinged, sliding, or revolving barrier at the entrance to a building, room, or vehicle, or in the framework of a cupboard.
 * Doors are definitely not just to rooms. Besides which, as we see in the very first episode of the new series, you can push both doors open by putting your hands where the handles are.  That's how Rose first enters the TARDIS.  So, if you pull on the left handle, you'll open the phone cubbyhole.  If you push on it, you'll open the whole door.

Prefixes
Prefixes aren't real world pages, strictly. They're administrative or TARDIS wiki pages. They should have a banner which is on my to-do list.

Leela
I'm sure Big Finish appreciates the implication that the information on its website is bogus. Either that or if you're not allowing the Jago & Litefoot series to be mentioned in the Leela article then we should delete the material relating to Big Finish's Gallifrey series, too. Please confirm if that's the case and I'll go ahead and make the appropriate revisions. 68.146.64.9 20:16, February 21, 2011 (UTC)

Hollow Men
Yeah. I hate ones like this, because some editor or other is always unhappy by the decision. Still, we already have a ton of pages in category:Songs from the real world where the name is never explicitly stated on screen, but the song is obvious from what our ears tell us. Auditory information is canonical, just as visual info is, though it can be overruled by dialogue. If there's a sign that says "Welcome to Honolulu" then we don't need dialogue to tell is we're in Honolulu. Likewise, if "Paperback Writer" is playing, we don't need Jamie to say, "Hey, it's the Beatles singing "Paperback Writer", Doctor." If we have a helicopter shot of iconic Paris, it's Paris — unless the dialogue calls it, for instance, New Paris.

Thus, the Doctor quoting familiar poetry, with the author's name being spoken in dialogue, is more the enough, I'd say to unambiguously name it "The Hollow Man" in the DWU.

So, yeah, the current The Hollow Men needs to go to The Hollow Men (novel), and the Elliot work gets the un-disambiguated name.

Chameleon
Heya :) Just noticed this in passing.  If two things from the DWU have the same name, then neither gets to go naked, as it were.  Both things have to have disambiguation.  So the sentient species, Chameleon, needs to move to Chameleon (humanoid), now that we've got Chameleon (reptile).  Chameleon would then become a disambig, since there's Chameleon circuit, giving us the requisite minimum number of items for a disambig page.
 * Cameo in The Ark maybe. I'd be willing to wager at least a few dollars that a chameleon pops up in a book somewhere, and we just haven't run across it yet.

"By media" companion cats
Yeah, I debated that one yesterday myself and I did see the utility of such cats. People will find those categories useful. I debated moving the cats to the real world super cat, but whether it's there or under the in-universe supercat, it's still mixing the two in a way that should normally be forbidden. At the end of the day, I just decided that it wasn't causing actual category recursion. So I left it alone until such time as I or others can give it a proper think.

[My current obsession with cats has everything to do with recursion. I'm not methodically going through every cat and weeding them out on the basis of adherence to the "four cat" rule seen at Floor 500.]

Now that you've gotten me thinking about it again, though, all that info could be conveyed through a single page, or charts on companion. As long as as the companions are broken down somewhere by media, then we've given people something they can use. Yeah, sorry for the stream of consciousness writing here, but those cats could go in favor of adding the info in a tabular way to companion, though obviously to the BTS section.

Bold Clone block
Could you explain why you blocked Bold Clone please? I've looked through the history of The Doctor's TARDIS and can't see what he did wrong. Did he do something at another page that, when added to his changes at the TARDIS, created a broader offense? And, are you sure it was for a reason covered by our blocking policy? What I see is that he took some pictures down, and he left a rationale in the revision note. What's wrong with that to cause you to block him without warning him on his talk page?
 * Not it's not the hastiness that bugs me. It's the fact that what he did isn't listed as an offense in tardis:blocking policy or tardis:vandalism policy.  The closest thing is the line about "bad faith edits" or "edit wars", but it's hard to see bad faith when he left a revision note that said there were too many pics.  And, if it's edit wars, you're kinda stuck right there with him.  But if it is edit wars, you know the policy seems to suggest a lower sorta block.   Yes, you can do more than 2 hours, but 24 for what were probably good faith edits seems harsh.


 * Look, of course I disagree with him, and I honestly do thank you for defending my work.

But I just don't see how you can block someone for 24 hours for what he's done so far at that article. If the block is really about only his editing at that page, I'd ask that you lift it. Blocking him from editing his own talk page is especially harsh in this circumstance.


 * Hmmm. Sorry to keep hammering this, but it's important that we admin don't give the wiki a reputation for "blocking at will".  What specific rule of the blocking policy are you alleging he crossed?


 * I am going to now slightly revert your block to allow him to post to his talk page. There really is no cause to completely ban him from speaking on the wiki.


 * Cool, I'm glad you see my questioning as an attempt to rectify actions against rules, rather than a personal attack on you. Because, again, I am incredibly appreciative that you'd defend my work here.  But I also don't want to lose editors because of unfair administrative practice.  Now I know what you may be thinking.  BC is a sometimes difficult editor and maybe it'd be okay to lose him.  But I think we're defined by how we treat the editors with whom we have conflict more than by those who go along with everything we say.  So it's important that we use our powers in accordance with the rules laid down, or that we talk about changing the rules.  In this particular case, BC can only be judged according ot the rules as they currently stand.  And I'm not seeing "repeated removal of content" anywhere in the rules.  The closest is tardis:editing policy, which prevents more than 4 reversions in 36 hours, which he didn't do.  So, I think you do have to let him off.  Note, too, that tardis:editing policy requires you, as much as him, to discuss things.  That is, you think he reverted you, but you were reverting him too.  Determinative in this situation is this quote from the editing policy:
 * In all situations discussion should be the norm, not an edit war or admin action (in the form of protection or blocking).

Changes to blocking policy
Moving away a bit from the the above case, I'm a little confused as to the specifics of your proposed change, cause I don't think you quite finished your second sentence. Are you suggesting that people should discuss any changes before making them to an article? If so, I don't think that would work, as it's pretty much against the spirit of a wiki. The rule against 4 reversions in 36 hours prevents too much abuse from happening. And if you're suggesting that articles not be changed whilst a discussion is underway, you'd have quite a problem administering that. Most people don't check the talk page before editing, so you'd end up with several cases of people making changes to the article, unawares of the ongoing discussion. And, of course, some people would claim to be unawares, when they really were.

Could you amplify your point a little bit? I'm not sure I'm understanding you fully.
 * I don't at all think you could have a rule which suggested that the current form of an article is the preferred form. That's very much against the spirit of wiki editing.  But then so does "gainsaying" an article — that is, just reverting the previous person's edits repeatedly.  I think the thing is that if you had started a discussion about these changes, and BC either completely ignored that discussion, or gave them nominal lip service whilst nevertheless continuing to revert things, your actions would've been wholly within the rules as they currently stand.  Likewise, he doesn't appear to have reached out to you and started a discussion when you started to revert his edits.   So, really, you both failed to take the steps you needed to, according to current policies.


 * Getting back to policy changes, I don't think you could "freeze" an article at the point of controversy but through full protection, which is an awfully big gun to pull out on most occasions. And I wouldn't want to see a rule that compelled admins to fully protect an article just because of a li'l edit war.  Though I intellectually understood why it was necessary, the Howling Halls protection rubbed me the wrong way.  I kinda didn't protest only because it was an insignificant article.  If something as important as the Doctor's TARDIS were ever fully protected, I'd go to the wall to take off that protection.  So, no, I don't think it's viable to actually take some action that would freeze an article until discussion happens.


 * Look how long the Howling Halls thing went on. Could we reasonably say to the vast majority of editors who never participate in any discussions, "Look, you can't touch this article for two months?" No, they'd think we were batty and leave.


 * I think you have two courses of action available to you at this point. You could check out wikipedia:wikipedia:3RR and other wikipedia policies around blocking to see if you find any language which addresses the problem you were having this time round.  Or you could maybe adjust your approach to the rules as they are.   When you get into "edit war-like" scenarios, take a step back. Get another admin to come in and adjudicate the situation, so that you're not in danger of being accused of admin abuse.  Start discussion with the user in question.  If that goes nowhere, take it to the talk page or the forum.  When I nearly got into an edit war with BC over the lead to The Leisure Hive, I just walked away from the article entirely and started a forum post on the matter.   Taking the time to write out a forum post on the issue reduced my blood pressure immediately.


 * And here's a final thought. I personally think an admin should avoid blocking someone with whom he or she is having an active editing dispute.  It's just unseemly.  Sure, you may be forced to if a person makes a crystal clear violation of the rules — like, profanity or spam or violations of the video policy or something.  But if you think about it, I think you'll agree that you weren't anywhere close to that this time.  That's why I say you need to either take on board the policy as it is, or find some better language that fits what you think was a problem this time round.